Center for Security Policy founder Frank Gaffney delivers a powerful warning about the enemy within, China’s role and why this moment is the most dangerous time in our country’s history. Don’t miss this impacting speech, held at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2021 Restoration Weekend on Nov. 11th-14th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. A transcript follows.
Transcript:
Frank Gaffney: Thank you very much. Well, I think it’s a commonplace, particularly at this event, for people to tell you how happy they are to be here. You have no idea how happy I am to be here. I feel a little bit like the prodigal son, as a matter of fact, and the warm welcome has been just, well, very embracing. And the chance, better yet, to have an opportunity to speak to you from my heart is just something that I will never adequately be able to express appreciation to David Horowitz and Michael Finch and their wonderful team here.
So thank you for being here. It’s late afternoon, but I’m going to try to do something that I think is absolutely vital, not just for you, because obviously you’re pretty high up the learning curve, but for our country. And that is to try to get our hands around not just the pieces of the challenges that we’ve been talking about all day, and starting with [Lonnie’s] litany of horribles as he was introducing Pete Hegseth, each of us has in turn been sort of fleshing this out.
What I want to try to do is give you what I kind of see as a unified field theory of what’s happening and why. And the truth of the matter is, as [Larry] has kindly said, I personally think of this as just our time’s moment in this long-running war for the free world. I think that accurately describes what’s at stake and what we will lose if we fail to measure up, as our predecessors have done, in previous phases of the war for the free world, against different adversaries, yes, and posing different threats to us, but it still has, as its sort of continuum quality, people who seek our destruction because we stand for freedom. And we want not only to enjoy it ourselves but we feel it’s our duty to try to help those who aspire to it as well, or who have it now and are at risk of losing it. And it turns out there’s a lot of them at the moment.
So I’m going to try to connect the dots, the proverbial dots, as they say, and give you a sense of not just the magnitude of the challenge we’re facing, but why, at whose hands, and to give you at least some ideas as to what to do about it, and then hopefully I’ll get all that done in time for some interactions with you.
My professional judgment is, this is the most dangerous time in our country’s history. We have never faced the combination of adversaries bringing to bear capabilities now in their hands. And that could take all day to do justice to, honestly, so I’m not. I’m just going to try to focus in on two specific and extraordinarily serious challenges. They cover a multitude of sins, so by sort of a reference, you’ll hear about others as well, and I’ll be happy to talk about others if you’d like to in a Q&A.
The two topics that I want to focus on are, one, the subject of the present danger, China, effort; namely, the Chinese Communist Party. And I’m making that distinction because personally, I think it is both accurate and necessary to make a distinction between the party and the people it misrules. We often glibly include them both, but you have about 90 million members, give or take, of the Chinese Communist Party, and the rest of them are more or less enslaved by it. And that is a distinction that’s worth keeping in mind and potentially exploiting.
The second focus is something that, despite challenges over our national history, I don’t think we’ve ever quite experienced. Certainly not in the way that we do today. That is the enemy within. And we’ll talk about some of the qualities of it and who it is and what they’re up to, but let me start with China.
Anybody familiar with Star Trek? How about the Borg? The Chinese Communist Party is the present Borg in our world. And that may sound over the top if you’re kind of into the science fiction version of this, but when you appreciate what the Chinese Communist Party has been doing and is doing now and aspires to do down the road, it is maybe even an understatement. The Borg, for those of you who have missed the 20th century, was this omnivorous capability that was too horrible to contemplate, and that’s about what we’ve got. You could hit just highlights of its evolution: Deng Xiaoping, in the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, said, that Cold War is over between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and the Soviets lost. A new Cold War is beginning with the United States, and China will win. But he set about doing something clever. He adopted a strategy that came to be called the “hide and bide” strategy, using that as a rubric under which to actually seduce the United States specifically and the West more generally into believing that China just wanted to be more or less like us, and if we just engaged with them and we made them rich, they would be. That was never the idea, and I’ll talk to you a little bit more about some of Deng’s other ideas that bear that out.
Flash forward to 1999, when two colonels in the People’s Liberation Army published a book called Unrestricted Warfare, in which they basically laid out a strategy for destroying the United States using nonkinetic means. A whole bunch of nonkinetic means: economic warfare, information operations, subversion, influence operations. The threats to our allies and friends. Undermining our position around the world in international organizations, among other places. In short, creating conditions under which they would dominate the world, not least of which is something you may have heard of called the Belt and Road Initiative.
Our Committee on the Present Danger: China, working with a sort of task force we set up called the Captive Nations Coalition, did a study recently which I really commend to you. It’s a quick read: 27, I think, countries we focused on out of about 145 around the world that are part of the Chinese Communist Party’s colonial empire buildout, which Deng calls, alternatively, the new China — the new Silk Road, or the Belt and Road Initiative. And what this is doing, folks, under our noses, is creating infrastructure for basically projecting power and control that will simply make inevitable the global domination of free nations and others by the CCP.
Then there’s subversion and corruption, other techniques. You may have heard of Hunter Biden; I think reference was made to him by my friend Gordon Chang, from whom I’ve learned most of what I’m telling you about China, by the way. A sort of case study in co-option and corruption leading to subversion. Any wonder that the Chinese Communist Party would rather have Joe Biden as president than Donald Trump? Or any wonder either that they went to the lengths they did to ensure Donald Trump was defeated?
Which I would say goes to the heart of that other piece, which has developed under this General Secretary of the Communist Party, Xi Jinping, who, instead of Deng Xiaoping’s hide-and-bide strategy, has said, it’s time to pull the mask off. You may have heard that just yesterday, at the conclusion of the sixth party plenum, where basically the mafia of the Chinese Communist Party leadership coronated the capo dei capi, Xi Jinping, as essentially the emperor of China. And they gave him an explicit mandate, not only to rewrite history to his benefit, but also to establish that his mission was to “make China strong.” And that means not just sort of with a capacity to go beyond the nonkinetic kinds of unrestricted warfare to the kinetic kinds, and that is precisely what Xi Jinping has been doing.
You may know that the largest navy in the world at the moment is that of communist China. You may know that it’s projected that they will double the size of the fleet in their navy in the next 10 years. Now, bear in mind that it is already larger than ours, and about half of ours is where theirs is, mostly. In the Western Pacific. The other half is on the other side of the planet, and in order to get there reasonably rapidly, they have to go through a canal in Panama that the Chinese Communist Party essentially operates and runs, or at least controls. That’s kind of a problem.
But it’s not the extent of it. The Chinese have massively built up their nuclear forces. They probably have more nuclear weapons than we do; certainly more modern ones. And much of that has only become apparent in the past six months. Because mostly we missed the fact that in the previous decade or two, they built 3,000 miles of underground tunnels in which to hide their nuclear weapons, and heavens knows what all else; 3,00 miles. That is, ladies and gentlemen, what they call in the intelligence business “a tell.” It’s a suggestion that they may be serious about this business, but they’ve just put 300 silos in place — I mean, literally. Just in the past few months, it appears. At least, we’ve just found them — in which they will put missiles equipped with 10 independently targetable re-entry vehicles, a technology which, by the way, Bill Clinton helped them get. Did you know? Surprise, surprise.
But that’s not the extent of it either. We’ve had, just in the past couple of weeks, the Chinese launching a so-called hypersonic device, which means it goes really fast, and that it can fly in ways that make it difficult to detect, let alone do anything to stop. It could be, especially because it’s launched on a space launch vehicle, not a dedicated ballistic missile, and therefore could be popped at any time — they launch hundreds of these things every year — it could be the perfect weapon to deploy and detonate a nuclear weapon in the exo-atmosphere above the United States, unleashing what’s known as electromagnetic pulse, something that is part of the Chinese doctrine. What that would do, if any of you have been without power for any protracted period of time, you know — it’s an inconvenience if it’s not very long, and it’s life-threatening if it is.
The advantage of an EMP to the Chinese Communist Party over simply devastating us with nuclear weapons is that, as they used to say about the old neutron bomb, you can kill all the people but save all the buildings. And if your real object is not simply to destroy the United States so as to get out of their way, the global domination they aspire to, saving all the buildings is a really good thing because then you can colonize the United States. The same is true, by the way, of something else we’ve learned a lot about lately.
The only upside that I can think of, of — well, I call it the Chinese Communist Party virus, COVID-19, is that suddenly, some of us, at least, have started getting clued up about the fact that the Chinese Communist Party has, going back to good old Deng Xiaoping’s day, been beavering away at a covert and illegal biological warfare program. And a colleague of mine by the name of Dr. Lawrence Sellin, who has been publishing a series of just breathtaking analyses at, mostly, the Gateway Pundit of late, has been drilling down on the magnitude of this program, the extent to which, essentially, every possible relevant Chinese entity — laboratories, academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies, other corporations — have been tasked by the CCP to help the biological weapons program. And by the way, one of the things that we’ve learned is that Deng Xiaoping had the idea, the explicit idea, of using it to depopulate the United States so it could be colonized. Again, save all those buildings. You actually — it’s better than the electromagnetic pulse because you won’t have fried all of their electronics, so it’d be easier to start them up again or keep using them.
But here’s the other thing, folks, that is just, I mean, chilling when you think about it. You’ve heard a lot about gain of function, right? Turns out Tony Fauci, of course, has been helping them master that technology, and we’ve been focusing in on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a part of this massive biological warfare program in China. What we haven’t been focusing on so much but Lawrence Sellin has, is the Chinese have also been using our research institutions, our academic centers, our capabilities to engage in bioengineering, including by stealing what we do to genetically modify rats so that they can be used for experimentation of this kind.
And do you know what all this adds up to? Two things. One is, you get weapons that are biologically engineered for the purposes of attacking specifically a population that looks a lot like us, or other ethnicities if you wish, or demographic groups. The other thing is that you can engineer, similarly, vaccines that will only help Han Chinese survive those diseases, if they’re not so perfectly tailored. Are you getting the impression this is the Borg? Yes, you’re right.
So let me turn to people who, as often as not, work with the Chinese Communist Party — certainly, in many cases, are inspired by them — at a minimum, have understood the value of Mao Zedong’s playbook for Marxist revolutions aimed at taking down governments not favored by Chinese or other communists, like ours. And that brings me to the enemy within.
As you, doubtless, know, if only because Pete Hegseth did a brilliant job of teeing this up this morning, we have had a succession of communist revolutionaries marching through our institutions, as they say, starting with our educational system, the Frankfurt School. It’s Columbia University’s Teachers College. And now, down to kindergarten level in our public — and for that matter, as he said, private school systems. Pete talked about that. We have begun to reap the whirlwind of that pedagogic takeover by enemies of our country with, now, a generation or two of Americans who don’t particularly take pride in this country, who may even feel ashamed of it, and not least, who are open to the idea that a much better system would be a socialist system, which is helpful to sharing with the wealth and being more of an equitable operation, or equity, at least.
This has brought about what Barack Obama promised, shortly before he was elected for the first time as President of the United States. And what was that? The — yeah, boy, great. Fundamental transformation of the United States of America. Let me just drill down on one particular example of it, because it just happens to be of a special importance, and that is what they’ve been doing to the United States military. We’ve been hearing a lot about critical race theory indoctrination. You probably are aware that one facet of that is that they now have a counter-extremism working group established with a direct report to the secretary of defense himself, not only to perform this indoctrination with what I call communist racist training and other CRT, but also to purge those who are not getting with the program. And how convenient that there seems to be a pretty high correlation between those warrior patriots who don’t actually abjure their oath of office to defend our Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and instead, think that that’s a solemn oath and something they are there in our military, prepared to sacrifice, in order to fulfill. Those people actually seem not to be terribly keen on these vaccines either. So if you tell everybody in uniform that they have to get the shot, you’ll wind up purging people that you wanted to purge on ideological grounds as well.
Then there’s Afghanistan. There was some talk about that this morning. I don’t need to belabor the point other than that if you can imagine, if you’re trying to basically take down the military of the United States, a brilliant way to do it is to humiliate it in the most egregious way, completely sullying those who made the sacrifice, to try to give the people of Afghanistan a different life, and instead, to give it all back to the Taliban and then $83 billion of weapons. I mean, you can’t make this up. And you’re not making this up.
I was intrigued by something else that I just would throw into this mix in terms of the military. I had a — on my appreciated podcast, radio show, yesterday, a colleague by the name of Sam Faddis — actually, it was on the television program. We have a television program on Real America’s Voice. Some of you actually mentioned to me that you’ve seen it. I call it the “front porch of the war room” on Saturday mornings. Sam Faddis, great, great former CIA undercover operative, said, “If you look at the cabinet and other senior personnel of the Biden Administration, in the national security space, it probably wouldn’t look a whole lot different if Xi Jinping himself were appointing them.” And we have — Larry mentioned one of our resources. There’s another — accountabilityiniative.org, which I would commend to you. Accountabilityinitiative.org, where you can find dossiers on about 23 or 24 of these characters. And the degree to which they have been compromised by the Chinese Communist Party or are simply all in for its program. What could possibly go wrong?
So let me conclude all of that by simply saying, we are now facing, on the one hand, the most formidable foreign adversary in our history and arguably in the world’s history, and on the other hand, a fifth column inside our country, starting with the President of the United States, I’m sorry to say, who is mounting — whether you call it fundamental transformation or, as I’m preferring, a wrecking operation against not just our military but against the whole establishment, the institutions, the well-being, the public health and safety of the American people. And whether it’s purposeful to assure the rise of China and the demise of this country or whether it’s just out of a loathing for this country or whether it’s both — I don’t know — it’s not good.
So let me conclude by just a few quick observations before Larry gets the cane about what do we do about this? And I want to start with an observation. Because every one of you, I suspect, at some point, has said, what are we going to do about this? I can tell you, most of you or others like you have asked me, what are we going to do about this, especially after you get this Debbie Downer dump, right?
And the first thing I would just say to you is, the thing we have to begin getting over is the idea that it will only matter if it’s a really big thing, and really large numbers of people are involved in it, and they’re doing something really consequential about the problem. History is made by small numbers of people doing, oftentimes, at least initially, relatively minor things. Sadly, it’s mostly small numbers of ruthless people who are determined to do awful things on a much larger scale, and if they don’t get stopped early on, they get to do a lot of that. Think, oh, I don’t know, Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Lenin or Mao Zedong. My point is that good people doing good things with small footprints and maybe, at least initially, small impacts, can make a huge difference.
An analogy that I often think of is — anybody a sailor here? Well, anybody who is, or been on a boat, knows that if you make a small course correction early in a voyage, you will wind up in a very different place than if you hadn’t done it. And maybe that’s on the rocks or maybe that’s safely to port.
So I’m here to ask for your help in tackling some small things, maybe. Maybe they turn into big things. So here are some examples. The first is, everybody needs to help raise awareness about what I’ve just been sharing with you. What everybody else here has been sharing with you. What everybody else who is coming in the course of this weekend is going to share with you. And people say, oh, well, that’s just preaching to the choir. Well, the choir is an instrument for inspiring the rest of the congregation, is it not? And more to the point, if the choir isn’t together, it’s not only discordant, it drives people away. So I’m asking you to join with my own efforts and those of others in this outfit, starting with David Horowitz and the Freedom Center, the Gatestone Institute, Breitbart, Bannon, Gateway Pundit and dozens of others who are all in the business of trying to educate not just the choir, not just the people who already get this, but the people that they know and who can be brought into a larger effort if they’re educated.
Just a quick digression: I’ve been inspired most of my life by this tale of Winston Churchill, during his wilderness years, as they called them — do you know what he did? He was a member of Parliament, but what he spent an awful lot of time doing was going around to small gatherings of citizens across the United Kingdom and just personally briefing them on what the Nazis were up to. And it was not an accident that when the time came and the country was revolted by what was going on with Neville Chamberlain, they turned to the man who had been in many of their living rooms.
What can we do now with the kind of people and capabilities that I just mentioned to really raise up this awareness? And more to the point, what happens to this country if we don’t do that, folks? We’re toast. Because we will be taken down while most of us are clueless about the fact that we’re being even attacked, let alone that we’ve been under attack from the Chinese Communist Party for decades.
So point one: Raise awareness. Get engaged. There’s been a lot of talk, several panels, I think, here about Virginia. There are a couple of Virginians out there I know — God bless you, me too. You were great — but isn’t that inspiring? What did it show you? It showed you that small numbers of people who are dedicated and determined can make a difference, and if you think that turned out to be just a small difference, think again. We’ve liberated the Commonwealth of Virginia, but we’ve inspired hundreds of millions of Americans. Get engaged. At the local level, if nothing else.
Press for putting this country on a war footing. I wrote a book of that name with some of my friends — I don’t know, 15 years ago or so. We haven’t done it yet. And if we don’t do it, we will be hopelessly unable to resist what is being thrown our way.
And let me just give you a specific example. I went through, sort of quickly, a litany of examples of what the Chinese Communist Party is doing, from building out a colonial empire to waging economic warfare against us to building up this immense military capability, and on and on and on. The question occurs: How are they paying for all that? The answer is, you’re paying for it. Not probably personally, but somebody who is managing your money — maybe Larry Fink, for example, at BlackRock — is putting your money into Chinese companies, either directly or through things like passive investment vehicles, index funds and the like. Some of those companies, folks, are actually the Chinese Communist Party’s military arm, the People’s Liberation Army. But even if they’re not, they all work for those guys. How does that sit with you? You okay with that? My friend Jeff Weisenfeld here knows all about this. I’m sure he’s not doing this, but there are other people who are, and it must stop.
I’m interesting in having a friend of mine come to your attention. Some of who follow Maria Bartiromo’s show may know of him. He was on there last week. His name is Roger Robinson, an extraordinary national treasure. He runs a group called RWR Advisory Group in Washington and the Prague Security Studies Institute in Prague. And when he was on Maria Bartiromo’s show last week, he said, you know, we hear some about 200 or so Chinese companies that are traded in our capital market. He said, we’ve done some research, and it turns out that if you add in what are called A shares, which are issued in China but can get inserted through Larry Fink and others inside our capital markets, or over-the-counter transactions, there are 5,000 of these Chinese companies in our capital markets, and you know who played an instrumental role in allowing much of this to happen on not only terms that are not really good for us, but preferential for the Chinese Communist Party? You’ve heard of him. His name is Joe Biden. When he was Vice President of the United States, in May of 2013, he helped negotiate an agreement that said those Chinese companies, whatever the number is, don’t need to conform to our laws with respect to accounting, so that investors have a clue of where they’re putting their money other than down a black hole. And thanks to that, the Chinese have, by some estimates, gotten a measly $3 trillion out of our capital markets. Roger says if you add up all those 5,000 companies, it’s probably $7 trillion or more. Ladies and gentlemen, you can buy a lot of perilous capability to this country, including all that biological warfare stuff, for a fraction of that sum.
So here’s an idea. You want something to do? Tell your Jeff Wiesenfeld you don’t want your money invested in Chinese companies anymore. Period. And if they don’t know how to figure out whether it is, I’ve got some resources for you. A colleague of mine by the name of Kevin Freeman runs something called Economic War Room, terrific television program. Economicwarroom.com is his website. He’s got a project where he’s going to train your Jeff Wiesenfeld to know where the Chinese are in your portfolio and to get you the hell out of it, or get them the hell out of it, as the case may be. And more to the point, how about this? To invest patriotically instead, probably for better return on investment when all is said and done. I’ve had people tell me that — people who invested 30 years ago in China have made about 2% a year; 2% a year. Chump change for selling out your country. Not that you did it, but it was done with your money. And this has to stop, folks.
Lastly, one last point — no, this is a minute. There is something else that is a new weapon that is coming our way, and I want you to be among the first to know about it. My friend John Solomon is, I’m told, writing a story about it today, so others will know about it shortly. It’s the idea of using humor — what a concept for us — humor to take apart the gas-lighting we have been exposed to for the past year or so. How would that be as a concept? The idea is a board game — I just call it The Game. Its formal title is Election 2020: You Decide. And it’s a very cool new-age, if you will, means of educating yourself and your leftist friends, frankly, about the truth of what happened in the elections, the truth about COVID, the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the truth about the Russian hoax and more, all of it making available to you not just the truth but also the videos that will prove the truth.
So here are a couple of examples of things you can do, you personally can do. So I hope you will get out and do it, because in addition, if we pray to God and ask his grace to save this country, I’m pretty sure we’re going to make it, with your help, through this war for the free world. Thank you.
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