Don't worry about drones? Americans have good reason not to trust the government. | Opinion
The drones in the night sky point to a truth we should have known all along: Just because government leaders say it doesn't mean that it's true.
I didn't think I would see a day when flocks of drones as big as SUVs were reported hovering overhead night after night. Depending on your point of view, the mystery of the drones falls somewhere between an Elon Musk fantasy and an M. Night Shyamalan horror movie.
For weeks, residents in Maryland, New Jersey and New York have reported seeing swarms of airborne drones at night. The unexplained sightings have now garnered the attention of law enforcement, state and local governments, members of Congress and President-elect Donald Trump.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Sunday that the federal government is deploying a drone detection system to her state to figure out what's happening.
The day before, Rep. Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey, said he's looking into giving local and state governments more power to deal with aerial drones, without waiting on the federal government to act. Smith called the drones a "very considerable danger."
The federal government has largely downplayed the sightings. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have said that the objects don't pose a national security threat, and that many of the reports have involved "manned aircraft."
Americans don't trust the government to tell them the truth
If the federal government says the drones are nothing to worry about, why doesn't anyone seem relieved?
The answer to that question isn't a mystery. Many Americans simply don't trust that the government will tell them the truth − whether about drones, the risks of inflation or President Joe Biden's health.
It's easy to write off concerns about drones as just another conspiracy theory or to smear worried Americans as paranoid and gullible.
But there's a reason why this story didn't quickly fly off into the sunset, like so many other stories that capture headlines one day and fade from memory the next: Americans have lost trust in our institutions
Remember when Democrats said Biden was fit and ready to serve?
And after all the gaslighting we've witnessed in the past year, there are good reasons to doubt that the government is telling us the truth.
Here are a few of the developments this year that were enough to make a normal person doubt reality, thanks to liberals and much of the legacy news media:
- Biden was supposedly a healthy, functioning president, until his presidential debate with Donald Trump in June suddenly exposed that he wasn't. Within weeks, Biden dropped out of the presidential race and has been largely missing in action for the past six months.
- In an unprecedented move, Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, replacing Biden just a little more than 100 days before Election Day and without appearing as a candidate on a single presidential primary ballot. In an election supposedly about saving democracy, it was a terribly undemocratic coup.
- Hunter Biden, the president's son, didn't have only a laptop scandal, which Democrats dismissed for years as fake news. He also was convicted on federal tax and gun charges, prompting his father to give him a historic pardon that protects him from prosecution and punishment for a decade's worth of possible federal crimes. We likely will never know the true extent of Hunter Biden's corruption.
- Tech giant Meta admitted that the Biden administration pressured the company to suppress news stories on Facebook about the COVID-19 pandemic and Hunter Biden to stop the spread of supposed misinformation. But at least some of those stories turned out to be true − see Hunter Biden, above.
All of this adds up to a truth we should have known all along: Just because government leaders say it doesn't mean that it's true.
Those mysterious lights in the nighttime sky could be nothing to worry about. But until the federal government is held accountable, Americans have good reason not to trust what they see and hear out of Washington.
Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist with Paste BN. She lives in Texas with her four kids. Sign up for her newsletter, The Right Track, and get it delivered to your inbox.