Kerby Anderson
Ben & Jerry’s creates flavors of ice cream, but they also create controversy. The latest has been their belief that “it’s high time we recognize that the US exists on stolen land and commit to returning it.” Unilever is the company that now owns Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. So far, it has lost $2 billion in market capitalization.
The first step, according to Ben & Jerry’s, would be to return the Black Hills of South Dakota, including Mount Rushmore, to the Lakota. Rich Lowry says that raises another question. “Once this transfer takes place, will the Lakota turn around and give the Black Hills back to the tribes they took them from?”
He warns that it isn’t wise to get your history lessons from people making ice cream. In his op-ed on “The Myth of Native American Innocence,” he reminds us that the history of North America is complex. Yes, the way this country treated several Indian tribes is a sad, dark chapter of American history. But that should be placed alongside the hatred, greed, and violence of the Indian tribes that engaged in intertribal warfare.
My response to so many of the claims by leftists these days is, “You first.” If you are concerned that your white privilege got you into college, then give up your scholarship and your place at the university. If you believe we should give back stolen land: “You first.”
The Ben and Jerry’s facility and corporate office sits on the land once occupied by the Coosuk Abenaki Nation. The chief of one of the tribes that descended from the Abenaki said his tribe is “always interested in reclaiming the stewardship of our lands.”
If it is time to give back stolen land, then my message to Ben & Jerry’s is, “You first.”

Kerby Anderson
In his video, John Stossel asked people on the street, “If you could spend $30 billion trying to solve the world’s problems, how would you spend it?” As you might imagine, the most common answer was to “fight climate change.”
Bjorn Lomborg (Copenhagen Consensus Center) has much better answers. In the past, we have talked about his several books on the environment and climate change. He says he was not surprised at the answers since we live in a rich world. But when he has put together experts from the UN, NGOs, and the university to address the world’s biggest problems, they give very different answers.
In his new book, Best Things First, Lomborg says that spending $35 billion in the poorest part of the earth could save 4.2 million lives every year. That would include screening for tuberculosis and getting medicine to people who need it. Hundreds of thousands die from malaria. Buying bed nets with insecticides that kill mosquitos would also save lives.
In a speech he gave at the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, he showed a graph of deaths from climate. These climate-related deaths (from floods, drought, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures) dropped from 500,000 a year in the 1920s to 11,000 today. A major reason for the decline is the fact that we have become wealthier. We have better technology and better predictive capabilities.
His latest writing and speeches are a reminder that we should be thinking smarter about how to spend our scarce economic resources. Thinking smartly also requires a recognition that the earth is not teetering on the edge of an environmental apocalypse. We need to focus on the best things first to make this planet an even better place to live.