Secure Freedom Minute

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met yesterday at the Reagan Library with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. He seemed to be channeling the Gipper in standing up for both Taiwan and America in the face of what the former president would surely describe as today’s “existential threat to freedom”: the Chinese Communist Party. 

Predictably, the bullies in Beijing reacted badly, threatening reprisals for this purported “threat to China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” To his credit, Speaker McCarthy doubled- down, telling Fox News host Laura Ingraham that he would move legislation to revoke the PRC’s most favored nation status and speed up weapons deliveries to Taiwan.

Such robustness stands in stark contrast to the Biden administration’s default setting of mollifying and appeasing Xi Jinping. That only emboldens the Chinese Communist Party, when we should be doing everything possible to deter, delegitimate and destroy it.  

This is Frank Gaffney.

Mexico’s hard-left president Manuel Lopez Obrador has written Chinese Communist dictator Xi Jinping asking for “help” with the burgeoning trafficking of the murderous synthetic opioid known as fentanyl. 

That’s like asking an arsonist to help fight fires he’s setting. 

In fact, Xi’s regime has long actively enabled what amounts to chemical warfare against the United States. These days that’s primarily being done by the Chinese Communist Party allowing the shipment of the drug’s precursor chemicals to be assembled and smuggled across our border in immense quantities by Mexican drug cartels. The Chinese also help lubricate the operation by laundering its windfall profits.

Like the cartels, the CCP is a transnational criminal organization. It must be prosecuted as such – the subject of my new book, The Indictment, not legitimated or otherwise invited to expand its presence in Mexico’s incipient failed state.

The Chinese Communist Party has been likened to the Borg, a Star Trek supervillain that seeks to collectivize everything. The Borg’s chilling admonition that “resistance is futile” comes to mind amidst revelations of yet another weaponized CCP phone application seducing, monitoring and exploiting American users.

The app is called Pinduoduo and a CNN investigation concluded that it utilizes “the most dangerous malware ever found in mainstream apps.” That’s because Pinduoduo’s program takes advantage of vulnerabilities in android phones to steal personal data, spy on its users and evade efforts to detect or remove the malicious software. 

Pinduoduo calls to mind George H.W. Bush’s remark about being “in deep doo doo.” That’s where we’ll surely be if we continue to allow the Chinese Communist Party to use this app, TikTok and other toxic information technology to wage “unrestricted warfare” against us. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

British wit Samuel Johnson described second marriages as “the triumph of hope over experience.” So is Wall Street’s enthusiasm for sinking billions more of our money in Chinese Communist e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba.

After all, the company is a case study in the dangers of investing in China. Its founder, Jack Ma, ran afoul of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, and his company was punished, resulting in a dramatic and protracted loss in share value. There is no guarantee that similar non-market forces won’t adversely impact U.S. investors in companies like Alibaba in the future.

The larger problem, however, for Americans whose pension funds or other investments have been sunk in Chinese corporations is that, in the event of the shooting war that Xi seems intent on launching, they will lose every cent. U.S. investors must divest from Communist China while they still can. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

The indictment of former President Donald Trump in New York yesterday coincided with a number of other recent, politically charged developments, including successive assaults on red state legislatures by so-called “transurrectionist” individuals, that fit a troubling pattern. They all seem calculated to change the subject. 

What we should be focused upon is the fundamental transformation of our country now underway at the hands of the most radical and anti-constitutional administration in our nation’s history. Team Biden’s wrecking operation at home – including, as a practical matter, the curtailing of our freedoms – combined with its disastrous policies abroad that benefit our nation’s enemies demand not only our urgent attention, but corrective actions.

By distracting, dividing and radicalizing us, however, enemies within and outside our country are being enabled and encouraged to redouble their efforts to take down America. We must stand fast against them.

If elected president, Senator Barack Obama promised a “fundamental transformation of the United States of America.” In the course of what’s been called his third term, a nominal Biden administration dominated by Obama’s staff is in the process of fundamentally transforming the world.

Reflect, for example, on the Middle East at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency. Our most important regional ally, Israel, had arguably never been stronger. Its strategic alliance with the U.S. was robust, encouraging stability through peace accords with former adversaries and isolating and deterring their common enemy, Iran. 

As an extremely timely Center for Security Policy webinar yesterday made clear, Israel is now isolated, undermined by Biden’s Obama retreads, dangerously divided at home and facing an array of emboldened foes, including a nuclear-capable Iran backed by Communist China. That’s a formula literally for disaster.   

 

This is Frank Gaffney.

The Biden administration has a plan for the next pandemic or other “public health emergency of international concern”: Make it worse. In fact, one might, like Lenin, say “The worse the better.”

That would be the effect of surrendering our sovereignty over declaring and responding to such events to an unaccountable proto-world government doing business as the UN’s World Health Organization. Never mind the WHO recommended disastrous policies during the COVID-19 pandemic that helped kill over a million Americans.

Yesterday, Senator Ron Johnson tried to ensure the U.S. Senate would be able to vote down the disastrous agreement with the WHO that Team Biden is secretly negotiating. His Democratic colleagues blocked him. 

As a result, we now have no choice but to withdraw from the World Health Organization before it finishes off more of us, and our constitutional Republic.

This is Frank Gaffney.

Have you noticed the peculiar reporting about the mass murder at a Nashville elementary school yesterday? It’s striking as much for what is not being said as what is.

Consider, for example, how this shooting would have been covered if a practicing Christian had attacked a school or other venue populated by so-called “transgender” individuals, instead of the other way around. You can bet the narrative would have been all about the threat posed to a victimized community by militant Christianity, and the perpetrator’s character and associates would have been exhaustively critiqued. 

In this case, we need to examine and determine if government officials’ “othering” of Christians as potential “domestic terrorists” and “violent extremists” is contributing to increasing persecution of believers here. Moreover, whether such behavior was a decisive factor in this attack or not, it must be condemned and stopped now.

In February 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned the nation’s governors they’re being targeted by Chinese Communist Party influence operators. Now, even Joe Biden’s Director of National Intelligence is piling on:

“Beijing [is] redoubling its efforts to build influence at the state and local level to shift U.S. policy in China’s favor because of Beijing’s belief that local officials are more pliable than their federal counterparts.”

Such pliability is evident in Michigan where Governor Gretchen Whitmer is giving the Chinese Communist Party $700 million to build not only “influence” there, but a Gotion Inc. electric vehicle battery factory. The company will also “set up a Party organization and carry out Party activities in accordance with the Constitution of the Communist Party of China.”

Fortunately, Michiganders are rejecting this obvious national security threat. Why isn’t the Chiden administration? 

This is Frank Gaffney.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will testify today before the House Energy Committee. According to a prepared statement, he’ll tell lawmakers that his company, “ByteDance, is not an agent of China or any other country.” And it stores “American data…on American soil, by an American company, overseen by American personnel.”

In fact, like all Chinese and other companies doing business in China, ByteDance must work for the Chinese Communist Party. It does what it’s told, including harvesting immense quantities of personal data from its users that the CCP weaponizes.

But even if that were not so, there’s no disputing the even more insidious feature of TikTok’s toxically addictive platform: It is used by our mortal enemy to propagandize mostly young and impressionable American users to hate our country and admire Communist China.

Shut TikTox down. 

This is Frank Gaffney.