Fantastic piece of journalism by Esquire’s Ryan Lizza on Devin Nunes’ family farm: Devin Nunes Family Farm is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret
Turns out the family sold their farm in California and moved to Iowa. On the surface, no big deal, right? Families move all the time. But he conveniently never mentioned that he no longer has a family farm in California.
There’s nothing particularly strange about a congressman’s family moving. But what is strange is that the family has apparently tried to conceal the move from the public—for more than a decade. As far as I could tell, until late August, neither Nunes nor the local California press that covers him had ever publicly mentioned that his family dairy is no longer in Tulare.
Nunes went to Iowa to campaign for the odious Steve King in 2010, for
example:
King’s office posted a press release online announcing that the town-hall event would be in Le Mars, a town fifty miles southwest of Sibley, and included some biographical information about Nunes, including this fact: “Congressman Nunes’ family has operated a dairy farm in Tulare County, California for three generations.” There was no mention that the Nunes family actually lived up the road in Sibley, where they operated a dairy. Strange.
I encourage everyone to read the whole piece, but it turns out that the biggest open secret is that dairy farms rely almost exclusively on undocumented immigrants for their labor. It sounds like decent work, but of course undocumented immigrants command a lower wage, with fewer benefits.
The staggering hypocrisy is of course that King is about as xenophobic as they come, his district voted for 45* by wide margins, the Nunes family farm is there, and they are using undocumented immigrants to run their businesses! All the while supporting the most anti-immigrant President* we have ever had.
The absurdity of this situation—funding and voting for politicians whose core promise is to implement immigration policies that would destroy their livelihoods—has led some of the Republican-supporting dairymen to rethink their political priorities. “Everyone’s got this feeling that in agriculture, we, the employers, are going to be criminalized,” the first area dairy farmer I had spoken to said. “I’ve talked to Steve King face-to-face, and that guy doesn’t care one iota about us. He does not care. He believes that if you have one undocumented worker on your place, you should probably go to prison and we need to get as many undocumented people out of here as possible.” (A spokesman for King did not respond to multiple interview requests.) The second dairy farmer, speaking of Trump’s and King’s views on undocumented immigrants, added, “They want to send ’em all back to Mexico and have them start over. What a crock of malarkey. Who’s gonna milk the cows?”
To be fair, Lizza points out that most of the people he talked to made it a point to say they disagree with the administration’s position on immigration.
Anyway, he tried to interview some of the Nunes family for the piece but instead they tailed him while he was researching the piece, refused to talk to him, and generally tried to scare him off. It’s a good piece of writing with a lot of twists and turns.
One more thing to add is that while he was working on the article, the Nunes family had the local publication delete the only existing news story which mentioned that they had moved to Iowa from California. Shady as heck.
Nunes’ opponent Andrew Janz is on this story, as you’d expect:
Please do yourself a favor and read the whole piece.
www.andrewjanzforcongress.org