Secure Freedom Minute

The costs of Joe Biden’s deliberate dismantling of America’s energy security are about to hit U.S. consumers hard again. The Saudis, Russians and other oil suppliers timed their production cut yesterday of 2 million barrels per day to the end of the irresponsible sell-off of our strategic petroleum reserve.

With less supply and demand for energy in Europe spiking as winter sets in, prices here are likely to rise further, possibly sharply. With the crushing burden of inflation already top-of-mind for American voters, the proverbial “buck” will rightly stop with an administration that has deliberately reduced domestic production of fossil fuels.

The question is will Team Biden reverse course before still more damage is done to our economy and people – or wait until it’s compelled to do so next year by an opposition with an electoral mandate to correct course?

This is Frank Gaffney.

You would never know it to hear Democrats decry racism in America and contend that our nation continues to engage in it systemically, but their partisans have historically been the greatest promoters of such intolerance – including in the form of slavery. Worse yet, they are responsible for what is, arguably, the most widespread enslavement ever, in our own time.

Of course, such things are not taught in the left’s Critical Race Theory indoctrination programs. But racist Democrats brought us the South’s plantation economy, the Confederacy, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow and filibustering of and violent resistance to civil rights. 

And, as a powerful Committee on the Present Danger: China webinar made clear yesterday, Democratic proponents of open borders are now enabling drug cartels to traffic here illegal aliens into endless indentured servitude and sexual slavery on an unprecedented scale. That must end.

This is Frank Gaffney.

Freedom dodged a bullet in Brazil on Sunday. Despite the stacked deck posed by: the country’s Marxists in and out of government; their international allies, led by the Chinese Communist Party; the leftist Brazilian media; wildly inaccurate pollsters; election machines known to be susceptible to fraud; and a hostile Biden administration, incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro is still a contender for reelection.   

Bolsonaro is now in a run-off at the end of this month with the Communist former president-turned-felon, Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro allies’ widespread success down-ballot confirms his great popular support.

Da Silva is considered the frontrunner, however, and with the contest so massively rigged in his favor, Lula’s bid to renew efforts he previously made to render Brazil, like the rest of the hemisphere, part of a Chinese empire remains a serious threat.

America must support freedom, and President Bolsonaro.

This is Frank Gaffney.

Team Biden reportedly is poised to have $7 billion in frozen Iranian funds released in exchange for the freeing of two Americans the mullahs have held hostage for years. This astounding ransom is just the latest indication of the exorbitant price the administration is paying for another “deal” that will not prevent Tehran from getting the Bomb.

Unfortunately, President Biden has also been rewarding other hostile governments in Russia, Venezuela and Afghanistan for seizing U.S. citizens. In each case, these regimes got back dangerous individuals convicted of serious crimes in the United States.

While one sympathizes with the American victims of such hostage-taking, the trouble with paying either financial or human ransoms is that it incentivizes the world’s bad actors to regard every one of us as potential leverage to extract U.S. concessions. Do you like having a target on your back?

This is Frank Gaffney.

At a summit this week in Washington, leaders of most Pacific Island nations agreed to paper over differences with the Biden administration that have given the Chinese Communist Party strategically ominous openings for its regional influence operations and colonization.

The Solomon Islands prime minister, however, did not sign on to the summiteers’ joint declaration. More importantly, he has allowed so-called “police” from China to be stationed in his country. Beijing is exploiting this opening to operate in, and ultimately militarize, islands like Guadalcanal that Americans bled and died to liberate from an earlier totalitarian empire.   

It turns out that Chinese “police” are reportedly setting up at secretive “service centers” elsewhere around the world, including in Canada and even here. Are we okay with the CCP thus implementing a new law authorizing extraterritorial enforcement of its policies against Chinese nationals and foreigners?

This is Frank Gaffney.

The full extent of the damage caused thus far by Hurricane Ian, let alone its longer-term repercussions for Florida and the eastern seaboard as the storm progresses further north are unknown. What is already clear, however, is that Ian will necessarily require national attention and resources on the home front at a problematic moment.  

The nearly simultaneous closure through apparent sabotage of Russian natural gas pipelines to Europe is further roiling the front created by Vladimir Putin’s ongoing invasion and, now, annexation of parts of Ukraine. The effect, and presumably the intent, is to intensify pressure on Ukraine’s European supporters to demand Kiev’s capitulation to Kremlin demands.

Unfortunately, these developments constitute distractions from the third front: the prospect that after next month’s Communist Party Congress, dictator Xi Jinping will be emboldened to engage in aggression towards Taiwan, and perhaps us.

This is Frank Gaffney.

For decades a vast army of Chinese Communist Party computer hackers has been waging cyberwarfare against the U.S. electric grid and other sensitive military and civilian networks and data bases.

According to the CCP’s top propaganda outlet, People’s Daily, America’s super-secret National Security Agency was successful last June in “infiltrating and controlling the core equipment of China's infrastructure, and stealing private data from Chinese users.”

If true, this would be among the first public indications that the United States is actually fighting back against the unrestricted warfare the CCP has waged against this country for over two decades. We, too, can now weaponize such information, including that of large numbers of Chinese nationals with “sensitive identities.”

It’s high time our mortal enemy is decisively punished for its aggression to date, and hopefully deterred from engaging in still worse down the road.  

This is Frank Gaffney.

Will the nationalist-populist sentiment that has recently won power in Sweden and Italy – and that could transform official Washington in November – prevent an impending geopolitical catastrophe in our hemisphere?

That’s in prospect if Marxists in Brazil and their foreign sponsors – especially, Communist China, but Russia and Iran, too – succeed in thwarting President Jair Bolsonaro’s reelection bid on Sunday.

As a powerful new documentary by Tucker Carlson makes clear, the Chinese Communists have already deeply penetrated Brazil’s infrastructure and economy, nearly colonizing the country. If they succeed in restoring to office their aggressive proxy, former President-turned-felon Lula da Silva, our enemies will basically complete their hegemony throughout the Western hemisphere.

The repercussions here would be dire in terms of further illegal immigration, trade disruptions and heightened dangers to U.S. national security. America must help keep Brazil free, while we still can.

This is Frank Gaffney.

Earlier this month, the people of Sweden – a nation long misruled by the left – repudiated their elites and voted for a government dominated by the right’s Swedish Democrats. Yesterday, a similar political earthquake brought to power in Italy a right-wing coalition led by a Thatcherhesque Giorgia Meloni.

The implications of such tectonic shifts for these two countries remain to be seen. But the message to the European Union and other globalists seems clear: National sovereignty and accountable government that protects it from distant bureaucrats and illegal immigrants now enjoy unprecedented popular support.

For us, the question is: To what extent are such sentiments next going to dominate our elections this fall? Clearly, the United States is in at least as urgent a need of a course-correction as Europe. And we must pray that America will secure a mandate for it, as well.

This is Frank Gaffney.

Are we sleepwalking toward catastrophe? Preoccupied with this fall’s election, or simply the day-to-day challenges of making ends meet in increasingly difficult economic circumstances, most Americans are missing some very ominous indicators of serious trouble ahead.

So, it would seem are our intelligence services and national security agencies – perhaps because they’re focused, instead, on Joe Biden’s political opposition, now officially designated  “enemies of the state.”

Historically, however, our nation would be on high-alert if any of the following were occurring – let alone, as now, all of them: The Kremlin is mobilizing its military reserves and explicitly threatening nuclear war; Communist China has massively increased its military capabilities and is adopting a war-footing; North Korea has publicly embraced preemptive nuclear strikes; and Iran will have the Bomb at any moment.

Sorry to disturb, but we ignore such developments at our extreme peril.

This is Frank Gaffney.