It all starts innocently enough, with proposals for wireless infrastructure improvements.
The alt-right has found itself a new baseless conspiracy, this time involving the emergence of next-generation wireless broadband networks.
On its surface, there’s not much that’s controversial about the nation’s efforts to deploy fifth generation (5G) wireless networks. While the 5G standard isn’t even completed yet, once these networks arrive (probably around 2020) they should provide consumers with notably faster speeds, lower latency, and better overall connection quality. Assuming you can afford it.
But then the extremely competent and tech savvy Trump Administration steps in.
That all changed recently when a leaked PowerPoint deck and memo produced by a senior National Security Council official indicated that Trump advisors had at least fleetingly eyed a proposal to nationalize America’s looming 5G networks. The report notes the proposal was considered as part of a conversation about shoring up the nation’s cyber-defenses.
But it was fake news, or so they say?
The proposal, at the end of the day, was little more than an offhand pipe dream by a member of Trump’s National Security Council. One apparently not well versed with the economic and political realities of the telecom market.
As such, the entire story, based entirely on a dated and discarded proposal by one individual, probably deserved about a quarter of the attention it received.
That has never stopped the alt-right before, nor will it now.
Yet the story has now found new life among alt-right conspiracy theorists who pretty clearly have a less-than-flimsy understanding of how these networks would actually work.
The "take-away":
The irony is there’s plenty of very real-yet bonkers privacy-related issues for alt-right figures to get upset about, from the fact we can no longer tell where companies like AT&T end and the NSA begins, to ongoing efforts by the government to demonize encryption and backdoor the ‘net, putting everybody’s privacy and security at risk.
Instead, folks like Posobiec have created a profitable cottage industry based on pulling fabricated concoctions wholesale out of their posteriors, breathlessly fanning unnecessary hysteria, and pushing a universe of conspiracies with only a fleeting, tangential connection to anything vaguely resembling reality.
The truth is out there. I want to believe.