Ted Cruz Blocks FCC Plan To Bring Mobile Wi-Fi To School Kids For A Very Very Stupid Reason

Last year the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can’t afford broadband) to get online. The E-Rate budget was not increased.

Enter the Taco-Bell-fart-in-a-suit known as Ted Cruz, who has introduced a Congressional Review Act (CRA) that would eliminate the FCC’s rule. Why? The effort likely upset companies like AT&T, which would obviously prefer it if the poor families’ in question had to pay them for an expensive wireless line. The CRA can be used to reverse rulings done within a set amount of time (usually 6 months).

Cruz’s press release announcing his change teeters in and out of typical far right weird stuff, including false claims that the kids using these services are “unmonitored” (in most states these options come with parental controls and monitoring). But this was the fun bit:

“The order also heightens the risk of censoring kids’ exposure to conservative viewpoints—a trend recently already seen in many districts.”

This idea that you must be exposed to MAGA race-baiting lies and bullshit to consider yourself well rounded has increasingly become a cornerstone of MAGA authoritarian ideology. The movement increasingly relies on propaganda to befuddle the public, because their actual policies (giving rich people tax breaks, letting corporations mercilessly fuck people over) aren’t all that popular.

The “proof” that Cruz points to is the recent kerfuffles surrounding NewsGuard, the company that tries to rate news organizations according to partisan and reliability bias. Trumplings are mad because NewGuard sometimes points out that right wing propaganda isn’t reliable or factual (though it has a long history of sometimes giving high marks to that very same right wing propaganda).

NewsGuard apparently partnered with The American Federation of Teachers to allow members to get the NewsGuard browser extension for free, but which has nothing to do with WiFi in schools, or any monitoring or blocking. Still, this agreement to offer free access to the browser extension seems to be causing Cruz to apparently suffer some sort of cognitive embolism.*

*Updated this paragraph to clarify NewsGuard’s partnership with AFT which is even less directly involved with school WiFi (i.e., not at all) than we originally reported. We regret the error of thinking that even Cruz’s ridiculous justification had a least some basis in truth.

This is all very very stupid for many reasons. One being that NewsGuard doesn’t even do that good of a job criticizing right wing bullshit and propaganda pretending to be real news. The other being that MAGA knobs keep trying to claim that any effort to call them on their bullshit is somehow “censorship.” It’s all part of an exhausting victimization complex that’s getting very, very old.

Again, some local telecom lobbyist very likely got Republicans to try and kill the measure thinking it hurts local wireless revenues. Cruz and other Republican sponsors of this effort quickly got to work dressing it up with some weird “we’re being censored” bullshit to distract everybody from their corruption. Now kids can’t do their homework. Typical MAGA stuff. Hooray for “populism.”