As explained in a previous commentary, Shelburne Farms is abusing its 501(c)(3) charitable organization status to advance a race-based ideology in lieu of educating the public about farming. Shelburne Farms is offering a series of courses available only to certain races of people, concealing the indoctrinating contents from the public, and calling themselves “open and embracing.” The “Healing the Roots of Racism” educator workshop referenced in my previous piece is just one example of an ideological mission to reshape not just the farm but society as a whole.

As one Shelburne Farms representative gushed about their “antiracism work”:

As we go through programming with this equity lens, we are able to better identify where our continued work lies. With issues of equity and inclusion, it’s important to realize that the work is never done. There’s always learning. There are always mistakes. And hopefully, there are always a few steps forward! For me, I’m thinking about issues of accessibility for students of all physical, cognitive, and emotional abilities, finding ways to better engage new American and English learners, and bringing more diverse authors into our library of resources. Addressing these issues is an essential piece of educating for sustainability and essential to building a better future for all on this planet. In hiring new education staff, we’ve added a question around diversity, equity, and inclusion to our interview process.

This is social justice ideology in application: people are being programmed to be race-centric; the “work” of retribution and false judgment “is never done”; racilzation is a higher priority than climate change or growing food; and job applicants are (illegally) screened for ideological acceptability as a condition of hiring. This systemic ideological discrimination replaces the Constitution.

The strategy of indoctrination, and the hate toward American culture and the Constitution, are plainly stated in links to the ignorant hatred that undergirds all “anti-racist” frauds. This course is centered on dismantling American culture:

Organizational and movement culture will shift towards greater mutual belonging, dignity, and power, with an increased ability to hold complexity and address, heal, and transform internalized oppression and trauma. … To transform, to create embodied change, somatics starts with the question of commitment. … Then we explore our habits, automatic reactions, and embodied survival strategies.  We begin to feel and perceive our individual and collective “current shapes”. At this phase in the Arc we also explore our resilience, and how to make it a purposeful practice. Next, in somatic opening, we get to change and deconstruct the embodied patterns that no longer serve us. Through opening, we are often healing wounds and developing more capacity to feel and to be skillful amidst feeling and change.  Somatic opening is the pragmatic process of deep transformation, shedding to change. … Somatics then moves us toward embodying new ways of being and action that align our values, longings, and actions. Often our social conditions and our family and community experiences do not teach us the embodied skills we need. This focus on developing embodied skills, whether it’s centered accountability and liberatory use of power, building deeper trust through conflict, or the capacity to be with the unknown or love more deeply, is essential to sustainable change. The mission of gs is to support social and climate justice movements in achieving their visions of a radically transformed society. … We aim to advance loving and rigorous movements that possess the creativity, resilience, and liberatory power needed to transform society.

So much for growing green beans at Shelburne Farms. The New Agers have systemically arrived! And if that was not enough hogwash for you, dear reader, ponder this:

Throughout this website, when I use the term white supremacy, I am referring to the ways in which these ruling class elite or the power elite in the colonies of what was to become the United States used the pseudo-scientific concept of race to create whiteness and a hierarchy of racialized value in order to

• disconnect and divide white people from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC);
• disconnect and divide Black, Indigenous, and People of Color from each other;
• disconnect and divide white people from other white people;
• disconnect and divide each and all of us from the earth, the sun, the wind, the water, the stars, the animals that roam(ed) the earth;
• disconnect and divide each of us from ourselves and from source (see below).

The power elite constructed white supremacy (and construct it still) to define who is fully human and who is not.

Really? Vermont is built on the labors of dairy farmers — the elites (of every skin color) always arrive from out-of-state, with big ideas (like eugenics) to “civilize” stupid white Vermonters. Now they have usurped an actual farm and are sowing hate, division, and contempt for the very culture in which they live, using funding of blatantly unconstitutional, racist programming. The Shelburne Farms Board must publicly prove their slanderous judgment of Vermont as white supremacist, and where Vermonters employed a “pseudo-scientific concept of race to create whiteness and a hierarchy of racialized value in order to define who is fully human and who is not.” Is there no accountability whatsoever for spewing this through a once-iconic nonprofit farm?

Farmers know that one reaps what one sows. Shelburne Farms has refused to provide access to the contents of its disgusting, ongoing racist indoctrination program. That, too, is against the laws that it seeks to erase.

For now, the Constitution and free speech are still with us. I am an Abenaki, but I am shunned by the racist justice warriors at Shelburne Farms who weaponize my race for their dogmatic subjugation of me and my family. That is an old tale: wake up, Vermonters — the new colonizers are here to thieve your land, your heritage, and even your tax revenues, to enslave you to reprogramming at your own expense.

John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield. © Copyright True North Reports 2022. All rights reserved.