Gigi Sohn may have failed to become an FCC commissioner under Joe Biden, but she’s still committed to fighting for the leftist agenda that scuttled her nomination.
The George Soros-backed lawyer’s latest mission is to convince state governments to resist the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate DEI from internet policy.
The Biden administration prioritized woke over quality and consumer choice in broadband access. Through programs such as the Digital Equity Act and Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD), Biden officials sought to DEI-ify Americans’ internet. President Trump condemned these endeavors as “racist” and “unconstitutional.” He announced his administration would scrap DEA grants and reform BEAD to meet consumer demands rather than the demands of liberal bureaucrats.
This development angers Sohn, and now she wants the states to resist Trump’s moves to de-wokify America. She urges state attorneys general to sue the administration to claw back DEA grants to continue the left’s war on meritocracy. She also supports state efforts to block the Trump administration’s BEAD reforms.
The president wants BEAD to ignore woke dictates and allow equal funding for both fiber and satellite internet options. But Virginia plans only to offer the financing of fiber options, a policy set by liberals like Sohn. Elon Musk’s Starlink would face unfair discrimination under this arrangement. That suits the left, which wants to punish Musk’s businesses. Sohn herself describes it as a “scary scenario” for Americans to have greater access to Starlink now, thanks to BEAD.
Several House Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, attacked the reforms because they want the grants reserved exclusively for fiber-based internet providers and Starlink completely cut out. However, fiber optic internet often doesn’t perform well in rural areas, in contrast to satellite-based options. The ostensible purpose of BEAD is to deliver better internet to such areas. But for the left, its purpose is to give handouts to its interest groups and advance their agenda.
SpaceX, Starlink’s provider, issued a stark criticism of Virginia’s decision to stick with the priorities set by the Biden administration and how it could create a precedent for other states to stifle consumer demand on behalf of woke dictates.
“Simply put, Virginia has put its heavy thumb on the scale in favor of expensive, slow-to-build fiber bias over speedy, low-cost, and technology-neutral competition,” SpaceX stated in a recent letter to the Department of Housing and Community Development. “Allowing this sort of noncompliant proposal to proceed will inevitably delay administration of the program and, worse, ultimately slow or prevent delivery of broadband to Virginians that need it most.”
But Sohn believes Virginia is in the right and SpaceX is the one setting a dangerous precedent. In a post published on LinkedIn, she lashed out at the tech company for daring to challenge the internet agenda set forth by leftists:
This Starlink comment opposing Virginia’s lawful BEAD final proposal is one of the most intemperate filings I’ve ever seen in the telecom policy space. There’s a lot of hyperbole and name-calling, but not a lot of facts. Read it for yourself and see if you agree.
My concern is that this filing is more about saber-rattling and frightening other states into granting the company more locations, even if they can’t provide priority broadband service…
What is Sohn’s motivation? Like most leftism, it’s a combination of ideology and greed.
She has a clear financial motivation: she runs the American Association for Public Broadband, a lobbying collective for the very same fiber and telecom companies that the Biden administration wanted to subsidize.
Sohn has spent her entire career devoted to promoting censorship. As JD Vance noted during her confirmation hearing, she was at the forefront of the “weird racialization” of America’s policies, which he feared she wanted to use to “censor based on” her radical racial views. Public Knowledge, a group that she founded, has defended NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index against attacks from Musk as merely serving as “services to support content moderation efforts; advertisers may use them to make judgments about brand safety,” while complaining that “Musk’s Twitter (now X) reinstated suspended accounts of controversial users, such as white nationalists; stopped enforcing policies on COVID-19 misinformation; and disbanded its Trust and Safety team.” Public Knowledge also accused Musk of turning Twitter into “the unofficial platform of the Trump campaign” for simply not censoring his supporters.
While Sohn reluctantly acknowledged the FCC could not prevent Musk from buying Twitter to save her nomination, she still wants to punish his other businesses.
Fortunately, Sohn and her allies have no power over the federal government, and the Trump administration is committed to maintaining their reforms. However, Sohn and her allies will continue to try to use blue states and weak Republican state governments to continue the Biden policies despite Trump’s policy reforms.