Secure Freedom Minute

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Among the most insidious legacies of Barack Obama’s presidency was the wrecking operation he conducted against the U.S. military. It was defunded, disarmed and subjected to social experimentation without regard for the adverse consequences for our troops’ warfighting capabilities, readiness and morale.

Tragically, Joe Biden is taking the radical left’s war against our armed forces to dangerous new levels. He is imposing the transgender agenda with all its attendant costs on the Defense Department. He is reinstating training that inflames racial tensions.

And even worse, the new administration and its allies on Capitol Hill have started purging military personnel deemed insufficiently aligned with the Commander-in-Chief. This amounts to a dangerous politicization of the Pentagon, one likely to deprive the nation of skilled American warriors whose service may soon be urgently needed if our enemies are emboldened by the evident weakening of our defenses.  

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

A preeminent concern about a Biden-Harris presidency is whether those two “old friends” of Communist China will do its bidding to America’s great detriment. One of the administration’s first, ominous acts suggests they are so inclined.

An initial Biden Executive Order clears the way for the Chinese to increase the presence in our electric grid of their transformers, chips and other technology, blocking the implementation of a sensible Trump directive requiring the elimination of such foreign equipment from our most critical infrastructure.

The risks of this concession are incalculably high. If the Chinese gear fails, or is deliberately disabled by Beijing, the effect could be a protracted – and possibly catastrophic – interruption of electricity essential to our economy, society and lives.

This decision is also a warning of other, dangerous appeasement of the Chinese Communist Party to come. It must be reversed now.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

One of the few – actually, very few – good news items to come out of the first days of the Biden-Harris administration is a glimmer of robust bipartisan opposition to the Chinese Communist Party.

Before he left office, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared the CCP’s oppression of Uyghur Muslims in western China to be “genocide.” Shortly thereafter, Joe Biden’s nominee as Pompeo’s replacement, Tony Blinkin, and his Treasury Secretary-designate, Janet Yellin, both endorsed that designation in congressional testimony.

Under international law, a finding of genocide obliges us to take action against the perpetrator. An appropriate first step would be to make this monstrous crime against humanity Item One in a public indictment justifying another designation: namely, that the Chinese Communist Party is a transnational criminal organization.

This would both delegitimize the CCP and make those underwriting and otherwise aiding it accomplices.  

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

If anyone doubted that “elections have consequences,” look no further than Joe Biden’s busy first day in the White House.

The new President immediately reversed a number of his predecessor’s policies. Among the blizzard of problematic Executive Orders he signed on “Day One” were directives that will incentivize illegal immigration and reopen America to aliens from nations – many of them Sharia-supremacist – where we cannot properly vet them.

Biden also recommitted the United States to a radical energy and climate change agenda, including a Paris accord that rewards Communist China for increasing its greenhouse gas emissions.

And as part of his so-called “racial equity” initiative, the 46th President reinstituted the practice Trump terminated of indoctrinating federal employees with the false narrative of America’s “systemic racism.”

Regrettably, the early consequences of last year’s election will be a weaker and more divided, not United States.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

America gets a new President today. So does Communist China, and the rest of the world.

Joe Biden is expected to take immediately a number of steps aimed at reversing his predecessor’s “America First” policies. Many of these – and others sure to come – will have the unmistakable effect of weakening the United States.

Consider just three examples: President Biden will begin to undermine our energy independence by canceling the Keystone XL pipeline. He will terminate construction of The Wall and adopt asylum and amnesty policies that incentivize illegal immigration. And he will rejoin – and re-legitimize – the Chinese-dominated and insidious World Health Organization that lied about and otherwise intensified the CCP virus.

Given Mr. Biden’s deep compromise by the Chinese Communists, we must scrutinize not only the damage his policies will do to us, but determine, as well, who benefits?

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

My old boss, Ronald Reagan, warned that every generation faces an existential threat to freedom. Unfortunately, we face a number of them. If our enemies prevail, Reagan believed, “We will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like to live in the United States when men were free.”

Tomorrow, Joe Biden and hundreds of his subordinates will take oaths to protect and defend the Constitution. What we tell our children depends critically on whether they fulfill those solemn promises.

For example, will we enjoy in the future, as we have in the past, freedoms of speech, religion and peaceable assembly? Will the press be free or effectively instruments of state propaganda? Will our elections be honestly conducted? Will officials compromised by hostile powers be barred from government service?

Team Biden must be held to its oaths.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The State Department has just confirmed that a Chinese laboratory suspected of being the source of the Covid-19 virus that’s killed nearly 400,000 Americans is associated with the Beijing regime’s illegal biological weapons program. Unfortunately, this is but the latest proof that the Chinese Communist Party is a transnational criminal organization.

Evidence abounds of other CCP crimes, as well, among them: its murderous smuggling of fentanyl; its economic warfare inside the United States, including the theft of invaluable intellectual property and data; its myriad crimes against humanity involving Captive Nations’ populations and China’s own; and its massive interference in the U.S. 2020 elections.

The United States has already designated far less dangerous  groups as TCOs, including Hezbollah and MS-13. Before he leaves office, Donald Trump should indelibly brand the worst of all the transnational criminal organizations: the Chinese Communist Party.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Yet another, staggering cost of the deadly virus unleashed by the Chinese Communist Party has just been reported. Open Doors USA’s annual World Watch List released yesterday reveals that the number of Christians experiencing heavy persecution now exceeds 340 million.

That’s more people than live in the United States and a vast increase over last year’s estimate of 260 million. The single biggest contributor to this burgeoning problem is Covid-19. For example, Chinese Communists blame Christians for spreading the disease. And they and other persecutors exploit the virus to deny Christians food, employment, health care and other services.

Worse is in the offing for believers and billions of others – around the world as the Chinese Communists expand and export their totalitarian surveillance-state techniques under the guise of monitoring Covid infections.

Will the Biden administration counter this ominous trend – or exacerbate it?

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

A top Chinese Communist Party influence operator boasted recently that China’s “old friends” on Wall Street have, for decades, successfully compelled the U.S. government to do Beijing’s bidding. A prime example was the 2013 deal brokered by then-Vice President Joe Biden that gave the CCP preferential access to our capital markets – and roughly $3 trillion in American investors’ funds.

Prof. Di Dongsheng claimed that the exception was the Trump administration. He lied. Thanks especially to the unstinting efforts of Wall Street veteran and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Communist China has been able to perpetuate U.S. underwriting even of companies building military technologies designed to destroy us.

After Mr. Mnuchin leaves office next week, he is expected to resume his lucrative business dealings with China – where his serial betrayal of Trump national security colleagues and the country will presumably be handsomely rewarded.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Our seventieth Secretary of State is arguably the best in our nation’s history. Certainly, few, if any, can match Mike Pompeo’s brilliance, his clarity about America’s vital role in the world and his courage in countering the dangers we face internationally. Consider two examples of such leadership just this week:

Yesterday, Mr. Pompeo teamed up with a former American hostage in Iran to reject any reversion to a policy of appeasement towards Tehran’s mullahs. Thanks to the Iranian regime’s strategic alliance with Al Qaeda, doing otherwise would effectively strengthen not just one, but two, of our most dangerous enemies.

The day before, Secretary Pompeo gave some tough love about American exceptionalism to people charged with promoting it to the world – employees of the Voice of America. That mission has been neglected for too long and must be made a priority for Team Biden.

This is Frank Gaffney.