A Special Kind of Stupid

Some of you know that I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT for the past several months. It does a lot of things very well. In many ways, it is spectacularly brilliant.

But it is also spectacularly stupid in other ways – just like my laptop is sometimes stupid. See, these bits of machinery and circuitry do exactly what we tell them to do. They don’t always, however, do what we mean to tell them to do.

This headline (from yesterday’s Cardinal News, an online news source focused on rural Virginia) reflects this special kind of stupid, although you have to read the sub-heading to figure out what’s going on. The Trump administration has ordered the cancellation of another Biden-era initiative – this one focused on providing more reliable Internet access to rural America. The problem lies in the title of the program – Broadband Equity Access and Deployment. It’s clear that an AI scrub of Biden-era programs was set to find forbidden words, including “equity,” and eliminate the programs.

This legislation – known informally as “Internet for All” – had prioritized fiber broadband over satellite and other wireless internet delivery systems to serve more rural regions. According to a directive issued on Friday, June 6, 2025, the program will now be “tech neutral,” and all internet service provider applications for funding must be rescinded. Elsewhere in the notice, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) eliminated the program’s requirement for affordability and low-cost plans, and has stopped deployment funding (the money that would actually do things like bring cellphone service to dead zones).

Virginia was the first state in the nation to submit a proposal for a share of the $42.5 billion program. The Commerce Department had approved Virginia’s $1.48 billion plan, and the state began implementing the program last December.

The Cardinal News article provides a lot more detail, and you can read it here.

One sneaky part of this is that putting satellite internet delivery systems on an equal basis with fiber broadband benefits companies that provide satellite services – like, oh I don’t know, Elon Musk’s Starlink system. We should note that the changes in the program were in place before last week’s National Divorce between Musk and the current Republican president. I don’t know what that bodes for what comes next.

The white areas on this map are the parts of the state that are underserved or unserved with broadband internet. Screenshot from Cardinal News article.

This map is color-coded by income levels. These two maps show the pattern – low-income areas lack broadband access.

And to layer in one another element – the poorer parts of the state that have the least access to broadband voted for the current Republican president in 2024.

Now I want to couple this with what I wrote about on Monday of this week – how the implementation of work requirements for Medicaid eligibility will negatively impact the people who are eligible for benefits. As I wrote then, bureaucratic red tape and inability to meet reporting requirements will undoubtedly kick qualified people off the Medicaid rolls.

This artistically tilted map of Virginia shows the areas of greatest reliance on Medicaid in the darkest blue shades – which are broadly congruent with the poorer, underserved, and Republican parts of the state. https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2025/02/06/medicaid-coverage-in-virginia-counties-2023/

It’s not hard to envision what will happen if these cuts are made in both the Medicaid program and the infrastructure that supports it. Low-income rural Republicans will lose their medical coverage and they’ll blame Democrats, because that’s who the current Republican administration and their media lackeys will blame. There is no policy-oriented reason for what the Republican Party is doing. The cruelty is the point.