Biden’s racist farm reparations: The blatantly unconstitutional Pigford 2.0 excludes white farmers

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The Biden-Harris administration is promising to press on with a blatantly unconstitutional $4 billion farm relief program that deliberately excludes white people even after a federal judge ruled it was racially discriminatory and temporarily blocked it.

Democrats view the explicitly racist government program as a down payment on the slavery reparations package they want to force on Americans a century and a half after Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans took Democrats’ slaves away from them.

Twelve plaintiffs in nine states sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in a case called Faust v. Vilsack to enjoin officials from implementing a loan-forgiveness program for farmers and ranchers under Section 1005 of the grotesque $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA), the recent so-called pandemic-related stimulus legislation. The plaintiffs say Section 1005 denies them equal protection of the law because eligibility to participate in the program is based solely on racial classifications.

“The Court recognized that the federal government’s plan to condition and allocate benefits on the basis of race raises grave constitutional concerns and threatens our clients with irreparable harm,” said Rick Esenberg, president and general counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL).

“The Biden administration is radically undermining bedrock principles of equality under the law. We look forward to continuing this litigation but urge the administration to change course now.”

WILL represents the 12 farmers and ranchers from Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, Oregon, and Kentucky. Each plaintiff would be eligible for the federal loan forgiveness program, but for their race.

U.S. District Judge William Griesbach of Green Bay, Wisconsin, cut through the woke nonsense argued by placeholder president Joe Biden’s legal team and issued a temporary restraining order against the program June 10.

“Plaintiffs are excluded from the program based on their race and are thus experiencing discrimination at the hands of their government,” Griesbach wrote.

Only someone who is a member of a “socially disadvantaged group,” meaning “a group whose members have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities,” is eligible for loan relief.

“In other words, the loan forgiveness program is based entirely on the race of the farmer or rancher,” the judge wrote. Only individuals “who are one or more of the following: Black/African American, American Indian, Alaskan native, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, or Pacific Islander,” are eligible under the ARPA program.

“Congress can implement race-neutral programs to help farmers and ranchers in need of financial assistance, such as requiring individual determinations of disadvantaged status or giving priority to loans of farmers and ranchers that were left out of the previous pandemic relief funding,” the judge wrote.

“It can also provide better outreach, education, and other resources. But it cannot discriminate on the basis of race.”

Matt Herrick, USDA director of communications, justified the racist, obviously unconstitutional program and told the Washington Post his agency would continue to discriminate against whites.

“We respectfully disagree with this temporary order and USDA will continue to forcefully defend our ability to carry out this act of Congress and deliver debt relief to socially disadvantaged borrowers,” Herrick said.

“When the temporary order is lifted, USDA will be prepared to provide the debt relief authorized by Congress,” he predicted.

Ignoring Judge Griesbach’s order, USDA officials, who say 17,000 farmers of color qualify for taxpayer-provided apartheid alms, are urging borrowers to keep filing.

The WaPo article claims that the farmer giveaway “sought to correct long-standing disadvantages faced by Black, Latino, and other minority farmers in getting loans from banks and the government.” The Biden administration asserted the dubious claim that people in communities of color “had a more difficult time accessing relief programs due to systemic racism and other issues.”

“Over the last 100 years, policies were implemented that specifically twisted in a way that disadvantaged socially disadvantaged producers,” said immortal swamp creature Tom Vilsack, the U.S. agriculture secretary, invoking critical race theory-based lies.

“There’s no better example of that than the COVID relief efforts. Billions of dollars went to White farmers, because the system is structured in a way that gives them significant advantages.”

Biden’s Zimbabwe-style farm loan forgiveness program hearkens back to the Pigford scandal that began in the Clinton era and resurfaced in the Obama era.

The Section 1005 program brings to mind an earlier program administered by the USDA that led to a class-action lawsuit known as Pigford v. Glickman, which was settled in 1999. Black farmers claimed they were discriminated against by the agency’s allocation of farm loans and assistance.

The government agreed to pay $50,000 to black claimants who said USDA loan administrators discriminated against them. The proof required was minimal, critics said, which led to fraud. In 2010, Congress appropriated $1.2 billion for claims that were filed late, in addition to the estimated $1 billion already paid out. Critics said the Obama administration dispensed settlement funds using even looser evidentiary standards than those that applied in the original settlement.

“Conservative crusader Andrew Breitbart was correct when he exposed a multibillion-dollar redistribution scheme to African-American farmers based on largely dubious claims of discrimination,” Investor’s Business Daily editorialized in April 2013.

The New York Times concluded years after the scandal broke “that Breitbart was right, that Pigford became not a redress of legitimate grievances but ‘a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees.’”

“Pigford was the kind of social justice championed by Van Jones, Obama’s former green jobs czar who advocated the redistribution of wealth from successful capitalists and entrepreneurs to minorities and American Indians who he says have been shut out of the system and exploited by it,” according to IBD.

“In a now famous rant, Jones talked about how minorities were ‘pushed,’ ‘bullied,’ ‘mistreated’ and ‘shoved into all the land that we didn’t want.’ Jones then thundered, ‘Give them the wealth! Give them the wealth!’”

Things have changed since then.

The self-admitted communist and black nationalist Van Jones has blended into the Democratic Party’s mainstream. The Democratic National Committee officially endorsed Black Lives Matter in 2015. Left-wingers were fine with last year’s Black Lives Matter and Antifa-led riots that reportedly caused more than $2 billion in damages nationwide and were encouraged by Democrat governors and mayors.

And the aggressive, in-your-face racism of our dangerously senile president, who claims “terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today,” is not even  acknowledged.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared June 16, 2021, at FrontPageMag.