Secure Freedom Minute

“What the President meant to say” is bureaucratese for damage- limitation when the nation’s Chief Executive makes policy via unscripted pronouncements. It kicked in after Joe Biden signaled during yesterday’s press conference that Russia could use a little military force against Ukraine with impunity. The uproar that ensued on both sides of the Atlantic prompted the White House immediately to affirm that the President meant to tell Vladimir Putin that any military action by his forces would result in a “swift, severe and united response.” Unfortunately, long before this telegraphed Biden dive, his humiliating Afghan surrender and collapse on impeding Putin’s Nordstream 2 gas pipeline, the Russian dictator knew what Americans are still learning to their horror:  This President is no match for ruthless tyrants – and not just Ukraine, but the world, is likely soon to suffer greatly as a result. This is Frank Gaffney. 

There’s a lot of loose talk at the moment about “voting rights.” The question is not so much what those rights are, but who gets to exercise them. And what partisans denouncing Republican state and federal legislators for “suppressing the vote” are really concerned about is that people who are not legal voters will be prevented from casting ballots. That would include, notably, illegal aliens – every one of whom can disenfranchise American citizens by effectively negating their ballots. Fortunately, Biden and Company currently cannot enact legislation that would institutionalize fraud-conducive voting arrangements like those that compromised the 2020 presidential election. But they are establishing in New York City the model for ending the citizenship requirement for voting that will surely be replicated in Democratic strongholds across the country. This must not be allowed to happen to your voting rights.  This is Frank Gaffney. 

America’s top athletes are, for better or worse, celebrities. That’s because they not only excel in their sports. Vast followings also can translate press coverage of their musings into ratings.    Thus, when prominent NBA players and owners curry favor with the Chinese Communist Party, their submission of human rights and U.S. interests to profit considerations gets attention. The most recent example is the statement by an owner of the Golden State Warriors that “I don’t care about the Uyghurs” being genocidally persecuted by the CCP. Fortunately, one courageous NBA player, Enes Kantor Freedom, is denouncing this preoccupation with “making money and promoting CCP propaganda.” Freedom has asked the Warriors owner whether he’d care if female members of his family were being tortured and gangraped every day, like Uyghur women. Will American Olympians care about genocide, or join those submitting to its perpetrators? This is Frank Gaffney. 

Today, we are supposed to be celebrating the life and accomplishments of Martin Luther King, tragically cut short by a white supremacist assassin’s bullet. Unfortunately, what we are witnessing in America today is MLK’s assassination 2.0 – this time at the hands of Marxist racists. Consider the radical left’s wholesale repudiation of Dr. King’s most famous aspiration, that we be judged by “the content of our character, not the color of our skin.” It is now Biden administration policy that Americans in government, in uniform and in schools be indoctrinated to believe we are unalterably defined by our race. What would Martin Luther King say about Critical Race Theory and denying white people medications and treatments reserved for “people of color”? He was the man we honor on this holiday precisely because he would reject such reverse-racism, and castigate those who perpetrate it. This is Frank Gaffney. 

Over a year after the so-called “insurrection” at the Capitol, the Justice Department has finally, formally accused eleven people with sedition in connection with what happened there on January 6, 2021. The most prominent of those thus charged is Stewart Rhodes, the founder of Oath Keepers, reinforcing the Biden team’s official narrative that our constitutional Republic is in mortal peril thanks to that and other “extremist militias” and their sympathizers. This prosecution may be complicated by the mostly kid-glove treatment Rhodes and an-as-yet-uncharged lieutenant, Ray Epps, have received to date, suggesting they were working with the FBI on January 6th – either as informants or provocateurs. Presumably, that evidence will emerge in any trials of Oath Keepers personnel and, if so undermine both such proceedings and the party line that large numbers of conservatives, veterans and patriots are domestic terrorists.  This is Frank Gaffney. 

North Korea just demonstrated a missile capability for which the United States has no counterpart. Worse yet, we have no defense against Kim Jong-un’s hypersonic weapon – or for that matter, similar systems now being introduced into the Russian and Chinese arsenals. How could a Communist regime so poor it can’t feed its people obtain the world’s most advanced missile technology? The answer is that North Korea’s tyrannical government gets by, as it always has, with the help of its friends in Beijing and Moscow. And they, in turn, have benefitted from help from us – notably, the transfer of hypersonic missile-related technology to the Russians pursuant to one of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s pay-to-play schemes. There must be accountability for such dangerous misconduct, and urgent steps taken to field credible in-kind deterrents to, and defenses against, the burgeoning hypersonic threat. This is Frank Gaffney.