‘The damage is terrifying’: Barbara Kingsolver on Trump, rural America and the recovery home funded by her hit novel; The Guardian, July 5, 2025

Hannah Marriott, The Guardian ; ‘The damage is terrifying’: Barbara Kingsolver on Trump, rural America and the recovery home funded by her hit novel

"Rural life and the opioid crisis have not been sufficiently represented in fiction, she says. “Appalachian life in general has not been sufficiently represented. People don’t know the complexity and the nuance.” Appalachians represent “ecosystems of people, the people in need and the people who give; the Memaws (grandmothers) who take care of all the kids.” She dismisses one infamous account – vice president JD Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy – as a book that was “really all about himself, how he got out and made good, and the people that stay behind, well, are just lazy”. Appalachian culture, she says, is about modesty and self-reliance. “If he were a real Appalachian, he wouldn’t tell that story.”...

“Charity is a very loaded concept. It involves a power imbalance. It is a person standing in a position of privilege saying: I will give this gift to you, and implicit is: ‘to help you become more like me’. Everything about that is odious to me.”...

Pride, denial and shame are longstanding Kingsolver fascinations. She says that the archetypal American story of the lone hero pulling themselves up by their bootstraps “is just bullshit. We have classes in this country. We have class barriers. There are places you can be born that you’re never going to get out of.” Still, she says, that myth is powerful: it “brainwashes” people; it can lead to self-blame...

She lives in Trump country, and says she understands how he “hooked” so many people, but she never demonises Trump voters herself, describing her neighbours as “some of the most generous, kindhearted people you will ever meet”. She has no kind words for the man himself. His presidency is, she says, “a circus. That’s too kind a word for it. Circuses make you laugh. This one makes you cry. It’s stunning how much damage one ignorant man can do.”

She points out that Trump’s “so-called Big Beautiful Bill” could be devastating for the region, with its cuts to the National Park Service, the Weather Service and disaster preparedness – just last year the area was hit by the devastating Hurricane Helene – and cuts to Medicaid, which could cause havoc in an already under-served area. “The damage will be unimaginable. Lots of people will die, lots of wild lands will be destroyed. The damage is terrifying.” Does she think her Trump-voting neighbours will change their allegiance if such terrors come to pass? “Will they connect the dots when our hospital closes? I don’t even know the answer to that,” she says, shaking her head, fearing that the TV and radio stations that told them to vote for Trump in the first place will “come up with some other reason why your hospital closed. For those of us who are in the information business, that’s a depressing subject.”...

In the long term, she says she believes in the Martin Luther King Jr quote that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”."

Alaska Cannot Survive This Bill; The New York Times, June 27, 2025

Bryce Edgmon and Cathy Giessel, The New York Times ; Alaska Cannot Survive This Bill

"The likely impacts from the “big, beautiful bill” are particularly ugly for our home state, Alaska: Nearly 40,000 Alaskans could lose health care coverage, thousands of families will go hungry through loss of benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and the shift in costs from the federal government to the state will plunge our budget into a severe deficit, cripple our state economy and make it harder to provide basic services.

This is not about partisanship. One of us is a Republican and the other is an independent. In the Alaska Legislature, our State Senate and House are led by a bipartisan governing coalition. Our focus is squarely on the survival of the people we represent.

The benefits of Medicaid and the SNAP program permeate the entire fabric of the Alaska economy, with one in three Alaskans receiving Medicaid, including more than half of the children. In remote Arctic communities, Medicaid dollars make medical travel possible for residents from the hundreds of roadless villages to the communities where they are able to receive proper medical treatments...

Alaska cannot afford to lose health care funding. Our state is near the top of the list for the highest rates of suicide, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections in the nation. It is also severely lacking in adequate behavioral health services. The cuts will only make these problems worse.

Work requirements instituted in Medicaid are untenable for rural Alaska, with many communities facing limited broadband access and job opportunities. Alaskans who lose health care coverage will be forced to delay care until it’s an emergency."

Federal funding cuts could be felt at Kentucky libraries; Spectrum News 1, June 19, 2025

KHYATI PATEL , Spectrum News 1; Federal funding cuts could be felt at Kentucky libraries

"Of Kentucky’s 120 counties, almost 80 counties only have one library.

“So what that means for our population is that no matter where you live in our county, the library that you have access to, it’s all in one location,” said Ashley Wagers, library director for the Jackson County Public Library.

She said the library’s bookmobile travels throughout the county with resources for people in some of the most rural areas of the state.

“It takes us as long as 30 to 45 minutes to get out to where they live. And when you’re faced with economic challenges, you know, you might not have a vehicle that’s even reliable to get to the library, to get to those resources,” Wagers said...

In May, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the federal agency which supports libraries, found out the law guiding its funding will expire this fall. Some funding from IMLS goes to the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives.

A state spokesperson said the federal budget cut equates to a loss of about $3 million for libraries across the Commonwealth.

They shared a statement which said, “As of May 4, 2025, staff at IMLS has been reduced to 12 from 77. Congress appropriates funding for IMLS and the legislation under the Museum and Library Services Act that dictates how the agency distributes funding expires on September 30, 2025. The first budget proposal for the upcoming federal fiscal year has removed all funding for IMLS grants, reducing the amount to $6 million to close out the agency. It would mean a loss of over $2.7 million for KDLA. To date, KDLA has not received an official award notification for the next fiscal year, which will run through September 30, 2026.”...

The state said the federal funds make up about 24% of KDLA’s operational budget."

Trump admin tells Pennsylvania, other states to shift broadband focus to cheaper options like Elon Musk’s Starlink; ABC27, June 17, 2025

Charlotte Keith of Spotlight PA via ABC27 , ABC27; Trump admin tells Pennsylvania, other states to shift broadband focus to cheaper options like Elon Musk’s Starlink

[Kip Currier: Consider how ill-advised and short-sighted this Trump 2.0 policy maneuver is; a gambit with concerning ramifications for Internet access throughout the U.S.:

First, as part of his DEI purges, Trump terminates the Digital Equity Act of 2021 on May 9, 2025 with an executive order, claiming that the bi-partisan law, signed by Joe Biden, for expanding high speed Internet access to millions of Americans (especially rural Americans) was unconstitutional and "racist".

Now, in June 2025 Trump encourages states to sign on to billionaire Elon Musk's Starlink satellite service. Musk's DOGE cuts have decimated government services.

As the nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom Spotlight PA points out in this article, too, Musk's Starlink Internet access and other carriers being pushed by the Trump administration rely on less reliable WiFi and satellite service, rather than "the internet via fiber optic cables, widely considered the gold standard for speed and reliability." 

Given Musk's recent tantrum during his early June dust-up with Trump in which Musk threatened to discontinue making his SpaceX Dragon spacecraft available to the U.S., does it seem like a well-advised policy decision to give Musk the power to control the Internet access of hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans?]

[Excerpt]

"Sweeping changes are coming to a massive program that aims to bring high-speed internet to everyone in the U.S., after the Trump administration rejected one of the initiative’s key policy goals.

The new rules for the $42.5 billion program change the way states will evaluate competing proposals, which areas are eligible for funding, and how long states have to award the grants. The announcement in early June upended months of planning and left Pennsylvania officials scrambling as they race to meet a newly accelerated timeline for getting the money out.

The changes likely will result in fewer Pennsylvanians in remote and rural areas being connected to the internet via fiber optic cables, widely considered the gold standard for speed and reliability. The program originally prioritized fiber projects, but under the new rules, states must select winners based on the lowest cost. The change will make applications from wireless and satellite internet providers, including Elon Musk’s Starlink, more competitive."

Trump’s Attack on the Postal Service Is a Threat to Democracy—and to Rural America; The New Yorker, August 11, 2020

Bill McKibben, The New Yorker; Trump’s Attack on the Postal Service Is a Threat to Democracy—and to Rural America

"In 2012, when the Postal Service planned on closing 3,830 branches, an analysis by Reuters showed that eighty per cent of those branches were in rural areas where the poverty rate topped the national average. You know who delivers the Amazon package the final mile to rural Americans? The U.S.P.S. You know how people get medicine, when the pharmacy is an hour’s drive away? In their mailbox. You know why many people can’t pay their bills electronically? Because too much of rural America has impossibly slow Internet, or none at all. These are the places where, during the pandemic, teachers and students all sit in cars in the school parking lot to Zoom with one another, because that’s the only spot with high-speed Wi-Fi. You want the ultimate example? Visit one of the sprawling Native American lands in the West and you’ll see how, as a member of the Mandan-Hidatsa tribe in North Dakota told Vox, the Postal Service helps keep those communities “connected to the world.” Should the government destroy the service, she said, “It would just be kind of a continuation of these structures in the U.S. that already dispossessed people of color, black and indigenous people of color, and people below the poverty line.” The mail, Kleeb said, “is a universal service that literally levels the playing field for all Americans. It is how we order goods, send gifts to our family, and keep small businesses alive. In the era of the coronavirus, mail is now our lifeline to have our voices heard for our ballots in the election. In fact, in eleven counties in our state, they have only mail-in ballots, because of how massive the county is land-wise.”

The least connected people in America; Politico, February 7, 2018

Margaret Harding McGill, Politico; The least connected people in America

[Kip Currier: A must-read primer on the State of the Digital and Tech Divides in America AND a compelling call for long-promised, long-overdue action on Broadband Internet access for all Americans.]

"As broadband internet becomes more and more important in the U.S. — the way Americans do everything from apply for jobs to chatting with their relatives to watching TV — one gap has become more glaring: the difference between those who have broadband and those who don't. An estimated 24 million people, about 8 percent of Americans, still have no home access to high-speed internet service, defined by the Federal Communications Commission as a download speed of 25 megabits per second. (That's what the FCC says allows telecommuting or streaming high-definition video.) The overwhelming majority of those people live in rural areas, like farms or in big, poorly served areas like this one.

The shorthand for fixing this problem is “closing the digital divide," and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says it's his top priority. But it has been a high-priority problem for years and remained persistently out of reach for reasons rooted in the structure of our telecommunications system itself. Internet access in the U.S. depends almost entirely on private companies; unlike other crucial services like postal delivery or electric power, it isn't considered the government's job, and isn't regulated as a public utility. But the limits of that system have become painfully apparent: Companies can't make money by running expensive wires to few customers, and a complex tangle of incentives offered by the government hasn't solved the problem in towns like Orofino.

Nowhere is the lack of broadband access more acute than in places like this: Rural Indian reservations have lower rates of coverage than anywhere else in the nation. About 35 percent of Americans living in tribal lands lack broadband access, according to the most recent report by the FCC. In Idaho, the FCC estimates that 83 percent of the tribal population lacks broadband, making the Nez Perce tribe among the least-connected groups in the country."

Microsoft Courts Rural America, And Politicians, With High-Speed Internet; NPR, All Tech Considered, July 11, 2017

Aarti Shahani, NPR, All Tech Considered; Microsoft Courts Rural America, And Politicians, With High-Speed Internet

"Millions of people in rural America don't have the Internet connectivity that those in cities take for granted. Microsoft is pledging to get 2 million rural Americans online, in a five-year plan; and the company is going to push phone companies and regulators to help get the whole 23.4 million connected."

Once Comcast’s Deal Shifted to a Focus on Broadband, Its Ambitions Were Sunk; New York Times, 4/23/15

Jonathan Mahler, New York Times; Once Comcast’s Deal Shifted to a Focus on Broadband, Its Ambitions Were Sunk:

"If there was a single moment when the winds seemed to shift against Comcast, it came in November, when President Obama released a video on the White House website in which he spoke about the future of the Internet. For the first time, Mr. Obama, who had long offered support for the idea of net neutrality but had always stopped short of suggesting how it might be achieved, was unambiguously clear about what he wanted. He called on the Federal Communications Commission to adopt “the strongest possible rules” to regulate the Internet.

“For almost a century, our law has recognized that companies who connect you to the world have special obligations not to exploit the monopoly they enjoy over access into and out of your home or business,” he said. “It is common sense that the same philosophy should guide any service that is based on the transmission of information — whether a phone call or a packet of data.”...

It meant that a lot of Americans living in rural areas no longer had what qualified as high-speed Internet access — making Comcast’s already large share of the broadband market considerably larger."