In 2010, Andrew Breitbart got into a fight with the NAACP, charging them with their very own racism. He published a video showing an NAACP audience which had cheered a statement in a speech by Shirley Sherrod mentioning an initial desire to refuse to help a white farmer in her capacity as USDA Director of Rural Development in Georgia. Not withstanding Breitbart’s accompanying statement that Ms. Sherrod actually decided that she would render aid to that farmer, the lefties attempted to spin his message against the NAACP attitudes as an attack on Shirley Sherrod. An apparent basis for their spin is the leftist assumption that their constituency cannot read, and could only take in the video clip. This fight grew into a firestorm, and eventually led to Breitbart’s investigation into a class action lawsuit of discrimination against Black farmers, from which Sherrod and her husband had benefited to the tune of $13 million, prior to her being hired by the USDA.
This was the Pigford v. Glickman decision, which morphed into the most bloated civil rights settlement in history.
While an expected 2000 Black farmers who had been thought to suffer discrimination from the USDA’s loan grant policies, the number of applicants for payouts ballooned to 16,000. In 2008, Senator Obama sponsored legislation was passed, which allowed another 70,000 people to qualify for settlements stemming from this original USDA decision. This latter law allowed Ms. Sherrod the larger $13 million windfall from the government.
The huge numbers of people benefiting from the original Pigford and Glickman payout by the USDA massively exceeded the total number of Black Farmers in the United States. Breitbart had uncovered one more government boondoggle paying out billions of dollars to more than double the total 40,000 black farmers in the U.S. He published a series of articles explaining the government fraud, which was ignored by the mainstream media, except FOX.
Now that the New York Times has finally caught up to this web of government fraud, and payment of agricultural settlement money to people who were never farmers, Breitbart.com is celebrating today that the lamestream media has finally noticed. One problem with their own article is the suggestion in the headline, that the story in the New York TImes “Vindicates ” Breitbart. Wrong!………. The headline should indicate instead that the New York Times is finally catching up with Breitbart.
The erroneous idea that the NYT is the news of record is something which needs to be corrected.
The “Gray Lady” has been exhibiting signs of dementia for years.
