Sarah Huckabee Sanders Sends American Enemy Packing with Eviction Notice
These days, an elected official acting both in constituents’ interests and in defense of the republic constitutes real news.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas announced that a Chinese company, designated “enemy”-owned, must relinquish its Arkansas land.
“I’m announcing that Syngenta, a Chinese-state-owned agra-chemical company, must give up its land holdings in Arkansas,” Sanders said.
In making this announcement, Sanders acted on an Arkansas law that forbids “enemy”-owned companies from holding land in the state.
Act 636, which Sanders signed into law earlier this year, excluded what it called a “prohibited foreign-party-controlled business” from owning Arkansas land.
The immediate context for Sanders’ decision is at least as interesting as the law or the Chinese company she identified.
“I have to say this past week has been pretty eye-opening,” the governor said at the beginning of her announcement.
She then referred to events in Israel.
“America’s enemies are on the march,” she said.
Those enemies, according to Sanders, include Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia and China. To one degree or another, each has professed and acted upon its hostility toward the United States.
“Yet, for too long, in the name of tolerance, we’ve let these dangerous governments infiltrate our country. Arkansas will tolerate them no longer,” she said.
Sanders then explained her decision to apply Act 636 to Syngenta, which conducts seed research and owns 160 acres of Arkansas land. She noted, for instance, that the U.S. Department of Defense has identified the company that owns Syngenta as a Chinese military company that poses “a clear threat to our state.”
The governor added that Chinese nationals abroad have no choice under Chinese law. If their home government demands it of them, they must collaborate with Chinese officials in gathering intelligence.
“We simply cannot trust those who pledge allegiance to a hostile foreign power,” Sanders said.
The governor noted that she has signed additional bills banning Russian- and Chinese-made drones as well as public contracts with the Chinese Communist Party.
“We will make sure that every company operating in Arkansas is a friend to Arkansas and good to hardworking Arkansans,” she said.
Finally, Sanders observed that her attorney general has the legal mechanisms in place to evict Syngenta.
“Arkansas will always protect our farmers and our national security interests,” she said.
On balance, Sanders’ decision represents a step in the right direction.
In fact, it would probably horrify many Americans to learn that hostile foreign powers already own U.S. land. The average American might wonder how Syngenta-like evictions became necessary in the first place.
After all, since the nation’s inception, thoughtful Americans have connected landownership to republicanism. In other words, if the people do not own land, then they do not have a republic.
In “Notes on the State of Virginia” (1784), for instance, Thomas Jefferson explained why the America must remain an agricultural nation.
“Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example,” Jefferson wrote.
Farmers, in fact, enjoy an independence denied to urban laborers whose livelihoods depend on market conditions. Thus, only farmers can sustain a republic.
Meanwhile, those who habitually depend on others wind up forming the unruly mobs that usher in tyranny.
“Dependance begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition,” Jefferson wrote.
Sanders’ decision, therefore, does more than target America’s enemies of the moment. It derives its moral force from the very roots of the republic.
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