Secure Freedom Minute

The Justice Department yesterday indicted former Cuban dictator Raoul Castro and others for three murders of American citizens thirty years ago. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it may mark “the beginning of the end” of the regime he and his brother, Fidel, have inflicted on the island’s longsuffering population for nearly seven decades.

The indictment was preceded by an oil embargo engineered by President Trump and a man whose family fled to freedom from Cuba, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It has precipitated sustained blackouts and economic privation that has translated into increasing public demands for liberty.

It’s hard to overstate the strategic implications of Cuba’s possibly imminent liberation. The Kremlin and Communist China have long weaponized the island, collecting signals intelligence there, running spy operations here and supporting insurgencies and hostile regimes throughout the Western hemisphere. 

Let us pray for Cuba Libre.

This is Frank Gaffney.

Today, Chinese emperor Xi Jinping accorded his vassal, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, the same red-carpet treatment Donald Trump got last week. Despite assertions that the President’s pomp-and-circumstance was evidence of respect that offset Xi’s several affronts and otherwise aggressive attitude, the message is clear: China’s ruler is actually an enemy. 

That reality was central to a PresentDangerChina.org webinar on Monday which critically examined last week’s Beijing summit and its outcomes. Our experts agreed that Xi’s regime is in acute political, economic and strategic difficulty, if not extremis, and that Mr. Trump has considerable leverage. But that can translate into heightened danger. 

That’s especially the case if the Xi-Putin meeting fits a pattern of such summits serving as preludes to joint “strategic arson.” If Xi feels emboldened to act against Taiwan, giving Russia its marching orders would be a precursor. 

Watch this space.

This is Frank Gaffney.

Yesterday, three men were killed outside the largest of 13 mosques in California’s San Diego County. Such violence is unconscionable and must be condemned. 

Even though little is known so far about the teenage shooters, the Islamic Center’s imam, Taha Hassane, nonetheless decried “intolerance.” And New York’s Muslim Mayor Zohran Mamdani denounced “Islamophobia.” 

Before sympathy for the victims and efforts to parlay this crime into a pretext for silencing those of us who legitimately oppose utterly intolerant and intentionally terrifying sharia-supremacism, a little level-setting is in order.

This mosque has long been associated with the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Two congregants aided the 9/11 hijackers. And Imam Hassane routinely misrepresents sharia and intolerantly inveighs against Israel and its supporters. 

Such facts do not justify violence. But they do underscore the need for legally and peacefully opposing metastasizing sharia in America.  

This is Frank Gaffney.

Yesterday, we celebrated on the Washington Mall 250 years of “one nation under God” by rededicating the American experiment to the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs not only central to its beginnings and history to date, but to its prospects for the future. 

Critics are determined to obscure, if not completely deny, the role the Scriptures and the hand of God played in inspiring the authors of our founding documents. “Rededicate 250” featured prayers, Biblical citations and statements from America’s get-go to underscore that, in our time, we must prize that spiritual genealogy and eschew efforts to alter it.

In particular, we cannot persist – in the name of religious freedom and “interfaith dialogue” – in according to Islam’s anti-constitutional sharia death-cult the status of a “great Abrahamic faith,” allowing it seditiously to undermine our nation and freedoms through unwarranted First Amendment protections.

Virginia’s Democratic Party might better be described as the Bolsheviks. After all, their approach to governance seems to be Lenin’s revolutionary practice of “the ends justify the means.” 

A prime example is the Democrats’ bid to redraw the commonwealth’s congressional districts. First, they created a constitutional amendment whose language was corruptly misleading and unlawfully adopted contributing to its narrow approval last month.

That outcome was immediately stayed by one judge and then rejected by the Virginia Supreme Court. The Bolsheviks reportedly want to retaliate by lowering its mandatory retirement age to 53 and restock the court with sympathetic jurists. 

Failing that, the Bolsheviks want the U.S. Supreme Court to endorse their shenanigans. Let us pray that they are repudiated again and the wellspring of America’s pro-freedom revolution 250 years ago will cease to be threatened by a Leninist one.  

This is Frank Gaffney.

Chinese emperor Xi Jinping’s lavish welcome for President Trump cannot obscure a harsh reality: China’s ruling Communist Party is at war with the United States. If we continue to ignore that natty fact, we invite a redoubling of the CCP’s long-running “unrestricted warfare” against America – an unforced, and possibly terminal, error of epic proportions. 

Much will depend on what comes next. If President Trump allows Xi to reduce their summit to yet-another opportunity to preside over one-sided deals with U.S. “captured elites,” 47 will be remembered as having perpetuated and greatly intensified the threat we face. 

If on the other hand, like President Reagan at Rekjyavik, Mr. Trump rejects the temptation to prop up the Chinese Communist Party, he may yet put it on the “ash-heap of history,” alongside the odious Soviet one that spawned the CCP.

Just do it.

This is Frank Gaffney.

China’s emperor Xi Jinping will wine and dine President Trump as part of a spectacle in Beijing intended to give the outward appearance of hospitality. I pray the U.S. delegation includes a food-tester. 

This is no joke. Poisoning enemies has long been part of the intrigues of China’s imperial courts. And, since Donald Trump poses a unique and existential threat to the CCP’s global ambitions, taking him out – presumably via a seeming “accident” – would be an elegant solution to Xi’s acute internal problems.

Alternatively, Xi may simply persist in poisonously impacting  this fall’s midterm elections and, thereby, the Trump presidency via restricting rare earth mineral exports, enabling and protracting Iran’s war with America and gaining new opportunities to penetrate and subvert our country.

Make no mistake: You are deep behind enemy lines, Mr. President. Stay safe, vigilant and protected by God. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

President Trump is taking numerous “old friends of China” to Beijing today – corporate executives who have made fortunes transforming the People’s Republic into a superpower. 

The President’s entourage reinforces the illusion that the PRC is merely an economic rival that a new poll indicates most Americans share. Mr. Trump just reinforced that misperception by declaring we have “a very friendly competition” with China. 

Actually, as a recent PresentDangerChina.com webinar underscored, Communist China is at war with us. It is perilous to ignore that fact and open our country and economy to further predations – thereby, enabling the CCP to intensify its decades long “unrestricted warfare” against us. 

The result will be to prop up Xi Jinping’s regime and embolden it further. Donald Trump has historically understood the Chinese threat and must be guided by that reality at this critical juncture. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

Sam Faddis is a brilliant former CIA spy who spent much of his career countering Iranian efforts to bring “Death to America.” With President Trump’s necessary rejection to what amounted to Iran’s demand for our surrender, Sam’s recommendation is to stop talking to the regime in Tehran and “go for the jugular.”

That would involve the following: targeting critical nodes of Iran’s oil infrastructure, border crossings with Pakistan and communications, while seizing two dozen ghost tankers full of Iranian oil off Malaysia and imposing a nationwide no-fly zone. 

Mr. Faddis also urges President Trump to cancel his impending trip to China and sanction its companies enabling Iran to continue waging war against us. As Sam pointed out in a webinar last week, doing otherwise invites not Xi Jinping’s help to us, but will embolden him further to help our enemies in Tehran.

This is Frank Gaffney.

The White House just released a new National Counterterrorism Strategy. It marks an important break from past official narratives about enemies foreign and domestic heretofore euphemistically and misleadingly called “terrorists.” 

Notably, it declared: “Americans should be safe to live their lives without the fear of terror attacks, the threat of jihadists, the flooding of our communities with deadly drugs at the hands of foreign narcoterrorists, or violent left-wing extremists who have adopted radical ideologies antithetical to the principles upon which our Republic was founded.” 

Particularly heartening is the acknowledgement that among the “terrorists” we confront are actually “jihadists,” in other words adherents to the totalitarian Islamic doctrine known as sharia that requires them to engage in holy war or “jihad.” The strategy explicitly calls for “protect[ing] Christians, who have been slaughtered at the hands of these Jihadi groups.” 

Praise God!

This is Frank Gaffney