Secure Freedom Minute

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Donald Trump is being sharply criticized for his remedying last week of injustices perpetrated against three of our Nation’s warriors by military commanders, investigators and/or courts. 

Yet, there have been myriad cases since 9/11 of troops in harm’s way being vilified and punished because their chain of command did the politically correct thing and threw them under the proverbial bus. Correcting such miscarriages of justice in the cases of two Army officers, First Lieutenant Clint Lorance and Major Mathew Golsteyn and a Navy Seal named Eddie Gallagher, should be but the start of a wider program of clemencies, pardons and restoration of ranks for other deserving veterans.

Far from undermining morale or promoting misconduct, standing with our men and women in uniform will restore their confidence that we are not just grateful for their service, but that we have their backs.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

On Tuesday, a compromised federal board committed government employees to underwrite Chinese companies that help their government repress its own people and threaten ours. By so doing, the financial sector insiders who made this decision have challenged patriotic Americans – both the military and civilian personnel whose billions of retirement dollars in the Thrift Savings Plan are on the line, and the rest of us. 

Yesterday, that challenge was taken up by a formidable group of national security leaders, legislators, financial players and China experts. At a briefing conducted by the Committee on the Present Danger: China, they warned that the TSP board’s decision is neither consistent with our country’s vital interests nor that panel’s fiduciary responsibilities to the Plan’s beneficiaries.

Review for yourself the compelling case for not underwriting the Chinese threat at PresentDangerChina.org. Then sign the petition there to oppose it.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Welcome to the Swamp. Everyone who endured the first of the House impeachment hearings yesterday was given an important civics lesson.  They saw through the testimony of two senior U.S. diplomats the Fourth Branch of our government at work.

If you learned in school that there were only three – the executive, the legislative and the judiciary – welcome to the reality of the Trump administration, in which a hostile permanent bureaucracy actively seeks to check and balance” and even subvert the duly elected President of the United States.

In particular, Foreign Service Officers are notorious for currying favor with their “clients” overseas rather than putting America first. 

Bureaucrats, especially State Department ones, may prefer their own foreign policy to the President’s. But they are not entitled to sabotage his, either through political warfare inside their agencies or through impeachment proceedings in Congress.  

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Today, while the eyes of the nation are focused on the start of the congressional show trial aimed at removing President Trump from office, a meeting being held nearby is likely to get virtually no public attention – even though its consequences may ultimately prove even more far-reaching.

At that meeting, on obscure group known as the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board will decide whether to compel federal employees and military personnel to invest their retirement funds in malevolent Chinese companies. Never mind that these corporations are helping China repress its own people and threaten ours. Or that their material reputational and financial risks are undisclosed –  and unaddressed.

A decision to go-ahead will encourage Wall Street to further underwrite the Chinese threat to all of us. Such behavior could prove fatal to our nation and its people. It must not be enabled. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Tomorrow, just two days after the Nation paused to salute its veterans, an obscure federal board may blithely disregard their past service and abiding patriotic values.

At issue is whether the federal Thrift Savings Plan will compel the retirement funds of past and present servicemen and women – and millions of other former and serving government employees – to be invested in Communist Chinese companies that help repress their own people and threaten ours. 

The board that oversees this pension system decided back in 2017 to do just that, starting next year. Its members are  scheduled to revisit that decision on Wednesday, but their Wall Street advisors are urging them not to change course.

The U.S. financial sector may be getting very rich by selling us out to China. But it’s appalling and unacceptable to force people who love this country to do so. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Thirty years ago tomorrow, a miracle occurred with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the most important symbol of what Ronald Reagan correctly described as the “Evil Empire.” Shortly thereafter, hundreds of millions of people enslaved by the Soviet Union were freed.

While this liberation was clearly a God-thing, his instruments for achieving it were two mere mortals, yet extraordinary men. A new film entitled “The Divine Plan” documents how President Reagan and Pope John Paul II overcame assassination attempts and the determined opposition of the most oppressive tyranny the world had seen to that point to inspire Poles and other captive peoples to resist, and ultimately destroy, Soviet communism.

Unfortunately, totalitarianism persists in our time. Indeed, Chinese Communists seek to dominate the entire world.

It’s time for The Divine Plan 2.0. And Donald Trump must play a starring role.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Last night, I saw a newly released movie that is, at once, searingly traumatizing and powerfully uplifting. I commend to everyone “Harriet,” the story of the hardships and successes of a slave in Maryland who became an iconic and courageous liberator known as “Moses” for her often-miraculous success in helping seventy others enslaved in southern states reach freedom in the North and Canada.

Indeed, a deeply moving subtext of the film is its portrayal of Harriet Tubman’s unshakable faith in God, whose grace repeatedly informed and often transformed her missions of mercy.

At a time when decades of steady improvement in race-relations in America have been seriously set back by politicians, provocateurs and media outlets, this film serves as a reminder of how far we have come – and of the imperative need to enlist divine providence to rise above our present adversities.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The national security crisis at our southern border may just have been transformed from something that was dismissed, derided and ignored by congressional Democrats to a reality that demands action. That could be the effect of the ambush and massacre of at least nine American citizens by drug cartels yesterday in an area of northern Mexico south of Arizona.

If so, the question is what, if anything will now be done? Will we finally finish building “The Wall”? Will we put troops along the border to help secure it?  Or will we, as President Trump just proposed to his Mexican counterpart, dispatch U.S. troops into Mexico to root out and destroy the gangs that killed Americans there and that are killing untold numbers of us with their drugs and violence here? 

The answer should be all of the above – and more, including interior enforcement.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The Trump administration formally notified the United Nations yesterday that we’re withdrawing from the Climate Change Treaty. That’s a presidential profile in courage, bucking acute pressure to accept a putative “consensus” about impending catastrophe and a costly accord that supposedly would prevent it. 

Geologist Gregory Wrightstone offers ample evidence in his book, Inconvenient Facts: The Science Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know, that – despite intense hype and widespread groupthink: the climate constantly changes; the current warming phase is actually positive on net; in any event, mankind has minimal ability to influence such change; and the high costs of trying to do so pursuant to a flawed UN Treaty cannot be justified.

Under President Trump, America is greatly reducing its environmental impact. It’s right to continue achieving that outside of a globalist treaty that transfers wealth to a China that is not.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Most of us have occasion to wonder how differently things might have turned out if, when making past choices, we knew what we later learned. The same applies to the great sweep of history.

For example, we probably could have avoided World War II if the allies had interrupted Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. 

And today, Asia expert Gordon Chang is warning that Communist China is the 21st Century’s Third Reich. That’s because, under Xi Jinping – its Fuhrer “with Chinese characteristics” – the PRC is becoming an unprecedented totalitarian monstrosity, brutally repressing its own people and increasingly threatening everybody else. 

Donald Trump has an opportunity – probably a fleeting one and perhaps the last – to intervene before the danger posed by China’s economic and military power reaches a fateful, Hitlerian point-of-no-return. At a minimum, he must ensure that we stop funding this enemy.

This is Frank Gaffney.