All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic

 

Jon Reisman

“I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”- Oath of Office/Allegiance
Every federal public official, military service member and new citizen takes an oath that includes a commitment to support and defend the Constitution against “all enemies, foreign and domestic”. Enemies’ lists have been frowned upon since the Nixon administration, and progressives have been trying to undermine the Constitution for more than a century, but given President Biden’s transparently inconsistent commitment to transparency, I thought an effort to actually identify those enemies of the Constitution would be appropriate. Of course, “enemy”, like “equity”, is very much in the eye of the beholder. Behold my own implicitly biased list.
Foreign Enemies
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
Nothing happens in China without the approval of the CCP and its dictator, Xi Jinpin. Here are some of Xi’s greatest hits:
• The incarceration of more than a million Uigher Muslims in reeducation concentration camps;
• The destruction of free speech and civil liberties in Hong Kong;
• The development and release of and subsequent suppression of information about Covid;
• The development and use of “social credit scores” in concert with Big Tech and internal intelligence and security services;
• The militarization of the South China Sea;
• The upcoming invasion of Taiwan.
Americans are being told by progressives and the mainstream media that referring to Covid as the Chinese Virus is racist and that America is a systemically racist country with an ongoing epidemic of anti-Asian hate crimes and discrimination. What Americans are not being told is the increasing amount of evidence that:
• The CCP engineered and either deliberately or accidently released a bio weapon which fortuitously (from the CCP point-of-view) damaged competing economies and helped replace the first and only US President who openly challenged China with one whose son was and possibly still is on their payroll;
• Elite Higher Education has been discriminating against Asian Americans for decades, just as they previously discriminated against another high achieving immigrant “non-white” minority, Jews;
• A disturbingly high percentage of the so-called anti- Asian hate crimes are committed by Blacks. This is also true of anti-Semitic hate crimes, the largest single category of hate crimes in the US. This information is suppressed because it invalidates the Black Lives Matter/Critical Race Theory narrative that Blacks cannot be racist because they are on the bottom of the oppressed/oppressor power pyramid.
The Iranian Mullahs
The US has much to answer for in Iran, starting with the CIA engineering the removal of a democratically elected Iranian socialist/nationalist and replacing him with the Shah in the 1950’s. Our comeuppance for that was the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 and the current regime, which is implacably committed to destroying Israel and restoring a Shiite Persian empire, much to the dismay of their Sunni Arab neighbors. The mullahs are the primary wellspring of terror in the Middle East.
The American left, which never saw a socialist they did not like and only despises Western (Christian) religious autocrats, has decided that Israel is bad and the Iranians are justifiably aggrieved and are trustworthy. Thus, President Obama paid off the mullahs with pallets of cash and agreed that they could have nukes and rockets to obliterate Israel as long as they waited awhile. The Senate abdicated their responsibility to ratify treaties (thank you Senator King!), but that at least allowed President Trump to withdraw from the appeasement deal and engineer the Abraham Accords forging an Israeli-Sunni Arab alliance against the mullahs. President Biden is about to re-appease the mullahs and betray our allies, but the Israelis and Sunni Arabs may have other ideas. Watch for an explicit alliance between Iran and China.
Russia, North Korea,
Pakistan
These three all have nukes and anti- American animus to varying degrees, but are not quite the threat that the CCP and mullahs represent and project.
Vladmir Putin is a stone cold killer and a Russian nationalist/former KGB spymaster. He has invaded several former Soviet Republics, including Georgia (in the Caucasus, not the US South) and the Ukraine. He has designs on making Europe dependent on Russian energy and reestablishing Russian domination and influence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.  My principal fear of Putin is that he is playing chess with addled checkers player Biden.
North Korea has nukes and the support of the CCP, which makes them dangerous.
Pakistan has nukes, is sympathetic to the Taliban and Muslim jihadists, and is in a shooting war with India, also nuclear armed and an emerging US ally, at least until president Biden puts Indian- American Kamala Harris in charge.
Next week: Domestic Enemies
Jon Reisman is an associate professor of economics and public policy at the University of Maine at Machias. His views are his own. Mr. Reisman welcomes comments as letters to the editor here, or to him directly via email at [email protected].

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