Thanks for this—deeply appreciate your clarity and candor. What this whole saga exposes isn’t just a misunderstanding of BEAD or broadband—it’s a deeper media failure, and one that folks like Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, and Jon (not John) Stewart routinely stumble into: the seductive ease of performative outrage over the boring, slow, necessary functions of democracy.
Ezra Klein, who should know better, failed the test here. He went on Lex Fridman’s show—a podcast that routinely launders fascist-adjacent ideology behind a mask of soft-spoken techno-optimism—and treated the entire thing as a neutral intellectual exercise. No pushback. No moral line-drawing. Then he turns around and mocks a multi-billion-dollar broadband deployment program from within the most powerful media platform in the world, based on a surface-level grasp of bureaucratic function. If you’re going to critique implementation, at least understand what you’re looking at.
As for Stewart? He never really had the plot to lose. He’s a charming contrarian—fun to rage with against “the system,” but he’s long trafficked in the same vague populist sentiment that powers the Bernies and the Bannons: government = broken, slow, corrupt. Rarely does he challenge his audience to sit with the unsexy complexities of policymaking in a pluralistic democracy. Because that’s not comedy. That’s civics. And civics doesn’t sell.
This isn’t just a media optics problem—it’s an epistemic rot. In our outrage economy, even good-faith liberals would rather mock bureaucratic slowness than educate their audience about what competent governance actually looks like. BEAD is doing exactly what it was structured to do—and if we let these bad-faith or lazy narratives fester, we’re handing the far right even more ammo for dismantling the very programs they never wanted to succeed.
Your Derek Thompson / Ezra Klein bit here seems misleading. Thompson said "we got some of this wrong" related to how the bill came together, as in who was responsible for it being terrible. Klein put it as "That was fair: Portions of that 14-stage process were insisted upon by congressional Republicans." Basically, that the terribleness of the bill was bipartisan, not just a function of the Democrats. Nobody seems to be saying they got the description of the bill itself wrong.
Maybe you disagree with all the folks that have weighed in here, including from the administration, and think the process that was passed into law was a good one, but your characterization of the argument and walk back seems misleading.
Very well written! Looking forward to the following posts.
Thanks for this—deeply appreciate your clarity and candor. What this whole saga exposes isn’t just a misunderstanding of BEAD or broadband—it’s a deeper media failure, and one that folks like Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, and Jon (not John) Stewart routinely stumble into: the seductive ease of performative outrage over the boring, slow, necessary functions of democracy.
Ezra Klein, who should know better, failed the test here. He went on Lex Fridman’s show—a podcast that routinely launders fascist-adjacent ideology behind a mask of soft-spoken techno-optimism—and treated the entire thing as a neutral intellectual exercise. No pushback. No moral line-drawing. Then he turns around and mocks a multi-billion-dollar broadband deployment program from within the most powerful media platform in the world, based on a surface-level grasp of bureaucratic function. If you’re going to critique implementation, at least understand what you’re looking at.
As for Stewart? He never really had the plot to lose. He’s a charming contrarian—fun to rage with against “the system,” but he’s long trafficked in the same vague populist sentiment that powers the Bernies and the Bannons: government = broken, slow, corrupt. Rarely does he challenge his audience to sit with the unsexy complexities of policymaking in a pluralistic democracy. Because that’s not comedy. That’s civics. And civics doesn’t sell.
This isn’t just a media optics problem—it’s an epistemic rot. In our outrage economy, even good-faith liberals would rather mock bureaucratic slowness than educate their audience about what competent governance actually looks like. BEAD is doing exactly what it was structured to do—and if we let these bad-faith or lazy narratives fester, we’re handing the far right even more ammo for dismantling the very programs they never wanted to succeed.
Your Derek Thompson / Ezra Klein bit here seems misleading. Thompson said "we got some of this wrong" related to how the bill came together, as in who was responsible for it being terrible. Klein put it as "That was fair: Portions of that 14-stage process were insisted upon by congressional Republicans." Basically, that the terribleness of the bill was bipartisan, not just a function of the Democrats. Nobody seems to be saying they got the description of the bill itself wrong.
Maybe you disagree with all the folks that have weighed in here, including from the administration, and think the process that was passed into law was a good one, but your characterization of the argument and walk back seems misleading.