Minnesota is having a challenging year, so challenging they are approaching California as the wackiest state, according to other states. They have a chronic anti-Semitism problem, including a member of Congress who may soon have to register as a foreign national, a Governor so completely associated with violent protests that mainstream Democrats were baffled he was designated as their Vice-Presidential nominee in the 2024 election, and rampant distrust of science that made Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the darling of events there.

That was Kennedy when the anti-vaxxers were all on the left, before they took credit for the COVID-19 vaccine President Trump fast-tracked after claiming he was risking lives.

Today, Kennedy seems to be cozy with Republicans, at least until a confirmation hearing when he may get the same treatment from Trump he got from Democrats when Obama wanted to give him control of EPA to advance his agenda against agriculture. 

Republicans have changed but Minnesota has not. They are still anti-science. That is why a predatort, Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, basically 25 progressive white people who oppose science, wants to help activists get regulations on a class of targeted pesticides called neonicotinoids (neonics) – then they can sue if a farmer claims they can “detect” the pesticide on their organic-eligible fields.

Some of their claims make little sense. One bee activist claims farmers are spraying neonics from helicopters. Since it is a seed treatment  that protects plants when they are most vulnerable to pests the imagery of some old biplane emitting clouds of it likely sells with people who have never used a hoe but farmers are baffled. 

Farmers are irrelevant to the agenda of anti-science activists, they are grooming potential jurors with misinformation and disinformation as they always have. Organic-corporation-funded groups like Natural Resources Defense Council claim “independent research” – which means concierge labs that will guarantee to find things like glyphosate in breast milk – finds that neonics don’t work and kill bees.

They don’t work? That’s right, progressives yet again think rural people are dumb rubes being exploited by Evil Science and only more regulations can save them from themselves. That kind of White Savior mentality had an outsized control over the Democratic party this election and helped cause 16,000,000 people to walk away from them. Insisting rural people, like urban activists portray farmers being sold by “slick” salespeople, are stupid had such a negative impact they lost all of Congress and the White House despite having 80% of the rich on their side and raising 300% more money than their opponent.(1)

Activists, or at least their “strategists”, must not know any agricultural salespeople, or any conventional farmers, or they’d know the salespeople are not slick at all, you don’t get that job unless you know agriculture first. I grew up on a farm and I bet I couldn’t get a job at an agriculture company because I am probably too polished, and I write in a cave all day. Farmers, the other group activists oppose, are arguably the most data-driven group in the United States. Sure, they sell imagery of bucolic sunsets but this is their reality:

They have real-time data on crop prices and soil conditions. They are in a world of narrow margins where every penny counts, they are not being duped by anyone. Organic famers don’t have to care about cost when they are dumping far-more-toxic copper sulfate on their plants because lobbyists and marketing heads inside a niche USDA committee claim it’s “organic” (along with dozens and dozens of other synthetic chemicals) and know they can just charge more and their rich clients won’t notice.

When you leave the world of Concierge Results – we will detect anything in anything if the check clears – studies show that the organic food process results in more pesticides in humans. Bees are not dying, they are at record levels. The chief killer of bees over the last 20 years has been airline and trucking accidents, because rather than pollinate all of our food, as merchants of doubt opposed to science falsely claim, honey bees are mostly rented to pollinate expensive crops like almonds.

Where are the predatorts suing the organic industry? There are none. Those are their biggest allies.

NOTES:

(1) They can force their agenda into any issue. They claimed people were getting COVID-19 because of modern pesticides, but to be fair the general belief in the science community is that a lot of this was funded by Russia using offshore donor-advised funds, Tides Foundation, etc. because agriculture and energy are their two biggest exports and they want to keep America out of Europe.