Daily Archives: June 27, 2021

Joseph Bishop-Henchman resigned Friday as chair of the Libertarian National Committee (LNC), after a controversy that began three months ago with provocative tweets, intensified two weeks ago with an attempted schism of the New Hampshire Libertarian Party (LPNH), and has now turned into a battle for the soul of America's third-largest political party.

Two other members of the 17-person LNC, Tucker Coburn and Francis Wendt, have also resigned in wake of the tumult. The long-influential Pragmatist Caucus, associated with the two presidential campaigns of Gary Johnson, has dissolved as a direct result. And one of the party's few elected officials, DeKalb, Illinois, City Clerk Sasha Cohen, resigned from the national Libertarian Party (L.P.) in protest, saying in an LNC Zoom meeting that "we are a big tent party, but no tent is big enough to hold racists and people of color, transphobes and trans people, bigots and their victims."

A "toxic culture has recently been harnessed in the service of a grouping with a declared goal of taking over the party and making it as repulsive as possible to everyone except themselves," Bishop-Henchman wrote in his resignation letter, referring to the party's ascendant Mises Caucus, which for the past few years has been advertising its intentions to launch a "takeover" of the L.P. to realign it more with the policy and messaging associated with Ron Paul and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. "I will not chair a party that knowingly and has now affirmatively chosen to stay affiliated with the toxic garbage that was being spewed by the New Hampshire party and similar bad actors in other states, the violent threats emanating from these people, and the deliberate destruction of the party's ability to appeal to voters and win elections."

Bishop-Henchman did not detail the specifics of the source or nature of the "violent threats" in his public comments on the LPNH matter and his resignation. He declined to be interviewed for this article, deferring to his public written statements.

The outgoing chair had lost the confidence of many Libertarians, and not just Mises Caucus members, by lending support to a highly irregular attempt on June 12 by the LPNH's then-chair, Jilletta Jarvis, to break away from the existing state L.P. and form a new one, seizing the former's digital assets in an attempt to regain control of a Twitter feed that had since the party's convention in March made headlines by saying stuff like "John McCain's brain tumor saved more lives than Anthony Fauci."

On June 16, the LNC voted 122, with three abstentions, to reject a Bishop-Henchman co-sponsored motion to disaffiliate with the existing New Hampshire party, which would have paved the way for Jarvis' rump to be recognized. The other pro-separatist voter, Coburn, the representative for the very region containing New Hampshire, joined Bishop-Henchman in resigning from the board after the vote.

On June 17, Jarvis relented, and returned control of the LPNH website and other digital property back to the existing party.

LNC at-large representative Joshua Smith, a leading member of the Mises Caucus, saw this as a resounding victory for the party's newer members, and for the independence of state affiliates. He says the group has effective control of around 25 state party affiliates now.

The failed New Hampshire coup was condemned by a wide range of non-Mises L.P. factions and figures as well, including 2020 vice presidential candidate Spike Cohen (who called it a "fiasco" that "should have remained an LPNH issue exclusively") and former congressman Justin Amash, who argued that "due process" requires acknowledging that "there's only one legitimate executive committee of @LPNH," while also stressing that "official social media accounts are for advancing the party's mission of organizing libertarians, not for personal experiments in edgelording."

The state party's restored Twitter feed wasted little time resting on its laurels. "The ultimate goal of wokeism is to infiltrate, occupy, and dominate every cultural, political, and corporate institution," the account tweeted June 20. "The Libertarian Party isn't immune to this. It must be identified and stopped immediately."

The "Mean Tweets"

"No one saw this even remotely coming, such a nuclear bomb," says LPNH Executive Committee at-large member Sean Dempsey, a Mises Caucus member. "No one imagined it happening. For my own part I considered myself good friends with Jilletta.We thought she was a true freedom fighter, and this caught us all off-guard. We were very hurt, and still feel stabbed in the back because of the way this was handled."

Jarvis (who declined to be interviewed for this article) and the rest of the six-member state Executive Committee, half of which belong to the Mises Caucus, were elected at the annual state convention March 1921. While he was not on the Communications Committee coming out of the convention, Jeremy Kauffman was added to the committee in April; by May that committee's chair granted him posting privileges. Kauffman is the founder and CEO of a blockchain-based, censorship-free content-publishing system called LBRY. He is a big player in New Hampshire libertarian politics, sitting on the board of the Free State Project, and he is notorious for highly inflammatory tweeting on his own personal account.

Sean Brennan was elected as treasurer only after the convention changed its bylaws to make him eligible; he had not been a dues-paying member long enough to qualify before.**

The Brennan maneuver raised some eyebrows among those resistant to the Mises influx, and there was a smattering of other complaints about the LPNH's post-convention actions. They booted a long-term activist and thorn in the Mises Caucus' side, Jackie Perry, for allegedly revealing private contact information about Jarvis; Perry insists it was all public, and that it was not clear the ExCom even has the legitimate power to get rid of members this way. One executive committee members' suggestion that they consider not running a gubernatorial candidate if a specific Republican much beloved by the state's larger liberty movement (which in New Hampshire has always been far more geared to the GOP than the L.P., even or especially among Free State Project members) was used to suggest the new ExCom was deliberately taking the L.P. out of electoral politics. A filing with the state as a political committee that Jarvis' new group made and the old one did not was used as evidence the Mises crowd wanted to drive the organization out of legal existence, but Brennan says that the LPNH did not get enough candidate donations to hit the legal limit requiring that filing.

All those controversies swirled in the chatter around the LPNH's misdeeds, but Dempsey believes they all amount to "red herrings." The visceral disgust displayed toward the party by Jarvis, Bishop-Henchman, and other Libertarians comes down to what Kauffman has done with the state party's Twitter feed. The whole kerfuffle was traceable to what LNC Secretary Caryn Ann Harlos, a very loud voice standing up for the prerogatives of the LPNH within the LNC, describes dismissively as "mean tweets."

Among the controversial LPNH tweets attributed to Kauffman was a call to "legalize child labor" because "children will learn more on a job site than in public school," another to keep Gitmo open "so that Anthony Fauci and every governor that locked their state down can be sent there, never again to be allowed inside of the United States," and still another to "Repeal the Civil Rights Act."

Kauffman defended his tactics on the Taking Human Action podcast over the weekend. "I'm a very committed libertarian, and I think this is good for the libertarian movement," he said. "I think L.P. national had been sort of taken over by what I would call, you know, woke neoliberal globalists, and they're not libertarians. Libertarianism is private property, bodily autonomy, voluntary association, right? These are sort of the core atoms of libertarian philosophy. And I don't think that the people who were on the LNC endorsed them."

The child labor tweetstorm in particular was "an absolute win" for the L.P., Kauffman insisted, since the backlashincluding from such people as Gary Johnsononly serves to spread radical ideas to those who wouldn't otherwise have been exposed to them. He maintained that the Mises incursion into the LPNH had grown membership from around 60 people last year to around 150.

The debate over "mean tweets" conflated Kauffman as voice of LPNH and voice for himself, in ways that he thinks are illegitimate but that many L.P.-adjacent folk think is perfectly appropriate.

It is Kauffman who Bishop-Henchman referred to, not by name, in his June 14 letter to the LNC when he writes of "an individual who does things like tweet about how black people have lower IQs and murdering trans people would be a good trade-off for lower taxes." Those ideas were tweeted on Kauffman's personal account, not the party's. (Kauffman and his fans stress that he specifically was talking about the superior morality of no taxes to 1,000 murdered transpeople, not just the "lower taxes" Bishop-Henchman wrote.***)

Kauffman insists "if the LPNH is in trouble, it needs to be about things LPNH said, not things I've said," since Mises Caucus folk are "on board with the idea of not policing things people say on private pages." This hits on one of the prime ideological or attitudinal fault lines between L.P. factions: The Mises crowd is far more likely to find only actual physical assaults on people's persons, property, or liberty worthy of condemnation, what they call "NAP violations" (for the "non-aggression principle"), not what they might write off as merely (at worst) bad words or bad thoughts.

Jarvis insisted, in arguing for her move to take the LPNH into her possession, that that messaging strategy "is, frankly, designed to discredit the Libertarian Party in the state and in our nation."

Jarvis continued: "January 6thshowed us what can happen when people are riled up into a frenzy and given little direction. For the last two months, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire has been using this strategy, the strategy of riling up mobs to frenzy and giving them no direction."

The Short and Unhappy Life of the New New Hampshire Libertarian Party

As the LPNH Twitter account continued dropping social media bombs, LNC Chair Bishop-Henchman sent a letter to Jarvis June 7 stating that "the party of which you are Chair is the LNC's sole qualifying organization in New Hampshire" and is "part of the official structure of the national party." Five days later Jarvis announced she was launching the new party.

In a videotaped chat with some LNC members June 13, Jarvis said that Bishop-Henchman knew what she was trying to do when that letter was requested (though she said it was technically asked for by a third party who she wouldn't name), and that she was therefore confident the LNC would recognize hers as the true Libertarian Party affiliate in New Hampshire.

Jarvis had originally been planning just to resign over frustration at the Executive Committee's communication strategy, but unnamed other people told her creating her own new party from scratch was another option.

So was Bishop-Henchman's letter intended to imply that the authority of the LNC was behind the new splinter party? The LNC is in the process of selecting people to form an investigatory committee this week to find out. If so, says LNC Secretary Caryn Ann Harlos, this would count as "corruption"an attack on a duly constituted state affiliate from the national party. For her raucous role in pushing this investigation, within and outside the LNC, Harlos was hit with a motion to remove her as secretary and from all her other L.P. committee positions, then another such motion when the first one was ruled out of order. That second one was also ruled out of order on Tuesday, so her position seems safe for now. She considered herself targeted as a whistleblower for her attempts to get to the bottom of whether LNC officials were illegitimately targeting a state party.

In his June 14 letter, written partly in response to calls for his removal over his alleged interference in New Hampshire, Bishop-Henchman insisted he did not know what Jarvis was going to do. "Claims that I was some kind of co-conspirator are false," he said. "I do not as LNC Chair tell state chairs and officers what they should do."

But Bishop-Henchman also tried to argue that the last three months of LPNH executive-committee behavior "amounted to their constructive resignation," since it was effectively "little different than if they had all gone out and endorsed Donald Trump or Joe Biden, basically." Thus, Jarvis "felt she had no choice to reconstitute the organization as best she could, with the people she could, who still supported the mission of the party."

Jarvis and 13 other LPNH members during the short-lived rump party wrote up new bylaws and a new platform, and crafted a familiar-sounding Libertarian oath with a new ending: "I will not advocate or endorse the initiation of force as a means to achieve political or social goals. I will advocate for the freedom from oppression and coercion for all New Hampshire residents and affirm that as Libertarians we condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant."

At the same time she seized possession of the original LPNH's digital property.

"When she locked the existing Executive Committee members out of digital assets owned by the party, the website, all the social media accounts, mailchimp, paypal, access to our email account," even membership records, said LPNH Executive Committee Member Sean Dempsey, that amounted to "theft of party property."

The moves shocked New Hampshire Libertarians. Stephen Nass, an at-large member of the Executive Committee, said in a phone interview this weekend that Jarvis was "old school, had been around, knows how to run a party, so she got elected unanimously" by all factions at the March convention.

Caleb Dyer, a former L.P. state legislator in New Hampshire who straddles the Mises/non-Mises divide, says he knows "for a fact" that the separatists' claim that "they exhausted every possible option before going nuclear with this campaign for disaffiliation" is "just a lie."

Dyer does worry that some of the Mises-oriented types care more about radical messaging than they do about winning elections, which to him means "philosophically they are not there to further the interests of the [LPNH]. They are specifically hindering those efforts." But those differences of philosophy are better solved, he thinks, using the available tools of process, negotiation, and management, rather than engineering a radical reorganization on the fly.

According to Executive Committee member Dempsey and current LPNH Interim Chair Nolan Pelletier, if the tweets were a core problem, Jarvis had it within her power all along to keep the keys of the Twitter account out of the hands of the controversial Jeremy Kauffman. As chair, she could have simply issued an order, or changed the password. Pelletier says that Kauffman is not currently one of the people tweeting from LPNH's official account.

What Does the Mises Caucus Want?

Bishop-Henchman's departure is the biggest national victory yet for the Mises Caucus, which functions as a Political Action Committee, one that raised nearly $100,000 in 20192020. So what do Misesians want?

The most common policy complaint heard about the L.P. in 2021 from Mises types is that the national party and most state affiliates were not vociferous enough against COVID-related lockdowns, thereby dropping the ball on the most vital liberty issue of the times.

"I felt my voice was not being represented in the party," says the LPNH's Dempsey. "We went through in 2020 one of the worst tyrannical totalitarian regimes in modern history and the national party was tweeting about trans rights. Yes, those are important, but get on the right page" and "know your audience."

Part of that audience is sick and tired of any party or candidate utterance that smacks of pandering to "wokeism," whether it be 2020 presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen tweeting that "It is not enough to be passively not racist, we must be actively anti-racist" or three-time former LNC chair Nicholas Sarwark serially criticizing the 1990s "paleolibertarian" excesses of people associated with the Mises Institute. Joshua Smith, who lost the LNC chair race to Sarwark in 2018, said: "We [in the caucus] don't message to collectivist ideology."

"I passionately reject the notion that Mises Caucus is completely, or filled with, racists or bigots," Dempsey says. "We just have, probably to our discredit, been so force-fed a narrative about having to virtue signal we probably don't say things enough like 'we reject bigotry' or 'racism is repugnant,' but those are empty words." What's important is making America a nation "dominated by support for freedom, property rights, free association, and due process."

Dyer detects an inconsistency in the Mises Caucus approach. "In broad strokes," he says, "they see themselves combatting wokeness as having infiltrated the Libertarian Party. They claim they don't want to fight the culture wars, while simultaneously picking a side, which I think is disingenuous."

The more Pragmatic Caucusfriendly Libertarians now fleeing the LNC or the party altogether worry that the Misesians consciously attract intolerant (and intolerable) elements.

"When New Hampshire's messaging started getting toxic," Dekalb City Clerk Sasha Cohen said in a phone interview over the weekend, "I got calls and messages from people who supported me during my campaign asking, 'What the fuck is wrong with your party?' A direct quote."

Alexander DiBenedetto, who ran the Pragmatist Caucus until its postNew Hampshire dissolution, warned in a phone interview Sunday that a Mises takeover would likely mean "the majority of the people from the Gary Johnson days leaving the party." (Those campaigns got the party its highest ever national vote totals and percentages.) The L.P. should spend less time and energy perfecting the most polarizing tweet to attract the most hate-retweets, DiBenedetto said, and more time organizing such initiatives as the door-knocking Frontier Project, which actually won a state legislative seat for Libertarian Marshall Burt in Wyoming last year. If a Mises Caucusstyle candidate wins the party's presidential nomination in 2024, he said, state parties unhappy with that approach might disaffiliate from the national party.

Francis Wendt, the Region 1 LNC member who resigned June 19, wrote in his farewell letter, "I will give the [Mises Caucus] credit, they have a very active base.However, activists are only part of the equation. You also need candidates, leaders, staff, and donors. Twitter trolls don't do that. Email blasts don't do that. Regurgitated messages from people that only show up for a day (convention) don't do that. Knocking doors does that. Writing checks does that. Making calls does that. Sitting up till 3 AM pouring over research does that."

In his resignation letter, Bishop-Henchman sounded a warning of his own. "Toxic people exhaust or drive out good people," he said. "Our mechanisms for removing such individuals and addressing such bad behavior are designed to be effectively impossible, and culturally, too many people who should know better passively tolerate it rather than confront it. It turns off donors, repulses allies, and makes team projects unviable."

But for the victorious Mises Caucus crowd, it was Bishop-Henchman and the pragmatists who lost sight of basic libertarian respect for property and due process in the New Hampshire battle and are now taking their balls and going home when things for a change don't go their way.

LNC member Joshua Smith remembers when "this [whole Mises Caucus thing] was just me and 50 other people chatting on a Facebook page." Today he finds his faction victorious after a bitterly fought battle over a party already struggling for respectability and vote-share, one in which an affiliate with fewer than 200 members can shake a national political party to the core.

"But now," he says, echoing a common Ron Paul fan meme, "It's Happening!"

**The article previously stated, according to sources on the scene, that Kauffman had paid for Brennan's LPNH lifetime membership. Kauffman, and other sources, say that is not true, and Brennan provided evidence it was not. The author regrets the error.

***The sentence preceding the three asterisks was added since original posting.

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Inside the Battle Over the Soul of the Libertarian Party - Reason

Economists are debating whether to take a domestic or international perspective on environmental ... [+] policy.

In recent years, an interesting debate has been taking place among economists. It centers around the appropriate scope of regulatory policy, with a particular emphasis on environmental regulation. Given the Biden Administrations ambitious environmental goals, this debate may accelerate in the coming months and years.

The issue economists are grappling with is whether benefits that accrue to foreigners from U.S. policies should receive the same weight in an economic analysis as costs that fall primarily on Americans. This dilemma comes up most often in climate policy, but is relevant to many other areas of policy as well.

The question is ultimately one of standing, meaning who gets counted in an economic analysis. One aspect of climate change that makes the issue so challenging is that the problem is global in nature. Our own emissions have effects that extend beyond our borders, and the same is true of other countries emissions.

The standing issue becomes more concrete when considering some of the technical inputs that go into regulatory economic analysis. Consider the social cost of carbon (SCC), which is a measure of the welfare cost from emitting a ton of carbon dioxide into the air. One estimate suggests that the domestic SCC is only about 7 to 23 percent of the total SCC, meaning most of the welfare benefits from U.S. actions to fight climate change go to foreigners. Meanwhile, the costs of complying with the same U.S. policies generally fall on Americans.

Traditionally, regulatory policy has taken the domestic-only perspective. That is, the focus has been on benefits and costs to Americans, and not on the impact our policies have on people in other nations. To some extent this makes sense. Perhaps our representatives in Washington, D.C. should focus their attention on doing the most good for the constituents who elected them. If our leaders gave the same weight to everyone on the planet in other areas of policy, like defense or immigration, our domestic institutions and resources might quickly become overwhelmed.

But on another levela purely economic levelthe domestic-only perspective really does not make much sense at all. When considering the economic tradeoffs involved with fighting climate change, shouldnt all of the benefits and costs of a policy be counted? Why should some individuals, who feel the effects of our actions as much as we do, be left out of the analysis by being given zero weight?

Many economists adhere to a principal that benefits and costs should receive the same weight in an analysis irrespective of who they apply to. The distribution of those effectswhile also importantshould be considered as a separate matter.

Heres another way to think about it: Even if we accept that some individuals should be excluded from an economic analysis, the decision about who to let in and who to keep out is a matter of values, not science. Its exactly the kind of political question we might expect to see different answers to when there is a change in administrations. We should not be surprised if Democrats, when they are in power, decide to count benefits to foreigners in their economic analysis, while Republicans take an America First perspective. After all, the two parties have different (and evolving) value systems.

But there are also reasons why conservatives and libertarians might want to rethink their position to keep certain people out of economic analysis. While some economists who endorse the global analysis perspective undoubtedly do so to tip the scales in favor of aggressive policy action by increasing those policies estimated benefits, it is far from obvious that things will play out that way.

Consider for example that when a policy is expected to reduce mortality, the analyst conducting the economic analysis will often attach a dollar value to the saved lives, typically using a metric called the value of a statistical life (VSL). Like the SCC, the VSL is another technical input in economic analysis. In this case, it is a measure of what a group of people is willing to pay to prevent the death of one of its members. Valuing lives can be controversial for a number of reasons, but its also widely done by governments, so for now, lets take for granted that our government is doing analysis correctly.

The VSL tends to vary dramatically depending on the group whose preferences are used to dictate policy. For example, when an analysis takes a domestic, U.S.-only perspective, the typical VSL used is an average of what Americans are willing to pay to prevent a death. When the analysis shifts to a global perspective, it stands to reason that the government should use the willingness to pay of the entire world.

Not surprisingly, willingness to pay is largely a function of income, and because the United States is richer than average, it also has a higher VSL than average. So assuming the governments current practices are the right ones, if an analysis takes a global perspectivegiving standing to all peoples of the worldthe appropriate VSL will fall from about $11 million (the current U.S. figure) to roughly $2 million.

So even while the value of climate benefits might rise significantly when taking a global perspective in economic analysis, the value of mortality benefits will decline significantly. Moreover, historically mortality benefits have constituted a much larger fraction of benefits in regulatory economic analysis than the benefits from reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Republicans are within their rights to take the domestic-only perspective when they are in power. But their arguments are less compelling when Democrats are representing the desires of their voters, because the question of who gets counted in an economic analysis is ultimately one of values. Republicans would be on firmer ground by emphasizing that once the decision is made to take a global perspective, consistency requires that all aspects of analysis do so. Democrats must accept all of the analytical implications that follow a change in core assumptions, not just the ones they find politically convenient.

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Why Conservatives And Libertarians Should Think Globally About Environmental Policy - Forbes

WASHINGTON Former Trump administration officials and conservative and libertarian nonprofits have launched lawsuits to block federal relief funds aimed at Black and minority farmers a development that House Agriculture Committee Chairman David Scott of Georgia calls an evil system at work here.

Suits have been filed in Florida, Wisconsin and Texas that say its unconstitutional to direct COVID-19 relief funds to Black farmers, who make up 1 percent of all farmers. The $4 billion in the American Rescue Plan is intended to help relieve debt the farmers accrued from decades of systematic discrimination in USDA lending.

A judge in a Florida federal court issued a nationwide injunction Wednesday, preventing the U.S. Department of Agriculture from issuing grants to those minority farmers. U.S. District Judge Marcia Morales Howard said the agency could still prepare to deliver debt relief until the program is found constitutionally permissible.

Scott, a Democrat, in an interview with States Newsroom was highly critical of the legal challenge, and questioned how any judge could deny the history of discrimination against Black farmers in the U.S.

There is a system, an evil system at work here, Scott said, and added that he believes Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to President Donald Trump, is behind it.

The lawsuit in Texas, Miller v. Vilsack, was filed by the nonprofit America First Legal. The organization was started earlier this year by Stephen Miller and Trumps chief of staff, former Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), as a conservative version of the ACLU.

America First Legal opposes discrimination in all forms, Miller said in a statement when the suit was filed. We hold fast to the immortal words of Martin Luther King Jr. that Americans should not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

America First Legal also includes in its leadership Matt Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa who for a time was the acting attorney general during the Trump administration, and Russ Vought, the former Office of Management and Budget director under Trump.

The lone plaintiff in that case is Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who is a rancher in the Lone Star State. Miller spent $641,000 running for his commissioner seat, according to the Houston Chronicle.

The suit takes issue with Sections 1005 and 1006 of the American Rescue Plan enacted in March that uses language in the 1990 farm bill to define socially disadvantaged agricultural producers as people subjected to racial or ethnic prejudices because of their identity as a member of a group without regard to their individual qualities.

That includes agriculture producers who are African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Hispanic or Asian or Pacific Islander.

The language does not prevent white farmers from also applying to the program, but all three lawsuits argue that the program excludes white farmers and is therefore discriminating against white farmers.

The USDA, which is headed up by Secretary Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa, did not respond to a request for comment.

In her ruling in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Morales Howard wrote that in enacting Section 1005, Congress expressed the intention of seeking to remedy a long, sad history of discrimination against (socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers) in the provision and receipt of USDA loans and programs.

Such an intention is not only laudable, it is demanded by the Constitution. But in doing so, Congress also must heed its obligation to do away with governmentally imposed discrimination based on race, Morales Howard wrote.

The suit is ongoing.

The Florida case was brought by North Florida farmer Scott Wynn, who is being represented by Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian legal organization based in California that has an office in the Sunshine State.

The lawsuit argues that Mr. Wynn is categorically excluded from loan assistance under Section 1005 because he is white.

Pacific Legal Foundation is one of the oldest conservative advocacy groups and receives funding from several conservative and libertarian groups such as the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Donors Trust, which is tied to the Charles G. Koch Foundation.

The Bradley Foundation also helps bankroll the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which filed a suit against USDA on behalf of 12 white farmers from Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota and Ohio in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.

From 2011 to 2018 the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty received nearly $6 million from the Bradley Foundation, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, which is a progressive nonprofit watchdog group. Michael Grebe, the former president and CEO of the Bradley Foundation, currently sits on the board of directors at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.

The Wisconsin suit, Faust et al v. Vilsack et al, also argues that white farmers are excluded from the program and is therefore discriminatory.

Georgias Scott, the first Black lawmaker to chair the House Agriculture Committee, has held multiple hearings outlining the decades of discrimination Black farmers faced from USDA. He said that white farmers can apply for the relief program.

Its a political gambit too, Scott said of the lawsuits. How can a judge say that there is no past or present discrimination?

Black and minority farmers were left out of the pandemic relief funds during the Trump administration. In a House Agriculture hearing, Vilsack said that only .1% of Black farmers received any of the $26 billion in economic aid provided to farmers through the agencys program created by the Trump administration to help farmers weather the pandemic.

Only $20.8 million went to Black farmers and the rest went to white farmers, he said.

Black lawmakers have also raised concerns that if the relief money is not sent to Black farmers, then those farmers could lose their land.

Were on the verge of losing what little Black and socially disadvantaged farmers we have, Scott said.

In 1920, there were nearly 1 million Black farmers who worked on 41.4 million acres, making up about 7% of the farming landscape.

Today, there are about 50,000 Black farmers who work on 4.7 million acres, making them 1.4% of the nations farmers. White farmers make up 98% of rural farmers.

Scott said that the lawsuits popping up in the courts in reaction to Black farmers getting federal help is just the past repeating itself, starting with the end of slavery.

In 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman gave newly freed slaves 40 acres and a mule. But after President Abraham Lincolns assassination, newly sworn-in President Andrew Johnson reversed Shermans order. Many Black scholars have cited this moment as the beginning of generational economic setbacks for African Americans.

There is a pattern of this refusal to recognize the strong discrimination and racism that Black people especially face, Scott said.

Over the last 150 years, Black farmers lost land due to New Deal legislation programs, and faced rampant discrimination from USDA, to the point that the agency had to reach a large settlement with Black farmers.

Congressional hearings, Government Accountability Office reports, federal courts and USDA reports have continued to find Black farmers faced discrimination that led to land loss and debt.

We got through slavery, we got through Jim Crow, Scott said. Were going to get through this.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news outlets supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.

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Relief payments to Black farmers on hold amid lawsuits backed by former Trump aides, conservative groups - Kansas Reflector

Miles Taylor, a man who was most famous when he was anonymous, threw his name last night into a hat most people were hoping wouldn't open until November 2022.

"If [former President Donald] Trump somehow wins the GOP nomination in 2024, I will run against him as an independent. And recruit more conservatives to do the same. We will split the vote and sink him," Taylor tweeted, insisting in a follow-up: "This is not a joke."

Taylor, a former Trump administration Department of Homeland Security chief of staff who wrote the bestselling book A Warning in 2019, starred in anti-Trump ads in 2020, and last month announced the intention to co-launch with 2016 anti-Trump independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin and a few former Republican elected officials an initiative to "catalyze an American renewal," made his latest splash on the same day as the official unveiling of the Renew America Movement (RAM).

RAM held a national town hall last night attended by such figures as 2016 Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee Bill Weld, Weld's fellow 2020 Republican presidential primary loser Joe Walsh, and former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele. The renewalists vow to raise "tens of millions" of dollars to defeat pro-Trump Republicans in a handful of Senate races and a couple dozen House contests in the 2022 midterms, according to Bloomberg.

For the moment, the new group is raising that money through an old vehicle, McMullin's 501(c)(4) nonprofit Stand Up Republic, which he launched two months after coming in fifth place in the 2016 election. McMullin, whose candidacylike Taylor's threatened 2024 runwas a direct challenge to Trump from the right, exceeded the Trump-Hillary Clinton margin in just two states: His home base of Utah, where he received 21.5 percent while Trump won by 18.1 percentage points, and Minnesota (1.8 percent vs. Clinton's margin of 1.5 points).

Only two independent candidates for president have received more than 1 percent of the national popular vote in the past centuryRoss Perot with 18.9 percent in 1992, and John Anderson with 6.6 percent in 1980. More to the anti-Trump point, the 45th president failed to win reelection not because his voters were lured away by third-party or independent candidates, but precisely because they weren't.

Trump received a higher percentage of votes in 2020 than he did in 2016: 46.9 percent, compared to 46.1. The main difference was that support for third-party candidates collapsed, from 5.7 percent to 1.8, and most of that bloc went to the Democratic Party, whose nominee jumped from 48.2 percent to 51.3. As I noted in November:

Pre-election pollspredictedthis2016 third-party voters, and specifically Libertarians (who made up 57 percent of the third-party electorate that year),repeatedly saidthat a majority of them were going straight, and preferred Biden to Trump by more than two to one. There were 7.8 million third-party voters last time, and just 2.7 million this time, so any strong lean by the remaining 5 million-plus was always going to dwarf whatever impact partisans may attribute to "spoilers."

Never-Trumpers have lost just about every intra-Republican fight over the past six years, usually by lopsided margins. Where they have punched above their weight has been in media attention, and (relatedly) in raising money from Democrats dreaming of a fractured GOP. As ever, I am rooting for all new political competition while taking all bets against.

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Never-Trump Republicans Announce New Fundraising Effort To Re-Defeat the Ex-President - Reason

I FIRST BECAME aware of the United Nationss Agenda 21 proposal from a pamphlet my grandfather handed me when I was around 10 years old. The sky-blue booklet, which I still have in a storage box somewhere (a crude memento after his passing last year), was produced as part of a conspiracy theorist movement that saw the UNs proposal for equitable global trade and sustainable urban development as a dystopian campaign for a socialist one-world-order that would empty rural lands and forcibly condense people into cities. Its been a while since Agenda 21s debut in 1992, but the UN proposal still garners attention within ecological movements, urban studies programs, conspiracy fantasies, and science fictions. Recently, books such as E. O. Wilsons Half-Earth: Our Planets Fight for Life and Tony Hisss Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth have advanced visions inspiring the Half-Earth movement, which proposes that 50 percent of global lands and waterways should be turned into conservation areas an ecological prospect that has doubtlessly sent Agenda 21 truthers into a spiral.

Whereas the government-wary libertarian may balk at a Half-Earth proposal, Matt Bells latest novel, Appleseed (Custom House, July 2021), takes an approach that seems eerily more plausible amid the rising influence of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and any number of neoliberal lone genius types for whom saving the planet is just another business venture an industry ripe for disruption and monopolization.

Appleseed plays on the dystopian climate disaster genre, deftly weaving threads from Greek mythology, magical realism, and Americas settler-colonial folklore to create the parallel universe its characters inhabit. True to its title, the book opens on two brothers, one human and one faun, venturing across the unsettled Midwestern frontier planting apple orchards. Chapman, the faun, harbors a secret desire to plant and harvest the perfect apple, one that will make him human and end his agonizing struggle between embracing his horned wildness and his desire to live a normal life alongside his brother. His story forms the past portion of the novels tri-temporal triptych structure, wherein each chapter follows characters centuries apart from each other in a recursive past/present/future cycle.

The plots central narrative (a term used loosely) takes place around 2070 after climate devastation has forced the creation of a Sacrifice Zone across the western and central United States. Choosing between the consolidation of the population or widespread urban collapse, the government has evacuated cities and rural communities, pushing them toward the East Coast and life on the megacorporation Earth Trusts Volunteer Agricultural Communities (VACs).

Not everyone has relocated willingly. Some stay behind to brave the heat and drought, preferring a Mad Maxadjacent freedom. Others detonate hydroelectric dams, tear up roads, and destroy infrastructure in a bid to re-wild the Sacrifice Zone and prevent Earth Trusts re-incursion in the federal governments absence. John, the present-day character, falls in the latter group. Perhaps a millennials grandchild, he grew up in Ohio and saw crippling drought and the extinction of the worlds honeybees, tragedies that pushed him to co-found Earth Trust with his childhood friend Eury. What begins as a garage start-up, however, quickly becomes an agro-industrial corporation turned independent global techno-state (think Amazon meets Microsoft meets a public-private infrastructure project on steroids).

While John wants to design nano-bees to pollinate and revive the nations remaining plant species, Eury unleashes grander ambitions. After John leaves the company to dwell in the Sacrifice Zone, Eury launches the VACs where specially designed crops (among them genetically modified apples), algorithmic efficiency, and social engineering combine. The arrangement enables Earth Trust to feed whole countries while housing and employing their climate refugees as Volunteers.

Despite global efforts, or a potent lack thereof, the climate only continues to inch closer to complete ecological disaster. While some of the worlds elite plan for hypothetical evacuations to Mars, Eury announces plans to turn back the clock and restore Earths lost species and habitats with one final moonshot project. However, her gift to humanity comes at a high price, one that John and a group of resistance fighters plan to prevent the world from paying.

Meanwhile, in Appleseeds third narrative, a thousand years in the future, a 3D-printed creature named C descends from a broken-down science vessel into the depths of a glacier. He scavenges the remnants of a civilization that came before, long since buried under a new ice age. At the bottom of a crevasse, C finds a twisted wreck of a tree, a relic that may hold the key to what caused humanitys demise. In his haste to return to his ship, he suffers a climbing accident, which forces him to throw himself and the tree sample into the ships recycler. Moments later, C is reprinted and reimbued with the memories of generations of clones that came before him. But each C is a little different, cobbled together from core biological elements and synthetic replacements harvested from the ship. With the injection of the tree, however, this C becomes something else entirely. His search for the trees origin instead becomes a search for humanity, or whats become of it.

Unpredictable to the last page, Appleseed ties these disparate narratives together with a rich network of symbolism and sharp prose. While there are tensely written action scenes befitting a sci-fi thriller, at the books core is a burning ethical question that wavers on the knife-edge of climate optimism and fatalism: Faced with the end of the world, would you bet on humanity to finally come together and avert disaster? Or one woman, one company, with a vision and the means to guarantee the outcome?

To quote the book, The problem is bigger than any one person, any one company or government: the problem belongs to every last person; until its solved everyone remains complicit, even if they resist. Bell tackles this aphorism from the novels opening in the age of settler-colonial expansion across the United States. Chapmans quasi-magical and spiritual connection to nature, and his only partial humanness, opens a window into the original sin committed by successive generations of settlers that worked their way across the continent exploiting nature for their survival. There is beauty in the planting of orchards, yet a profound irony in the streams Chapman and his brother divert and the trees they cut down to make space for them. Thus, nature gives and gives over millennia until its exhausted collapse forces mankind back the way it came in a race against extinction.

Appleseed is propelled by the strength of its ideas rather than its specific characters or exotic worldbuilding. There are nods to Iain M. Banks and Ursula K. Le Guin, which might make the reader feel as though theyre watching an elaborate thought experiment untangle itself. The characters have lives of their own insomuch as they are tools to solve that greater puzzle. As such, the book occasionally breaks the fourth wall, veering away from the temporal plots into passages such as the one quoted above where the narrator speaks directly to the reader about their current and future complicity in the events about to occur. In this way, Bell pulls readers back and forth between seeing Eury and Earth Trusts enormous power as a villainous force to be fought, and the only means of survival in a world where governments are ineffectual and unsustainable resource consumption continues unabated. Moments such as these, and more ethereal scenes where Chapman is chased by three time-bending spirits in the Ohio woods, pull Appleseed out of the sci-fi genre and into something more a cerebral folktale all its own.

Because the novels present-day timeline is so close to our own, the alternate world Bell creates feels jarringly prescient. Bill Gates is already the largest private owner of farmland in the United States and has plans to create a new city in the Arizona desert. Nevada is considering a law that would allow corporations to build and manage legally autonomous cities, and Elon Musk has long had his sights on Mars. Couple these realities with the long-standing American belief in the power of companies to innovate faster and further than state actors and its not hard to imagine a future where the fight against climate change isnt waged against multinational corporations but is co-opted by them.

Appleseed is not your typical sci-fi novel in the same way the 2016 film Arrival is less about an alien invasion and more about theories of linguistics-driven perception. So, while readers expecting a gritty climate dystopia, or a one-world-order, might be disoriented by Appleseeds bucolic opening chapter about an apple-obsessed 18th-century faun, theyre in for something incredibly unique and equally gripping.

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The Problem Belongs to Every Last Person: On Matt Bell's Appleseed - lareviewofbooks

So were funding Elon Musk's and Jeff Bezos next big adventure into space with our tax dollars and off the blood, sweat and tears of the underpaid, abused workers who made them insanely wealthy.

Its almost as big a waste as spending most of our tax dollars on a military whose mission lately seems to be looting and plundering the planet for cheap resources while committing genocide and creating refugees. For whom?Our corporate giants with their fat military contracts. Were even paying billions for them to stockpile more nukes which if we use just one, were goners.

So often I hear the Libertarian mantra about the people who live off the system: people who get housing, disability, food stamps, a free lap top or phone. What about these bloodsuckers. No one mentions them. Theyre hailed as heroes and jobs providers. This planet is in hospice due to our using our atmosphere and oceans as open sewers and destroying the nature we depend on.

Time to get our priorities straight. Time we took care of our Earth Mother and each other and stopped wasting our tax dollars on those who have too much as it is.

Charlotte Burns

Palmer

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Letter: It's time to take care of Earth and stop wasting tax dollars - Worcester Telegram