Daniel Foster‘s piece on the Pigford settlement in National Review is really about as bad as one might have assumed from reading Conor Fridersdorf’s initial post and the screeds at Big Government alleging a blackety black conspiracy to defraud white folks of their hard earned money. It truly is, as Mark Thompson noted, a sort of ideological laundering, it does nothing more than add a respectable sheen to the red-faced racial resentment offered by people like Rep. Steve King, who railed against the settlement as “backdoor reparations.”

I’m tempted to fisk it, but everything that’s bad about it is in the conclusion, so I’ll just cite that:

At a December 8 signing ceremony, President Obama heralded Pigford II as the close of “a long and unfortunate chapter in our history.” In a way, one hopes the president is right—that the credulity, or perhaps the shame, of the American government and its taxpayers cannot be strained to accommodate the petty greed of more than 94,000 phantom farmers, and that the con will finally have run its course. But that is unlikely. Two Pigfordstyle class-action suits—one for Hispanic farmers, another for women—with the potential to dwarf current settlements are working their way through the courts. Like so many Pigfords to the trough.

This is just seething with genteel white racial populism. Not only have nearly a hundred thousand greedy Negroes gotten their hands on your money, but women and Messicans are coming for your wallet too. They’re nothing but pigs with their snouts out.

You wouldn’t know from Foster’s piece that the true “phantom” is the 94,000 number, since the vast majority of the late claims were not allowed to proceed. You wouldn’t know that the number of people who actually received a settlement under Pigford I was 15,642, 69% of the 22,721 whose claims were evaluated. You wouldn’t know that according to the Congressional Research Service, those numbers are “relatively poor approval percentages” rather than a figurative trough from which lazy minorities are feeding. As Thompson noted, at the current rate, only about 60,000 settlements total are likely to be ultimately approved, a number that’s far from absurd given the group of people to whom the settlement applies.

Also, the USDA did an internal study on its practices in the 1990s and came away with a trough that looks more like this:

According to the commissioned study, few appeals were made by minority complainants because of the slowness of the process, the lack of confidence in the decision makers, the lack of knowledge about the rules, and the significant bureaucracy involved in the process. Other findings showed that (1) the largest USDA loans (top 1%) went to corporations (65%) and white male farmers (25%); (2) loans to black males averaged $4,000 (or 25%) less than those given to white males; and (3) 97% of disaster payments went to white farmers, while less than 1% went to black farmers. The study reported that the reasons for discrepancies in treatment between black and white farmers could not be easily determined due to “gross deficiencies” in USDA data collection and handling.

That wasn’t worthy of outrage of course, until someone actually decided that rampant racial discrimination in the USDA was a problem that needed to be solved.