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Farmers’ debts and racial payoffs — 29 Comments

1. Hayek famously argued that the desire for equality of outcome mandated unequal treatment under the law. The current obsession with the “racialization of everything” has produced, inter alia, a fetishizing of the toxic concept of “equity”, by which the equally proportional representation of all groups (however they may be defined) in all measurable areas must be attained (a completely chimerical quest) “by any means necessary.” Neither facts nor logic (least of all, fairness) have any part to play in this madness.

2. I’m sorry, that constitution thing you were going on about? It’s outdated, an artifact of structural racism, so we don’t have to be concerned about it any more. Awake, comrades!

3. I just hope someone challenges this and an injunction is issued. Once the money is paid, tough to get it back.

   The Dems are so, so brazen.

4. No money for the “Cajun” crawfish farmers. That’s just wrong!

5. That’s why reparations is coming soon, too. If it’s “systemic racism” the finer points of individual liability don’t matter.

   In my old DC neighborhood, the DC government took to excluding certain zip codes from eligibility for the vaccine. They didn’t dare declare racial eligibility, but such was the intent. That was so last month, however.

   Here in Florida, the state just opened up to my age group. I went to the health portal I was directed to, and while I did get an appointment, the only choice of venue (not just available venue) was something called the “Center for Health Equity” (how long has that been its name?) in “the hood” about 16 miles away. My 90 year old mother — as I’ve written here — a waking-hours consumer of MSNBC and CNN, but never a “progressive” or indeed political at all in her earlier years, chastised me for accepting an appointment there and taking away the vaccine from black people. (I’ve since found a closer appointment directly from a chain store website).

   The point seems to be to increase racial hatred and resentment. It seems to be working with blacks too, at least in the case of my husband’s friend, who used to be quite conservative, ex-military and law enforcement, and always described his upbringing in a not very black small town in the mid-West as full of helpful white teachers and general acceptance (and he is in his 70s). He now says he couldn’t possibly meet up with us anywhere in Florida but a major city, as he is afraid of all the white supremacists here.

   It’s the sickening consolidation of the elites’ power through fear and whatya gonna do about it humiliation.

6. Nancy B, same with my black BiL. Previously fairly middle of the road. Spent the last year in covid lockdown consuming CNN 10 hours/day. Now spouts leftist tripe and how whites are out to get blacks. Somehow his wife and the rest of us are excluded. Before he actually said he wouldn’t go near the “hood” because of the crime etc. Now he says they are all victims. The Left is doing a magnificent job…scary how successful they are.

7. Since every branch of the federal government has rendered the Constitution of the United States a ‘dead letter’ this bill’s unconstitutionality is… moot.

   Cornhead,

   “I just hope someone challenges this and an injunction is issued. Once the money is paid, tough to get it back. The Dems are so, so brazen.”

   The less consequence suffered by the criminal, the more brazen their criminality will become.

   At least some portion of the money can be recovered. Simply seize the assets of every member of Congress who voted for this abomination. Plus the assets of every major donor to them. Seizing the assets of Soros, Buffet, Gates, Bezos, ‘celebrities’… et al would be a substantial downpayment upon America’s indebtedness.

   Look, fair play and the rule of law are now a joke.

   They’ve “called the tune” and get to “pay the piper”.

8. Blatantly racist and unconstitutional. A conservative law foundation will have to find a farmer who is excluded in order to have “standing” to sue.

9. This is the victim culture coming full circle. Now they demand as their due cash, deference and obsequious. Bull Crap. I tell them I subscribe to MLK dictates and I judge them on the content of their character. Usually that kind of snaps them out of it.

   Physicsguy – your black BiL. Is he an observant Christian ie. goes to church Sundays and reads the bible?

   To start bridging the divide in perceptions can I suggest you forward a couple of articles to him and ask him to read and then have an honest discussion with him.

   The first one starts out with this quote.

   “This government has failed us . . . We need a self-help program, a do-it-yourself philosophy, a do-it-right-now philosophy, an it’s-already-too-late philosophy.”
   — Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet”

   https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/13/big-white-lies/

   https://redstate.com/lenny_mcallister/2021/03/07/was-the-maj-toure-panel-too-much-blackness-for-the-folks-at-cpac-n338859

   https://redstate.com/jeffc/2021/03/07/follow-up-if-candace-owens-had-done-this-blexit-would-have-been-more-than-a-fantasy-n338949

   These are articles where we, people of good will, are genuinely hearing and trying to understand what is going on in the black community. The first two really made an impression on me. Hear his fears but put it in the context of how victimization porn only makes him weaker.

   Robert Barnes made an observation that a problem can NEVER be fixed by a politician. Because if it is fixed then the politician has to show he can answer new problems. So if the race problem is resolved then Sharpton, Jackson, Clyburn, Booker and Kama Sutra will have to find new work. That was Trump’s problem. He fixed things. He fixed the border and illegal immigration so people didn’t rate it high on the priority list. Now it will be.

   I could go on and on but you have a good grasp of what is going on and how the current administration is making things worse for black men. Good Luck.

10. In other news, Friends, the Constitution has no meaning anymore.

    What is to Be Done™ about that?

    Well I couldn’t rightly say. I am sure that Neo’s ongoing cataloging of the Left’s dismantling of the old dispensation is useful as a record of their depredations, and may even help awaken some ‘Normies’ from their slumbers. But folks of good will are going to need a better practical guide to their daily lives than a piece of dead parchment and a bunch of nostalgic feelings.

    There is nothing to be gained playing by Queensberry Rules when your Opponent is going at you with knives and flails. How to live and plan for the future is a personal decision, but throwing out the old rule book and basic assumptions for the duration is a good place to start. Note that this does not imply sprouting a horned helmet and incising exhortatory runes on one’s battle axe. Just that trusting blindly any of the old civic religion’s tenets is likely to get oneself into a world of pain in the coming years.

    Back to Muh Constitution. A mental exercise I like to go through once every 12 months is to go back and look at predictions made by other people which I scoffed at at the time. Do this going back say 1, 3, 10 years just for fun. Look to see if anyone was right or even more right than he/she could have imagined back then. Then, look at what he/she is saying *today* 🙂 Yes, survival bias, and other confounders, but still a good exercise.

11. I’m not sure the courts will stand against this. As the Bakke case showed, progressive judges will tie themselves in knots to avoid the obvious. Also, progressives today come at this issue with such a white hot zeal that I can’t see them accepting a decision against them as legitimate. I fear that’s going to weigh on the mind of Roberts for sure and potentially others.

    I would add to Zaphod, you’re absolutely right that progressives are coming at us with knives and flails, but coming back at them the same way does nothing but accelerate failure. When my progressive friends were flipping out about Trump in 2016, I told them to relax because a Trump victory would be the best thing that ever happened to the progressive movement. I said they would likely have President Kamala Harris and complete control of the government in 2020 to do whatever progressive things they wanted. (I wasn’t too far off.)

    Are we better off now than we were in 2016? No. Are we better off now than we would have been had we nominated another candidate in 2016? No. (Well maybe better off than if we had nominated Jeb!, but I believe that Jeb! ended up being the biggest Trump enabler of all.)

    Recall the popular definition of insanity about doing the same thing over again and expecting different results.

12. “…a Trump victory would be the best thing that ever happened to the progressive movement…”

    If you mean by “compelling” the Democrats to respond by launching a civil war in 2016 and then “forcing” them to weaponize an epidemic to help them steal an election in 2020 so as to enable them to consolidate absolute power, well then, you might be right.

    On the other hand, by forcing the issue, they have revealed themselves in ways they may have preferred not to….perhaps…

    (On the third hand, if there is any justice in this particular world of ours….)

13. (Continued…)

    …and this rousing effort—in defense of Progressive mediocrity, or rather insanity—demonstrates what, exactly?
    https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democrats-effort-save-newsom-recall-effort

    That after the citizenry (in California, no less) catch a glimpse of who the person behind the curtain really is (and what that person is really wearing)—and come to their own logical conclusions—the progressive agenda is to go to any length to deflect responsibility and put back that curtain where it belongs?

    No peeking, now. No scrutinizing! No questioning!

    No thinking!!

    Which raises the question: having shown their hand so blatantly and so pathetically, what kind of progressive “victory” is that?

14. Bauxite asking the wrong hypothetical questions again. Would the country be better off today in the second Hellary inferno, since kinetic responses are verbotten? Above all things, Trump was the worst conceivable outcome, Bauxite?

15. Barry Meislin – Trump gave them an opportunity to get away with it. I’d say that about 2/3 of the attacks on Trump were completely baseless. (See, e.g., the WaPo correction yesterday about the call with the Georgia SoS.) The problem is that the other 1/3 were not. Trump really did suggest that a judge with Mexican parents could not impartially decide his case. He, having never served himself, really did denigrate POWs by saying that he preferred soldiers who didn’t get caught, and so on. The 1/3 that was true made the 2/3 that was ridiculous sound plausible enough that people believed it all. Pointing that out isn’t apologizing for Democrats. Their behavior was reprehensible, but it was also completely predictable. Trump either didn’t know that or couldn’t handle it. That is why he lost.

    Om – I think it is very clear that the level of zealotry and resolve among progressives has been amplified by Trump in a way that it would not have been by another Republican president or by a Hillary administration. We’re going to get it worse and faster now than we would have otherwise. I’ll give you judges. I was thrilled (and somewhat surprised) by Trump’s judicial nominations. Understand, though, that those judges are the only shred of Trump’s policy legacy that will be left standing past the end of this summer, provided that no Senators flip on court packing. Don’t overestimate the value of judges, though. Most conservative-minded judges understand well what Scalia explained in his Obergefell dissent about the powerlessness of the judiciary and I suspect many of them will choose to bend and live to fight another day.

    That’s what it really comes down to. We may find that the Trump choice was really between (i) four decent years followed by total defeat; or (ii) continuing to muddle through while losing slowly.

16. Bauxite:

    When you start your line of thought from a premise that Trump was the worst possible outcome, are surprised and recognize that he wasn’t, but fall back into the line of thought that you had before Trump was elected, well, what is that line about insanity? Refusal to accept actual events in order to recast the past and predict the future?

17. “That is why he lost.”

    I’m afraid that for me, that line of argument is a non sequitur and will always remain one…since I am convinced that he actually did NOT lose—and that given the “peculiarities” of this “election”, he COULD NOT not have won (though I suppose one shouldn’t debate this in polite company…).

    This 1/3-2/3s business, while neat and tidy (and seemingly well thought out) is mere conjecture; since it appears (unless I’ve overlooked something here) to have ignored the elaborately planned Russiagate onslaught, i.e., the concerted and unceasing war that was waged—starting even before Day 1—against the Trump presidency by the Obama administration and a great many members of the current Democratic Politburo, most significantly its figurehead leader, “Biden”, together with the media, of course.

    So might that alter the ratio to 1/5-4/5s? 1/10-9/10s?

    BTW, if the argument is that Trump wasn’t the perfect president, I’ll agree with you; but it seems to me that “one has to dance with the girl that brung you”.

    (And if pigs had wings, they’d be able to fly.)

18. Related:
    https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_sovereign_crime_of_industrial_scale_vote_fraud.html
    H/T Powerline blog

19. I have a vague recollection that there have been “give money to minority farmers” programs for a while now. I can’t remember the details, but I seem to recall hearing about individuals or groups during the Obama Administration that were specifically setting up farms with black owners (at least on paper) to get money from the Feds.

20. junior – you are thinking of this –
    https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2013/06/pigford_the_unexamined_obama_administration_scandal.html

    I excerpt at length to show that, as with the Sovereign Crime (h/t Barry), the Democrats (aka Leftist Party of America aka Uniparty of the Deep State) have been running the same play book for a long, long time. Having had nearly unqualified success under Obama (and prior presidents), they are back in business on steroids.

    June 15, 2013
    Pigford: The Unexamined Obama Administration Scandal
    By Jim O’Sullivan
    The Obama administration has again been protected from a troubling scandal by the mainstream media (MSM) using the tactic of omission to simply ignore the scandal, its reality, and the negative blowback attendant to a disturbing story. As sunlight began to illuminate the scandal’s inconvenient and troubling facts, charges of racism were used to temporarily silence those sounding the alarm. Seemingly, the alarm-ringers’ only crime was having the temerity to respond with a politically incorrect point of view to abuses.

    The underreported scandal referenced is generally identified as “Pigford.” Pigford’s germination occurred in 1997 as a lawsuit (Pigford vs. Glickman) alleging that 91 African-American farmers were unfairly denied loans by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) due to racial discrimination which prevented the complainants from farming. In 1999, the black farmers won their case.

    Pigford has the distinction of being an out-of-control waste of taxpayer funds and/or a cynical attempt by the Obama administration to curry favor with certain minority groups to which neither President Obama nor Attorney General Eric Holder can plead ignorance of involvement. Both have had knowledge since the court ruled on the Pigford lawsuit; in 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama supported and voted for the funding of the initial settlement. Since then, Eric Holder (and Obama) have been involved in overseeing and managing the Pigford “judgment fund.”

    Yet can Pigford be fairly described as a scandal?

    Pigford began innocently enough: as a lawsuit to redress a perceived wrong against a group of 91. But then the number climbed to 400….then 1,600…then…

    The number of black farmers has metastasized — nay, exploded — and the aggrieved group now includes not only blacks, but Hispanics, Native Americans, and females. In fact over 90,000 people have filed claims seeking a payment under the terms of the original Pigford court ruling. That decision, now referred to as Pigford #1, was anticipated to cost approximately $120 million, including legal fees.

    Pigford #2 is the appellation used to identify an expanded payment regime that funds more payments to African-Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and females. This regimen grew out of the fact that thousands of claimants missed the original Pigford #1 filing deadline of October 12, 1999. Interestingly, Native American potential claimants were estimated at 5,300, while plaintiff lawyers pegged the exposure at an estimated 19,000 Native Americans. The judgment fund announced by Agricultural Secretary Thomas Vilsack and Eric Holder in 2010 was expanded from just over $120 million to $1.25 billion, given the expectation of many more filers.

    However, the explosion of claimants has caused payouts to reach $4.4 billion and has swelled legal fees to over $130 million. More importantly, the claim’s process created a rush to get a share of the monies allocated to the judgment fund, even if no real claim existed. Essentially, the process encouraged people to lie and spawned a cottage industry. Claimants had only to file applications for a $50,000 payment by stating that they had “thought about” applying for loans to become a farmer. Proof of a claimant’s intent to farm also included a statement from that petitioner saying he or she had attempted to farm by planting a batch of tomatoes in his or her backyard and having that statement verified by a family member. In essence, the need to be a farmer at the time of the alleged discriminatory actions by the USDA was not a requirement to share in the financial redress.

    Fraud was endemic to the claims process — for example, every apartment in a New York City building received a settlement of at least $50,000. Further, some families received checks of $50,000 for each family member (see the NYT’s fraud identification narrative of 4-26-13). These payments were dispensed by the judgment fund’s monitor, whose management and control fell to the Executive Branch and Justice Department. Due to the application vetting process, the payouts were criticized by both Representative Steve King (D-IA) and journalist Andrew Breitbart as payoffs to Obama’s/Democrats’ preferred groups to gain a favored political position with those entities.

    King and Breitbart had the courage to indelicately point out that some of payouts were ridiculous, fraudulent, and highly politicized. Both Congressman King and Breitbart were predictably charged with racism by many in the MSM; only because The New York Times printed their recent investigatory story have some MSM members begrudgingly ceded the veracity of King’s and Breitbart’s concerns.

    The combination of the racial criticism, the MSM’s silence regarding Pigford, and the quarantine on additional Pigford narratives subsequent to the NY Times’ article have emphasized the media’s concern for the damage an ongoing discussion of Pigford could cause the president. Potential stories may have included added evidence of rampant fraud and controversy:

    Well, you get the picture.
    Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results is not insanity, even if liberalism is now a bona fide mental disease.

21. Barry Meislin – Trump is in Florida right now and Joe Biden is living in the White House, so Trump lost. Full stop. Were dirty tactics a part of that loss? You bet they were. Was the loss due to voter fraud? I’m not as certain as you, but I agree that there were a lot of fishy things about the election and I don’t think we’ve seen all the evidence yet, and may never see it.

    Wasn’t part of Trump’s appeal, though, that he was uniquely willing and able to fight fire with fire and counter the knives and flails of the left? Trump did exactly what he said he would. It didn’t work. It blew up in his face, and ours.

    If you want to be angry at someone about that, blame Trump. It was Trump who didn’t have any plan to counter Democrats’ election shenanigans in the summer and fall (when it actually might have made a difference). It was Trump who acted like a clown at his daily COVID press conferences to turn what should have been a strength on policy into a weakness on form. It was Trump who failed to prepare for the first debate and came off looking like an unhinged maniac. In an election where 44k votes could have changed the outcome, these things mattered.

    I don’t buy the defenses of Trump either. The press is dishonest and partisan. Yes. Democrats are dirty hypocrites. You bet. Republicans didn’t back up his fraud claims. No, they didn’t.

    All of these things were predictable, though. The press and Democrats (but I repeat myself) are who they are. Republicans were never going to throw out 250 years of norms and tradition without smoking gun-levels of hard evidence that fraud changed the outcome of the election.

    The relevant question is how well did Trump’s tactics fare in the real world. The answer is that they were a resounding failure.

22. Bauxite:

    There were plenty of legal challenges (as well as rhetoric) from the Trump administration and others on the right during the summer and fall of 2020. Some failed, but some actually succeeded. I’ve written about this before. Was Trump to blame for the decisions of the liberal courts that went against him? I fail to see how.

    See, for example, this post as well as this one.

    In addition, I watched plenty of those COVID press conferences. I didn’t see him “acting like a clown.” Most of the time he seemed well-informed and to be taking things quite seriously. I didn’t see very single moment or watch every single presentation, but I watched many of them.

    Trump underestimated the strength of the forces arrayed against him. That was possibly his biggest flaw, but I don’t blame him for it since it was hard to know – sort of like turning over a rock an having bugs crawl out. And perhaps he didn’t actually underestimate them. Perhaps he thought it would be a really hard fight but nevertheless worth fighting.

    When you say his tactics were “a resounding failure,” you are making two errors I believe. The first is that we don’t know the final result; it’s early yet. The second is you don’t have a clue what could have succeeded. I think that, with the tactics of the left and how far they had already gotten with the Gramscian march prior to Trump’s election, the die was already cast. So although I hold out some hope that time will reveal a better result, I am actually quite pessimistic that such a result is possible, or that it was still possible in 2016.

23. “The relevant question is…”

    We’re talking past each other, it would seem.
    (It can happen. Even at the best of times.)

    And yes, what you say is true: Biden is firmly ensconced in the WH, having—obviously!—captured the imagination of the nation!; having—obviously—run a stellar, even brilliant, campaign; having—obviously—won the HIGHEST number of votes EVUH!!

    A RECORD!!! MY OH MY, WHAT A VICTORY IT WAS!!!

    And indeed, that really WAS quite an extraordinary campaign he ran, wasn’t it?….
    Perfection. Absolute perfection. (I still can’t get over it, so it seems…)

    But as you say, none of this matters. He’s in the WH. (Right?) Nor can one argue with “success”, can one…?

    So I’ll finish up with this:
    Might it just be possible that the truly “relevant question” is not so much the “resounding failure” of Trump’s tactics (how many votes did Trump manage to win, again?) but the “extraordinary success” of the “tactics” of the Democratic Party and its adjuncts.

    In other words, maybe “the relevant question is. “How well did the tactics of the Democrat ‘cabal’ fare in the real world….”

    But once again, OMMV….

24. “I think that, with the tactics of the left and how far they had already gotten with the Gramscian march prior to Trump’s election, the die was already cast.”

    No doubt, the odious Gramscian march is critically important overall; but if one holds (as I do) that the election was clearly fraudulent, then the Gramscian march has absolutely NOTHING to do with the election RESULTS.

    In fact, one can claim the opposite: that Trump’s victory denied—subverted, upended, stolen—by the Democrats’ “brilliant(?) tactical success”(?)) demonstrated clearly that a large swath of the country rejects this Gramscian-inspired “fundamental transformation”.

    Moreover, one can make the same claim even if one insists that “of course Trump lost.”

25. As long as we’re on the subject of Trump’s failures…:
    https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/16/5-other-totally-bogus-stories-designed-to-hurt-trump-the-media-got-away-with/

    I mean, the least Trump should have done was to tell the media (firmly but politely? with “Presidential” mien? with JFK-esque humor and charm?) that they were reporting things that were, um, not exactly accurate…. (Whereupon the media would no doubt have quickly apologized and corrected the record…immediately!)

    I’m pretty sure, however, that most if not all of the blame CAN be placed on Trump—for having won in 2016. If he had had the decency to lose, he wouldn’t have been able—even if he had wanted—to subsequently expose himself as such a “resounding failure”….

26. Barry Meislin:

    I think the Gramscian march was especially important in the law schools. After all, future judges are trained there, and in the years since I went to law school, the teaching of law has gone way to the left. So the court decisions are all part of that. Also, in order for fraud to be perpetrated if a lot of people cooperate in that process, you have to have a lot of people who believe the ends justify the means, and to do that you have to have undermined traditional Western values and morality.

27. Bauxite:

    I’m concerned you haven’t found a more sophisticated or nuanced argument beyond “Orange Man Bad.” Sad.

    Jeb! or Kasich needs a better cheer leader. Or is it Ben Sasse you are pining for?

28. Bauxite:

    Is Trump to blame for this too?

    https://www.breitbart.com/2020-election/2021/03/16/mi-court-michigan-secretary-of-states-absentee-ballot-order-broke-law-vindicating-trump-claim/

29. Neo’s reply to Bauxite was a model conversation:
    B. raised the talking points that are standard now on the left, on the NeverTrump faux-right, and by some concerned genuine conservatives; made a “good” case (articulate, intelligible, and sticking to major complaints); and was polite.
    Neo responded point-by-point with contrary evidence, which could be persuasive to people open to doing some research into the non-MSM-dominated media accounts.

    I’m going to be much less genteel, and repost a couple of articles that have bearing, with a hat-tip to om today (Michigan court; and it’s not the only one coming in a too many days late and a lot of dollars short), and Barry earlier this week.

    https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_sovereign_crime_of_industrial_scale_vote_fraud.html

    https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/02/05/delingpole-presidential-election-wasnt-rigged-it-was-fortified-says-time-magazine/

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