Secure Freedom Minute

Some good news emerged from Israel this week. The electorate of the Jewish State finally decided to reinstate a strong and tested leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, with an actual parliamentary majority.

The vote reflected understandable concerns about a toxic brew of growing dangers, including: an imminently nuclear-armed Iran; increasingly deadly weapons in the hands of Tehran’s terrorist proxies doing business as Hamas and Hezbollah; and rising violence by jihadist Palestinians within Israel and territories it controls. 

This is no time for weak and feckless leadership in Jerusalem. 

Another electoral factor appears to have been a repudiation of the outgoing leftist interim government’s submissiveness to the dictates of a hostile Biden administration. “Bibi” has shown himself able and willing to stand up to anti-Zionists in Washington. He now has a mandate to do that, and deserves our steadfast support as he fulfills it. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

Yesterday, Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, made a brief statement in which he did not concede to his opponent in Sunday’s run-off election, Lula da Silva. Afterwards, however, his chief of staff stated that a transition is now underway.

If so, every major country in the Western Hemisphere from the Arctic to Antarctica is now – or soon will be – in the hands of explicitly Communist regimes or like-minded ideologues. That’s dangerous for freedom in general, and America in particular.

To be sure, this “fundamental transformation” has been a long time coming, but it has accelerated dramatically thanks to the Biden administration’s malign neglect, if not its active encouragement. Especially the Communists’ victories on its watch in Peru, Chile, Colombia and now Brazil will imperil U.S. economic interests, assure increased illegal immigration here and cement China’s colonial domination of our hemisphere.

God help us.

This is Frank Gaffney.

Elderly federal Judge Kenneth Hoyt put two election integrity activists in jail yesterday until they publicly identify – and thereby put at risk – a reported FBI confidential informant.

The practical effect of Judge Hoyt capriciously locking up True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips is to prevent them from warning of an ominous prospect: Communist China may be able to exploit access given to sensitive electoral data by the indicted CEO of Konnech Inc. to affect our midterms a week from today.

Suppressing such information could make a difference in turnout and outcomes, just as preventing voters from knowing the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop did in the 2020 presidential race. That would make Judge Hoyt’s arbitrary decision tantamount to election interference. My old boss, Ronald Reagan, who appointed him to the bench thirty-five years ago, must be spinning in his grave.

This is Frank Gaffney.

Whether there’s a political sea-change in the impending midterms depends in part on whether popular revulsion at Team Biden’s policies will translate into repudiation at the polls. That will depend significantly on whether electoral machinery, ballots and Big Tech manipulation will determine the outcome, not legal voters.

Two people committed to genuinely free and fair elections are Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips of TruetheVote.org. Among other services rendered, they recently exposed a company called Konnech for giving Communist China access to, and the ability to secretly manipulate, sensitive elections data.   

A federal judge is now insisting that Engelbrecht and Phillips reveal the confidential source who tipped them off. They refuse to do so and are being threatened with jail for contempt of court.

Such a travesty would invite utter contempt for election integrity at a moment we can least afford it.

 

This is Frank Gaffney.

Millions of us deeply resent what we have suffered in the wake of the Chinese Communist Party deliberately spreading a virus genetically engineered in its biological warfare lab in Wuhan. Most are unaware, however, that the CCP not only brought us the COVID-19 pandemic.

Communist China’s dominance of the World Health Organization also translated into a WHO-recommended pandemic response featuring lockdowns, social distancing, masking and mandated injections with inadequately tested vaccines, measures collectively known as “the China Model.” That model’s adoption here contributed to a million deaths, a ravaged economy and the loss of constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.  

Now, secret negotiations are underway aimed at allowing the WHO to dictate when and how we will deal with future public health crises.

We cannot legitimate the WHO’s past, Chinese-directed malevolence, let alone willingly submit to more – and worse – from now on.

This is Frank Gaffney.

Notwithstanding fevered warnings of “threats to democracy,” we live in a constitutional republic in which voters select representatives, not directly approve legislation.  

For such a system to function properly, the electorate must be able to make informed choices about their representatives. This requires campaigns and elections meant to establish their fitness to represent us. The Constitution’s framers instituted a further safeguard by guaranteeing freedom of the press, expecting journalists to ensure that evidence to the contrary would be exposed. 

The Pennsylvania Senate debate Monday night made plain that Democrat John Fetterman, his family and partisans and the media have been dishonest about the extent to which a debilitating stroke rendered him unable to perform the duties of that office.  

Sadly, similar perfidy brought us Joe Biden. We cannot afford any more of such real threats to good governance in America.  

 

This is Frank Gaffney.

In the run-up to the 2020 elections, leading Democrats like Senators Amy Klobuchar, Mark Warner and Ron Widen warned in a documentary film called “Kill Chain” that U.S. electoral machines were designed to connect to the internet and subject to manipulation. They were concerned Donald Trump would take advantage of such vulnerabilities to steal a victory over his opponent.

Then, after Joe Biden curiously got more votes than even Barack Obama, Democratic partisans suddenly insisted there was no basis for challenging the outcome and those who disagreed are dangerous “election deniers.” Call it “The Pivot.”

Now, with the looming prospect of massive midterm defeats, Democrats are pivoting again, warning of impending election irregularities and setting the stage for contesting the results. Republicans have mobilized to monitor the polls and hopefully ensure election integrity. How about making that a genuinely bipartisan undertaking?

This is Frank Gaffney.

The Biden administration has been populated from its inception by individuals playing for the other team. Joe Biden’s compromise by the Chinese Communist Party and his record of policies that advance its agenda is the most egregious example, but hardly the only one.

Robert Malley used to promote the interests of Iran during the Obama presidency, including negotiating a seriously defective nuclear deal. Malley has been doing the same under Biden, offering reckless and humiliating concessions that have only emboldened the mullahs further.

Fortunately, the Iranian people’s expanding revolt against those tyrants is a showstopper for Malley’s negotiations that serve to legitimate the regime the uprising explicitly seeks to overthrow. So, Malley recently denied that reality, falsely claiming that the revolutionaries simply seek greater official recognition of human rights.

We must stop negotiating with the ayatollahs and Rob Malley must go.  

 

This is Frank Gaffney.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin used to remove rivals by having them secretly murdered and then “disappeared” from earlier group photos. On Sunday, the newly installed Communist emperor of China bloodlessly dispatched his predecessor by having him physically escorted from the main stage during the closing session of the 20th Party Congress.

Reportedly, Hu Jintao, who ruled the People’s Republic for 10 years, was about to use that platform to warn against the then-impending concentration of power in Xi Jinping’s hands. The party line, however, is that he was experiencing some sort of medical emergency. It was clear from Hu’s stricken reaction to his unwilling departure, though, that he knew he was heading to the gulag — not an urgent care facility.

That’s a tell regarding what to expect from a Xi Jinping unleashed. The trouble is he is intent on disappearing America, too.

This is Frank Gaffney.

The son of the last Shah of Iran, Prince Reza Pahlavi, spoke powerfully yesterday to, and for, the Iranian people. His speech was widely broadcast and well-received. It can help bring down the tyrannical regime that’s long misruled them and threatens us.

The Prince says he’s not interested in running a successor government. But he outlined what it should look like – namely one that is: democratic, and therefore accountable; secular, instead of theocratic; and inclusive, truly representing his nation’s many ethnic minorities and regions.

Barack Obama says it was a mistake when he ignored such aspirations in 2009 in pursuit of a nuclear deal with the ayatollahs. The Biden administration is signaling its efforts to do the same are at an end. We now must demonstrate our solidarity with those seeking freedom in Iran, and actually help them achieve it.

 

This is Frank Gaffney.