This Week’s Show

Contents

01m51s Drone panic
06m55s This land is their land
11m05s End student visas
16m28s Zero-based immigration policy
21m43s Chauvin gets a break
24m22s How they spend our money
26m14s VDARE’s Christmas message
26m58s Signoff: Not a Christmas song?

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Transcript

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air for Christmas! That was the voice of the great American soprano Leontyne Price giving us Hark! The Herald Angels Sing; this is the voice of your suitably genial host John Derbyshire with reflections and commentary on the week’s news.

First, those mysterious drones.

02 — Drone panic. From early December on, my local news media here in New York were running stories about mysterious lights hovering above night-time New Jersey. The lights were generally described as coming from “drones,” but nobody seemed to know for certain just what they were. If the authorities — the FBI, Homeland Security, the Federal Aviation Administration — if they knew, they weren’t telling us.

I assumed it was just a hysteria of the sort our media are drone to … sorry: I mean prone to in periods when there isn’t much political news — for example, when one federal administration is packing up to make way for a new one. Drones were the new Qanon, another hysteria I could never summon up any interest in.

It didn’t help that the drones seemed mainly to be seen over New Jersey. To seasoned New Yorkers like your genial host, New Jerseyans are the dimwitted country cousins; like the Irish are to the English, or New Zealanders to Australians. Do you think 180 is a high IQ? You do? What, for the whole of New Jersey? (ta-da!) And so on. That reality-TV show Jersey Shore of course reinforced the stereotype.

Last Saturday conspiracy theorists finally caught up with the drone business. It was, they told us, the opening phase of Project Blue Beam. That’s a conspiracy theory cooked up thirty years ago by a Canadian wacko, alleging a covert operation by global elites to establish a totalitarian world government by orchestrating fake celestial or supernatural events using advanced technology.

Among those on board with that were Roseanne Barr, Adam Kinzinger, Alex Jones, and Charlie Kirk — a pretty solid bench of tinfoil-hat conspiracizers, lacking only Tucker Carlson and RFK, Jr.

Sane people pointed out that with most of the sightings near military bases, it wasn’t likely these drones were of foreign nationality, or we would have shot them down. Other sane people said they might not be drones at all, just small manned aircraft displaying the lights that are required in U.S. airspace.

The question vexing most of us was: Why don’t the feds tell us what’s going on? With all their surveillance technology, they surely know. Donald Trump voiced that vexation on Monday at a press conference in Palm Beach — his first presser as President-Elect. Quote:

The government knows what is happening. For some reason, they don’t want to comment. And I think they’d be better off saying what it is our military knows and our president knows.

End quote.

I didn’t see much mystery myself. With five weeks to Trump’s inauguration, I assumed that Biden and his people were too busy packing their boxes to bother with minor responsibilities like telling us what they know about something.

Then the following day, Tuesday, the FBI, FAA, Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security said in a joint statement that, quote:

We assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones.

End quote.

So that was the end of the drone panic, right? Wrong!

03 — This land is their land. While Jersey Girls had been worrying that voyeurs might be using drones to record their extracurricular activities and Roseanne Barr was moving stuff into her fallout shelter in preparation for the Apocalypse, the New York Post had been gathering information on drone sightings elsewhere. Quote from that organ, December 18th, quote:

At least 17 military bases adjacent to Chinese-owned farmland across the US have experienced a rash of drone sightings in recent weeks, The Post has learned.

Mysterious drones have been reported near military bases in Hawaii and by installations in Utah, California, Maine and Florida — among other facilities scattered throughout the country.

The Post previously identified 19 military bases that lie close to farmland bought up by Chinese-owned companies — a situation that has worried China analysts, who feared the Communist country would use the land to spy on US military operations.

End quote.

Further down the report we learn that as of year-end 2022, Chinese investors owned 350 thousand acres of US farmland — that’s 546 square miles — as of December 31, 2022. Just one guy, billionaire and Chinese Communist Party member Chén Tiānqiáo is the second-largest foreign owner of farmland in the U.S.A — nearly 200,000 acres of farmland, which is 312 square miles.

It’s sheer coincidence, of course, that so much of this Chinese-owned farmland is right up adjacent to our military installations. Sheer coincidence, right? Sure.

Reading reports like this I’m struck time and again by the easy-going carelessness of the federal officials we trust to administer our laws, and indeed of the laws themselves. Why isn’t any drone within sight of a U.S. military base immediately shot down? Why do we allow foreigners to buy hundreds of square miles of our farmland?

“This land is your land, this land is my land, …” warbled Woody Guthrie back in the day. That needs an update, Woody. Today several hundred square miles of it is their land.

How many square miles of mainland China’s farmland is owned by American citizens? I think we all know the answer to that one.

Our agricultural land is one component of our country’s resources, of ...