Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Perle

Perle’s sentence reads like a tidy checklist, but it’s really a political permission slip. The rhetorical trick is the phrase “before the strike”: it frames terrorism as an imminent, near-inevitable event unless the state expands its reach. Once you accept that clock-ticking premise, the three imperatives sound like common sense rather than choices with tradeoffs.

The escalation is deliberate. “Deny them entry” is border policy. “Curtail their freedom of action inside” is domestic surveillance, policing, detention, and the elastic category of “action” that can slide from plotting violence to associating with the wrong people. The third step does the most work: “deprive them of material and moral support from within.” Material support already carries heavy legal force in U.S. counterterrorism, but “moral support” is the real tell. It smuggles in the idea that beliefs, speech, charities, mosques, communities, and dissent can be treated as supply lines. The enemy is no longer just an attacker; it’s an ecosystem.

Context matters: Perle is a post-9/11 national security hawk, influential in the Bush-era policy world where preemption, expansive executive power, and broad definitions of “support” became fixtures. The intent isn’t simply to outline security measures; it’s to normalize an inside/outside binary in which “within the country” becomes a contested zone requiring purification. The subtext is that the most dangerous threat is not the foreign infiltrator but the domestic enabler, a category that can be widened as needed. That’s why the line works: it’s structured like pragmatism, but it quietly redefines the boundaries of liberty as a potential vulnerability.