Donald Trump’s incoming counterterrorism czar wants you to join the government’s war on terrorism. That’s the message he conveyed yesterday in a little-noticed interview following the reportedly ISIS-inspired vehicle ramming attack in New Orleans. The remarks paint an alarming picture of the incoming administration’s plans to take the war on terrorism to “the streets of America” — a war in which “you are the first responder,” as the Trump nominee put it.
“You are on the front line of the war against global jihadism,” Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s incoming senior director for counterterrorism, told Newsmax. His rhetoric reminds me of the post-9/11 paranoia of the Bush administration, during which the national security state crept into American civic life in all sorts of ways that remain with us today. In much the same fashion, Gorka stressed that preventing terrorism is a responsibility you — not in the plural sense but you personally — share with even the elite operators like the Navy SEALs(!) As he told Newsmax:
“You need to understand — every single one of our Newsmax viewers. You are on the front line of the war against global jihadism. It’s not just our tier one operators. It’s not just the guys at Dam Neck, the SEALs, or the guys over the wire at Bragg. You. You, like the people on Bourbon Street, are on the front line. So be aware. Keep your head on a swivel…it’s not about warzones 8,000 miles away in Central Asia. It’s about here on the streets of America. You are the first responder.”
Several troubling implications arise from Gorka’s counter-terror vision. Deputizing ordinary people as volunteers for the national security state induces them to view the world through that framework, which just doesn’t map onto civic life. Should a teacher really adopt the worldview of a Navy SEAL? Also, Gorka’s rhetoric implies that terror attacks happen because the public wasn’t vigilant enough, rather than that our lavishly funded national security state failed to anticipate them. (There’s already plenty of signs that New Orleans authorities failed to properly deploy barriers that would have prevented the attack.)
Gorka’s extreme views may well make him the most dangerous figure in the incoming Trump administration, as I’ve previously reported. While the major media have tended to obsess about Tulsi Gabbard and her supposed ties to the Russians (despite there being no hard evidence), Gorka has basically completely avoided scrutiny. Particularly alarming are his views on “radical Islamic terrorism,” a phrase he is fond of. When asked if Trump believes Islam is a religion, for instance, Gorka has repeatedly declined to answer. “Anybody who downplays the role of religious ideology,” Gorka said in 2017, “they are deleting reality to fit their own world.”
Gorka revisits this theme in the Newsmax interview, implying that the New Orleans attacker’s conversion to Islam should have been reported to authorities:
“And if you hear people doing strange things, acting peculiarly, apparently this individual converted to Islam last year. You need to also share that information, because the best protection is local law enforcement. They know the territory better. Don’t rely on somebody hundreds of miles away, thousands of miles away in DC or in some intelligence agency.”
The irony here is that portraying these terror attacks as some kind of religious war is literally ISIS’ strategy, which aims to persuade Muslims that nonbelievers are at war with them due to their faith. In actuality, studies show that terrorists often have low religious literacy and are motivated by all sorts of different factors. There’s already evidence that Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the New Orleans attacker, was experiencing unemployment and underwent a divorce, which could have motivated the attack.
Despite these other factors, both Gorka and Trump are going all in on religion and immigration as the explanation, with Trump posting the following statement to Truth Social after the attack:
“With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe.”
The revalation that the attacker was Texas born and raised, even serving in the U.S. military, hasn’t changed Gorka’s messaging at all. In another interview with Newsmax today, Gorka simply brushes this detail aside, saying that “irrespective” of that fact, “Islamic radicalization…is not an indigenous phenomenon,” linking it to illegal immigration.
Talk about “deleting reality to fit their own world!”
Here’s what Gorka said in full:
“The statement made by my colleague, who is the deputy chief of staff in coming to the white House, Stephen Miller, was right on the money yesterday that this is not an indigenous problem, irrespective of the fact that this man was apparently born and raised in Texas, Islamist Islamic radicalization, becoming a member of the global jihadi movement is not an indigenous phenomenon to the United States. It was imported here and after the last four years, we have no idea how many people snuck into the border when we had no borders.”
In other words, it doesn’t matter what the facts are because, well, Immigration Bad. And that’s what’s so dangerous about Gorka: he’s an ideologue who’s already decided what he thinks. There were a lot of that type during the last war on terror, pushing for us to invade Iraq. Unlike other Trump functionaries, he’s a true believer; so much so that he was forced out of the first Trump administration in 2017 over ideological differences. But this time around Gorka has a much more senior position, with he and the president in seeming lockstep.
