Secure Freedom Minute

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

As President Biden confers with other leaders this week, the disconnects between his stewardship of our security and steps being taken by our adversaries should be top of mind. Instead, they’re getting scarcely any attention – especially here at home.

Take for example, Biden’s squandering of our strategic petroleum reserves. In a bid to mitigate his policies’ disastrous inflation of energy prices, the President has been selling off a million barrels a day, bringing the reserves to their lowest levels since 1987.

Meanwhile, Communist China has been aggressively building up its stocks of not only oil – including Russian imports, but uranium, rare earth minerals, fertilizers and food. Obviously, doing so reduces the availability of such commodities to others. In stark contrast to Biden’s profligacy, moreover, they are consistent with the CCP’s preparations for kinetic war – and could prove decisive in our defeat.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa met virtually last week in what amounted to an ominous throw-down to the United States and its dollar’s privileged status as the world’s reserve currency. 

The Russians and Chinese have been trying for some time to supplant the dollar, especially following the financial punishment meted out to Russia’s ruble and economy following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Now, they appear to have the buy-in of not only South Africa for a “BRICS” basket of currencies, but two putative American allies: Brazil and India.

It remains to be seen how fast this alternative to the dollar will materialize and with what effect. But the present impetus behind it makes more likely a scenario we should dread – when we can no longer sustain profligate spending and economic dominance by simply printing more money. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

It’s no secret that domestic terrorists are intent on inflicting violent harm in our country. It turns out, though, they’re not the white supremacists we’re incessantly told are the greatest threat.

Instead, they are anarchists and Marxists who have seized on the impending Supreme Court ruling on abortion as a pretext to inflict a “Summer of Rage” that could make that of 2020 pale by comparison.

It remains to be seen whether groups like “Jane’s Revenge” will be joined by unknown numbers of others – including possibly military-age men who have entered this country illegally since Joe Biden opened our southern border and admitted tens of thousands more from Afghanistan.

What we do know now is that, if our security agencies remain focused on phony threats conjured up proponents of Critical Race Theory, instead of real ones, our peril will be enormous.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Just as the danger posed by the Chinese Communist Party is reaching unprecedented heights, the Biden State Department has chosen an “Old Friend” of China to manage the bilateral relationship. Evidently, Hunter Biden wasn’t available.

Instead, Tom Donilon got the gig. As Barack Obama’s national security advisor, he presided over the surrender of the South China Sea to Beijing. These days, he runs an investment institute for Larry Fink’s financial management firm, BlackRock –  which the CCP recently rewarded for its service to China with the first wholly foreign-owned mutual fund business there.

Such service by BlackRock has included playing a leading role in transferring $3-6 trillion in U.S. investments to CCP front companies. It also recently helped such companies gain access to the retirement savings of federal employees and military personnel.

The times demand American patriots in charge, not China’s Old Friends.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

There may be a worse time for Joe Biden to pay a visit to the Middle East, but it is hard to think of one. The government of Israel has just fallen, its parliament disbanded and the fifth round of elections in three years called for October.

The Biden team has been emboldening the Palestinians to engage in renewed violence. Jordan’s kingdom is hanging by a thread. And the likelihood of conflict with Iran seems to be growing by the moment.

There is literally no chance that President Biden’s presence will improve matters. His team has fostered regional instability by subverting Israel, appeasing Iran’s mullahs and simultaneously undermining Saudi Arabia and asking it to increase oil production. China and Russia are making regional inroads at our expense.

It’s in the vital interests of the United States for Joe Biden to stay home. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The election of an erstwhile narco-terrorist leader to be Colombia’s next president moves Latin America to the brink of being entirely run by this country’s enemies. With the fall of Peru and Chile to Communists last year and the prospect that Brazil’s electorate may soon return to power its former radical leader, Lula, an enduring ascendancy of indigenous Marxists seems assured.

Worse yet, external forces are at work there, as well. The Chinese Communists and their Russian and Iranian allies are aggressively expanding influence operations, infrastructure build-outs and basing arrangements that will strengthen their footholds in the Western Hemisphere under the banner of today’s Communist Internationale, known as the Forum of Sao Paolo. No good can come of all this for U.S. commercial or strategic interests – or the flow of still more illegal aliens fleeing leftist predations.

Paging President Monroe.

This is Frank Gaffney

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Team Biden’s appalling surrender of Afghanistan last year shocked the world. Many were similarly astonished when the U.S. administration effectively encouraged Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. There can be no surprise about Biden’s next – and most dangerous – failure to deter aggression, namely the war the Chinese Communist Party is poised to launch against Taiwan.

After all, a powerful webinar sponsored yesterday by the Committee on the Present Danger: China served notice that the CCP is actively preparing for such a conflict. It has amassed the capabilities to conduct one decisively in the absence of effective countermeasures. And, all other things being equal, U.S. assets, personnel and territory will likely be targeted.

We may still be able to deter such a world-changing disaster. But we must do so at once, not persist in Biden behavior that instead invites it. Learn more at PresentDangerChina.org.

This is Frank Gaffney

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Last month, the World Health Organization sought with the help of the Biden administration to secure sweeping new powers to dictate what constitute public health emergencies and how they will be addressed.

That gambit was blocked by an unexpected surge of opposition from nations not as willing to surrender their sovereignty to an unaccountable supranational organization as is Team Biden.

The WHO’s complete submission to the Chinese Communist Party line in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic may have been a factor. As its Director-General renews his bid for expanded powers, he is distancing himself a bit from Beijing –notably, by expressing a willingness to consider afresh whether the Covid virus actually did come from a Chinese bioweapons laboratory.

Watch this space as our Center for Security Policy has a major new study on that subject coming out next week.  

This is Frank Gaffney

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

On Monday, Communist China ratcheted up yet again its territorial claims to the waters, airspace and resources of the Western Pacific. Beijing declared that it “has sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction over the Taiwan Strait,” the 90-mile-wide stretch that separates Taiwan’s island from the Chinese mainland.

The United States and Taiwanese governments have, properly, rejected this assertion, affirming that the Strait is, instead, an international waterway and declaring an intention to continue to exercise freedom of navigation there.

Unfortunately, in the Taiwan Strait as elsewhere, the Chinese Communist Party is inexorably creating facts on the ground – or, at sea – that will enable the People’s Liberation Army not just to enforce its requirements for permission to transit or otherwise utilize contested areas. They are preparing for war. We must, therefore, be about deterring and, if necessary, defeating the future aggression being telegraphed.

This is Frank Gaffney

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

“Do something” is not generally a prescription for considered and appropriate action in an emergency. That’s especially true when the proposed options require the compromise of Americans’ constitutional rights.

A gaggle of Republican Senators have just agreed with Democratic counterparts that the something they are prepared to do in response to recent mass shootings is adopt a national “Red Flag” law. As a result, in the name of preventing deplorable, but random, acts of “gun violence,” every American could be one anonymous denunciation away from having their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms eliminated.  

If this initiative becomes law, it will likely be viewed by Republican voters as the “White Flag” initiative, an abject – and profoundly alienating – monoparty surrender to gun-grabbing Marxists at a moment when our arms are needed more than ever to safeguard all our liberties.

This is Frank Gaffney.