In late 2020, Massachusetts lawmakers (with overwhelming public support) passed an expansion of the state’s “right to repair” law. The original law was the first in the nation to be passed in 2013. The update dramatically improved it, requiring that all new vehicles be accessible via a standardized, transparent platform that allows owners and third-party repair shops to access vehicle data via a mobile device.
The goal: reduce repair monopolies, and make it cheaper and easier to get your vehicle repaired (with the added bonus of less environmental harm).
Mass. automakers immediately got to work trying to scare the press, public, and legislators away from the improvements by running ads claiming that the updated legislation would be a boon to sexual predators. They also filed suit under the banner of the inaccurately named Alliance for Automotive Innovation (AAI), which stalled the bill from taking effect for the better part of the last four years (thanks to what U.S. District Judge Douglas Woolock called “unforeseeable and unforeseen circumstances“).
After the case was finally transferred to a new judge, late last week U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston dismissed the AAI’s lawsuit. Massachusetts AG Andrea Joy Campbell applauded the ruling. The auto industry, signaling its intent to appeal, once again lied by claiming that making car repairs easier and cheaper poses a security threat to consumers:
“Today’s decision will introduce potential security risks to our customers and their vehicles.”
Which, again, is pretty funny coming from an industry with some of the worst privacy and security standards in all of tech. Mozilla’s recent report on flimsy auto industry privacy standards found the industry routinely collects all manner of sensitive driver behavior data (including data on your phone), doesn’t adequately encrypt it, then sells access to it to a broad variety of different middlemen.
And the New York Times, prompted by efforts by Senator Ron Wyden, recently unveiled how companies like GM routinely mislead customers about the scope and nature of the data collection, often selling sensitive consumer data covertly to insurance providers who then jack up owners’ insurance rates. The revelations resulted in wave of lawsuits.
So yes, the auto industry cares not a whit about consumer security and privacy, until their lucrative attempted dealership repair monopolies are threatened, at which point they’re suddenly and uncharacteristically champions of consumer welfare. Curious how that works.
Automakers aren’t alone in their efforts to try and demonize popular, bipartisan repair reforms. Apple and John Deere have also spent years trying to defend their profitable repair monopolies by claiming that making access to less expensive options will result in an absolute parade of security and privacy problems for consumers. A bipartisan 2021 FTC study found the complaints to be empty, self-serving bluster.
It’s a familiar playbook. When Donald Trump receives backlash from the public or the press for some action he’s taken, say barring AP News from White House press briefings and events because it won’t bow to his desire to rename parts of a large body of water, he doesn’t shrink. He doubles down. Every single time. All the more so when organizations like AP fight back, filing a lawsuit claiming First and Fourth Amendment infringements. No quarter will be given to the enemy, as it were, which, in this case, would be the press outlets that serve the American people.
That all of this is an obvious strongman approach to free speech matters not at all. After all, the administration and its quasi-government and opportunist sycophants is lousy with free speech hypocrites. It’s a doublespeak buffet for everyone, it seems, with fans of the administration happily cheering it along, not realizing that this is all going to boomerang back upon them eventually. But for now, the Star Wars line appears to at least partially apply.
And it’s only because of the willingness of some percentage of the country, and by extension those who represent them, that Trump can triple down as he’s doing now. No longer satisfied with attempting to bully one international news institution, he has now decided to exert an iron fist in controlling who gets access to the White House Press Pool, despite a century of precedent.
The White House said Tuesday that its officials “will determine” which news outlets can regularly cover President Donald Trump up close — a sharp break from a century of tradition in which a pool of independently chosen news organizations go where the chief executive does and hold him accountable on behalf of regular Americans.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the changes would rotate traditional outlets from the group and include some streaming services. Leavitt cast the change as a modernization of the press pool, saying the move would be more inclusive and restore “access back to the American people” who elected Trump. But media experts said the move raised troubling First Amendment issues because the president is choosing who covers him.
“The White House press team, in this administration, will determine who gets to enjoy the very privileged and limited access in spaces such as Air Force One and the Oval Office,” Leavitt said at a daily briefing. She added at another point: “A select group of D.C.-based journalists should no longer have a monopoly of press access at the White House.”
I shan’t mince words: this is complete bullshit. And, frankly, it’s transparently bullshit. The White House is not doing this to give any kind of press coverage “back to the American people.” It’s doing this to control who can ask, and by extension what will be asked, of the administration. And, if you’ve listened to any of the “new media” that has been getting invites and called on for questions in recent press briefings, it becomes all the more obvious. Some of the smaller outlets have put forth such hard-hitting questions which amount to, essentially: “Hey, you’ve done such an awesome job so far with literally everything. How do you feel about being so awesome?”
Already some outlets have lost some access. The White House kicked a HuffPost reporter out of the press pool, while Reuters had access to at least one briefing cut as well. Notably, neither organization has had a habit for bootlicking. But that shouldn’t matter. The absolute right thing to do here is for every press outlet, whatever its leanings, to boycott press briefings and events. Any outlet that does not do that until the Press Pool’s autonomy is restored is a propaganda organization by definition; a wing of the press that has relinquished editorial control to the government.
You can absolutely expect more lawsuits over this. And, save for a Supreme Court decision to abdicate its responsibility, this should end with a slap against the administration and a return to normal. The First Amendment implications of all of this should be obvious, after all.
”It means the president can pick and choose who covers the executive branch, ignoring the fact that it is the American people who through their taxes pay for the running of the White House, the president’s travels and the press secretary’s salary,” Jon Marshall, a media history professor at Northwestern University and author of “Clash: Presidents and the Press in Times of Crisis,” said in a text.
Eugene Daniels, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said the organization consistently expands its membership and pool rotations to facilitate the inclusion of new and emerging outlets.
“This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States. It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president,” Daniels said in a statement. “In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”
Again, the only sane move is for the press, all of the press, to boycott press briefings and events. They’re generally completely unnecessary to begin with. If the White House wants to control the questions it gets, then it should get none. If it wants to relay information to the public via the press, however, then it should do so while treating the press as an independent entity.
And in the end, if the only press outlet covering these briefings are PatriotPressForTrump.org, well, the public is smart enough to understand the implications of that.
Look, sometimes you make mistakes. Maybe you send an email to the wrong person. Maybe you accidentally buy the wrong kind of pasta sauce at the grocery store. Maybe you accidentally dismantle critical global health infrastructure. These things happen! At least, that’s what Elon Musk wants us to believe.
At yesterday’s first official Musk/Trump administration cabinet meeting, Elon decided to share a cute little anecdote about his DOGE team’s approach to governing. Just a fun little story about how they “accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention efforts. What a knee slapper!
Elon Musk: "We will make mistakes. We won't be perfect … so for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was ebola prevention."
Here’s Musk’s exact quote, which deserves to be read in full because, well, you’ll see:
We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make mistakes, we’ll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention. [nervous chuckle] I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored Ebola prevention immediately and there was no interruption.
The only problem is that almost everything here is nonsense… well, except for the part about canceling the program on Ebola prevention. Musk absolutely did that. And some other terrible stuff as well. But the fixing the mistake part? That doesn’t appear to have actually happened. Oopsie!
[Nervous chuckle intensifies]
The Real Impact of “Accidental” Cuts
To be clear, this one scenario actually offers a really good case study in how dangerously short-sighted the Musk/DOGE efforts are, in which they have no clue what they’re doing, are slashing and burning, and figuring they can just “fix it very quickly after” when things go wrong.
Except, that’s often not how this works, and the things they’re doing are creating not just lasting damage, but real-time harms that can never be fixed.
So, first of all, they absolutely cut off Ebola prevention and it had real world consequences the day they did, because there was an Ebola outbreak reported in Uganda that very day. As Ebola expert (and survivor!) Dr. Craig Spencer explained, normally the US would send an Ebola expert to Uganda to help with the prevention, which they were unable to do, because Musk and DOGE basically made that impossible. Spencer’s explanation of what happened is maddening (this is just a snippet):
On January 29, Uganda reported an Ebola outbreak. Normally the U.S. would’ve very quickly sent one of our Ebola experts to help the response. But this time, we didn’t. Because we couldn’t. Because this administration wouldn’t let them go right when this outbreak was declared.
And normally the U.S. would’ve helped set up border screening and other measures on the ground.
But this time, we didn’t.
Normally, we would’ve spoke with the WHO about helping end the outbreak.
But this time, we didn’t.
Because CDC staff weren’t even allowed to talk to them.
I’ve been told by a colleague that Uganda tried calling the White House to notify them of the outbreak for 2 days…but no one answered the phone. Two months ago we had amazing experts working on global health security there. Now there appears to be no one to pick up a phone.
Lies About ‘Fixing’ Those Mistakes
It turns out that Elon and DOGE actually fired 90% of the team working on it. Which raises an interesting question: How exactly do you “turn on” Ebola prevention when you’ve fired all the people who… you know… prevent Ebola?
“There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention” of Ebola and other diseases, said Nidhi Bouri, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration and oversaw the agency’s response to health-care outbreaks.
[….]
Bouri said her former USAID team of 60 people working on disease-response had been cut to about six staffers as of earlier this week. She calledthe recent USAID response to Uganda’s Ebola outbreak a “one-off,” far diminished from “the full suite” of activities that the agency historically would mount, such as ramping up efforts to monitor whether the disease had spread to neighboring countries.
“The full spectrum — the investments in disease surveillance, the investments in what we mobilize … moving commodities, supporting lab workers — that capacity is now a tenth of what it was,” Bouri said.
Furthermore, contrary to Elon’s claim, it appears that the funds for Ebola prevention have not resumed at all:
Other current and former USAID officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal operations, agreed with Bouri’s assessment.
“There was a waiver for Ebola, but USAID funds have never been back online,” said a current official. “USAID has been frozen: staff and money.”
“If there was a need to respond to Ebola, it would be a disaster assistance response team, or DART,” said one former official. “There is no longer a capability to send a DART or support one from Washington. Many of those people are contractors who were let go at the very beginning.”
This should be terrifying. Even if you’re so myopic that you think “America First” means not doing any foreign aid work (and boy, is that a discussion for another day), surely you can recognize that preventing foreign outbreaks of deadly diseases helps protect Americans at home as well. Right? Right???
A Pattern of Destruction
And the Ebola example is just one example.
There have been multiple reports of how the DOGE team halted funding for PEPFAR, which is the “President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,” started by George W. Bush that has been credited with saving over 26 million lives and limiting the spread of AIDS globally. But DOGE stopped the program.
In Africa, thousands of U.S.-funded health workers have been laid off and clinics have closed, restricting access to HIV testing and treatment. African health officials and experts have pleaded for PEPFAR to resume, fearing services that have become a key part of the health care system will be stripped in a way that sets countries back decades.
And even though Marco Rubio has promoted PEPFAR and claimed that he signed a limited waiver to keep some (not all) of it funded… reports are that the DOGE team has still blocked any PEPFAR funding from going through. As the AP reports:
“…aid groups say they know of no payments getting through for that or any program.”
And even though a court ordered USAID to continue its congressionally mandated funding efforts two weeks ago, the Musk/Trump administration has refused to do so. Yesterday, after the judge made it clear that they were walking into a contempt of court situation, the DOJ ran to the Supreme Court, which put a temporary pause on the order, giving the Court a couple more days to evaluate.
Meanwhile, people are dying. Right now. Today. While Elon and his DOGE crew chuckle about their “accidental” mistakes (all easily preventable if they hadn’t fired actual experts or just… asked people to explain what was happening), and then claimed they “immediately” fixed things they didn’t actually fix.
And we could easily go on. I mean, last week they “accidentally” fired all the experts working to prevent avian flu and then were scrambling to try to find them to rehire them. Because nothing says “competent governance” and “efficiency” quite like firing your bird flu experts in the middle of a bird flu outbreak, and then struggling to find the fired experts in order to beg them to come back.
It seems like everywhere you look, these kinds of “accidental” mistakes are being made, and they’re not being rectified.
But Elon and the DOGE crew think it’s all just a laugh.
It’s Not Just The Incompetence, It’s The Indifference
Here’s the thing about all of this: None of it had to happen. None of these “accidents” were inevitable. Even if you wanted to cut actual waste, fraud, and abuse (and who doesn’t?), there are ways to do that without, you know, accidentally dismantling global disease prevention infrastructure.
But there’s no interest from Musk or DOGE in figuring any of that out. Zero. Zilch. Nada. There’s not even a pretense of concern about the irreversible damage being done.
Not only do they have a total lack of intellectual curiosity to learn about the institutions and systems they’re destroying, there’s not even one bit of concern about the very real damage that has been done and can’t be fixed, even if they actually were turning back on the funding (which, again, it appears they’re not).
There are a million stories to be covering these days about all this, but this is a tragedy of epic proportions. And the only acknowledgment of it is a little giggle from Elon, in which he admits to just one part of the error, but falsely states they corrected it. Because apparently that’s where we are now: treating global health infrastructure like it’s a Twitter feature that can be rolled back with a quick deployment.
The real tragedy isn’t just the destruction of vital programs — it’s that lives are being treated as acceptable collateral damage in an ideological experiment, based off of a myth. Musk, DOGE, and the Project 2025 crew are completely bought into the false belief that federal government employees do nothing useful, that they don’t work, and almost all foreign aid is wasted.
When global health infrastructure built over decades is dismantled overnight, it can’t simply be restored with a presidential waiver or a tweet. What’s being lost here isn’t just money or bureaucracy, but institutional knowledge, relationships, and capacity that took years to build. And Musk shows no signs of learning this lesson at all. To him, it remains a joke and a meme to tweet. As people die.
Lots of states have been passing performative, rights-violating bills that mandate sites hosting porn start performing age verification or suffer the consequences. The consequences can be severe, with fines being multiplied per access by unverified users on top of legal actions brought by state prosecutors.
Most of these follow the same problematic blueprint. Even if you ignore the obvious First Amendment issues (that these sites require verification from people who have full legal access to this content), you can’t ignore the impossible logistics issues.
Almost every bill contains the same wording because they’re all following the same special interest group’s wording: any site with more than one-third (33.3%) “pornographic” content is subject to the law. What’s left unexplained is how sites are supposed to calculate this percentage. Is it one-third of all content? Is it one-third of the total amount of hosted content in terms of storage space? Or is it one-third of all uploaded content, regardless of file size? No one knows!
And those writing these laws don’t even pretend to care there are no useful metrics that might allow sites to attempt to comply with these laws. On top of that, these laws pass the entire buck to websites, demanding they engage in “reasonable” efforts to verify age, without providing any details as to what might be considered “reasonable” by legislators.
Heads, the government wins. Tails, the websites lose.
Somehow, this had been made even worse in South Dakota with the complete elimination of one metric that held the slim possibility of providing websites with the guidance they needed to determine whether or not they needed to implement age verification processes.
The [South Dakota] Senate panel had two options for age verification on its plate Tuesday.
Each aimed to force adult sites to ask visitors for something like a credit card or state-issued driver’s license to prove they’re old enough to be there. Both required the deletion of that data after the visit. Each would let South Dakota’s attorney general levy criminal fines against companies that don’t comply.
One of them, Senate Bill 18 , rejected by the committee, follows the model of Texas by targeting sites where one-third of the content is adult material.
HB 1053 draws no such line.
HB 1053 [PDF] is the bill headed to the governor’s desk. Just because Kristi Noem — who was inexplicably elevated to the head of the US Dept. of Homeland Security — is no longer manning the desk doesn’t mean her successor won’t just as gleefully sign a bill that’s not only unconstitutional, but one that makes it almost impossible for any host of third-party content to abide by it.
The “one-third” language in the Senate bill at least indicated these legal impositions wouldn’t affect most websites accessible by South Dakotans. The adopted bill, however, says no level of “pornographic” material is acceptable without age verification.
Here’s godawful state rep Bethany Soye (R-Sioux Falls) explaining her evisceration of the only thing keeping this proposed law from being an all-out assault on the internet in general.
The House bill came from Rep. Bethany Soye, R-Sioux Falls. On Tuesday, she said the one-third figure was pulled from thin air by Louisiana lawmakers looking to preempt concerns about an overly broad restriction in their age verification legislation.
“Every state just blindly copied them,” said Soye, who is an attorney. “And I think that we can do better than that.”
To her, the one-third standard amounts to an invitation for porn sites to find ways to keep their total adult content just below the line, perhaps at 29.9% pornography.
“You can already see the loophole,” Soye said.
But it’s not even a loophole. Not a single state passing a similar bill has provided websites with any guidance as to how this 33.3% ratio should be calculated. Any service subject to laws like these has just pulled the plug in states where these laws have been passed, rather than subject themselves to multiple fines, fees, and DA-initiated legal action just because their math doesn’t match the invisible, indescribable math being used to prosecute them. This brings the effective rate to 0.1%, which means pretty much any site can be sued/fined for violating this law.
And that means that adults in these states have no legal access to content they are supposed to have legal access to. That’s the intent of these laws. They’re not crafted to protect children. They’re crafted to deny adults access to content legislators like Bethany Soye don’t personally care for.
As I stated earlier, Bethany Soye is a terrible legislator and, I would reasonably speculate, a hateful bigot as well. I don’t have any evidence of this other than her own legislative record, which shows her sponsoring bills that violate constitutional rights for the sole purpose of advancing her own personal moral views. She’s already sponsored or co-sponsored bills targeting everything from adult content to drag shows to mask mandates during pandemics. While some might argue she does a good job representing her constituents because a lot of residents are just as bigoted, she does an absolutely abhorrent job protecting their rights, which might matter to them at some point when it’s their favorite stuff being stifled by government incursions.
If this gets signed into law, it will be challenged in court. And it will be struck down once a federal judge gets a chance to read this blatant attack on the freedom to access content, which is a sizable part of the First Amendment. Until then, we’re just going to have to endure the stupidity of Rep. Site and her cohorts in the state legislature who seem to believe a strong Republican majority gives them the right to extend their collective middle fingers to pretty much every constitutional amendment but the 2nd.
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Look, when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post a decade ago, people worried that a billionaire owner might interfere with the paper’s editorial independence. For years, those fears seemed overblown — Bezos appeared content to let journalists do journalism while he focused on more pressing matters (like building rockets and not paying taxes). But it turns out the worriers were right, just early.
In the last few months, Bezos has made it increasingly clear that the Washington Post now exists primarily as a vehicle for expressing Bezos’ opinions, not anyone else’s. (To be clear, he has every right to do this — it’s his paper! — though it’s a bit rich to claim this somehow builds “trust” in journalism.)
The first indication of this editorial interference was Bezos’ decision to block the WaPo from endorsing Kamala Harris before the election. Bezos later claimed that this was necessary to bring back “trust” in journalism, totally missing that the real way to destroy trust in journalism is… to have billionaires stepping in and interfering with the journalism.
But that was just the appetizer. The main course of billionaire meddling arrived in an email Bezos sent to all employees:
I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.
We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.
There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.
I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.
I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” After careful consideration, David decided to step away. This is a significant shift, it won’t be easy, and it will require 100% commitment — I respect his decision. We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction.
I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.
Jeff
Let’s enjoy the rich irony of this ridiculous email together, shall we?
We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.
First off, this sounds like the late night bong-fueled thoughts of a college kid who just discovered Ayn Rand, not a 61 year old ultra billionaire who should recognize that the world contains more nuance and complexities than “personal liberties and free markets, good; everything else, bad.”
Look, I’m sympathetic to the broad strokes here. BestNetTech’s whole ethos is built around personal liberties and free markets. But there’s an important difference: we recognize these concepts as complex systems that require careful calibration, not simple catchphrases to be wielded like rhetorical clubs. And — much more importantly — we’ve spent years documenting how the loudest champions of “personal liberty and free markets” often use those very words while systematically dismantling actual liberties and enabling good old-fashioned crony capitalism.
The billionaire freedom paradox works something like this: Elon Musk, who has clearly appointed himself America’s shadow president, has spent the last almost three years falsely claiming that he is all about bringing back the “personal liberty” of free speech… while actually doing a tremendous amount of work to suppress and stifle the speech of those who challenge him.
And it’s not just an Elon thing. Consider Rupert Murdoch, who for decades positioned himself as the world’s most prominent champion of free market capitalism. Right up until his own businesses started losing in that free market. Then, suddenly, the invisible hand didn’t seem so wise anymore, and he demanded corporate welfare in the form of special taxes on the companies beating him at his own game. (Funny how that works.)
We see this pattern so often it might as well be a law of nature: the volume of someone’s “personal liberty” rhetoric is inversely proportional to their actual respect for others’ liberties. Call it the Billionaire’s First Law of Freedom. Hell, if Bezos was all about “personal liberties,” why is he blocking the opinion team from having the “personal liberty” to write about things Bezos disagrees with?
There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.
This argument might sound familiar to media watchers. It’s essentially the same logic the NY Times used when killing its public editor role: “Why have internal accountability when the internet exists?” (A question that answers itself, really.) In both cases, these newspapers fundamentally misunderstand both their own role and how the internet actually works.
Here’s the thing: The Washington Post’s Opinion pages don’t derive their value from being yet another place to read opinions (we have plenty of those, thanks). They matter because of decades of hard-won institutional credibility and editorial infrastructure. When something appears in the Washington Post, it carries weight precisely because it’s gone through that process, because there’s at least a general sense of an institutional commitment to certain standards.
Now, has this system sometimes failed? Absolutely. The WaPo Opinion section has published its share of terrible takes over the years. (Boy, have they ever.) But Bezos’ announcement doesn’t even pretend to address quality control or editorial standards. Instead, it just declares which opinions are allowed: specifically, the ones Jeff likes. It’s less “building trust in journalism” and more “building an extremely expensive personal blog.”
And, in doing so, it simultaneously undermines the long-held institutional credibility that provided so much value to the Washington Post in the first place.
I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.
Paraphrasing: “And therefore, I am taking away that freedom from my staff, and the opinion writers they bring in to make sure that the Washington Post no longer has creativity, invention, or prosperity.”
I mean, seriously. Read that again. It’s like declaring yourself Champion of Democracy by abolishing elections (I dread how long until this analogy comes true).
As for David Shipley’s resignation (after being stripped of his own “personal liberties,” naturally), the message couldn’t be clearer: The next Opinion editor’s job description might as well read “Must be willing to serve as Jeff Bezos’ ideological ventriloquist dummy.”
Again, he is absolutely allowed to do this, as it is his property. But it’s a major shift in the way people think of the Washington Post and what they will expect from it. And, whether or not they trust it.
I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.
Ah yes, the famously underserved “free markets and personal liberties” opinion market. A genre about as neglected as superhero movies in Hollywood, or AI companies in venture capital portfolios.
What Bezos really means is that he’s upset that the WaPo Opinion pages has, on occasion, called out the nonsense and excesses of the billionaire class, and the institutional failures to curb crony capitalism. And he’s sort of right — most serious publications tend to engage with these ideas as complex policy matters rather than using them as rhetorical sledgehammers to promote whatever simplistic goal the billionaire class wants this week.
Let’s codify what we might call The Ultra Billionaire’s Guide to Freedom™:
“Free markets” means I’m free to make as much money as possible
“Personal liberty” means I’m personally at liberty to do whatever I want
If you disagree with points 1 or 2, see point 2 again
If you try to stop me from exercising points 1 or 2, your personal liberties suddenly become theoretical constructs worthy of philosophical debate (or just outright suppression, if time is short) rather than actual rights
(Note: This guide is subject to change without notice, especially if the free market starts producing outcomes the billionaire doesn’t like.)
The Washington Post Opinion section has effectively been transformed from a forum for diverse viewpoints into Jeff’s Personal Newsletter About Freedom. Multiple WaPo journalists have already recognized this and called it out. While the opinion side and news side traditionally maintain separate territories, several news-side reporters have made it clear that any similar encroachment on their turf will trigger a mass exodus. (A personal liberty they still retain, at least for now.)
When Bezos first dipped his toe into editorial interference by blocking the Harris endorsement, over 300,000 WaPo subscribers voted with their wallets and cancelled their subscriptions. (The free market at work, you might say.) If you’re one of those ex-subscribers looking for a publication that still believes in actual journalistic independence — and not just as a marketing slogan to whitewash billionaire guilt — feel free to check out the many ways you can support BestNetTech.
And, Jeff, you’re free to donate as well, but we won’t change our editorial policies for anyone.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) contained a whopping $42.5 billion to expand broadband access under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. To make sure that money wasn’t wasted, it contained a number of provisions (as the name kind of implies).
Like demanding ISPs provide at least one tier of service poor people could afford. Or encouraging networks built with taxpayer money be open access, which, as we’ve discussed at length, helps boost broadband competition and lower costs. As well as encouragement that taxpayer money be spent on the most future-proof technology (fiber) where applicable. Pretty common sense stuff.
King Trump earlobe nibbler Ted Cruz has been whining ever since the infrastructure bill was passed about how these kinds of common sense provisions are “woke.” “Woke,” you’ll recall was a pop culture term that used to mean “enlightened,” which was hijacked by authoritarians to whine about anything they don’t like. Now new Trump NTIA boss Arielle Roth has joined the fun:
“Roth has criticized the program’s emphasis on fiber and “a woke social agenda” that the NTIA has been pushing in its funding.”
Again, by “woke” we mean “trying to make sure broadband that uses taxpayer money is affordable to people” and “trying to make sure that taxpayer money is spent on the best possible technology.”
They’ll ignore all the important stuff — like making sure U.S. broadband maps are accurate. Meanwhile they’ll gut the agency in charge of keeping telecoms from ripping you off (the FCC), resulting in higher bills for everyone. Then, once they’ve redirected money to cronies and gutted oversight of the sector and mapping of real-world access, they’ll declare “mission accomplished” on U.S. broadband access.
Great stuff, very innovative. And definitely not “woke.”
