Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD), author of Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland, warned of China’s procurement of U.S.-based food production assets on Friday’s edition of the Breitbart News Daily podcast with host Alex Marlow.
Noem described foreign acquisitions of U.S. food production infrastructure and arable land as a threat to national security.
“I have been talking about food security as a national security issue for about 15 years, now, being involved in farming and ranching,” she remarked. “I was very young when I started working on federal policy, because the United States has always embraced a policy where we believed it was important to grow our own food in this country, and I’m a strong believer that when another country controls our food supply, that’s when they truly control us.”
She continued, “If we think a pandemic was scary, wait until we realize that we can’t put food on the grocery store shelves because China controls the entire system, and what most of America hasn’t been paying attention to, is that China — for years — has been buying up our chemical companies, our fertilizer companies, our processing systems, and now they’re buying land, and we have foreign countries that are heavily invested in that entire supply system.”
“We are losing control of the ability to feed our people,” she warned, “and that’s what is challenging us today. We finally are waking up to that, but it is going to be a serious situation that this administration needs to recognize they have a huge role in, and all they’ve done is strengthen our enemies and given them more ability to control our food supply which makes us in a very precarious situation as a country.”
Noem described big city life as a possible frustrater of human social instincts and needs. Small towns, she said, tend to afford a level of familiarity and depth of social interaction that she assessed as lacking in big cities.
“[I benefit from] an incredible perspective that so many people in this country don’t get to have,” Noem said of her life in South Dakota, “and they don’t realize how much they need it — that interaction and sense of community, and people who wave when they drive by on the road and stop and smile and ask how your day is going — is what keeps us human.”
She went on, “It feeds our souls and it helps our mental health, as well. I think so many people are constantly challenged with the busyness, the noise, and the lack of personal interaction that happens many times in big cities. [It] really does affect them long-term, and it would be good for everybody to get out and be in the country, and be in being smaller towns where people can relax and just understand that we’re all a part of humanity, and we were all created to love each other.”
Noem also warned of fatherlessness as a widespread problem across America.
“We have a fatherlessness issue [in America],” she stated. “Kids need parents in their life. They need a role model. Even for young men, it’s extremely important that they have a male role model — a father figure — in their life that can exemplify some of the traits that are needed to bring leadership to a family, but even for young women, it’s true.”
She reflected, “[My father] taught me things by doing them and giving me impossible things to do. … I think that all teaches you how to deal with other areas of life and other people, and that’s something that we’re missing in this country, right now.”
Fatherlessness contributes to excessive consumption of video games and television among children, Noem argued.
She advised, “We need our children to have people that are investing in them and are spending a lot less time watching TV and playing video games and doing entertainment than they are really spending facetime with their kids and teaching life lessons to them.”
“Our job is to prepare them for life,” Noem concluded. “When we look at our children, many times we see parents trying to do everything for their kids, and that’s crippling them. Our real job as parents is to prepare them for life, and I think the best gift my dad gave me was hard things to do, and I had to figure them out.”
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