On Friday, Janet Levy wrote about the fact that the Chinese have purchased land in North Dakota, immediately next to two highly sensitive military bases. The Biden administration is unconcerned, but ordinary Americans think it’s a problem when a geopolitical foe starts buying up land around military bases. Now, Governor Ron DeSantis is talking about ways to push back against the Chinese gobbling up American farmland—that is, our food source.

Were we living in normal times, the people in Washington, both in the Biden administration and in Congress, would be getting very worried about the fact that China is buying up massive tracts of American farmland. After all, our population continues to grow, supply chains are breaking down, Ukraine and Russia are ceasing to have food to export, the Dutch government is seizing farmer’s land, Sri Lanka and Panama are having food shortages...and D.C. sits complacently as China buys up land that ought to be feeding Americans.

Ron DeSantis, however, is not complacent. In an appearance on Laura Ingraham’s show, DeSantis said that the Chinese purchases are “a huge problem.” As a general matter, DeSantis says, “I don’t think they should be able to do it.” Indeed, he’s generally disturbed about China’s increasing influence in America. In 2019, Florida shut down the last of its Confucius Institutes, which are organizations that represent the Chinese Communist Party on American campuses.

Image: Ron DeSantis. Fox News.

DeSantis also told Ingraham that the Florida legislature is contemplating trying to clear CCP connections from its pension funds as well: “We're also probably going to do legislation next legislative session about our pension investments, with things that may be linked to the CCP. We don't necessarily have a lot of it, but we want to make sure that we're cutting ties so that we're not funding our number-one adversary.”

Currently, America is in the peculiar position of having a political elite—that is, people who, while not actually elite in terms of character but in terms of power—that owes its allegiance, not to the country it governs, but to the country that funds it. Usually, when the political class is hostile to the people it governs, that’s because the political class represents invaders, whether it was the Hyksos in Egypt or the Normans in England. America has done something extraordinary, which is to have created a homegrown leadership class that hates the country it leads.

DeSantis, however, like Donald Trump, loves America and believes that it deserves a leadership class that wishes it well, rather than wishes to sell its resources to the highest bidder.

Currently, there’s a lot of chatter about Trump versus DeSantis in 2024. I see both men having virtues and issues. But we haven’t even had the 2022 election, so I’m not interested in looking that far ahead. In the near term, we must have both men work for the good of America rather than for the good of their potential political runs in two years.