The goal seems to be to keep people in rural areas ignorant and/or sell more starlink terminals
this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Trump kills rural broadband grants, calls digital equity program “racist and illegal”
(arstechnica.com)
It's easy to funnel money from the rubes. It was only 2 years ago that I learned some churches will automatically withdraw tithes from your bank account and they encourage you to set up "direct deposit" with them.
The entire economic model of these loons is built on the same principle: anything you use regularly, for "free" or built with taxpayer money, should instead become a subscription service you have to pay for, to a cabal of rich sociopaths. In the meantime, the actual free option is brain rotting propaganda to keep you voting for the rich sociopaths so they can repeat step 1. See: Fox News.
Churches and other religious congregations in the US are NOT funded with taxpayers money (at least, pending Supreme Court decision on the Kansas taxpayer supported Catholic school), and pastor salary and building upkeep are very real costs. If a family values the community having employee(s) and a building, and doesn't want the hassle of other payment options, automatic debits are a good option to have available.
Things that actually are funded with taxpayer money, yes, they should be free. The Project 2025 plan to kill NOAA so weather forecasts will only be available to subscribers of private companies is incredibly destructive to such a huge number of people, and yes, this broadband decision is in that same awful category.
You misread my comment. I'm relating direct tithing to churches, to things like NOAA. That's actually an incredible example of what I'm talking about. But I'm not saying churches are taxpayer funded no.
That being said... I'm not putting it past religious fundamentalists to convince Trump to issue an executive order garnishing every American's wages in the name of tithing to the church. It would be foul, and fucked, but the last 6 months have given me an ample imagination.
Isn't the fact that they get a tax credit kinda means they get that money through?
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Deny social security
Giving rural old white farmers broadband is racist?
let them eat starlink!
This is probably the whole point.
This should be written down for the saying of this time in history
Stupid is as stupid votes.
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So it went from socialist to racist to offer incentives to companies to put broadband in rural areas. Boy sure I'm glad there's somebody at the top to tell us these things. Here I thought it was just a sensible thing to do all this time. Silly me.
Probably shouldn't have called it Digital Equity Internet. I could see where the confusion comes in.
They need to keep their base stupid.
Doesn't seem like they need to work very hard at it tbh.
Fair point
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This will be just great for the Appalachian region J.D. Vance was playing up as his homeland.
They could have really used that money to get some broadband deployed and a workforce trained up: https://communitynetworks.org/content/connect-humanity-project-aims-bring-broadband-rural-appalachia
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calls digital equity program “racist and illegal”
I don't see why he would kill anything over that. Those are like his two favorite things.
And this predominantly benefits poor white people. I think he just saw "equity" and assumed it helped brown people.
Did he just look at the word "equity" and assume it somehow helped minorities? That's the only reason I can imagine him calling it racist.
Yes, yes that is exactly what has been happening. This is not the only example of them doing Ctrl+f and ending grants.
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But... but... rural is white Trump country. They need the interweb tubes.
Musk is rolling out a new tier of cheap starlink, lower bandwidth but also zero-tiers certain providers (think Fox News).
I wish I was being sarcastic. They're worried they need to bridge the gap from talk radio.
In Canada, we just give them the money, they twiddle their thumbs for a few years then say they're abandoning the project and keep the money. Then we wait a few years, and decide to give them more money for the same thing again.
They’ve already done that here once before in the US, too.
10 billion dollars to redefine 5g as 1/10th it's original bandwidth and then not meet the standards of providing it anyway.
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All those red counties can keep enjoying paying over $100 a month for terrible local cable company "100mbps" (20mbps in reality) download speeds with 56k upload. That's the great America they wanted after all. Meanwhile in my very blue city I pay $60 a month for symmetric gigabit.
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Have fun watching diabetes commercials on cable while the rest of us enjoy what we want on streaming platforms.
Not even going to bother addressing the veteran stuff. Trump hating the military and its personnel is old news and his voters couldn't give a flying fuck.
Internet access is racist and illegal! Thanks conservatives!
If they only know twitter then you could understand a bit the confusion.
It must literally just be the word "equity".
I really hope that someone is collecting all the laws that Trump is making up on the fly so that we can compare the documents; at least do a word count of Trump's collected laws and covfefe vs the Constitution.
His boyfriend must be complaining because it doesn't benefit Starlink or something
Racist? His main voter base are right winged fucks in the rural areas
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Does this create communication blund spots? Because that's dangerously good preperation for gulags or something
Just a couple weeks ago, with the announcement of orders being opened to the public, people in my (pretty red) area were celebrating the expected arrival of broadband from these grants,
Wonder if its going to happen now. 🤦
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