The New School Nazis: It's Your Actions that Define You

It’s a Tangle

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” – Abraham Lincoln

Tompkins County government is overwhelmingly Progressive in both composition and policy making—it’s the perfect place for studying Progressive policies and actions.

The Lansing Loophole

In 2015, the planning to remake the town of Lansing, NY went public.

The public awareness began with Cornell’s Survey Research Institute cold calling about the issues, before Lansing’s residents even knew they were issues.

After the town of Lansing telephone survey: a public meeting filled the town hall with angry and concerned residents. Authorities backed down, claiming that this survey was “only preliminary” and just “to get an indication,” and that additional surveys would be conducted later.

They lied.

No other surveys were ever conducted, and that same, publicly rejected survey, was presented unchanged in the new Town of Lansing Comprehensive Plan as the public mandate.

Oddly, the survey results were displayed by combining two very different municipalities [the Town of Lansing and the Village of Lansing] a difference codified when the original town of Lansing was broken apart, and with considerable animus. The Village of Lansing comp plan recounts that “residents in the area organized a campaign to force a referendum to establish a separate village,” and states that, “The importance of our Village history cannot be overstated--the Village of Lansing was founded for the sole purpose of creating a government that would adopt a zoning ordinance and regulate land use.”

The oddness of this pretending that historically irreconcilable differences have been reconciled was explained when the “Lansing Loophole” was unveiled.

In Lansing’s first “loophole election” Village-supported proxies won every town board seat. Not one of the town’s Cornell-affiliated candidates visited, or had anything to do with the town’s rural community—instead, they effectively gerrymandered a voting advantage by promoting a clever loophole that allowed residents of the Village of Lansing municipality to vote in Town of Lansing elections—assuring the election of officials that forced, at no cost to themselves, ever-repressive policies and an increasingly restrictive zoning.

By 2023, Lansing’s “Vichy” government had “expressly repealed and superseded” the existing rural/agricultural zoning, replacing it with a punitive agricultural zoning. This new zoning unilaterally stripped sixty-four previously permitted non-farming rural land uses — even those “permitted as of right” — from the rural population and then “streamlined” the approval of all agricultural uses.

The use of Form-based Codes was praised and embraced in the Cornell-planned, 300 page, 2018 Comprehensive Plan for the Town of Lansing—appearing eighty-five times, and in conjunction with every new land use policy—rapturously describing how it would encourage a “sense of community among neighbors” and insisting that “significant public input ensures that the impacted community is getting what it desires.”

This was a lie.

There was no representation, no participation, and no consideration for Lansing’s rural community, none whatsoever—thus exposing the untold and ugly truth about Form-based codes: all regulatory power is placed in the hands of government to do as they wish—and Lansing’s government had been taken out of the hands of its people.
 
The superficial pretense of concern for others voiced by “Lansing’s” government has all the sincerity of a con man’s smile—and the rural community knows it.

“Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.” – Mark Twain

In the Fall of 2025, two local write-ins ran for seats on Lansing’s Town Board— and won—but lost the election when the neighboring Village voted six-to-one to stop them. [A disparity in voting that again gives the lie to any talk of togetherness.]

The Tompkins County Comprehensive Plan “presents a vision for the future of the community”:

“In rural areas the Plan envisions a working landscape of farms and forests.”

In the Plan’s “vision for the future,” the rural community no longer exists.

Everywhere you turn in our rural community; in every new regulation, and every new policy—there is the abuse of power and a sly use of lawful tools. It’s a path that leads back to before the first survey; to rooms we will never know—and conversations we were never meant to hear.

Tompkins County’s Progressive government is molding a new society—and some of us are just excess material.

This is only one path through the tangle, just one story . . .

Let’s turn the page . . .