Measles is so back, baby! I know, you had thought we were done talking about this vile disease. After all, the outbreak that started in Texas among communities that are relatively unvaccinated finally slowed down at the tail end of the summer. That came after that outbreak almost single-handedly generated more cases of measles in America than had occurred since 1992, as well as caused three deaths. This all occurred under the watch of RFK Jr. as head of HHS. Kennedy is largely responsible for the disease’s return, thanks to his long anti-vaccine advocacy and due to his direct mismanagement of the measles outbreaks. He also blames the victims of the disease, too.
Those who wanted to cover for Kennedy and the Trump administration attempted to point to the Texas outbreak starting before Trump was in office. That’s both not really true and besides the point since the explosion of cases happened well into the year, but it’s also a moot point since there are more outbreaks than just that one. 44 outbreaks, in fact, according to the CDC, compared with only 16 outbreaks in all of 2024. And, as always, the cases largely effect children and the unvaccinated.
And to give you yet another real world example of how this is all playing out, an outbreak is South Carolina has resulted in the necessary quarantining of 150 children due to their being unvaccinated.
Last week, officials in Greenville identified an eighth measles case that is potentially linked to the outbreak. Seven outbreak cases had been confirmed since September 25 in neighboring Spartanburg, where transmission was identified in two schools: Fairforest Elementary and Global Academy, a public charter school.
Across those two schools, at least 153 unvaccinated children were exposed to the virus and have been put in a 21-day quarantine, during which they are barred from attending school, state officials said in a press conference. Twenty-one days is the maximum incubation period, spanning from when a person is exposed to when they would develop a rash if infected.
As the ArsTechnica post goes on to note, Spartanburg has more unvaccinated children as a result of religious exemption than anywhere else in the state. South Carolina as a whole used to have the 95%+ vaccination rate that experts indicate provides the kind of herd immunity that keeps everyone safe, but that has dropped in the past several years to 93.7%. That might not seem like a big deal, but it is. And it’s even worse nation-wide when it comes to school-aged children.
The latest data indicates that the MMR vaccination coverage for US kindergartners was just 92.5 percent in the 2024–2025 school year, down from 95.2 percent in 2019–2020. Non-medical exemptions are now at 3.4 percent, an all-time high.
I am confident that any Almighty that may exist, and certainly any one worth believing in, doesn’t want you to get measles. If we don’t reverse the trend on our MMR vaccination rates, these outbreaks will continue to sprout up and more people will become infected. Eventually more of them will die.
But I don’t see that trend reversing while RFK Jr. is still in charge of American healthcare.
Americans are not peasants. We are citizens of a republic founded on the revolutionary proposition that ordinary people can govern themselves. This isn’t poetry or aspiration—it’s the foundational premise of the American project. And right now, a faction of tech oligarchs is betting everything on proving that premise wrong.
They want to replace “We the People” with “We the Users.”
When Peter Thiel writes that democracy and freedom are incompatible, he’s not making a philosophical observation. He’s stating a preference. When Elon Musk guts federal agencies while posting American flags, he’s not reforming government. He’s replacing citizenship with administration. When Silicon Valley oligarchs speak about “optimization” and “efficiency,” they’re not talking about improving systems that serve citizens. They’re talking about managing peasants.
Because that’s what they think we are. Peasants. Masses incapable of self-governance. Users to be monetized. Workers to be replaced. Voters to be manipulated through algorithmic feeds designed to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. Populations requiring management by those with superior intelligence and technological sophistication.
You see this in your daily life. An algorithm decides what news you see, not your own judgment about what matters. Your feed is curated by systems optimized for engagement rather than truth, designed to keep you scrolling rather than thinking. Your attention becomes their commodity. Your consciousness becomes their resource. Your capacity for independent judgment gets systematically eroded by platforms that treat you as a user to be optimized rather than a citizen capable of self-governance.
This represents the complete inversion of the American founding premise. The revolutionary generation staked everything on a radical proposition: that ordinary people could govern themselves, that citizenship was possible, that republican self-governance was superior to rule by kings, aristocrats, or anyone claiming the right to govern based on superior status, breeding, or intelligence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident” means exactly what it says—not that kings acknowledge these truths, not that the intelligent agree with them, not that the powerful grant them, but that citizens assert them as the foundation of legitimate government. Self-evident to whom? To us. To the people who govern ourselves through collective deliberation rather than submitting to administration by our betters.
Lincoln understood what was at stake when he stood at Gettysburg and declared that the war would determine whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Not government for the people by superior managers. Not government of the people by technological elites. But government by the people themselves—the radical proposition that citizens possess the capacity to govern rather than requiring governance by those who claim superior qualification.
The distinction between citizens and peasants isn’t semantic. It’s ontological. Peasants exist to be governed. Their role is obedience, tribute, and acceptance of decisions made by those qualified to make them. Citizens govern themselves. Their role is participation, judgment, and shared responsibility for collective outcomes.
We are not peasants. And yet every assault on American institutions over the past several years represents the systematic effort to transform us into exactly that.
The systematic elimination of civil service protections doesn’t improve government efficiency—it replaces professional judgment answerable to law with personal loyalty answerable to power. The attacks on independent agencies don’t reduce bureaucratic waste—they eliminate the institutional mechanisms through which citizens check oligarchic extraction. The celebration of “disruption” doesn’t foster innovation—it destroys the stable frameworks within which genuine self-governance becomes possible.
DOGE isn’t a government efficiency project. It’s the systematic replacement of citizenship with administration, democratic accountability with optimization metrics, collective self-governance with management by superior intelligence. When Elon Musk eliminates entire agencies staffed by career professionals and replaces them with political loyalists, he’s not improving government. He’s implementing his explicit belief that most people are incapable of meaningful judgment and require direction from those smart enough to know better.
This is why the flag-posting rings so hollow. Genuine patriotism implies reciprocal obligation—that loving your country means contributing to its maintenance as a collective project, that national pride entails responsibility for national institutions, that citizenship is something you participate in rather than perform. What the tech oligarchs demonstrate is nationalism without reciprocity: they want the aesthetic of belonging to a great nation while refusing every actual obligation that citizenship requires.
They love America as a brand, as an identity marker, as a territory they control. But they hate America as an actual collective project requiring their submission to democratic judgment, their participation in shared governance, their acceptance that other citizens possess equal standing to challenge their preferences and constrain their power.
Even Steve Bannon—nationalist populist, former Trump strategist, authoritarian movement builder—recognizes what the Silicon Valley faction represents. In a rare point of agreement across factional lines, Bannon has observed that the tech oligarchs aren’t patriots but post-national extractors using patriotic language to disguise systematic looting. When even authoritarian allies can see that you’re not engaged in national renewal but oligarchic capture, the performance has become too obvious to maintain.
Americans are not peasants. We are citizens of a republic founded on the revolutionary proposition that self-governance is possible, that ordinary people possess the capacity for judgment, that democratic deliberation beats optimization by superior intelligence. Every accommodation to oligarchic extraction, every acceptance of their framing, every failure to defend citizenship against those who would reduce us to subjects in their optimization experiments—all of it betrays the fundamental premise that makes America America.
We deserve better than this because citizenship is the foundation of what we are. Not subjects. Not users. Not populations to be managed. Citizens.
And citizens don’t wait for permission to defend what we are. We govern, or we lose everything that makes us who we are. The choice is here. The choice is now. History will not forgive us if we forget what we are—and surrender without a fight to those who would reduce us to peasants in a land our ancestors bled to make free.
We are not peasants. We are citizens. And citizenship is not a gift granted by superior intelligence. It is a responsibility we claim, a burden we carry, a right we defend—or lose forever to those who never believed we deserved it in the first place.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
It’s a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t choice appearing on the California ballot this Election Day: choose gerrymandering, or have gerrymandering chosen for you. It’s an ugly decision to be forced to make. But, for the moment, at least, one that needs to be made.
At issue is Proposition 50, which would change the law affecting how California Congressional redistricting is done in the near term. Under current California law, it is done after every 10-year census by an independent commission tasked with balancing districts, subject to certain criteria imposed by state and federal law. State law, for instance, requires neighborhoods and local communities be kept together to the greatest extent possible, and the commission is ordinarily prohibited from considering political parties, current office holders, or prospective candidates when it draws its district maps.
The problem is that not every state plays by the same rules. And, in particular, states like Texas have now openly taken steps to redistrict again, even though there has been no new census to provide a basis for making any changes to their existing maps. Worse, the changes they want to make are changes deliberately intended to disadvantage Democrats and instead produce, statewide, as many Republican representatives as possible, irrespective of any local community preference to the contrary, in order to ensure Republican control over the House of Representatives in DC, even if nationwide the party would lack the support to be a majority. In other words, these states, controlled by Republicans, are trying to force the House majority into Republican hands by manipulating the Congressional representation of the people in their own state.
In response, the California legislature put Prop 50 on the ballot primarily to fight fire with fire. If these red states try to artificially inflate the number of Republicans to Congress then California will change its law to produce as many Democrats as possible in order to try to neutralize the Republican advantage those red states are trying to engineer.
There are, of course, strong reasons not to change California’s law this way. Gerrymandering is an incredibly anti-democratic policy, no matter who’s doing it. It dooms some communities to always be in the political minority, even when a fair measurement of the state’s overall political will should result in these minority preferences being entitled to at least some representation. Setting aside a principled approach to apportioning congressional seats that goes out of its way to not gerrymander, to instead join these other states in a race to distort election results is hardly something to enthusiastically cheer.
There’s also a chance that it could potentially backfire. While the goal may be to make sure that overall Democratic representation in Congress is preserved, it’s possible that these manipulations could result in weakening otherwise strong Democratic districts by now remapping them to include more likely Republican voters. Of course, the same is true in states like Texas, which may be sabotaging Republican districts by rolling into them more voters more likely to vote for Democrats.
But there are also points in favor of this plan, and they seem to, on balance, outweigh those against as well as ameliorate some of the concerns. For one thing, the change Prop 50 would bring is inherently temporary. Prop 50 has a built-in sunset provision so that, no matter what happens, we go back to the old system after the next national census in 2030. Prop 50 would only cover the 2026, 2028, and 2030 elections, and if we really hated it after 2026 there’s nothing that would keep us from passing another proposition to end it sooner, apart from the logistical burden of running another ballot measure. Which is not negligible, but if the politics really turned against the change, it is still reversible. After all, the current law Prop 50 would change is itself is the result of its own ballot measure.
And that current law itself offers yet another reason to vote for the new one: because there’s actually a problem with the current one. Not in terms of its general approach, which tries to use a politically neutral committee to do apportionment so that communities can best be represented by those most accurately reflecting their political will. The problem with this law is that it hardcoded into the rules for how the committee members should be appointed a requirement that the membership should always include some number of Democrats, and some number of Republicans, as well as some number unaligned with either. A better way to do it would have been to require some number of people affiliated with the two most popular parties, whichever they may be, and the rest be unaffiliated. By hardcoding either party into the law however it means that the law can end up out of sync with the political makeup of the state as partisan politics evolve.
In fact, that’s the problem driving Prop 50: partisan politics have evolved. While it may have seemed, back in 2010 when the current law was passed, that Democrats and Republicans were timeless political forces never subject to change, history has shown otherwise—which is the problem that Prop 50 is responding to. Even though Democrats and Republicans had been around for decades by that point as generally stable parties, now that the Republican party has essentially become the new American Nazi party, continuing to give it a potentially outsized seat at the table seems much less advisable, not just in terms of giving it influence but also because it means that the system itself can’t adapt to any evolutions in the partisan landscape. If new parties become popular, perhaps because people are disenchanted with the old ones, the system won’t be able to treat them as major players so long as the old players get the benefit of this built-in advantage in how they get to participate in the redistricting system.
But the more immediate problem is that, given the way Republicans have changed, giving Republicans any political power threatens the entire democratic system. It would ordinarily be unthinkable to manipulate an electoral system to favor or disfavor a party—except that’s the business Republicans themselves are now in. And adopting a principled position to not engage in such practices unfortunately has the practical consequence of yielding to those eager to weaponize them the power to do so, and in a way inconsistent with the continued function of our representative democracy.
Allowing Republicans to grab gerrymandered power now surrenders our nation to them, which is not a decision we can afford to make if our nation is to have a future. At this moment in history there are existential reasons to ensure that Democrats can get to Congress in strong enough numbers to exert political power instead. Not because Democrats are necessarily all that great, but because Republicans are openly committed to autocratic policies that upend our constitutional order. If our federal system is going to be defended, the party not going out of its way to attack it at least needs a shot at getting into office in sufficient numbers to protect it.
And because Democrats aren’t just the current minority party in those red states but more often than not the party preference of minorities. The goal of getting them elected isn’t just to further that specific party but to make sure that communities favoring them can simply be represented in Congress at all. As long as Republicans have the power to frustrate that representation, it’s important that the rest of us make sure to have their backs so that everyone can participate in directing the future of our country.
Furthermore, the proposition does a bit more than just change how California’s congressional districts are to be mapped for the next few election cycles. Although it is mostly symbolic, the proposition declares its support of the principle that congressional apportionment should be done by “fair, independent, and nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide.” It further declares that there should be federal legislation and even a constitutional amendment to ensure that this approach become the rule nationwide that all states must follow to end, once and for all, the gamesmanship that these red states are engaging in, so that no state is able to frustrate the political will of their people in pursuit of their own disproportionate power ever again.
As far as the Trump administration is concerned, there’s only one crime worth targeting: not being white.
Despite ICE now being the best-funded federal law enforcement agency and military troops being scrambled to any area of the country that pisses Trump off, ICE is no closer to reaching White House advisor Stephen Miller’s baseline target of 3,000 arrests per day than it was the day after Trump’s second inauguration.
Since this seems to be the only thing Trump consistently cares about (give or take his antipathy towards renewable resources, “transgender for everyone,” and whatever the fuck “woke” is), every federal law enforcement agency is starving itself of resources in hopes of turning this administration’s fascist, bigoted fantasies into reality.
The DHS — under puppy-killing Bratz doll Kristi Noem — has already done its part, shifting pretty much the entirety of its investigative wing into support roles for ICE operations. This happened despite the GOP being collectively (and vocally) convinced anyone straying from binary gender roles is nothing more than a child molester. HSI used to hunt down child predators. Now, it’s decided to throw kids to the wolves while it targets day laborers without criminal records. (Or maybe it just got tired of arresting Republicans and evangelical religious leaders on the regular for their crimes against children.)
It’s one thing for the DHS to do stupid stuff with its own talent. It’s quite another when it begins bleeding into other federal agencies and infecting them with the same “get the brown people” energy that’s made DHS and ICE the repugnant agencies they are.
Personnel data obtained by Mark Warner, a Democratic senator, and shared with the Guardian, suggests the Trump administration has moved 45% of FBI agents in the country’s 25 largest field offices to support the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration crackdown. Across all of the FBI’s offices, 23% of the roughly 13,000 total agents at the bureau are now working on immigration, according to Warner, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.
If nothing else, it will probably please Charlie Kirk’s widow to know the FBI is being flown at half-staff. Throwing this manpower at immigration enforcement doesn’t seem to be budging the arrests-per-day needle much. Meanwhile, other criminal investigations are being under-served, which says something much nastier about an already-nasty administration: it doesn’t care about crime; it only cares about rounding up non-white people and removing them from the country.
The only upside given this influx of FBI agents, ATF officers, and DEA personnel is that fewer people are getting caught up in federal law enforcement entrapment schemes (stash house stings, radicalizing people into terrorism arrests, etc.). On the other hand, people who’ve done nothing more than engage in civil violations are being subjected to the combined force of multiple federal law enforcement agencies who have been encouraged — if not explicitly instructed — to engage in biased policing.
And it’s probably even worse than it immediately appears, what with the government’s general unwillingness to be completely honest about its form and functions. Senator Warner says this is probably an under-count:
The data is understating the scale of the reorganization, as the FBI only provided counts for agents who are now spending more than half of their job doing immigration enforcement, according to Warner. The senator’s office said it was likely that more than a quarter of FBI agents’ total hours were now dedicated to immigration, and that in some field offices, more than half of the agents had been redirected to DHS.
The FBI isn’t an anomaly. It’s just another symptom of this administration’s anti-immigrant sickness. The administration pretends this massive surge of immigration enforcement is essential to the nation’s security. And it says this while rerouting actual national security personnel to DHS support roles, compromising what little is left of this nation’s security forces:
The US Department of Homeland Security has shifted hundreds of national security specialists, including cyber personnel, into jobs that support President Donald Trump’s deportations and said it would dismiss anyone who refuses to go along, according to current and former DHS employees.
[…]
Refusing a new role would be considered grounds for termination, according to two copies of letters from DHS human resources seen by Bloomberg News. Mandatory job changes often include disruptive geographic relocations and give affected workers a one-week deadline to either accept or resign, employees said.
A lot is said about the banality of evil and its contribution to authoritarianism. But not enough is said about this administration’s absolute contempt for pretty much anyone who actually works for the federal government. The DOGE purges were never enough. This administration is so banally evil it considers even raising concerns about unemployment or unexpected upheavals of employees’ lives as acts of disloyalty.
Even the most callous of corporations tend to throw a few incentives towards people being laid off and/or expected to immediately relocate (severance packages, relocation assistance). But this government considers anyone outside of Trump’s immediate circle to be acceptable collateral damage, pompously assuming there are millions of similarly qualified people just dying to work for a madman with access to nearly unlimited power.
But beyond the obvious and deliberate disregard for anyone unwilling to toe the line at a moment’s notice is the brain bleed this sort of action initiates. Talent will be leaving, either because they can’t survive the mandatory disruption of their lives or because they’re now being forced into becoming part of an effort that only serves Trump’s basest urges, rather than the good of the nation.
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JD Vance thinks praising Hitler and talking about putting political enemies into death chambers is harmless “kids being kids,” but criticizing Charlie Kirk is somehow deserving of state-supported punishment.
It sure looks like he’s got quite the double standard.
Yesterday, Vance defended Young Republican leaders who were caught in leaked chat logs making racist, antisemitic, and pro-Nazi comments, dismissing their behavior as harmless kids being edgy. But just a month ago, this very same JD Vance was calling for people to be reported to their employers for making far milder comments about Charlie Kirk’s death. And this week, his administration revoked visas from foreigners who criticized Kirk online.
Let’s start with what Vance said yesterday about the Young Republicans scandal. When asked about leaked Telegram messages showing Republican leaders joking about gas chambers, expressing love for Hitler, and using racial slurs more than 250 times, Vance had this to say:
The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives. At some point, we’re all going to have to say, ‘enough of this BS, we’re not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old’s group chat to ruin a kid’s life for the rest of time. That’s just not ok.
You can see that video at the end of this clip here:
JD Vance dismisses Young Republicans who in a group chat said "I love Hitler" and joked about slavery and rape as "a bunch of kids" who "told stupid jokes" and adds that "most of the stupid things I did when I was a teenager and young adult, they're not on the internet."
There are several problems with this defense. First, these weren’t “kids”—many of the participants were in their twenties and thirties, and some held high-level government positions. Peter Giunta was chief of staff to a New York assemblymember. William Hendrix worked for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach. Michael Bartels serves as a senior adviser in the Trump administration’s Small Business Administration.
Second, these weren’t just “stupid jokes.” The leaked messages included participants saying “I love Hitler,” joking about putting political opponents in gas chambers, using racial slurs hundreds of times, and discussing rape as “epic.” One participant wrote about creating “the greatest physiological torture methods known to man” for political opponents.
But the bigger issue isn’t Vance’s factual errors—it’s his breathtaking hypocrisy.
Just last month, Vance guest-hosted Charlie Kirk’s radio show and had a very different message about “edgy, offensive” comments. When people made critical remarks about Kirk’s death, Vance urged listeners to hold them accountable:
Call them out, and hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.
This wasn’t theoretical. Many people lost their jobs after Vance’s call to action. Apparently, their “edgy, offensive” jokes were uncivil and unacceptable, and a perfectly good reason to “ruin their lives,” but when it’s pro-Nazi (!!!) content, suddenly Vance wants to give it a pass? Come on.
And this week, Vance’s own administration took it even further. The State Department revoked visas from at least six foreigners who made critical comments about Kirk’s death on social media. The department explicitly stated as much in a tweet:
If you can’t read that, it says:
The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans.
The State Department continues to identify visa holders who celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk. Here are just a few examples of aliens who are no longer welcome in the U.S.
It then proceeded to show the posts from people whose visas it had revoked, making it blatantly clear that they were deciding to punish people in America for their speech, an unambiguous First Amendment violation. The State Department then showed social media posts from some of those whose visas were revoked, and they appeared way less “edgy” and “offensive” than anything that was revealed in that Young Republicans chat.
So let’s be clear about the double standard here: When Young Republicans joke about Hitler and gas chambers, they’re just “kids” telling “edgy, offensive jokes” that we shouldn’t ruin their lives over. But when foreigners or Americans criticize a conservative influencer—with comments that were objectively far milder than “I love Hitler”—they deserve to lose their jobs, their visas, and their livelihoods.
And, of course, this is a regular pattern from the Trump administration. Graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk was literally kidnapped off the street for writing a mild op-ed in support of Palestine. The administration has revoked over 6,000 student visas this year, sometimes targeting students who protested in support of Palestine (the State Dept. falsely said it was for “terrorist activity.”) Jimmy Kimmel’s show was taken off the air over an extremely mild joke about MAGA’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death.
And there are many more examples as well.
Hell, there are even more examples of Vance trying to dismiss horrible things his friends say as “kids being kids.” Remember Marko Elez, the 25-year-old DOGE bro who was found to have posted a ton of truly racist shit just last year? After the tweets came out, Elez resigned, but JD Vance quickly stepped up to defend the tweets as some form of youthful edgy indiscretion:
So, again, when it’s blatantly racist, hateful shit, Vance’s response is:
I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.
The pattern is unmistakable: pro-Nazi, blatantly hateful rhetoric from Republican allies gets dismissed as harmless fun, while even mild criticism of conservative figures or support for Palestinian rights gets you targeted for life-ruining punishment by federal agencies.
Vance owes the American people an explanation that he will never give. When exactly are “edgy, offensive jokes” acceptable, and when do they deserve government retaliation? Because right now, it appears the only rule is that it’s all in good fun if your hateful, pro-Nazi posts are in support of the MAGA plan. And simply cannot be allowed if they call out bad behavior on the part of MAGA folks.
If joking about Hitler and gas chambers is just boys being boys, then surely criticizing a political commentator should barely register as offensive speech. Yet somehow, the people making Nazi jokes get Vice Presidential protection while their critics get federal persecution.
This is the MAGA world view: hateful neo-Nazi supporting bigotry is all cool if you’re doing so in support of team MAGA. But if you’re not on the team, then it’s fine to weaponize the entire government against your political views. This is the very blueprint for authoritarian control of speech.
Vance knows full well that he’s using a double standard here. But that’s part of his fascistic view of the world. He’s flaunting the fact that he will abuse his position to protect his friends, while eagerly punishing his political opponents for doing way less. It’s right out of the fascist playbook.
Vance finds it hilarious that he’s getting away with such a double standard, but that doesn’t mean anyone else needs to play along. Keep calling it out. And if there are any true reporters left, they should keep asking him about this double standard over and over again.
Back in May we noted how Trump illegally declared he was unilaterally destroying the $2.75 billion Digital Equity Act, lying repeatedly that the law was “racist” and “unconstitutional.” The law, passed as part of the infrastructure bill, was slated to bring millions in new broadband grants and digital literacy tools, education, and training to Americans (of all kinds).
The bill helped everybody (including Trump-supporting rural veterans and rural residents), but because Trump’s team seemed to assume that the word equity meant “help minorities,” the program was the brutal victim of our mad, incoherent, con man king and his army of mindless earlobe nibblers.
Back in June, a coalition of 20 states sued the Trump administration, correctly stating that it’s illegal for the administration to unilaterally dismantle an act of Congress and freeze and repurpose funding that had already been allotted. That case is winding through the court system, but the damage has already been done to countless traditionally underfunded programs and organizations that had been told they were getting the money.
This week the National Digital Inclusivity Alliance (NDIA) filed another lawsuit against the government, again (correctly) noting that the freezing of the funds is illegal and violates the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches as outlined in the Constitution.
The NDIA was poised to receive one of the biggest chunks of Act funding; a $25.7 million grant it was going to use to help connect people to the Internet via 13 programs across 11 states. Not only via direct access to affordable physical equipment, but digital literacy training for seniors and vets to gain access to online education, health care, and other essential services:
“NDIA is taking the extraordinary step of suing the federal government for the 30,000 people who were counting on our Digital Navigator + program to help guide them through submitting job applications, accessing telehealth, attending classes, and staying safe online. Thousands more across the country stood to benefit from Digital Equity Act grants through other trusted community organizations. Let’s be very clear, the Digital Equity Act is not unconstitutional nor racist, it passed with overwhelming bipartisan support to ensure the United States can compete in today’s modern economy.”
There’s a long list of groups that were also planning to use this funding to help their communities navigate things like the rising number of online scams that tend to disproportionately target the elderly. They’re all now shit out of luck because of a bunch of weird racist zealots (who like to pretend they’re saving taxpayer money with one hand, while setting it on fire with the other).
A driving motivation behind these attacks on online equity isn’t “saving money,” it’s dismantling government efforts to do anything about the problems created by consolidated corporate power. That means lobotomizing the FCC. It means killing programs that gave school kids free Wi-Fi. It means undermining efforts to protect U.S. citizens (in red or blue states alike) from fraud and robocall hell.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to insist his random-ass butchery of government is only “impacting Democrats”:
After bragging about permanently cutting "Democrat programs," Trump says "we're not closing up Republican programs."
I was not previously aware that the President of the United States could unilaterally destroy an act of Congress, freeze funding for beneficial bipartisan programs, lie about the impact repeatedly, and face absolutely zero repercussions whatsoever. Consider me properly informed.
