Secure Freedom Minute

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Following a meeting of the so-called “Two Trumps” – the American one and the “Trump of the Tropics,” Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro – a potentially transformational partnership was announced.  President Trump declared that Brazil is now a “major non-NATO ally.” He even suggested it may become a NATO one.

This strategic alliance and the election of the conservative Bolsonaro that made it possible, may be the most strategic development in the Western hemisphere since Fidel Castro’s revolution ushered in five decades of leftist violence and oppression in much of the region.

But for this partnership’s promise to be actualized, it must engineer a hemispheric intervention to end the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.  Before millions more Venezuelans flee their country or die there en masse, concerted regional action is needed to cut off the foreign-supplied financial and security life-support that sustains the Maduro regime.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

There’s something bizarre about the incessant media coverage given to the despicable attacks that killed fifty Muslims in New Zealand mosques last week. The roughly simultaneous murders of some 120 Christians who were hacked to death by jihadists in Nigeria has gone relatively unreported.   

The sharply contrasting attention to these incidents is the more remarkable since the reprehensible mistreatment of Muslim minorities around the world – even when the million or more Uighurs being jailed in Communist Chinese gulags are included – pales by comparison to the upwards of 245 million Christians being heavily persecuted globally.

Whatever the reason for this disparate coverage, it feeds the grievously false impression that so-called “Islamophobia” is a massive and growing problem, whereas the actual, intensifying persecution of Christians by Sharia-supremacists and others is not. The media’s silence only emboldens the perpetrators to redouble their oppression.  

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

There was a gaping hole in the Fox News line-up on Saturday night. One of America’s most popular cable hosts, Judge Jeanine Pirro, was off the air after the network’s management placed her in the penalty box for two weeks. 

This punishment is for Judge Jeanine posing a straightforward question during her open on March 9th concerning the source of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s serial and virulent anti-Semitism. Specifically, she asked: “Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine [of women wearing head-coverings known as hijabs] indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?”

Rather than applaud its anchor for opening a much-needed debate about Sharia-supremacism in America, Fox capitulated to pressure from Rep. Omar’s Muslim Brotherhood friends. It strongly condemned Judge Jeanine, then suspended her for two weeks.

Let’s let #FoxNews know that’s unacceptable.

This is Frank Gaffney.

KATIE HOPKINS, Creator of HopkinsWorld.com blog

Implications of the growing divisions within nations globally

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, Author of The Case for Trump (2019), Senior Fellow in Military History at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Professor Emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno:

Making the case for Trump

Why Congress won’t accept the US border poses a national security threat?

Theories on the Anti-Trump conspiracy

BRIAN KENNEDY, President of the American Strategy Group, Senior Fellow and Board Member of the Claremont Institute:

China’s long-term economic ambitions

Is the US no longer national security oriented?

(PART TWO):

President Trump’s China policy

Why the U.S. must take space seriously

Consequences of the collapse of Venezuela’s electric grid

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The nation’s top military officer yesterday explicitly rebuked Google for providing “direct support” to Communist China and its armed forces. In congressional testimony Gen. Joseph Dunford and Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan warned that Google’s supplying of surveillance technology and other assistance to an ever-more-blatantly-hostile foreign power is harmful to our own security.

They might have added that by giving what might be called “aid and comfort” to the People’s Republic of China, Google has added insult to injury. Its overwhelmingly leftist workers previously had refused to do business with the Pentagon, denying needed skills and expertise to those who would defend them from the likes of Chinese who seek to take our country down.

Google users and shareholders who find such behavior unacceptable – to say nothing of its creepy invasions of our privacy – should raise Cain about it.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The Republican-controlled Senate is expected today to join the Democrat-controlled House in saying that there’s not a national emergency along our southern border. To be sure, some GOP senators will try to have it both ways, claiming they actually think there is a national emergency. But they oppose President Trump’s unilateral action to address it by constructing new physical barriers that Congress has repeatedly failed to approve.

Such political contortionism is all the more irresponsible in light of the certainty that the emergency is about to become even more acute. The catastrophe unfolding as a result of the collapse of Venezuela’s electric grid will predictably result in large numbers – possibly millions – of additional refugees.  Many inevitably will try to come here.

Senators who effectively vote for an open border will be held accountable.  Republican ones will likely be primaried.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

An important Senate hearing today will shed light on what Communist China is doing that constitutes a “new era of U.S.-Chinese competition.”  A more accurate description for this period would be “wartime,” because Beijing has engaged in unrestricted, and unreciprocated, warfare against us for decades.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman James Risch of Idaho is to be congratulated for calling for a new approach. He intends to encourage a recalibration about the extent and character of China’s increasingly aggressive behavior. 

Hopefully, in the process of today’s and coming hearings on this subject, Chairman Risch will not only educate the American people to this present danger, but arouse us to support the actions we must take in response.

These include not only rebuilding our military, but also countering the economic, financial and other asymmetric forms of warfare the Chinese are assiduously employing against us.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The lights are out in most of Venezuela. And America’s last remaining diplomats will be out of there shortly, too.  A desperate and unsustainable situation is becoming a full-fledged catastrophe.

Nicholas Maduro, the communist dictator still illegitimately clinging to power, is blaming the lack of it across his country on cyberwarfare by the United States.    A more likely explanation is his regime’s endemic neglect of the Venezuelan infrastructure, now compounded by efforts to restore power that have resulted in the distribution of unbalanced loads that are causing the destruction of effectively irreplaceable equipment.

Our returning diplomats will attest to the resulting collapse of Venezuela’s society. Presumably, they will also make clear the humanitarian imperative of a U.S.-backed regional intervention to prevent a hemispheric refugee crisis. 

Another take-away:  We must protect our own, vulnerable grid lest we face a similar, existential threat here.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The Trump administration’s budget for the next fiscal year comes out today. While its details are not yet available, two priorities have been telegraphed.

First, the President seeks another increase in defense funding while curbing expenditures on domestic programs. This allocation of resources is made imperative by, among other dangers around the world, rapidly intensifying threats from Communist China.

Second, Mr. Trump wants another $8.6 billion for construction of physical barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border to complete “the Wall” in the top seventeen places along that frontier used by those illegally bringing in drugs, trafficked women and children and terrorists.

It’s predictable that the President’s opponents on Capitol Hill will seek to substitute their priorities for his. But Mr. Trump’s blueprint is the right starting point for the debate we must have on securing our country against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The House of Representatives yesterday approved a resolution that condemned bigotry. The woman whose serial anti-Semitic bigotry prompted the measure, Rep. Ilhan Omar, actually voted for it, however.

Indeed, she and the two other Muslim Members of Congress, André Carson and Rashida Tlaib, called the resolution “historic” because it also specifically condemned so-called “Islamophobia.” The obvious implication is that, not only is that made-up syndrome a problem in America comparable to the very real and growing threat of anti-Semitism, but that they are morally equivalent.

Anxiety about the promotion here of Islam’s totalitarian Sharia doctrine is not a “phobia,” which is clinically defined as an unreasoned fear. Jews and the rest of us have ample reason to oppose the anti-Semitism and other supremacist behavior associated with Sharia.  It’s a travesty that the House Democrats are pandering to, rather than condemning such conduct. 

This is Frank Gaffney.