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Reports: Joe Biden Invites Rapper, Former Food Blogger, Ex-Obama Staffer to Cuba Meeting

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The administration of President Joe Biden has invited a prominent Cuban rapper, a food blogger turned left-wing policy activist, and a former staffer for President Barack Obama to a meeting on Friday to discuss the ongoing repression of dissidents in Cuba.

The White House previewed the guestlist for the event, scheduled for Friday afternoon, to the Associated Press on Thursday. The meeting followed a virtual discussion Biden hosted last week with Cuban-American celebrities Gloria Estefan and Andy García, among others, on the issue.

“The White House did not provide more details, only saying that new sanctions will be discussed as well as ways to establish internet access for the Cuban people,” the AP reported.

Protests erupted nationwide in Cuba on July 11 demanding an end to the Communist Party’s rule of the island, which began in 1959. The protests consisted almost entirely of peaceful marches and assemblies in every major city of the country and featured attendees clearly chanting “freedom!” and other anti-communist slogans. The Castro regime responded to the protests with overwhelming violence, including opening fire on unarmed protesters, publicly beating individuals believed to be participating in protests, and allegedly torturing and sexually assaulting those imprisoned.

Human rights activists and members of the Cuban exile community have urged Biden to take action against the regime through sanctions, weapons aid, or restoring internet access to Cuban users after the Castro regime shut it down. Republican lawmakers – many of them representing large Cuban-American populations – have also requested a meeting with the president to discuss moving forward with policies to aid the dissidents. Biden responded by organizing the Estefan Zoom meeting and sanctioning one Cuban official who predecessor Donald Trump had already sanctioned, a move panned as “symbolic but meaningless.”

Biden’s meeting Friday will reportedly focus on restoring internet to the island to allow Cubans to share videos of police brutality and other real-time oppression by the Castro regime. At the top of the AP’s invite list is music artist Yotuel Romero, formerly of the rap group Orishas. Romero is one of several Cuban artists behind the hit single “Patria y Vida,” released this February as a protest anthem against the regime. The song’s title, which translates to “Fatherland and Life,” is an inversion of the Communist Party slogan patria o muerte, meaning “fatherland or death.”

Patria y vida has become a rallying cry and representative slogan of the protest movement in Cuba and the diaspora.

Prior to “Patria y Vida,” however, Yotuel’s former group was a darling of the Castro regime. Prior to 2021, the archives of Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, reveal a significant amount of positive coverage of both Romero and the Orishas, fueled by compliant interviews with the rapper himself.

Speaking to Granma in 2016 about the Orishas reuniting that year for the first time in eight years, Romero said, “We always had good relations with our country. For example, in this reunion we have had all the support of Cuban music institutions.” All Cuban artistic institutions are government-run, through the Ministry of Culture; Cuba made it illegal to write songs, draw, or film anything without a preemptive permit from the Ministry in 2019.

Romero appeared to confirm his visit to Washington with a post on Instagram Thursday night.

Also on the reported guest list for Biden’s event is Ana Sofía Peláez, the co-founder of the Miami Freedom Project, a liberal policy advocacy group. The project claims to advocate for climate change, immigration, and “racial justice” issues, all prominent left-wing policy issues and many not especially popular in the overwhelmingly Republican Cuban-American community. Prior to founding the group, Peláez was most famous as a food writer, having launched her blog Hungry Sofia in 2008.

The Associated Press also reported the presence of L. Felice Gorordo, a tech entrepreneur who worked on “Latino, immigration, and business outreach” in the Obama White House. Obama-era reports identify Gorordo as a vocal advocate for Obama’s disastrous Cuba policy – largely consisting of economic concessions to dictator Raúl Castro in the form of enhanced U.S. tourism to the island that resulted in astronomical numbers of politically motivated arrests and oppression on the island.

People participate in a rally outside the White House in Washington in support of the protesters in Cuba. The problems of two tiny Caribbean states, Cuba and Haiti, have vexed U.S. presidents for decades. Now, Haiti and Cuba are posing a growing challenge for President Joe Biden that could have political ramifications.(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

The last name on the Associated Press’s list is Manny Díaz, the former mayor of Miami now serving as the chair of the increasingly unpopular Florida Democratic Party.

An outlier on the reported guess list, who the Associated Press did not name, is human rights activist Rosa María Payá of the Cuba Decide movement. Florida’s WPLG Local 10 reported her expected presence at the meeting Friday. Payá, unlike most of the other names on the list, is one of the most prominent voices in the Cuban exile community against communism, organizing efforts in support of free and democratic efforts on the island and advocating for justice in the name of the victims of the regime. Payá’s father, Oswaldo Payá, founded the island’s Christian Liberation Movement, an anti-communist group. The Castro regime is widely believed to have killed Payá and fellow activist Harold Cepero in a car “accident” in 2012.

The White House has yet to confirm the reported guest list.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

Report: Chinese Paramilitary Trained Cuban 'Black Beret' Repressive Force

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The independent outlet ADN Cuba published photos late Thursday reportedly showing members of Cuba’s “black beret” repressive forces training alongside the Chinese People’s Armed Police (PAP), a paramilitary force deployed to repress Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Hong Kong protesters.

A significant Chinese paramilitary presence on the island suggests closer cooperation between Beijing and Havana than many reports have superficially noted and presents national security risks for the United States, which maintains a military facility on the island in Guantánamo Bay in addition to being a mere 90 miles from Cuba.

The black berets – formally the Special National Brigade (BEN) of the Cuban communist regime – are themselves a paramilitary force used to repress pro-democracy dissidents. They have become a major focus of international coverage in the past month due to their role in suppressing the July 11 protests, which erupted simultaneously in almost every major city on the island that day. The protests overwhelmingly consisted of peaceful marches and assemblies in town squares demanding the end of the 62-year-old Castro regime.

Despite the lack of violent activity on the part of protesters, the Communist Party reacted to the protests by issuing an “order of combat” demanding civilians physically assault suspected protesters and deploying black berets to publicly brutalize and arrest them. Many of those identified as victims of police brutality are children and several have stated that they were not participating in protests, merely caught near an assembly and assumed to be sympathetic.

In the days following the initial protests, Cubans filmed black beret BEN troops engaging in violent door-to-door raids looking for suspected protesters and dragging civilians out of their homes. In one particularly violent incident, a family filmed police beating a man, and a black beret accompanied by an attack dog shooting him, in his own living room in front of his toddler children.

Warning – Graphic:

According to ADN Cuba, Chinese paramilitaries typically deployed to repress ethnic Tibetans and Uyghur people in East Turkestan, the occupied region China refers to as Xinjiang, recently visited China to train black beret recruits. The report did not date the photos of the alleged training but identified them as having been taken in the outskirts of Havana province. The photos show Cuban recruits and apparent Chinese paramilitary soldiers marching together, posing in front of the two nations’ flags, and holding Soviet-era weaponry. ADN Cuba noted that the color of the uniforms on the apparent Chinese officers matched that of PAP uniforms, not the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Chinese state media has in the past admitted to paramilitary interactions between the PAP and Cuba. In a special 2009 report marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the state-run China Daily noted that the PAP had “sent delegations to over 30 countries for bilateral or multilateral counter-terrorism exchanges. The list of countries included in those “counter-terrorism exchanges” included Cuba. Among the other participants were “France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, Israel, Brazil … South Africa, Russia and Pakistan.”

China Daily listed among the PAP’s responsibilities to “protect important targets, disperse illegal assemblies … nip illegal activities and criminal offenses in the bud, hunt down criminal suspects, and participate in emergency rescue and disaster relief work.”

A study published by National Defense University in 2014 on the PAP noted that it was initially designed as a joint military and civilian law enforcement and national security force. Among the first major reforms that current dictator Xi Jinping undertook after taking power in 2013 was to reform the PAP as a fully military force, streamlining what had become a convoluted chain of command that gave the commander-in-chief of China’s armed forces limited control over the PAP.

“The reforms place Xi firmly in charge of the PAP, though he will have to exercise authority through trusted agents. The success of continued PAP reforms will depend on elite consensus that centralized management of PAP deployments is desirable,” the study noted.

National Defense University’s report emphasized that the Communist Party used the PAP mostly in Xinjiang and Tibet to repress pro-democracy forces there. Xi’s reports resulted, in part, in “concentrating multiple PAP mobile detachments in areas with large ethnic Tibetan populations, including Tibet, Sichuan, and Yunnan, as well as in Xinjiang.”

“The restructured internal security forces could be more effective in quelling unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang as well as in ethnic minority areas of Sichuan, Yunnan, and Qinghai,” the study noted.

China is currently engaging in a genocide of the Uyghur people and other ethnic minorities in East Turkestan/Xinjiang fueled by a widespread network of concentration camps used to torture, sterilize, and enslave “undesirable” populations. In Tibet, China has for decades implemented brutal measures to repress the native religion, Tibetan Buddhism, and effectively outlaw the Tibetan language and culture.

In 2018, shortly after human rights experts believe the Communist Party began using concentration camps to imprison Uyghurs, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, the People’s Daily, boasted that over 10,000 PAP officers were engaging in “military-style training” in the region.

In a significant deviation from traditional deployments of the PAP, reports began circulating in 2019 that Xi had moved large numbers of PAP soldiers to Shenzhen, the Chinese province that borders Hong Kong, in response to pro-democracy protests there. The state-run Global Times propaganda outlet reported in August of that year that the PAP was conducting “large-scale exercises” on the Hong Kong border. While Beijing never admitted to letting the PAP cross into Hong Kong, Reuters cited multiple sources there in March 2020 confirming that the PAP had operated to actively repress protests within Hong Kong in 2019.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry has vocally supported the Castro regime’s violent crackdown of dissidents this month.

“I’d like to stress that China stands ready to work with Cuba to implement the important consensus of the two heads of state and is firmly committed to deepening friendly relations between the two countries,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters on July 13. “China firmly opposes foreign interference in Cuba’s internal affairs, firmly supports what Cuba has done in fighting COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus], improving people’s livelihood and upholding social stability.”

China became Cuba’s largest trade partner in 2017, shortly before Cuba joined the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s global infrastructure debt trap program. China allowed Cuba into the BRI despite the fact that its stated goal is to allegedly reconstruct the Ancient Silk Road that connected eastern China to western Europe — a route in which ancient Cuba played no role whatsoever.

China’s ties to Cuba have resulted in growing ties between the oppressed peoples of both countries.

“As a nation suffering genocide and other atrocities under Chinese Communist occupation, the people of East Turkistan, especially the Uyghurs, stand in solidarity with the Cuban people as they strive for freedom from the Communist dictatorship in Cuba,” Salih Hudayar, the prime minister of the East Turkestan government in exile told Breitbart News this week. “China is the biggest supporter and is a lifeline of Cuba’s communist dictatorship.”

Uyghur protesters in Washington, DC, last week joined Cuban-Americans and allies in calling for an end to global communism. The Cuban-American D.C. presence, which began shortly after July 11 and has persisted for two weeks, also featured Tibetan activists waving the flag of the region in solidarity.

The Chinese-Australian dissident artist Badiucao, who supplied much of the art embraced by the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, debuted art in the aftermath of July 11 in support of the Cuban protest movement.

Cuban pro-democracy activists have supported efforts to end the enslavement of Uyghur people in East Turkestan. Cubans on the island also organized protests nationwide on the island in April in support of Hong Kong protesters imprisoned for attempting to flee unjust prosecution under the Chinese-controlled Hong Kong legal system.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

Cuban Cancer Patient Arrested for Illegal T-Shirt: 'They Hit Me So Much I Got to Prison Defecating'

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Miriela Cruz, a Cuban woman arrested on July 11 for wearing a shirt reading “down with the dictatorship,” described being brutalized and tortured in putrid jail cells in an interview shortly after her release, the Cuban independent site ADN Cuba reported Wednesday.

Cruz shared her story in audio posted to Facebook on Tuesday by Anamely Ramos, a longtime anti-communist dissident and member of the pro-democracy artist collective the San Isidro Movement. The head of the movement, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, disappeared on July 11 and has not been seen since. Human rights activists presume Otero is in police custody, one of hundreds confirmed to be imprisoned or disappeared since that date.

Thousands of Cubans took the streets of nearly every major city in the country — as many as 40 municipalities, according to some estimates — for protests against the Communist Party on July 11. The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, largely consisting of assemblies of moving marches through major streets and chants of “freedom!” Police responded by opening fire with live ammunition into armed crowds, publicly beating protesters they could apprehend, and imprisoning and torturing anyone within sight of a protest, including minors.

Cruz’s son, 26-year-old Dayron Fanego, was arrested during the protests in San José de las Lajas, a Havana metropolitan area suburb. Police arrived at Fanego’s home and dragged him off of his own doorstep. As in many similar cases, Cruz said that police refused to give her information on her son, so she decided to wear an anti-communist shirt to the local police station. Her shirt featured several anti-regime slogans including “down with the dictatorship,” “no more hunger,” and “no more repression.”

Police immediately arrested Cruz, which at least allowed her to see her son in prison. Police took her to a local prison with no accommodations made for her advanced age or her cancer status, but not before tearing her shirt off and beating her at the station.

“They hit me so much that I arrived defecated to the prison,” Cruz said in the audio interview.

“In the cell, there were 20 of us women, there was one cup for all 20, there was Covid [Chinese coronavirus] in the prison,” Cruz detailed. Cancer patients are at heightened risk for coronavirus complications, a fact that did not prompt Cuban authorities to offer Cruz any differentiated treatment after the beating from younger, healthy prisoners. “We drank water from a bucket in the bathroom, [there was] extreme dirtiness.”

Cruz said that she witnessed and experienced regular beatings during her seven days in prison, and saw her son beaten, as well.

“They forced people to say ‘viva Díaz-Canel’ and ‘viva Cuba’ by beating them. There were people there with fractured arms, blows to the head, bruises,” Cruz narrated. “They beat me mercilessly.”

Cruz also accused police officers of shaming her by forcing her to walk around the prison in only a brassiere and parade in front of military officials there. Women and girls slowly coming out to speak about their abuses in prison following the July 11 protests have similarly testified to sexual abuse or threats of rape. In one dramatic account, 17-year-old Gabriela Zequeira said police officers threatened to lock her in a room with two men who would rape her and forced her to strip naked and digitally penetrate herself, allegedly to confirm she was not trying to smuggle weapons into the prison. Zequeira was arrested for being near a protest but did not participate in any.

Ramos, who posted the audio of Cruz’s testimony, noted on Facebook that police only agreed to let Cruz go after she signed a false guilty plea on charges of armed robbery.

“She told the officials that, without glasses, she could barely see, but they insisted that it was just the bail paper,” Ramos noted. She added that a team of activists are documenting Cruz’s case, and the many individual cases slowly trickling out of Cuba, with international human rights organizations in an attempt to bring awareness to each individual case and thus pressure the regime not to act violently against those involved.

Fanego remains in prison at press time.

The Castro regime has denied any use of violence against protesters despite the many testimonies and video evidence of such acts. The denials followed President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s call for an “order of combat” urging civilians to violently assault “counterrevolutionaries” wherever they may be suspected to exist. To limit the flow of information abroad, authorities shut down internet access from the state-run telecommunications company ETECSA on the first day of the protests. While Cubans have had some success smuggling audio and videos out of the country with VPNs, and independent journalist outlets continue to operate even while many of their staffers remain missing or imprisoned, the lack of communication with the outside world and among Cubans on the island has limited the ability to recreate the protests of July 11.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

Cuba Responds to Protests: 3 Extra Pounds of Rice Rations, No Extra Freedom

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The Ministry of Interior Commerce in Cuba announced Wednesday that it would increase rice rations by an extra three pounds per person per month, an attempt to quell the eruption of anti-communist unrest that has persisted since July 11.

That day, thousands of Cubans nationwide — in nearly every city on the island — organized peaceful marches calling for the end of the communist Castro regime, which has used executions, torture, and imprisonment to stay in power since 1959. The scope of the protests attracted international attention and has triggered ongoing protests by Cubans in the diaspora in major capitals around the world, most prominently in Washington, D.C.

The protesters chanted slogans like “freedom” and anti-communist phrases, plainly stating opposition to the regime. The Communist Party of Cuba has attributed the protests to alleged illicit American intelligence activity, without providing any evidence for U.S. involvement, while international leftist groups sympathetic to the regime have claimed the protesters were objecting to an increasingly dire economic situation in the country that they, too, blamed on the United States. The administration of President Joe Biden adopted the false claim that the protesters were objecting to a deteriorating Chinese coronavirus situation.

Attempting to fuel the narrative that the protesters were demanding an improved economic situation, the Ministry of Interior Commerce (MINCIN) announced a giveaway of a paltry three extra pounds of rice per person every month from August to December. Minister Betsy Díaz Velázquez said at a press conference that the extra food rations were in part possible due to humanitarian aid from Russia and Nicaragua, allied leftist regimes.

Díaz explicitly connected the rations to the protests, stating the government sought “in this way to begin giving the population a level of satisfaction at a time in which the imperialism [the United States] is trying to create irritation and disgust among our people and has a high responsibility in what is happening.”

As a communist country, the Cuban Communist Country controls and distributes the nation’s food supply. Citizens receive ration cards that specify how much food each individual can purchase; it is illegal for individuals to independently decide how much food they need for their homes.

Díaz also noted that families would have access to their August food rations early, according to the official newspaper of the Communist Party, Granma. The newspaper added that Díaz announced that it had received extra “prime materials, like wheat flour, whose destination will be, fundamentally, towards local production industries to increase the output of bread and crackers.”

The announcement did not specify any provisions of extra protein other than powdered milk for senior citizens and beans for four different provinces.

The independent outlet Cubanet noted Wednesday that the general Cuban population met the announcement with outrage, noting it did nothing to address the core demand of the protesters that the communist regime leaves power.

“Every day they remind me more of Orwell’s 1984 with this increase by three pounds of the rice [ration] as if that represented the liberty and human rights that the people want, useless bunch of people,” one social media user highlighted by Cubanet lamented.

Díaz, the minister of interior commerce, has been one of the least popular members of the Communist Party leadership for years. Díaz outraged the general population in 2019 in an interview on state television attempting to address shortages created by poor management of food industries by the Party, particularly a shortage of flour that resulted from the government failing to repair aging wheat mills. The government blamed then-President Donald Trump for the shortages, without explaining what role he would have had in the mechanical failures, and cut rations for the majority of citizens.

Díaz said on national television that, in addition to the United States, Cuban citizens themselves were responsible for shortages due to hoarding, adding most Cubans supporting receiving less food through the ration system.

“There are a variety of different opinions, most consider these [rations] good and even insist on us continuing to ration products,” she alleged, prompting widespread indignation.

The Castro regime has not supplemented its meager increase in rice rations with any reduction in human rights violations or restoration of basic freedoms for the Cuban people at press time. Following the protests, the regime enacted mass arrests and ordered state security officials to conduct violent door-to-door raids against suspected protesters. Those arrested, human rights groups have alleged, are being subjected to summary judgment trials with no significant due process safeguards. Police have denied the accused in many cases knowledge of what crime they are facing a trial for and access to an attorney. Those sentenced have said they have faced “summary trials” alongside as many as 30 other people and sentenced simultaneously.

Those outside of prison have accused police of openly threatening them, including children erroneously arrested despite playing no role in the protests.

Gabriela Zequeira Hernández, a 17-year-old sentenced to eight months of house arrest for having witnessed protests she did not participate in, told Cubanet this week — shortly after her release from one of Cuba’s most notorious prisons — that police officers threatened to trap her in a room with two large men who would rape her. She was also subject to a strip search and forced to digitally penetrate herself while squatting in front of guards, allegedly to ensure she was not hiding a weapon.

The parents of Yoel Misael Fuentes García, a 16-year-old, told independent outlets last week that police visited the boy in the hospital to threaten him after police shot him on July 11. Fuentes was also not participating in the protests, merely peeking out of his home out of curiosity after hearing the tumult of the crowd.

“We, the relatives, had to see Yoelito through a glass in the hospital. Meanwhile, a police officer went directly to his bed to interrogate and coerce him,” his stepfather told Diario de Cuba. “He told him that they could take him to 100 y Aldabó.”

100 y Aldabó is one of Cuba’s most violent political prisoners and where Zequeira experienced her sexual assault and threats.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

Gaffney: Peru's Farewell to the Free World

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Today is Peru’s independence day, ordinarily an occasion for great celebrations in one of Latin America’s most important nations.

Tragically, this year’s anniversary may be the last to be celebrated by Peruvians in a democratic, increasingly prosperous and sovereign country.

Think of it as a farewell party to the Free World.

An election in June alleged to have been riddled with fraud resulted last week in a narrow victory for Pedro Castillo, a Marxist schoolteacher accused of having ties to the Shining Path terrorist group. He has declared his intention to rewrite the country’s constitution so as to, among other things, enable him to serve more than a single term. Other communists have parlayed such latitude into protracted holds on power.

Despite a victory margin of only 40,000, his Leninist Free Peru party claims a mandate for radical policies that would threaten to fundamentally transform Peru. It would also further traumatize a region already reeling from the cumulative effects of totalitarian misrule, endemic corruption, narco-trafficking, mass illegal migration and the Chinese Communist Party virus. And we in the United States will not be immune to the ripple effects of what’s seemingly in store for the Peruvian people.

Precisely what Castillo will do and when remains to be seen. He has tried to distance himself from his own party, Free Peru, after the public text of the party’s political platform alarmed the continent. Notably, Castillo has refused to condemn the text or leave the party, insisting merely that he is not a communist.

The party itself makes no secret of its admiration for the hemisphere’s most revolutionary leftist leaders, including the Castros of Cuba and Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, who have destroyed once-promising economies and countries. A number of them came to Lima to witness the new president’s inauguration today.

Typically, such leaders’ playbooks involve a combination of: nationalizing key industries and running them into the ground; imposing a centrally planned economy which inevitably fails to provide the promised growth and prosperity; the seizure and redistribution of land and other property, with all the attendant social as well as economic turmoil; government involvement with criminal enterprises that prosper from the cultivation, movement and/or sale of drugs; corrupt officials, judges, and law enforcement; and, not least, the prominent presence and enormous influence of Cuban, Iranian/Hezbollah, Russian and Chinese intelligence, security and/or “business” personnel.

Should Castillo in fact implement such policies in Peru, the likely repercussions are not hard to predict. Look no further than Venezuela under Messrs. Chávez and Maduro. That once-prosperous nation with its vast oil reserves has been reduced to its present status as one of the most oppressive, crime-wracked, and bankrupt countries in the world. Its government is, as a practical matter, a narco-regime. And many millions of its people have fled the political repression and starvation, seeking refuge in Peru and elsewhere, including the United States.

Some experts believe that – unlike Venezuela’s Chávez, who took his time boiling the proverbial frog by instituting communist changes incrementally – Castillo (or more to the point, the radicals around him for whom he is but a front-man) are determined to effect their Marxist makeover of Peru quickly.

The consequences of such a transformation will, of course, be felt most dramatically by the Peruvian people. The instability that could ensue from a potential nationalization of Peru’s mines, or Lima terminating cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, redistribution of assets in the name of “land reform,” and intensifying collaboration with the likes of the regimes in Havana, Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing would, however, be a blight on the region, as well. Thanks especially to the Chinese coronavirus, Chile, Colombia, and Brazil are already on the ropes and upcoming elections could produce similar results to Peru’s in at least two of the three.

It is, moreover, predictable that a destabilized Peru will be harmful to U.S. interests, including here at home. Losing a friendly, generally aligned nation to narco-traffickers, Marxists, and foreign adversaries will prove costly in a variety of ways. For example, a disruption of Peruvian supplies of copper, other minerals, and raw materials would prove harmful to our economy. A surge in cocaine smuggling would intensify America’s already serious narcotics-driven public health crisis. And the Biden-induced invasion of our southern border will be greatly exacerbated by the emigration of potentially millions of Peruvians.

For all these reasons, one might have expected that the U.S. government would have sought to ensure that the allegedly widespread election fraud that enabled Castillo to lay claim to Peru’s presidency would be forensically investigated. Instead, for weeks after the election in June, it did essentially nothing. Perhaps such passivity was due to an unwillingness to dignify forensic investigations of electoral integrity at a moment when the Biden-Harris administration’s legitimacy is itself under scrutiny. Alternatively, it may simply have been prompted by sympathy for Marxist revolutions much in evidence these days in the Democratic Party and parts of the federal government’s executive and legislative branches.

Whatever the reason, we are likely to look back at the present moment with great regret for our having interposed no objection to the Marxists’ lopping off of yet another chunk of the Free World – an action that will be disastrous in its own right, but surely will also encourage freedom’s enemies to redouble their efforts to force the submission of still more countries, including our own.

Frank J. Gaffney is the founder and Executive Chairman of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C.