Kent retweeted
SpaceX is calling on the FCC to END billions of dollars in outdated broadband subsidies
In a new regulatory filing, SpaceX is challenging legacy High-Cost programs that continue sending more than $3 BILLION annually to incumbent providers
And SpaceX made it very clear what these programs really are:
“These mechanisms are corporate welfare programs, not broadband programs”
Here's what SpaceX put on the record:
• More than $3 BILLION annually continues flowing through legacy High-Cost subsidies and Enhanced A-CAM
• Subsidized service areas cover just 5% of U.S. broadband-serviceable locations, based on boundaries dating back to 1984
• No measurable difference in broadband subscription rates between subsidized areas and comparable high-cost areas outside them
• Competitive fixed wireless, cable and next-generation satellite broadband are increasingly serving these communities without the same legacy subsidies
• Millions of Americans still struggle with broadband affordability, while existing Lifeline assistance remains underfunded
And this is where Starlink changes the equation
High-speed, low-latency satellite internet is reaching remote communities without requiring traditional broadband infrastructure to be built to every home
SpaceX is challenging the idea that taxpayers should continue funding legacy programs indefinitely when newer technologies and competition are changing how rural America gets connected
The message to the FCC is simple:
Stop protecting outdated subsidy structures and redirect those billions toward programs that actually benefit consumers
Kent retweeted
Interesting.
I’m still waiting for the numbers on how illegal aliens, dead people, and homeless people filing multiple ballots from portapotties and vacant lots voted.
I keep hearing, Republicans did this, Republicans did that. Still no word on those core Democratic demographics.
Kent retweeted
VERIZON'S CEO SAID STARLINK MOBILE WOULD COST $500 BILLION. THAT IS MORE THAN HIS ENTIRE COMPANY. 📞💀
Verizon CEO Dan Schulman got on the Q3 earnings call and told Wall Street that SpaceX would need four to six years and $300 billion to $500 billion to build a real US carrier network. Later in the same call, he stretched it to half a trillion over seven or eight years.
He said it like it was a threat.
Sir. Let me introduce you to a stock screener.
📉 Verizon market cap: about $185 billion
📉 T-Mobile: about $170 billion
📉 AT&T: about $145 billion
Add it up. $500 billion. That is the ENTIRE American wireless industry. All three of them. Every tower, every mall kiosk, every bill with fourteen line items and an "administrative charge" nobody at the company can explain.
This man stood up on an earnings call and announced that building a carrier from scratch costs exactly what it costs to buy every carrier that already exists. He thinks he described a moat. What he did was hang a FOR SALE sign on his whole industry and read the price out loud.
And the part that should have ended the call early: his LOW number is bigger than his own company.
$300 billion to build one. $185 billion to buy his.
Take Verizon out at a premium, swallow all $166 billion of its debt, and you are around $350 billion all in. Still inside the range he quoted. Except instead of a slide about 65,000 towers you have to go pour concrete for, you get:
📶 94.5 million postpaid phone lines already paying every month
💰 $18 billion of free cash flow in nine months
📡 A national spectrum portfolio
🌐 The old UUNET backbone, which Verizon has owned since it swallowed MCI in 2006, one of the original pipes the internet runs on
Then you dump the rest. The retail leases. The copper. The set-top boxes. The 6,000 person customer experience transformation department. The billing system that charges you a fee to pay your bill. Spin it, sell it, let it drift out to sea.
Keep the fiber and the backbone, bolt it to a direct-to-cell constellation, and you stop being a phone company. You become the internet with a free cell network attached.
Net cost after the spinoffs is probably less than the $44 billion somebody once paid for Twitter. 🐦
And SpaceX already wrote a $17 billion check for EchoStar's spectrum in September. That is not a theory. That is a man with a cart.
Musk's reply to the four-to-six-year lecture was shorter than the lecture: it will take 2 or 3 years.
My favorite moment is Schulman insisting Starlink would be "the sixth, not the fourth" competitor in the US, and that there is "no magic wand" for building a network. Buddy, that is not a moat. That is a man who has never personally watched someone land a rocket on a boat.
Worth noting: Verizon got removed from the Dow Jones in June and replaced by Alphabet. The index that carried General Electric for 110 years looked at Verizon and said, "No thank you."
So here is my read, and I sell technology for a living, so I have seen this movie:
That was not a defense. That was a pitch deck. The new CEO, in the chair since October, came over from PayPal and needs a story for the board. Nothing says "I have a plan" like telling the market that your biggest competitor would have to outspend your entire valuation to beat you. Nothing says "please, make me an offer and let me retire" quite as loudly, either.
Legacy telcos are a bond with a logo. They have managed decline for so long they mistake it for strategy. One of them is getting bought, stripped and bolted to a satellite constellation, and the CEO who publicly priced the alternative at half a trillion dollars just volunteered.
Dan, blink twice if you want out. 🦋
Kent retweeted
basically this
The White underclass is a miracle, and probably why the West has succeeded.
Thomas Frank wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas” to explore why poor Whites don’t vote for socialist policies that would (narrowly, in the short-term) benefit them. Of course he concluded it was about racism, as he was predetermined to do by his ideology.
But I actually think he highlighted an incredibly important fact: poor White Americans, uniquely among underclasses globally, don’t vote for socialism.
The typical dynamic is rich people trying to keep what they have and poor people trying to take it. But the American lower-class White does not behave this way, because he has a deontological aversion to government interference. The collection of attitudes and beliefs described as “rugged individualism” are often assessed in terms of how they impact the individual, but I think it’s much more important to consider how they impact a nation.
(White) America has the world’s least resentful or grasping underclass. This is a treasure. They should be preserved and rewarded. Many might be net-negative fiscally in a narrow sense, but they are hugely net-positive if you consider their votes. Trump famously said “I love the poorly educated.” He was right to say this. Every nation has an elite. No other nation has such a high quality of virtuous common people.
Kent retweeted
Take a brief recess from the political circus to watch the funniest 60 seconds on the internet. Worth it! 🤣
Kent retweeted
HISTORY LESSON ON YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY CARD:
Just in case some of you young whippersnappers (& some older ones) didn’t know this. It’s easy to check out, if you don’t believe it. Be sure and show it to your family and friends. They need a little history lesson on what’s what and it doesn’t matter whether you are Democrat or Republican. Facts are FACTS.
Up until the 1980's, Social Security cards expressly stated the number and card were not to be used for identification purposes.
Since nearly everyone in the United States now has a number, it became convenient to use it anyway and the "NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION" message was removed.
Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, introduced the Social Security (FICA) Program. His promises are in black, with updates in brackets.
1.) That participation in the Program would be completely voluntary [No longer voluntary],
2.) That the participants would only have to pay 1% of the first $1,400 of their annual Incomes into the Program [Now 7.65% on the first $90,000, and 15% on the first $90,000 if you’re self-employed],
3.) That the money the participants elected to put into the Program would be deductible from their income for tax purposes each year [No longer tax deductible],
4.) That the money the participants put into the independent ‘Trust Fund’ rather than into the general operating fund, and therefore, would only be used to fund the Social Security Retirement Program, and no other Government program [Under Johnson the money was moved to the General Fund and spent], and
5.) That the annuity payments to the retirees would never be taxed as income [Under Clinton & Gore up to 85% of your Social Security can be taxed].
Since many of us have paid into FICA for years and are now receiving a Social Security check every month — and then finding that we are getting taxed on 85% of the money we paid to the Federal government to ‘put away’ — you may be interested in the following:
Q: Which Political Party took Social Security from the independent ‘Trust Fund’ and put it into the general fund so that Congress could spend it?
A: It was Lyndon Johnson and the democratically controlled House and Senate.
Q: Which Political Party eliminated the income tax deduction for Social Security (FICA) withholding?
A: The Democratic Party.
Q: Which Political Party started taxing Social Security annuities?
A: The Democratic Party, with Al Gore casting the ‘tie-breaking’ deciding vote as President of the Senate, while he was Vice President of the US
AND MY FAVORITE:
Q: Which Political Party decided to start giving annuity payments to immigrants?
A: That’s right! Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Party. Immigrants moved into this country, and at age 65, began to receive Social Security payments! The Democratic Party gave these payments to them, even though they never paid a dime into it!
Now, after violating the original contract (FICA), the Democrats turn around and tell you that the Republicans want to take your Social Security away!
And the worst part about it is uninformed citizens believe it! If enough people receive this, maybe a seed of awareness will be planted and maybe changes will evolve. Maybe not, though. Some Democrats are awfully sure of what isn’t so — but it’s worth a try.
Kent retweeted
Watch this. The free west is fighting for its life, folks.
@AsraNomani
Kent retweeted
🚨🚨 THE ILLEGITIMACY PLAYBOOK / THE DEMOCRACY FILES: A PRIMER 🚨
I will be using this thread to track all drops, so bookmark it.
I spent most of yesterday backing everything (now 312 gigabytes) up in various sources and getting the materials out to others. I also produced an AI video (below) to explain the whole thing to others are not on 𝕏 - feel free to distribute.
Here's the primer:
USAID, the foreign aid agency, had a democracy office. Inside the agency, it was called DRG.
Officially, DRG administered "democracy assistance." They'd go inside countries they thought were sliding into authoritarianism and help the opposition there. That assistance included election monitoring, judicary support, independent media, and civil society building.
You may have heard the term "color revolution." The model comes from Serbia in 2000, where trained student activists brought down Milosevic with the help of Western governments, after sustained protests. With the help of USAID's democracy office, this model was implemented in many other countries to topple governments: Georgia's "Rose Revolution" in 2003, Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" in 2004, and many more.
Then last year, DOGE shut down USAID. But the USAID democracy office didn't stop. They formed a group called the Democracy Renewal Group, the same initials as their office (USAID Democracy, Human Rights, Governance). Their goal: apply their own playbook to the United States itself.
This goal became a plan, called Renew American Democracy (RAD). It invoked the "4 B's" framework. Block - use lawfare and protests to make life harder for the Trump administration. Bridge & Belong - control dialogue and win people over. The final and most important B is Build. Build means redesigning the American government itself, and the crisis is the opening.
In their own words:
"We can take that breakdown moment and leverage it for a big structural reform, you know, refounding moment." - Danielle Reiff, DRG lead.
Calls show DRG working alongside DSA on ideas of creating a different government, one that does away with the Constitution itself.
DRG does not run the Block operations. They hand it to UDA, the United Democracy Alliance. One organizer calls it a "huge galaxy": lawsuits, street protests, non-cooperation. They list No Kings, Indivisible, MoveOn, 50501, and many other mega-activist NGOs among their members.
Another organizer calls UDA Erica Chenoweth's project. Chenoweth is the Harvard professor behind the three-and-half-percent rule of regime change: get that share of a country's populace onto the streets, and historically, the movement wins.
The UDA is very "hush-hush." They have no website, no roster, no filings.
Then come the red lines: things the Trump administration could do, such as calling the Insurrection Act on protesters, that would mean that the federal government, in their words, "crosses the threshold into illegitimacy." Nobody voted on those lines. There was no public debate. These red lines were developed within secretive working groups, and in a paper addressed to governors and staff.
In the words of Reiff/DRG:
"So that if there is a red line crossed in terms of a Constitutional crisis, like everyone's already pre-organized. And so Mike Smith actually said, he goes, oh, you guys have the day after tomorrow plan."
Cross a line, and the paper's options include states refusing to lend their resources to federal officials, and governors convening what it calls a "Third Continential Congress."
Running the UDA's Insurrection Act working group: Rear Admiral Mike Smith (RET) of National Security Leaders of America (NSL4A). NSL4A is also credited with operationalizing UDA, the blocking operations. NSL4A consists of about 1,600 ex-officers, spies, diplomats. They're turning red lines into indicators and running a situation room to monitor them throughout the midterms and beyond.
The NSL4A's lawyers told them to stop recording meetings in case of subpoenas. But the rest of the network continued to record. DRG works in conjunction with Renew to Thrive (R2T), which ended up accidentally publishing 400+ calls and thousands of documents. These calls and documents were never meant for our eyes, but it's them, on tape.
Thousands of NGOs and billions of dollars are involved in this endeavor. Most of them believe they're saving democracy. The problem is that people who spent their careers deciding when other countries' governments had lost their legitimacy wrote that test for ours, in private, and planned for what comes after.
Who decides when your government is legitimate?
Kent retweeted
This song is🔥
Louisiana HVAC worker Jason Bellard’s faith-rooted song “May God Bless America”
(w/ Steve Gruber & The Freedom Project) hits #3 on iTunes.
💪 A blue-collar anthem of patriotism and conviction ahead of the midterms.
GOD BLESS AMERICA 🇺🇸
Kent retweeted
I wrote this description/warning of what is happening in the West. Please watch it and share it with others. @idicenter
Kent retweeted
Trump is also trying to prevent a nuclear war. The crazed Baltics are letting their airspace be used for attacks on Russia. i.e., NATO airspace. Hoping Putin responds and we will be there, namely WWIII. Republican Senate needs to put on big boy pants and stop sucking off the defense industrial complex. The entire psyop against MAGA is being run by London and Obama. They intend to kill you if you ever supported Donald Trump and they win. Just listen to Slotkin and Susan Rice. Wake up, people and get 10 others to the polls to vote for Trump even if it means voting for a Republican who sucks. We'll settle that later.
