The Government’s Incredible Drone Denials
By now the resolution of the sightings hardly matters. This is another nail in the coffin of Washington’s credibility.
Drone denying feds. The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger writes:
“The big Chinese spy balloon that floated across the breadth of the U.S. for a week last year was a source of endless fascination. But for the past week, fascination with close encounters of an unexplained kind with drones have created a public response that is both amazed and disgusted.
Amazement that the federal government can’t tell the public why drones are filling the night skies over multiple states and military installations. Disgust at the reasonable belief that the government is refusing to explain what is happening.
The magnitude of the incidents and reported events is startling. Initially, people in New Jersey, Connecticut and Staten Island, N.Y., said they were seeing drones hovering in the night sky. Days passed. Governors, members of Congress and the mayor of Belleville, N.J., demanded an explanation from Washington. They got next to nothing.
The nighttime incursions began to affect significant facilities. On Friday, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio temporarily closed its airspace, and Stewart Airport in Orange County, N.Y., closed its runway. In New Jersey, there were sightings near the U.S. Army’s Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle. There were also reports this month of drone flights over the U.S.’s air base in Ramstein, Germany, and similar drone sightings over three U.S. military facilities across the U.K.
Karl Marx said something that is often true: History repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
The tragedy revived by the drone response is the long but inexorable fall of trust in government. Since 1972, the Gallup Poll’s average for trust in the federal government’s ability to handle domestic problems has been 52%. By last year, it had plummeted to 37%. With the drones, this tragic withdrawal of confidence in government has degenerated into farce.
Last Friday Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas—arguably the least credible U.S. bureaucrat of all time—told CNN: “We haven’t seen anything unusual.” Musing further, he said, “One can go into a convenience store and buy a small drone.” Even by government standards this was a caricature of dismissal, so on Sunday Mr. Mayorkas admitted, “There’s no question that people are seeing drones.”
It may be true that an adversary such as China or Iran wouldn’t fly drones night after night with lights blinking for easy identification. Still, drone operators flying over controlled space, such as airports, normally would require waivers issued by the Federal Aviation Administration.
On Monday evening, Fox News asked White House national-security press secretary John Kirby the simplest imaginable question: If there’s no reason to worry, why hasn’t a single one of these non-nefarious drone operators been publicly identified? Mr. Kirby: “These are legal and lawful drones flying for the common good.” That was it, though he then revived the paranoia by suggesting the drones flying over military bases are a “different category.”
For grim amusement, we’ll note that when President-elect Donald Trump said on the weekend that the military knows where the drones take off, Bloomberg News added the obligatory all-media Trump disclaimer, “without citing evidence.” Evidence?
By now, the resolution of this fiasco hardly matters. It’s another nail in the coffin of government credibility.
The biggest story in the U.S. this year was Mr. Trump’s astonishing sweep back into office. The former president deserves personal credit for that achievement, but surely his win in great part is a result of the public’s erosion of faith in established institutions—government, science, media and academia.
Government credibility took a hit during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the mandated closing of schools and businesses ran too long, causing significant personal and economic damage. The media’s incessant appeals to “settled science” and repudiation of dissent didn’t help. Now social media’s random thoughts have supplanted science.
The Biden administration let four years pass without explaining why it allowed millions of illegal migrants to cross the southern border.
Amid a shocking outbreak of antisemitism on campus, three university presidents sat before Congress blandly parsing when they would discipline students calling for the “genocide of Jews.”
The U.S. electorate’s Trumpian turn isn’t an outlier. A rising level of no confidence in government’s competence has gone global. Germany’s government collapsed this week, preceded earlier in the month by France’s. The vote in the U.K. to put Labour back in power was a generalized withdrawal of confidence in conservative governance. The Trudeau government in Canada could be next. Whether left, right or center doesn’t seem to matter. Get rid of them.
Beneath this trend is the public’s plausible belief that government, with its hands in everything, increasingly has no answers for modern problems, such as homelessness, housing, migration and ransomware. The blame-shifting language coming out of Washington about the drones is typical. They are sending the complaining jurisdictions “resources,” while they conduct an “ongoing investigation.” Legislation will be introduced in Congress to sort out jurisdictional responsibility for monitoring drone traffic. And people ask why we need the Department of Government Efficiency.
Perhaps the most maddening thing about the no-explanation drone response is the government’s insouciance. The feds are giving the impression that despite public concern, they just don’t care.
The president-elect promises to fix this loss of faith. Of all the hills he’s climbed, this surely is the steepest.”
A bizarre problem that needs fixing – and honesty – asap.
