Some months ago, we heard a story about China buying up farmland here in the U.S. We weren’t happy about it, but it seemed to make sense: China is home to 1.3 billion people, or 20% of the world’s population, and yet it accounts for just 10% of the world’s farmable land. Were a severe drought to hit China, it would be catastrophic. This, we thought, was simply an insurance policy.

Wrong. Very wrong.

In a groundbreaking report from CNN, we now know the following: “Since at least 2017, federal officials have investigated Chinese land purchases near critical infrastructure, shut down a high-profile regional consulate believed by the US government to be a hotbed of Chinese spies and stonewalled what they saw as clear efforts to plant listening devices near sensitive military and government facilities."    

The report continues:

Among the most alarming things the FBI uncovered pertains to Chinese-made Huawei equipment atop cell towers near US military bases in the rural Midwest. According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, the FBI determined the equipment was capable of capturing and disrupting highly restricted Defense Department communications, including those used by US Strategic Command, which oversees the country’s nuclear weapons.

While broad concerns about Huawei equipment near US military installations have been well known, the existence of this investigation and its findings have never been reported. Its origins stretch back to at least the Obama administration. It was described to CNN by more than a dozen sources, including current and former national security officials, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Just how stupid are we? Plenty stupid, as it turns out.

It speaks to the seriousness of this threat that word about it is only coming out now, given that we began looking into it perhaps a decade ago. According to CNN, "The investigation was so secret that some senior policymakers in the White House and elsewhere in government weren’t briefed on its existence until 2019, according to two sources familiar with the matter.”

But given what we know about Communist China’s global ambitions; given what we learned just this week about its efforts to infiltrate and surreptitiously influence the central bank of the United States; and given China’s ever-growing status not as a geopolitical rival but as an enemy of the United States and our freedom-loving way of life, why on earth are we allowing these Wuhan Flu-spreading, live-organ-harvesting, intellectual-property-thieving commies to buy so much as a square inch of our precious land? This isn’t xenophobia. It’s common sense.

Donald Trump understood this threat. Joe Biden doesn’t. Or, if he does, he doesn’t seem to be saying anything about it. Why, it’s almost as if the ChiComs have him right where they want him. Almost as if the Big Guy’s secretive business dealings with the Red Dragon are coming back to bite the rest of us.

Think about it: Why would Joe Biden be trying to stop House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from visiting Taiwan, the independent and prosperous island nation that China has long considered a breakaway republic? And why would China feel so emboldened as to threaten the U.S. with “serious consequences” if Pelosi goes ahead with her trip? Have we been reduced to taking orders from Xi Jinping? We can be sure the rest of the world is watching, and Nancy Pelosi had better take that trip.

So much for the long-held belief that China would eventually open up and become more friendly to the West as it began to adopt the elements of capitalism into its communist structure. “The widespread Western assumption that growing prosperity within China and increasing connectivity with the West would automatically lead to greater political freedom has been shown to be plain wrong.” So said Great Britain’s MI5 director, Ken McCallum, who met recently with FBI Director Christopher Ray to discuss the growing threat of Chinese espionage.

As columnist Gary Bauer notes: “Donald Trump understood this threat. Unlike previous administrations, both Democrat and Republican, Trump was serious about confronting communist China. One of the most important steps he took was banning the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from the U.S. He also got our British allies to act as well.”

Now we know why. As the CNN report points out, “The FBI determined the [Huawei] equipment was capable of capturing and disrupting highly restricted Defense Department communications, including those used by U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the country’s nuclear weapons.”

As it turns out, then, China isn’t so much concerned about its food security as it is in winning a war against the United States.

“For years,” the CNN report notes, “small, rural telecom providers had been installing cheaper, Chinese-made routers and other technology atop cell towers up and down [Interstate 25] and elsewhere in the region [of Colorado and Montana, and reaching into Nebraska]. Across much of these sparsely populated swaths of the west, these smaller carriers are the only option for cell coverage. And many of them turned to Huawei for cheaper, reliable equipment."    

So there we have it: cheap goods from China.

To no one’s surprise, the CNN report also cautions against "xenophobic overreach,” but we’re not having any of it. This is a grave threat to our national security. If we can’t send these scheming commies packing, and if we can’t rip out every last fiber of this compromised telecom equipment and replace it with our own, we might as well turn in our Global Superpower card.

As it stands now, though, we appear to be stuck on stupid.