Strange things are happening with Dr. Sebastian Gorka. In a clip that circulated widely yesterday, the deputy assistant to the President was asked by Breitbart’s Alex Marlow whether he thought right-wing terror is currently a threat in the US. Gorka brought up Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes – unprompted – claiming they had lauded Sharia law and said Muslim states were better than America. “I’m not sure that Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson are conservatives… If you remove those individuals and you understand that they’re not conservatives, what’s left?” Judging by those comments, it seems that Gorka, as Trump’s senior director of counterterrorism, regards the two podcasters as domestic security threats.
Never one to recoil from an argument, Carlson has asked Gorka for an interview. “Seb! I’ve been watching you talk about me on the internet and I think it might be more productive to speak directly,” Tucker wrote yesterday in a text message to Gorka, seen by Cockburn. “I’m happy to meet you anywhere for an interview, so please let me know. Thanks a lot. Tucker.”
So far, Carlson has had no reply. Surely, the “Lion of Budapest” – as Dr. Gorka is known in some kookier circles – is not afraid of a verbal sparring match on the Tucker Carlson Network?
Ken Klippenstein, a national security reporter, inferred that Gorka might be looking to use the new national security directive – known as NSPM-7 – to target Carlson and his ilk:
None of this is actually about extremism. It’s about the fact that Carlson, like Fuentes, recently broke with Trump – bitterly – over the Iran War. That’s the real offense. So now they’re being cast as extremist threats. But to avoid alarming conservatives, the administration can’t just say that – it has to first strip them of their conservative credentials, redefine them as something foreign-affiliated and dangerous, and then go after them. That’s how the terrorism two-step works: the Trump administration just asserts that a right-winger isn’t really a right winger and then it can say it doesn’t target right-wingers.
Gorka denies that he’d suggested Carlson and Fuentes were terrorists. “I said nothing of the sort,” he wrote in response to James Fishback, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Florida. Gorka pointed to the main threat groups listed in NSPM-7, adding, “I don’t see Big Foot-obsessed podcasters or diminutive clickbait merchants, do you?”
Gorka has never shied away from a feud, as Paul Wood writes in the forthcoming US edition of The Spectator:
Gorka says his targets are “human filth.” They are “obliterated” and their bodies stacked “like cordwood.” There is something unseemly about this. It is not how the military themselves talk, certainly not in public, let alone from a White House podium. Professional soldiers are circumspect about killing; Gorka revels in it. He boasts on X about hanging out at “Bragg” with the Green Berets. A source familiar with that world told me the real “snake-eaters” – the special forces – “hold Gorka in contempt.”
Cockburn is sure that Dr. Derring-Do has been busy ordering drone strikes against America’s enemies and will soon get back to Carlson and agree to appear on his show. He is, after all, the author of Why We Fight: Defeating America’s Enemies – With No Apologies. Surely he won’t make his apologies and duck this particular fight?
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