Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about Secretary of Defense James Mattis apparently overriding President Trump’s policy on transgender soldiers, Antifa violence, the crisis in North Korea, and China’s hegemonic ambitions.
Gaffney said of Mattis’ action on transgender military personnel: “He’s not countering the president’s instruction not to bring more transgenders in. He is doing what the president, as I read it, allowed him to do under his order. I personally think it’s a mistake, but he nonetheless left him the latitude – I suspect at the request of the Secretary of Defense – to study what to do about the number that are in the military now.”
“We are hearing inflated numbers, by the way, from some of the usual suspects, the sort of agenda types who have been social-engineering the military throughout the Obama years,” Gaffney added. “That there are thousands and thousands and thousands of them. I think that’s unlikely. But whatever the number is, there is some number, and I guess the Secretary of Defense feels that they’re entitled to some sort of rigorous evaluation.”
“I’d much rather be in this position than the one in which he’s studying whether to have them in at all, and that we’re back to the Obama years, where the default setting is everybody can come. That was crazy,” he said.
“But it’s still, I think, undesirable to have people who have a clinical medical condition that is inconsistent with service,” Gaffney argued. “The average, we’re told, number of days that these what are known as ‘gender dysphoriacs’ are unable to deploy is upwards of 100 days per year. Common sense tells you that is inconsistent with not only good order and discipline, but just readiness of the units in which they serve.”
“I think this should be a no-brainer. It shouldn’t take a long time to figure it out,” he said of Mattis’ decision. “I hope that consistent with the president’s overall direction, which I believe the Secretary of Defense is faithfully executing, no more in. Those that are in should be separated from the service as quickly as possible.”
Marlow argued that Mattis was wasting time and resources on gingerly handling a transgender policy former President Barack Obama only implemented during his last days in office, in a transparent attempt to pander to groups that will never approve of President Trump, no matter what he does.
“Why do we have to accept the media’s premise that this deserves a fair hearing, and a bunch of taxpayer expenditure?” Marlow asked.
“This is not just the media. This is the agenda of the radical left, and they’re all about trying to prevent the president from doing what he was elected to do,” Gaffney replied.
“Whether it is Antifa doing this with violence in the streets of this country – and by the way, I think we ought to coin a new phrase for these guys, because when you look at who they actually are, they’re Marxist-Leninists, they’re anarchists, they’re Islamists and other revolutionaries. I think we ought to be calling them ‘pro-totes,’ which is to say pro-totalitarians. They are completely at odds with the president’s agenda, yes, but also I believe the national security of the United States and the nature of our republic, our democratic republic,” he said.
“That’s what this is about. It’s a kind of Alinskyite freeze ‘em, fix ‘em, polarize ‘em, and ultimately take ‘em down strategy. That’s what the transgender thing is one symptom of – hardly the most important, but certainly a symptom of the phenomenon,” said Gaffney.
Gaffney agreed with Marlow’s contention that a “massive amount of brainwashing” has occurred in American higher education to make totalitarian left-wing ideology palatable.
“It’s been called the cultural Marxist march through the institutions, Alex, as you know,” he told Marlow. “This is something that has been going on since at least the late 1960s, most especially in our educational institutions.”
“Is there anybody listening to this show today who hasn’t had the experience of sending off a perfectly squared-away kid to college – spending in many cases very good money for the privilege, if you will – and then finding what comes back is somebody who has in fact been brainwashed?” he asked. “Many of us are lucky enough to have them survive the experience, but truthfully there is unmistakably a pattern of this that has been going on for years in this country.”
“I’m afraid it’s now migrating to the point where those kids who have been brainwashed for a generation or two are now not just out on the streets with the Antifa types in some cases, fortunately not that many, but they’re now in business. They’re now in the press. Not least, they’re now getting themselves into elected office. Stand by, my friend – this trend is going to get worse before it gets better,” he predicted.
Gaffney warned “the Antifas, and the other radical leftists, and their Islamist allies, and so on” are “making very few bones about the idea they seek to take us down.”
“There’s a fascinating clip from the demonstration, the riots, that took place most recently in Berkeley in which the quote is from the crowd, repeated again and again: ‘No Trump, no wall, no USA at all.’ That tells you everything you need to know. There it is,” he said.
Marlow turned to North Korea’s provocative missile launch over Japanese territory, which Gaffney took as a sign that North Korea is “emboldened” and “testing the envelope.”
“They’re seeing what they can get away with. So far, they’re getting away with this,” said Gaffney. “The effects thus far have been more, I don’t know, protests from the U.N. Security Council.”
“That missile should have been shot down, by if not us the Japanese for sure,” he said. “I’m afraid that the takeaway for the North Koreans is, as they have consistently been encouraged to believe, they can get away with pretty damn near anything.”
Gaffney said the larger subplot is that President Trump has “made some very strong statements about the intolerability of all this,” only to find his directives “countermanded by at least one, if not more, of his subordinates publicly.”
“That, I’m afraid, is further reinforcing the confidence of one of the most dangerous regimes on the planet – which, oh, by the way, is joined at the hip with another of the most dangerous on the planet, the Iranians – that they and North Korea can build those nuclear weapons, they can build the ballistic missiles with which to deliver them, they can deploy them aboard satellites which could be used in an electromagnetic pulse attack against us. They may even be able to conduct such attacks without, if not no cost, at least tolerable cost to the regime,” he said.
“Nothing, again, could be more dangerous to the security of this country, and our friends and allies and forces in the region,” he warned.
When Marlow said China is enabling some of America’s most dangerous adversaries, Gaffney corrected him by saying, “They’re enabling all of them.”
“The Chinese are up to their eyeballs in making the world a more dangerous place,” Gaffney said.
“I personally believe it’s not just the North Koreans they’re supporting, it’s not just the Iranians they’re buying oil from, it’s not just the Russians that they’re actively collaborating with in unsettling the region and supporting the Cubans, supporting the Venezuelans, and on and on. I think they’re also delighted at the very least, if not up to their eyeballs, with the Islamists,” he said.
“As long as they’re not messing around with China itself, kind of like the Saudi play – you can go do that jihad thing someplace else, just not here at home,” he elaborated. “That’s pretty much, I think, the Chinese attitude. The more that we’re sucked into places like Afghanistan, for example, or other Islamic civil wars, the more we are fraught with these problems that we talked about a moment ago, the domestic turmoil. This is the Chinese to a ‘T.’”
“They are moving inexorably to dominate not just the South China Sea, but other choke points around the world. They are building military bases overseas. They are projecting power, increasingly. They’re building this so-called Silk Road / One Belt, One Road, all that. This is really a geostrategic play from a power that wishes us ill and seeks to supplant us, as they think is their right to do in returning to the Middle Kingdom status of the world,” Gaffney said.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.