Chinese Spy Balloon

Surveillance

Yesterday afternoon news broke regarding the spotting of a balloon object, roughly the size of three buses, floating above Billings, Montana. According to a Sr. Defense Official, “We are confident that this high-altitude surveillance balloon belongs to the People’s Republic of China.” It appears that the NSA suddenly has competition in the field of illegally spying on American citizens. President Biden, who refused to answer questions regarding the balloon, previously referred to the CCP as, “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge.” According to an NBC News report, the balloon, “Flew over Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, through Canada, and into Montana.” The significance of Montana is that it’s home to fields of intercontinental ballistic missile silos and military intelligence. The term “Chinese Spy Balloon” is almost as obscure of a term as Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bizarre and infamous, “Jewish Space Lasers.” However, unlike Taylor Greene’s space lasers, this balloon exists and maintains its presence over the United States. This morning, a U.S. Military Official stated in a press conference, “While we won’t get into specifics in regards to the exact location, I can tell you that the balloon continues to move eastward and is currently over the center of the continental United States.”

The U.S. government acknowledges that they’ve been tracking the balloon for several days, which begs the question, why wasn’t this balloon turned into the Hindenburg the moment it crossed into U.S. airspace?

A Milley

U.S. reports indicate that General Mark Milley and senior military officials advised President Biden not to shoot down the balloon due to fear the debris could pose to people on the ground. However, another U.S. military official stated on Thursday, “So the first question is, does it pose a threat, a physical kinetic threat to individuals in the United States in the U.S. homeland? Our assessment is it does not.” The voluntary allowance for Chinese spying in our homeland does not seem wise.

General Mark Milley, the now infamous “Woke General,” should perhaps spend less time focusing on the ideological indoctrinating of our military on matters of “White Rage” and more time on the growing creep of Chinese escalatory action and the falling off-of-a-cliff military enrollment rate.

Laptop

The issue of the growing partisan divide in our country extends far beyond superfluous Facebook and Thanksgiving Dinner political arguments. The partisan divide forces us into tribalistic camps where we can’t see past our “Blue Team” and “Red Team” affiliations creating an environment that allows serious issues that affect all of us to go by the wayside.

While I couldn’t care less about Hunter Biden’s use of crack and solicitation of prostitutes, I think we ought to be asking questions about the business dealings exposed through the laptop. Obsessing over the moral character of Hunter as a way to attack Joe is as silly as it is distracting from the issues associated with the laptop that we ought to inquire about. Yesterday, in a change of strategy by Hunter Biden, his lawyers urged an investigation into the “Trafficking in stolen material from his laptop.” This is in part an acknowledgment of the legitimacy of his ownership over the controversial laptop that he left in a Delaware computer repair shop. According to a BBC World News Report (not exactly the official publication of MAGAstan), the information obtained from his laptop has led to the “Justice Department investigating Hunter Biden’s finances including scrutinizing some of his past Chinese business dealings and other transactions.” From that same article, “The New York Post cited a purported email from Hunter Biden in August 2017 indicating he was receiving a $10m annual fee from a Chinese billionaire for “introductions alone.” The email contained the phrase, “10 held by H for the big guy.” “In 2013, Hunter flew aboard Air Force Two with his father, who was then vice-president, on an official visit to Beijing, where the younger Biden met investment banker Jonathan Li. Hunter told the New Yorker he had just met Mr Li for “a cup of coffee”, but 12 days after the trip a private equity fund, BHR Partners, was approved by the Chinese authorities. Mr Li was chief executive and Hunter was a board member. He would hold a 10% stake.”

James Comer, the chairman of the oversight committee investigating the laptop stated, “We have evidence–that we’ve been transparent with and will continue to be transparent with–where this family has taken in millions and millions of dollars from our adversaries, mainly in China.” While not jumping to conclusions, this does beg the question, should we have legitimate concerns over our president receiving tens of millions of dollars including equity stakes in CCP-controlled companies? The same CCP that President Biden himself referred to as our “Greatest geopolitical challenge.”

Puppet

Post-2016 election we spent a lot of time, money, and resources investigating the claims that President Trump was a “Russian Puppet,” claims that I felt deserved to be examined and gone through with a fine-toothed comb. Perhaps here in 2023, it is time we take a legitimate look into President Biden’s dealings with China because I do not know too many people that would simply hand over tens of millions of dollars (Perhaps hundreds of millions with equity shares) without strings attached. Spotlight on this conflict of interest grows when ratcheted-up Chinese aggression continues to go unaccounted for, whether it’s this balloon or the CCP-controlled TikTok that is able to simply carry on with its surveilling of our citizenry. I can assure you, Joe Biden was not handed over a fortune for his business acumen, even the most leftward among us acknowledge that he is not exactly on the verge of splitting the atom. This large of a “Bag” only comes with the strings of political influence attached, which invites the question, how beholden is our president to Chinese interests?

Pride

On matters of geopolitics, I am reminded of a quote from one of my favorite shows, Madmen. While in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the protagonist Don Draper says to his associate, “C’mon, we don’t really know what’s going on here, you know that.” I keep this in mind when it comes to global conflicts, we are extremely limited in the amount of information we’re given. It is hard to distinguish what is blatant corruption and what is just run-of-the-mill incompetence, both are exhibited on a large scale within our government. However, one can reasonably ask how this balloon situation is possible when we continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on our ever-expanding military-industrial complex. As a country, we are exposing our soft underbelly to the world. Matters such as this one being allowed to persist make us look weak, feeble, and vulnerable. As we continue to deepen our involvement in Ukraine and with our allied Taiwan, demonstrations of Chinese aggression will only hasten and progress. This tribalistic partisan divide only becomes exacerbated by those who benefit from the division, it is necessary to set our political affiliations aside to turn our attention to far greater matters at hand. Pride comes before the fall. I, and we, need to set our pride and egos aside to find objectivity and reason.