Frank Gaffney is joined by Dede Laugesen & Sam Brownback
By Securing America | June 1, 2026, 9:21 PM
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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:
Frank Gaffney: Welcome to Securing America with me, Frank Gaffney, the program that’s a kind of owner’s manual for protecting the country we love against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to the glory of God and His kingdom.
This is a very special edition of Securing America. I’m proud to say we have with us one of America’s foremost statesmen, and I mean that in every sense of the word. He has served in numerous capacities, both at the state and federal level. He has represented our country internationally. He has been a singularly impactful figure on one of the greatest problems of our time, one that my colleague Dede Laugesen and I speak about each week on this program.
It’s one of my favorite parts of the program, in point of fact, because it is so under-addressed almost every place else. And that is the plight of Christians being persecuted around this world in numbers that are simply mind-boggling.
We’re going to talk about one of the countries in which this is happening on an industrial scale, the subject of our guest’s new, and I’m sure going to be wildly successful, book.
Dede, the president and CEO of Save the Persecuted Christians, the co-author with me of a book about this very subject — I may just flog it shamelessly — we call it The Indictment: Prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party and Friends for Crimes Against America, China and the World.
Dede, good to have you with us as always, and I’m so pleased to have this full hour. Tell us about whom we are speaking.
Dede Laugesen: Ambassador Brownback sponsored, as a member of the Senate at the time. So he’s been in this for a very long time.
And we have worked together on China, the issues with China’s strengthening and reformation of its religious laws.
Ambassador Brownback, you’ve written this book. Why did you choose China? Out of all of the nations that are in the top fifty of the Open Doors World Watch List who are persecuting Christians, why did you write this book? What drove you to write about the Chinese Communist Party and what they’re doing to people of faith, of all faiths?
Sam Brownback: Yeah. Thanks, Dede, and thanks for the question. Thank you, and thank you for having me on the show.
I need to start by acknowledging your leadership and the leadership that Frank’s led in this field since I’ve been around politics. I mean, he is the old warhorse on this, and he smells the smoke and he runs to the battle. And he’s smelling a lot here, so just hats off. And a really great accolade and recognition, frankly, of your long-term leadership in this field.
And Dede, your passion and the work that you’ve done has been just fantastic. The focus you guys have brought on China, Nigeria, and a number of different places really needs to be recognized.
Dede, I wrote this book, and I wrote it now, because all trails lead back to Beijing. That’s what I was just seeing in the ambassadorship role and what I saw in the Senate as well when I was working human rights issues, is that the Chinese Communist Party is the great enabler of human rights abuses around the world.
It’s the puppet master. It’s the puppet master behind Russia. It’s behind Iran. You get the Chinese Communist Party out of here, and all this stuff, not all of it, but a lot of it just really gets a lot simpler. It just goes away. They can’t do it without this big behemoth of an evil that’s behind them.
Frank Gaffney: Pick up on that point, Mr. Ambassador. Let me just say your first name is Sam. That was neglected. We call you Mr. Ambassador around here.
Thank you for those very kind words. But evil really is what’s going on here, isn’t it? It is a spiritual war. And we’ve been discouraged in this country to not think of ourselves as good. But certainly, by contrast with the Chinese Communist Party and all of the malevolent things it does to its own people, not least, this really makes it a clash between spiritual good and evil, does it not?
Sam Brownback: It does. And Frank, we ought to talk more often in those terms of good versus evil. We’re not perfect, but what they’re doing is evil. This is evil.
They’ve killed more of their own people than any regime in the history of mankind, and the second one isn’t even close. They’ve got three genocides going on right now. Their horrific, disastrous one-child policy — who knows how many children were killed in that? And I don’t count those in the number of killing more of their own people than anybody else in the history of mankind.
That’s the level of what you’re talking about. And now they want to take over the world, and they’ve got a pretty good run going at it right now. So you’re looking at this and going, it is time to sound the five-bell alarm and start working around to see what this is.
Ronald Reagan said early on, when he was traveling America, trying to really push the country to confront the Soviet Union, he said, “They’re at war with us, whether we realize we’re at war with them or not.”
And I feel like that’s a lot of Americans’ attitude right now: “Oh, well, you know, I buy a lot of stuff from China, and are they really all that bad?” And you go, no, no, this is evil. This is really bad. And they mean to kick us out.
Frank Gaffney: We want to go through the book in some detail. And again, its title is China’s War on Faith.
But just again, at the macro level, and I always stumble around trying to think of which of your titles we should use. The latest is ambassador, of course. You were a governor of your native state of Kansas. You were a senator, as Dede mentioned. You were a congressman before that. I believe you served in the state legislature.
You’ve been truly a statesman throughout all of this time, and your focus like a laser on human rights, and the need particularly to protect the one we enshrine in our country as the first of those rights, those freedoms, namely religious liberty, has been, I think, unparalleled, with the possible exception of your counterpart in the House, Congressman Frank Wolf.
But when you talk about the level of destruction of the people of China, just to put some numbers on it, I’ve heard as high as 100 million killed outright, and then somewhere on the order of 400 million — I think the Chinese government there has actually acknowledged — 400 million babies, mostly girls, murdered in the womb.
And as you say, it’s just stupefyingly horrific. That’s what they’ve done to their own people. And I’m always given to saying, imagine what they would do to us if they get their hands on us, as they hope to.
Sam Brownback: I love the Chinese people. We adopted one of those Chinese girls. My wife and I did, twenty-five years ago. And she’s wonderful. I love the Chinese people. I love the Chinese civilization and culture.
I despise what the Chinese Communist Party has done to that country and seeks to do to the world: reduce everybody to an economic entity, and that’s it. Because communism, of course, is officially atheistic. So there’s no soul, there’s no spirit, there’s no God, and there’s no room for any of that.
And so everybody’s just this economic cog in here, and that’s all you are. And that’s what you’re going to be reduced to. And then they operationally spend billions of dollars each year to enforce this religious persecution and religious control.
Frank Gaffney: We’re going to talk about some of the mechanisms that they’ve been using to do that, Sam, on the other side of a short break.
This is documenting the horror of our time, and I call it the greatest human scandal — well, crisis — in history. We’re going to talk about it all and more.
Stay tuned for more with Senator, Congressman, Governor, Ambassador Sam Brownback right after this.