OPINION

Two Priorities: Defend the Homeland and Ensure Honest Elections

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

It turns out that nations do not stumble into wars and conflict. Wars are generally the result of globalist forces with ulterior motives or political leaders who seek to shore up and protect their political position by demonizing a target, then rallying the people’s support around the enemy of that target, in the name of patriotism and American interests. 

The American people are wising up after spending $8 trillion over some 20 years in the so-called war against terror in the Middle East in Iraq and Afghanistan—protracted engagements that cost lives and ended in failure, often creating resentment from the native people we were purportedly trying to help. In 2001, the year of 9/11 that triggered the war on terror, total U.S. national debt stood at about $3.4 trillion. Today U.S. national debt has grown by 10-fold to $34 trillion. 

The permanent elite in Washington recently assured the American people (with no discussion or accounting for costs) that the U.S. military could fund and prevail in a two-front war—one against Russia in the European theater to defend Ukraine; and the second against China in the Pacific theater to defend Taiwan. 

That was until the Middle East blew up on October 7, thrusting the United States into a new kind of war with multiple fronts. Radical Muslim jihadis never conceded that 9/11 would be the final attack on the United States. In fact, the Iranian mullahs and Hezbollah have explicitly stated repeatedly that they seek to inflict death and destruction on both Israel and America on a mass-casualty scale never seen before.

The American people are also finally wising up about the harm that globalists at the U.N., the international banking cabal and the World Economic Forum have already wrought in Europe with their replacement migration policies that induced European nations to open the doors to immigration from Middle East and North African countries. As a result, the population of Muslims increased 16-fold—to about 30 million, spread out across most European and Scandinavian countries with disastrous social costs—bringing cultural and political division, riots, and crime. 

The open border policy of the Biden administration is affectively advancing in the United States what the replacement migration policies accomplished in Europe—breaking down identification with and affection for the nation state. 

Among the 8 million migrants from dozens of countries who have swarmed across the U.S. southern border during the nearly three years of the Biden administration, there are a good number of radical Islamists from terrorist hotbeds in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Hezbollah from Venezuela, and both Chinese PLA special forces and Chinese military age single men. If only 1 percent of the 8 million migrants who have arrived in Biden’s first three years are radicalized America-haters, that would be 80,000 people who could wreak havoc in the United States. 

FBI Director Chris Wray recently confirmed that America is now in a new and unprecedented time of risk and danger. He publicly stated, “The reality is that the terrorism threat has been elevated throughout 2023, but the ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans in the United States to a whole other level.”

Recently, Sohaib Abuayyash, a Jordanian who originally came to the U.S. years ago on a Palestinian passport — was arrested in Houston on Oct. 19, after investigators said he had been "conducting physical training" and "trained with weapons to possibly commit an attack.” In a recent candid testimony before congress, Wray described Abuayyash as a man who had been "studying how to build bombs and posted online about his support for killing Jews."

It’s noteworthy that Venezuela pumps in more migrants to the U.S. than any other country. Most of these migrants come to the U.S. to escape poverty and find more opportunity, but another small portion have different motivations. Hezbollah, a Shiite terrorist group controlled and funded by Iran, became well-entrenched in Venezuela during the radical socialist regime of Hugo Chavez. Hezbollah influence in Venezuela has continued to grow under the successor Maduro regime, with the hewing of a vast infrastructure within Venezuela for its criminal activities, including drug trafficking, money laundering, and illicit smuggling.

The recent surge of Chinese males crossing the U.S. border suggests disciplined land-based military operations may be in the offing. Recently Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) reported that “10,000-plus” Chinese nationals have been apprehended in fiscal 2023, a massive 300 percent increase from the year prior. 

It is well-known that the U.S. electric grid can be shut down for years by an EMP attack or by destroying just nine critical nodes. Just 15 years ago spies from China and Russia were found on a mission to map the U.S. power grid—its infrastructure and nodes.   So, it’s essential to deploy  the American military to protect the American electric grid—now. 

Wray recently acknowledged that, “There is no doubt that the greatest long-term threat to our nation’s…national security is that posed by the Chinese communist government,”  He described the scope this way: “We’ve now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours. Of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China.” 

Domestic security policy recommendations by the U.S. intelligence agencies used to be shaped by a five to 10-year forward look of where   threats were heading. No more. It’s all happening very fast, right now. 

But it is not too late to save America. The deep state plan may include allowing terrorist attacks in the U.S. homeland to justify the imposition of a lockdown and then a shutdown of the November 2024 election. That is unequivocally not an option. America has lived through many wars, including the Civil War, which brought unprecedented destruction to the southern states—and we never considered delaying or cancelling elections. Instead, we must use the opportunity of troubled times to defend the homeland and ensure we have honest elections no matter what the circumstances. 

________________________

 

Scott Powell is senior fellow at Discovery Institute, and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. His recent book, Rediscovering America, was #1 Amazon New Release in the history genre for eight weeks. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org