Much of the United States is caught up in the sort of paroxysm that grips the public’s attention from time to time and then quickly disappears, this one the threat posed by drones over New Jersey and other parts of the Mid-Atlantic. But the real issue isn’t unmanned (and unidentified) aerial vehicles so much as it is a lack of government transparency, and for proof of that look no further the Biden administration’s stonewalling over its immigration policies for the past four years.
“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”. Season 1, episode 22, of the classic Rod Serling TV anthology “The Twilight Zone” was titled “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, and the tale is so timeless the nuns had us read the script when I was in junior high.
Briefly, it begins on an average (by ‘60s television standards) street with children playing and neighbors working on their lawns, when tranquility is disrupted by a shadow followed by a flash and a boom, after which mechanical devices — including phones and radios — stop working.
Directly afterwards, everybody becomes more insular and paranoid, with accusations flying and an eventual (accidental) killing.
Serling — writer, host, and narrator — was making a point about Cold War paranoia and the thin veneer of society, and to hammer it home he ended with the following soliloquy:
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.
While Serling could be known for his subtlety, this was not an instance when he leaned into it.
In post-pandemic retrospect, the episode wasn’t so much about “thoughts, attitudes, and prejudices” of suburban America so much as was about the impacts news blackouts can have on otherwise rational people.
When the phones and radios stopped working, the residents of Maple Street had no way to determine what was going on, and when they were encouraged (by local boy Tommy who read a story about space aliens) to stay put and not seek any outside contact, the denizens of Maple Street were left to imagine the worst.
“Mystery Drone Sightings Continue”. With that preface, consider the following from a December 16 AP article headlined “Mystery drone sightings continue in New Jersey and across the U.S.”:
A large number of mysterious drones have been reported flying over parts of New Jersey and have been spotted in recent days across the eastern U.S., sparking speculation and concern over where they are coming from and why.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and U.S. Sen. Andy Kim have both gone out on drone hunts, hoping for answers.
If the image of a governor and a U.S. senator scanning the night skies over the Garden State on “drone hunts”, “hoping for answers” isn’t dispiriting (or amusing), I don’t know what is, but in any event the answers Murphy, Kim, and other inquiring minds are looking for likely aren’t to be found over Passaic, but in Washington, D.C.
Trust me when I say that the government goes to great lengths to ensure the 5.3 million square miles of U.S. domestic airspace is constantly monitored, if not controlled. Whatever’s out there — and up there — is something that’s on our federal radar, both literally and metaphorically.
Given that, I assume this folderol is some combination of people (including Murphy and Kim) taking rare strolls out on some of the coldest nights of the year looking for strange phenomena and finding them (even if they're not really that strange or phenomenal) and a military that would prefer they all stayed inside while it tests its latest contraptions.
With respect to the latter point, you can’t monitor (and ideally control) 5.3 million square miles of domestic airspace in a world full of threats without constantly improving your capabilities to do so. And for my tax dollars, I’d prefer they not go blabbing about their efforts, lest the potential threats figure it out.
CHNV Flights and the “Secure Border” that Isn’t. Few likely have any problems with classified defense information being kept under wraps by our federal government in the name of national security, even though we’re paying for it all.
Once we find out that our government has been using the veil of secrecy to keep us in the dark about more mundane matters in its own political interests, however, we start asking questions about other things and become suspicious of everything else we may not have been told.
During her first press conference on Inauguration Day 2021, Biden’s then-Press Secretary Jen Psaki took to the White House rostrum and said:
When the President asked me to serve in this role, we talked about the importance of bringing truth and transparency back to the briefing room, and he asked me to ensure we are communicating about the policies across the Biden-Harris administration and the work his team is doing every single day on behalf of all American people.
Which brings me to immigration, a subject on which the Biden administration deliberately failed to live up to those lofty first-day promises of “truth and transparency”.
For the past 47 months, I have pored over various disjointed and inconsistent DHS reports in a vain attempt to determine just how many “inadmissible applicants for admission” (read: “illegal migrants”) the Biden administration has released into the United States in violation of clear congressional mandates in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
My best estimate is around six million of them, not counting another 1.9 million illegal entrants who evaded apprehension and entered illegally (identified in statute as “got-aways”). Again, however, that’s just an estimate based on imperfect information, not an exact total.
Why can’t I tell you the precise number? Because even though the Biden DHS knows — to the last digit — how many illegal aliens it has released into the United States, it has steadfastly refused to release that figure. Even Fox News’ Bret Baier was unable to pry that statistic from Vice President Kamala Harris when he interviewed her on October 16.
For what it’s worth, I’d settle for just a percentage of aliens encountered by CBP who were released into the United States, and although DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Baier that he knew “the data” during his own Fox News appearance in January, the secretary still refused to disclose it.
Migrant releases aren’t (just) salacious details of a poorly managed system that Harris and Mayorkas created and oversaw, they are actionable intelligence that state, local, and municipal officials need to prepare their budgets and to plan for increased class sizes, housing, and medical services.
The administration has refused to share that data because they know how politically unpopular it would be, and for a while they were protected by a media class that largely agreed with what it was doing.
Remember the backlash in the New York Times and Washington Post when Mayorkas told Congress in March 2021, “The border is secure and the border is not open,” when it plainly wasn’t?
How about when he made similar fallacious claims before Congress in November 2022?
If you don’t remember the denunciations in those “papers of record”, it’s not because your memory’s faulty but because they and most other outlets played along with what Mayorkas was claiming.
Then, there’s the Biden-Harris program under which up to 30,000 inadmissible nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela — none of whom has a visa or any right to enter — are allowed to fly into the United States each month, “CHNV parole”.
That one at least merited its own White House “fact sheet”, but the press was largely uninterested in talking about CHNV parole until then-candidate Donald Trump — apparently tipped off by my colleague Todd Bensman’s reporting on the program — gave a speech in March, stating:
Today it was announced that 325,000 people were flown in from parts unknown. Migrants were flown in airplanes, not going through borders ... . It was unbelievable. I said that must be a mistake. They flew 325,000 migrants. Flew them in over the borders and into our country.
AP, CNN, and PolitiFact only reported on CHNV parole in an attempt to debunk Trump’s statements, but in so doing they revealed the existence of a (illegal) program they had been loath to ever mention. But once Americans found out about it, they weren’t happy — about either the program or the cover-up.
When the American people are kept in the dark about drones, immigration, or any other salient issue, we lose trust in our government and institutions. Fortunately, we have the power to force transparency — and on November 5, the voters used that power.