America stands at an electromagnetic crossroads. Nearly three decades ago Congress slipped a single paragraph—the now‑infamous Section 704—into the 1996 Telecommunications Act. That sentence forbids states and towns from blocking antennas “on the basis of the environmental effects of radio‑frequency emissions.” In one stroke local democracy was silenced, public‑health oversight was ceded to a commerce agency, and a vast build‑out of microwave infrastructure became legally untouchable. The constitutional wound remains open: First‑Amendment speech rights and Tenth‑Amendment police powers vanish the moment a citizen raises the subject of health.
“In effect Washington sold national spectrum rights at the price of local civil rights. Town‑hall microphones go dead the moment a mother says the word ‘leukemia’. That is not telecommunications policy; it is prior restraint on health speech.”
The science that Section 704 buried has not been idle. In 2021 the D.C. Circuit, faced with a 1,100‑page evidentiary record, ruled that the FCC’s “thermal‑only” exposure limits were “arbitrary and capricious.” Since that judgment the research gap has only widened. This April a World Health Organization task‑force reviewed fifty‑two lifetime animal studies and judged, with high certainty, that non‑thermal radio‑frequency exposure produces malignant gliomas and heart‑schwannomas. Days later another WHO review issued a corrigendum: after correcting weighting errors the key fertility endpoint—pregnancy rate when exposed males mate with unexposed females—now also carries high certainty. The pooled odds‑ratio is 1.68, heterogeneity is a modest 21 %, and nine independent studies across rodents and rabbits point the same way even when the single 43 W kg outlier is removed.
“Judge Robert Wilkins, writing for a unanimous D.C. Circuit, called the FCC record ‘by any measure inadequate’ and ordered the agency to explain why it had ignored evidence of cancer, DNA damage and harm to children.”
How can fields far too weak to cook tissue produce tumours and sterile litters? A 2025 umbrella review in Frontiers in Public Health supplies the missing biophysics. Polarised, pulsed signals—the hallmark of Wi‑Fi and 5 G—force the ions parked inside voltage‑gated channels to oscillate at the beat frequency of the signal. The charged sensor that opens the channel sits a billionth of a metre away; micro‑volt swings become pico‑newton levers that pop the gate at the wrong time. Calcium floods the cytosol, mitochondria erupt in reactive oxygen species, and comet‑assay photographs capture DNA sliced into shreds—all at power densities well below the FCC limit. Twenty‑eight distinct pathologies traced back to this single initiating event; the Bradford‑Hill plausibility box is now ticked.
“The U.S. National Toxicology Program saw the same tumours but at 1.5 W kg⁻¹—the lowest power it tested—while higher powers produced fewer tumours. That dose‑inversion is the fingerprint of a biological trigger, not a heat lamp.”
Even the White House’s Make America Healthy Again report—heralded as a sweeping exposome audit—could not cleanse the literature; it simply closed its search window in 2022, thereby omitting the WHO’s 2024–25 findings, the EHT court decision, the mechanism paper, and an entire body of peer‑reviewed sponsorship‑bias research showing that industry‑funded experiments are nine times less likely to detect harm. Silence is not neutrality; it is selection.
“MAHA closed its literature search at December 2022—thirteen months before the WHO’s high‑certainty cancer verdict and fifteen months before the fertility corrigendum. It also excludes every sponsorship‑bias meta‑analysis even though those papers sit in PubMed with titles that include the word bias. When an exposome audit deletes the exposure with the strongest funding bias on record, omission becomes spin.”
Against that backdrop the Trump Organization holds a rare, double‑edged influence: the political megaphone of a presidential campaign and the commercial leverage of a new mobile brand. Both enterprises face a choice. They can continue to trade on twentieth‑century microwave engineering—or they can lead the country into a Light Age.
The alternative already carries an IEEE number: 802.11bb. Li‑Fi moves gigabits on invisible infrared light, cannot penetrate walls, and therefore cannot eavesdrop or expose bystanders. The patent that embeds a bio‑defence duty‑cycle and seamless hand‑off to outdoor satellite links—US 11 700 058 B2—has been pledged, royalty‑free, to a U.S. sovereign wealth fund so that every citizen shares the upside. A Clean Ether Act, modelled on the Clean Air Act of 1970, would finish the job: cap indoor power density at one‑ten‑thousandth of today’s limit, restore local zoning rights by repealing Section 704, and steer federal broadband grants toward light‑based infrastructure. The result would be an American photonics industry exporting security‑grade connectivity instead of liability.
The technical conversion is simpler than past public‑health pivots. Cars did not vanish when tetra‑ethyl lead was banned; catalytic‑converter patents created fortunes and children’s blood‑lead levels collapsed. Cigarettes did not disappear when warning labels arrived; they shrank from social centre‑piece to afterthought. Wireless can follow the same arc—if leadership decides that public health is not negotiable.
That leadership moment now belongs to the Trump team. They can print a campaign slogan on a handset and sell yesterday’s technology, or they can announce—clearly, unequivocally—that the brand will not trade in tumour risk, fertility loss and DNA fragmentation. A Li‑Fi‑first handset, a Li‑Fi‑first network, and a presidential call for a Clean Ether Act would end the FCC’s quarter‑century stalemate overnight. Investors would migrate to photonics, schools would retrofit lighting instead of pleading for metal‑detector‑style Faraday cages, and the constitutional gag on local self‑defence would be gone.
History rarely offers a second draft, yet here it is: the court has warned, the science has matured, the alternative has standardised, and a single family enterprise, straddling politics and markets, can rewrite the narrative. It would be a signature achievement—one that turns a name synonymous with towers of concrete and steel into a beacon of light.
The decision will not wait for another election cycle, another tranche of industry‑funded reassurance, or another generation of children to absorb the statistical burden. The evidence is high‑certainty, the mechanism is settled, and the obligation to act has crossed the threshold of delay.
Choose the light.
