Center for Security Policy founder Frank Gaffney joined SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss Donald Trump’s recent foreign policy speech, which Gaffney previously described as “Reaganesque” in an analysis for Breitbart News.
“Having had the privilege of serving with President Reagan, I know it when I see it,” Gaffney said. “What Donald Trump did, in this piece, was lay out both an understanding of the existential threat we’re facing – and this, of course, is something Reagan described as every generation’s task, is to confront existential threats to freedom. And Donald Trump said ours is radical Islam.”
“You guys have done tremendous reporting on this, both in London and in the States, and I just want to say thank you for your courage in speaking to all of this, and I want to commend Donald Trump for his courage as well, specifically in a couple of key respects,” Gaffney added.
“One: he defined the enemy, and this is, of course, an essential starting point,” he continued, agreeing with Kassam that the Obama Administration has been exceptionally poor at defining the enemy, but Republicans also have shied from the task.
“Specifically, he called attention to sharia, and sharia supremacism, as the ideological underpinnings of this danger we’re facing, both abroad and at home. And he made a point of saying, as my old boss Reagan did, we need to deal with this threat as, well, the fundamental existential challenge it represents, by using all instruments of national power against it. This really hearkened back to Reagan’s strategy for defeating the last of these threats, namely Soviet communism,” Gaffney recalled.
“And he specifically spoke to something that, I’m sure, resonated with you, as it did with me, about this ideological dimension, and the necessity of countering it as well,” he continued. “It’s not enough to go try to defeat people militarily. It’s not even enough to use economic, and intelligence, and information capabilities, as Reagan did against the Soviets. You’ve got to go after this whole idea of the legitimacy, and the supremacy, of this hostile ideology.”
Referring to a previous caller’s point, Gaffney said “we don’t need to import more people who adhere to this ideology, and are therefore prone, at best, to hostility to our Constitution, to our values, as Donald Trump put it – and, at worst, are active threats, in the form of jihad, of either the violent kind, or the stealthy Muslim Brotherhood kind.”
“I was very heartened to hear Donald Trump talk about the necessity of countering the networks that support radicalization. That’s the Muslim Brotherhood’s operations here. Those are the mosques, those are the Islamic societies, and cultural centers, and influence operations, and front groups,” he said. “God love him for calling them out, and setting forward – in what I hope will be a defining debate for this election – a choice between people who think, ‘Hey, we’re all good with more of that. In this country as well as overseas, we want to legitimate it, we want to empower it, we want to embolden our enemies,’ versus somebody who says, ‘No, we’re going to defeat them, we want victory over jihad.’”
Speaking from the perspective of a London-based “newcomer to American politics,” Kassam approvingly cited Teddy Roosevelt’s idea that “as a foreign national, would-be immigrant to this country, you must share our values to gain admission.” He wondered why that principle has been abandoned so thoroughly over the course of the last hundred years.
“Well, I think since 1965, basically, when Teddy Kennedy, and Joe Biden, and their ilk essentially mutated, beyond recognition, the immigration laws of the United States, and started essentially saying hey, listen, everybody has a right to come here, and the more unlike us they are, the better,” Gaffney replied. “That has really opened the door, and unfortunately, under Barack Obama particularly, we’ve seen locomotives full of people who don’t have any affinity for us, who do not share our values. And, as I say, in many cases – not all by any means – in many cases actually believe it is God’s will that they transform this country to one that conforms to sharia, that replaces our Constitution with this barbaric, repressive, totalitarian program that you know so well.”
“We don’t have any obligation to bring those people in, and in fact, to the contrary, I think – as Teddy Roosevelt has said, and as Donald Trump now said more recently – we have an obligation to America, and to Americans, to ensure that people come here with the same yearning to breathe free, and to build themselves and our country, in its democratic and Constitutional traditions,” Gaffney argued. “And, if they don’t, keep them the hell out of here.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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