The Democratic nominee for Senate in Arkansas, Hallie Shoffner, raised money in the summer of 2020 for a "racial and social justice" bail fund founded by a left-wing activist who was later sentenced to 17 months in prison for her role in a series of firebombing attacks on police cars in Little Rock.
Shoffner and the family farming company she ran at the time, SFR Seed, donated flowers to a jewelry store in Little Rock, Bella Vita Jewelry, that in turn sold bouquets to raise money for the Little Rock Freedom Fund. The store's owner posed with Shoffner as she cut the flowers at Shoffner's farm, according to a June 22, 2020, Facebook post, which said the bouquets had generated "$1285 to donate to the LR Freedom Fund" with "one week of sales left."
Shortly thereafter, in late August and early September of 2020, a group of rioters carried out a string of attacks on empty police cars in Little Rock and North Little Rock, breaking windows, slashing tires, throwing Molotov cocktails, and spray-painting the vehicles, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Little Rock Freedom Fund founder Brittany Dawn Jeffrey was one of four individuals charged for the attacks in December 2020 and later admitted in a guilty plea that the rioters made the Molotov cocktails at her residence with bottles of liquor, bedsheets, and gasoline. She was sentenced to time served in December 2022 after spending 17 months in pretrial detention. During that time, the Little Rock Freedom Fund sold T-shirts with her photo alongside a quote from convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur, the left-wing Arkansas Worker reported at the time.
Little Rock Freedom Fund, according to its website, "is a black-led movement organization that was founded by veteran black activists in Little Rock amid the 2020 Summer of Resistance" that works on issues like "pretrial detention, unmitigated trauma, and voter disenfranchisement." The group has said that America consists of "stolen lands built by stolen hands" and called for "a future that includes LANDBACK and Reparations, where all people and Mother Earth can thrive." It also accused Israel of "genocide" one month after Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack.
Shoffner's support for the fund reflects her long history of left-wing activism—something she is now working to downplay as she seeks to unseat incumbent Republican senator Tom Cotton in a ruby-red state President Donald Trump carried by more than 30 percentage points in 2024.
Shoffner is running as a lifelong farmer who had no plans to run for office. "She's not a politician, she's not much for political parties, and she's never run for office in her life—the only thing Hallie ever wanted to do was farm," her campaign site read in November. But while Shoffner grew up on her family's farm in eastern Arkansas, she left it to work as an activist for groups like PROMSEX, a Soros-funded social justice nonprofit in Peru, and Seis Puentes, an Arkansas nonprofit that helps illegal immigrants navigate U.S. government systems, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Shoffner has also cast herself as a fighter for "working families" who was forced to close her family's farms due to "rising costs," though her latest financial disclosure shows she is worth up to $3.1 million and holds a position in a family trust.
A Shoffner campaign spokeswoman told the Free Beacon that "when the world was in the middle of a global pandemic and protests around the country provoked discussion about the appropriate use of police force," Shoffner "let a woman who owns a small business cut some flowers from her field" that were sold "to donate to a nonprofit that helped nonviolent protesters in Little Rock with bail." Shoffner "never met" the fund's criminal founder, who was "appropriately charged and sentenced," the spokeswoman said before pivoting to Cotton.
"If you are digging into how candidates spent their time five years ago during the summer, does the Free Beacon plan to point out that in June 2020, Tom Cotton authored an op-ed published in the New York Times, titled 'Send in the Troops,' that called for the military to use violence against lawful protesters as they do in China and Iran?" she asked. "That piece was so inflammatory that Editorial Page Editor James Bennet resigned days later, and multiple Constitutional scholars pointed out that Cotton's suggestions violated the First Amendment and Posse Comitatus."
Cotton's op-ed addressed rioters who attacked police officers and "roved the streets, smashing and emptying hundreds of businesses" in an "orgy of violence." A majority of Americans supported deploying the U.S. military to address such violence, according to a June 2020 Ipsos poll.
It's unclear, meanwhile, how Shoffner knows that arrestees freed by the Little Rock Freedom Fund were exclusively "nonviolent protesters." The group does not publicize the names of those for whom it posts bail, and it raised money to free "people across Arkansas" in June 2021, well after the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. One man whom the group bailed out at the time appears to be Broderick Fourte, who was arrested "in reference to a disturbance possibly involving a weapon," "had an active search waiver on file," and was found "in a large field" carrying "a folding knife, two lighters, and a glass pipe with burnt residue in it," according to the Faulkner County Sheriff's Office.
