Ted Cruz Pats Himself On The Back At Senate Hearing For Screwing Over Rural School Children

Ted Cruz last week chaired a Senate hearing dubbed “Plugged Out: Examining the Impact of Technology on America’s Youth.” The hearing spent a lot of time doubling down on the scary-sounding, often-baseless stories lawmakers tell themselves as they push terrible laws like KOSMA to “protect the children” from a completely unproven link between social media and mental health problems.

Laws like KOSMA, as we’ve repeatedly reported, are unconstitutional messes that often create more problems than they profess to solve. And lawmakers like Ted Cruz, which we’ve also documented repeatedly, have shown time and time again how they aren’t actually interested in protecting kids (from tech giants or anything else), or doing any of the heavy lifting (like, say ensuring everyone has access to affordable mental health care or affordable broadband) required to actually help anybody.

But when it comes to Ted Cruz, it’s even worse than all that. Last year we noted how Cruz was at the forefront of efforts to kill FCC reforms that made it easier and cheaper for kids to access the internet and do their homework.

More specifically, Cruz leveraged the Congressional Review Act to kill FCC modifications to the E-Rate program that allowed school libraries to offer kids free Wi-Fi hotspots. This was a broadly popular, uncontroversial program that made it easier for rural, low-income kids to get online. And Cruz killed it because companies like AT&T don’t want the government offering alternatives to their overpriced service.

Cruz, of course, couldn’t just openly announce that telecom lobbyist corruption resulted in him killing a helpful program with broad, bipartisan support. So he made up a whole bunch of bullshit about how this Wi-Fi program was “censoring Conservative viewpoints” and resulting in kids running amok unsupervised online. As we debunked in detail it was all lies; he just threw a bunch of nonsense at the wall, and our lazy, shitty press parroted much of it unskeptically.

Fast forward to last week and Cruz’s support for the awful KOSMA bill. Cruz actually took time out in his grandstanding “protect the children!” hearing testimony to pat himself on the back for the fact he made it harder for rural American schoolchildren to access the internet:

“During the Biden administration, not only did Congressional Democrats give billions of dollars to the FCC to buy personal internet devices for children, but the Biden FCC sought to bankroll kids’ unsupervised internet access and undermine parental rights by expanding the E-Rate program to install Wi-Fi hotspots off campus, including on school buses and in students’ homes.“

Cruz is, as usual, lying. The expanded Wi-Fi hotspot program didn’t cost the FCC any additional taxpayer money whatsoever. They leveraged existing E-Rate funds to ensure the most disadvantaged, rural kids (many of whose parents voted for Trump) had access to affordable Internet when not on school grounds, either via a cheap access point at home, or a cheap access point on a local bus or bookmobile.

Again, the Republican opposition to this wasn’t rooted in any sort of good intention. AT&T and Verizon simply don’t like the precedent of the government offering affordable (or free) broadband internet access to people. Even people in areas their networks don’t reach. They’d much rather those families be stuck paying an arm and a leg for spotty, expensive, often unreliable broadband access.

Cruz dressed up his lazy corruption as some sort of noble “protection of the children,” a pretty common refrain in DC policy circles. And because the U.S. press generally sucks (in part due to the Republican assault on media consolidation and ownership limits), he was broadly allowed to lie repeatedly about this without being seriously challenged in the media.

To make matters worse, he’s leveraging his corrupt protection of the Republican-coddled telecom industry as some sort of noble justification for passing shitty, half-cooked legislation on a completely different front. But as is so often the case, the “protect the children” and race-baiting, culture war trolling generally exists to divide and disorient the public so they don’t cooperatively target the real problem: rich assholes.

In the case of KOSKA, as we saw with the fake GOP antitrust inquiries into “big tech,” or fake concerns about “free speech,” Cruz’s interest isn’t in actually reining in big tech or helping kids. His interest is in finding leverage points over modern media giants that can be used to bully them into protecting and coddling authoritarians and their rank propaganda, a gambit that’s proven to be quite successful so far.