This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute. 

Donald Trump’s address to the United Nations yesterday was tough love, minus the love.  Its leitmotif was a full-throated and oft-repeated extolling of sovereignty, which he described as not only his duty to champion for America, but also a corrective for what ails the UN.

The President spoke the hard truth about the threats posed to the world by Rocket Man’s North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and even Russia in Ukraine and China in the South China Sea. It could be a Trump Doctrine’s defining blueprint.

Unless, that is, two things now occur:  First, will the President be countermanded, or otherwise undercut, by his own subordinates?  And second, will his forceful rhetoric be unaccompanied by the deeds needed to actualize it? 

The President’s past tolerance of such behavior has not only undermined him, it has emboldened the adversaries he rightly castigated yesterday. 

This is Frank Gaffney. 

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

As President Trump tells the UN today that nations are entitled to put their own interests first, congressional testimony should shed light on one country, Communist China, that is increasingly doing just that – at our expense.

The Navy’s top leaders will discuss four incidents this year, three of them crashes, that have sidelined U.S. Pacific-based warships as China escalates tensions in that ocean’s western waters.  The hearing will surely expose serious problems with training, readiness and excessive demands on a fleet that is too small to perform its myriad, vital missions.

A recent Pentagon report, however, found that China is employing “coercive tactics, such as the use of…its maritime militia, to enforce maritime claims and advance its interests in ways…calculated to fall below the threshold of provoking conflict.” The question occurs: Have those tactics had anything to do with these fatal collisions?

This is Frank Gaffney. 

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Last week, Congress, with President Trump’s approval, embraced a post-Charlottesville narrative about “hate groups” that explicitly condemns “white supremacists” and “neo-Nazis,” but makes no mention of other enemies of freedom currently much in evidence here – like Antifa, communists, anarchists, and black and Sharia-supremacists.

By so doing, this joint resolution has encouraged the latter’s efforts to denounce, suppress and ultimately criminalize the free speech of anyone deemed a “hater” or “bigot.”  The question then becomes, who does the deeming?

It is worrying that Rod Rosenstein, the Justice Department’s Number Two official, seems to have at least implicitly endorsed this week two discredited, yet self-appointed arbiters of “hate,” and therefore of speech in America. Our leaders should explicitly repudiate – not legitimize by attending conferences featuring – the radical leftist Southern Poverty Law Center and its ally, CAIR, the Hamas-founded Council on American Islamic Relations. 

This is Frank Gaffney. 

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Ronald Reagan warned that every generation faces “an existential threat to freedom.”  Our forefathers have successfully defended the Free World – and passed it on to us to do the same. 

Today, totalitarians are once again on the march, seeking to impose their agenda where possible through terrifying violence, but through stealthy, subversive means as well. 

 While we are insistently encouraged to focus on “white supremacists” and “neo-Nazis,” the actual and present danger to freedom emanates from Sharia-supremacists. In places like the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, currently meeting in Warsaw, and here on Capitol Hill, the Islamists and their enablers are making progress waging political warfare against free speech, lest it give “offense” and promote “hate.”

Freedom requires free expression.  Those who love freedom must defend our First Amendment rights – or lose this War for the Free World.

This is Frank Gaffney. 

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The Department of Homeland Security yesterday told the rest of the U.S. government to stop using software produced by Russia’s Kaspersky Labs.  Why, one might well wonder, would such a “Binding Operational Directive” be needed, with all the hard experience with cyber attacks on both the public and private sector – to say nothing of known Kaspersky ties to the Kremlin’s intelligence services and Putin’s own recent warning that Russian businesses shouldn’t use foreign software?

There are two possible answers, both troubling. The first is that political and/or foreign policy considerations have often caused the U.S. military to be less sensitive than it should be to the obvious dangers of relying on overseas suppliers.

Second, as two security contractors caught up in the Benghazi debacle have recently reminded us, when it comes to our security, relying on low-bidders is a formula for disaster.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

The Supreme Court yesterday again stopped a lower court from interfering with Donald Trump’s so-called “travel ban.” This is another promising sign of how the justices may ultimately rule when they take up the President’s immigration-pause next month. 

Yet to be publicly addressed by the judicial or any other branch of government, however, is the reason this pause is so needed: To put into place a means of performing what Mr. Trump has called “extreme vetting” in order to stop importing more jihadists.

Such a filter has been recommended by five other national security experts and myself in a friend-of-the-court brief filed last month in connection with this case. Just as we previously used an ideological test to prevent Nazis and Communists from coming to this country, now we must keep out Sharia-supremacists.

This is Frank Gaffney. Read the amicus brief at SecureFreedom.org.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Breitbart reporter Aaron Klein has observed that, during events yesterday marking the jihadist attacks of September 11, 2001, President Trump and three of his senior subordinates failed to name the perpetrators. Instead, they used euphemisms like “terrorists,” “barbaric forces of evil and destruction,” and “horrible, horrible enemies…like we have never seen before.” 

Now, if this were either of the other two post-9/11 administrations, such deflections would be standard operating procedure. But this is the presidency of Donald Trump – a man who savaged his predecessors for their failure to acknowledge we confront “radical Islamic terrorism” – and promising that he would. 

If Mr. Trump’s base is to avoid the conclusion that they have been subjected to a colossal bait-and-switch, preventing the defeat our bonafide Sharia-supremacist foes, he must – for starters – repudiate Defense Secretary Mattis’ absurd assertion we confront “maniacs disguised in false religious garb.” 

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Sixteen years ago today, Americans confronted for the first time the full horror of Sharia-supremacism.  Unfortunately, even now, too few of us understand that reality – let alone that, if we persist in our abiding cluelessness, much worse is in store. 

The truth is that the perpetrators of the horrific 9/11 attacks we commemorate today were at the time simply the leading edge of what is called the “global Islamic movement.”  All Muslims do not practice their faith as its authorities say they should. But unknown millions do adhere to that totalitarian military, political and legal doctrine, known as Sharia, and therefore must wage jihad, or holy war – one way or another – to make Sharia supreme worldwide. 

Until we get that, and effectively counter Sharia-supremacism, we will neither properly honor the victims of 9/11, nor prevent more and worse jihadism in the future.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Suddenly, the talk of the town in Republican-controlled official Washington is “Chuck and Nancy.”  With that chummy reference to the Senate and House Democratic leaders, President Trump sent a powerful shot across the bow of their GOP counterparts, “Mitch and Paul.”

Mr. Trump took this step as a new, national opinion survey found that 63 percent of those polled want Sen. McConnell and Speaker Ryan replaced. 

The President justified his short-term deficit and budget deal with the Democrats as a means of obtaining a defense spending increase at a time when the prospect of deadly international conflicts seems to be growing the day. 

The McLaughlin poll showed though that both congressional Republicans and President Trump are in political danger if they abandon the platform they ran on in 2016 – and the voters who were persuaded by it to put them in charge. 

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Al Franken is best known for his career as a comedian.  What he did in his role as a U.S. Senator from Minnesota yesterday though was no joke.

In a hearing to consider the nomination of Amy Barrett to become a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Sen. Franken cited the radical leftist Southern Poverty Law Center to sully Prof. Barrett’s character and confirmation prospects. The nominee had spoken before the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom, which the SPLC has smeared as a “hate group.”

Fortunately, the public will not be amused at Franken’s legitimating of a defamatory political warfare operation devoted to suppressing the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech of those with whom it disagrees.  A new McLaughlin and Associates poll found that, by a margin of 85 to 8 percent, respondents favor free speech, even if it “offends” some others. 

This is Frank Gaffney.