Gorka

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see two

katherine wife

pension plan

pow

merri ok

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an 7 24

Appearing on CNN Thursday to discuss President Joe Biden's struggles after a poor debate performance more than two weeks ago, a Republican party strategist found herself having to explain away an ugly racist attack on Vice President Kamala Harris made by one of Donald Trump's closest allies.

On Newsmax's "Rob Schmitt Tonight" on Wednesday, the host asked Sebastian Gorka, "Do these donors really think that Kamala Harris is going to do better in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania than Joe Biden would?"

Gorka, who served as Trump's deputy assistant in 2017, shot back, "Stop it, alright? She's a DEI hire, right? She's a woman. She's colored! Therefore she's gotta be good."

On Thursday, CNN host Sara Sidner put Maura Gillespie, who served as press secretary to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), on the spot by asking, "Is this line of attack going to backfire? To try to use that kind of language against Kamala Harris?"

"I don't see right now where he was on, but I'm assuming that because of the fact that he was on a far-right network, no, it's not going to backfire on him," Gillespie offered.

"A lot of what most people in the Trump world say and do actually gets some positive reactions, which for me as a woman is infuriating because my worth is not based on my body part. It is my intellect and it's who I am and who I bring to the table and what I bring to the table."

Still not addressing the offensive "colored" remark, she continued, "It's really frustrating when this is the kind of comment we hear across the board. We hear it — I've been hearing this my entire career.

"But, that being said, it doesn't mean that just because she is a woman or if she weren't, that she is the next best person to be in the White House," she added. "I think we take things based on her work, her merit and again, she is staying behind Joe Biden and she's staying with him and has not said that she is trying to lead ahead of him or anything like that."

Watch below or at the link.

===

bannon feinberg kushner erik

...

To be sure, the war in Afghanistan, particularly logistics and surveillance operations, is already heavily contracted, as I’ve documented here over the years. But under Prince’s approach, the actual fighting would be done by mercenaries, presumably in his employ. The United States “would see CIA, special operators, and contractors working with Afghan forces to target terrorists,” he told Breitbart.“I say go back to the model that worked, for a couple hundred years in the region, by the East India company,which used professional Western soldiers who were contracted and lived with trained with and when necessary fought with their local counterparts.”

On Thursday, Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s deputy assistant for national-security affairs, seemed to endorse the proposals when he was asked about the Mattis meeting in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

“It’s not about bilking the government,” he said. “It’s about the opposite. It’s about saving taxpayer money. It’s about creating indigenous capacity.” Turning to Prince himself, Gorka had the highest praise. “This is man who hires former operators [from] a first-tier Special Operations Force, retired individuals.” They will go to Afghanistan “not to go and fight instead of somebody else, but to help the Afghans, to help local indigenous forces to protect their own territories,” he said. “So this is a cost-cutting venture. We’ve opened the door here at the White House for outside ideas because the last 16 years have been disastrous.”

Feinberg’s expertise is much broader: He helps provide the capital that feeds the military-contracting industry. Through Cerberus Capital Management LP, the $30 billion private-equity firm he co-founded in 1992, Feinberg has acquired dozens of companies engaged in military and intelligence operations. As Bloomberg News reported in a detailed profile last February, “Feinberg has bought companies that refuel spy planes, train Green Berets, make sniper rifles and watch America’s foes from space.He’s handed out jobs, lobbying contracts and campaign cash to some of the most powerful people in the nation’s capital.”

===

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/432450-gorka-fox-part-ways

hmmn

gorka...parted ways with Fox News and has joined Sinclair Broadcasting.

Gorka, who joined Fox News as a national security strategist in November 2017 following a seven-month stint in President Trump's White House, will serve as a national contributor at Sinclair.

"I'm very excited to be one of Sinclair's national contributors," Gorka told the Hill by email. "Fox News and Fox Business Network have both been very good to be before I joined the Trump Administration and after I left the White House.

"I am especially grateful to Sean Hannity," he continues. "My new nationally syndicated radio show with Salem Radio and position with Sinclairwill allow me to go deeper on the key issues of the Trump era."

The 48-year-old British, Hungarian and U.S. citizen told The Hill that his Fox News contract had expired. A Fox News spokesperson confirmed the exit and said the the parting of ways was mutual.

Gorka launched his syndicated talk radio show, "America First," in November.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/former-trump-aide-warns-democratic-socialists-want-to-take-away-your-hamburgers-what-stalin-dreamt-about-but-never-achieved/

Sebastian Gorka, former deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, told attendees at the right-wing CPAC convention on Thursday that nobody should be fooled about the term “democratic socialism,” because that’s just the politically-correct term for “communism” being used by people that “want to take away your hamburgers.” Also your house and your pick-up truck.

“This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved,” Gorka blustered. “You are on the frontlines on the war against communism.”

It’s pretty funny. Watch:

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

Feb 28, 2019

Replying to @atrupar

.@GOPChairwoman Ronna McDaniel: "People eating dog food to survive. That's the path Democrats want to take us down."

Embedded video

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

Former Trump White House official Sebastian Gorka: "They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved."

????????????? pic.twitter.com/t5amL02ABm

2,855

8:08 AM - Feb 28, 2019

Gorka front-loaded his fear mongering by pointing specifically to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her leadership on pushing for a Green New Deal to help solve the climate crisis. “That is why Ocasio-Cortez has introduced the Green New Deal, which is, which is — remember this one, use it — it’s a watermelon,” Gorka said. “Green on the outside, deep, deep red communist on the inside.”

For people afraid of actual communism or having their hamburgers taken away by an authoritarian left-wing state, however, Gorka said there is no reason to be scared. “Donald J. Trump,” he declared, “is never going to let it happen!” The crowd roared with approval.

Whether that’s true or not, the American people—who polls show are increasingly favorable to the ideas of “socialism” and “democratic socialism“—will just have to wait and see.

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/twitter-trolls-convinced-sebastian-gorka-that-democrats-are-fascists/

Gorka, a former deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, cited critical tweets from random Twitter users as proof that Democrats are literally fascist.

Gorka joined Breitbart News radio this morning for an extended interview dedicated to his newly released book. Near the top of the interview, Gorka and the host briefly discuss Gorka’s status as an immigrant to America from the United Kingdom.

“You’re the type of person that I was told by the Democratic Party that we should be elevating,” host Alex Marlow told Gorka.

“Yeah, I find it very amusing. I’ve saved several of them over the years, especially when I was in the White House working for the president, all these liberals tweeting at me, ‘When are we going to deport Gorka?’ The great tolerance of the left,” Gorka said. “Immigrants are great, except if they’re conservatives.”

Marlow compared Gorka to Dinesh D’Souza, who is often criticized by Democrats for the woefully inaccurate films he produces. He told Gorka that the critiques of D’Souza “just reveals the left in a nutshell” and that “it’s all about politics.”

“You know what? It’s fascism. They are the fascists. They want to deport people they politically disagree with. I mean, when have you ever heard a conservative say that?” Gorka said. “It just doesn’t happen.”

Marlow chimed in, “We want law and order and they want viewpoint discrimination.”[audio]

thug swarm

https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018/06/11/foxs-sebastian-gorka-accuses-canadian-prime-minister-really-childish-and-unprofessional-behavior/220408

crooks &

https://crooksandliars.com/2018/05/seb-gorkas-fingerprints-all-over-iran-deal

Who would DO such a thing?

There is evidence that someone connected to the Trump White House hired Israeli spy firm Black Cube to find "dirt" on at least two former Obama officials connected to the Iran Nuclear Deal.

What is the point in that? Apparently to make it look like some low-level officials privately benefitted from the deal? To blackmail them or their wives? The whole thing is so weird but then again, Gorka.

It's Roger Stone, Gorka, Corey Lewandowski, Steve Bannon dirty tricks bullying straight out of the Nixon playbook.

So Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker finds that these two officials, were pretty low-level... and their wiveswere contacted via fake emails from fake people of fake companies:

The Observer reported that aides of President Trump had hired Black Cube to run the operation in order to undermine the Iran deal, allegations that Black Cube denies. “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it,” a source told the Observer. One of the sources familiar with the effort told me that it was, in fact, part of Black Cube’s work for a private-sector client pursuing commercial interests related to sanctions on Iran....

Kahl, who worked as an adviser to Vice-President Joe Biden, said that he believed Trump associates may have been involved because of unsubstantiated reports in conservative media outlets accusing Rhodes and Kahl of damaging leaks about the Trump Administration. “Why Ben and I? Why conjoin Ben and me?” Kahl asked. “Of all the other senior people in the White House, I’m least senior.”

Of course. The reason someone close to Trump hired Black Cube to go after Rhodes and Kahl is because they're unknown enough that those two in particular could be the subject of smears at right wing blogs.

Today on Andrea Mitchell's show, national security expert Ned Price noted that this targeting has Seb Gorka's fingerprints all over it.

ANDREA MITCHELL: I want to ask you about another intelligence controversy, Black Cube. New revelations that, in fact, an Israeli covert firm was being used by some people connected to the Trump administration to go after former Obama people like Ben Rhodes, who were involved in the Iran negotiations, and try to discredit them.

NED PRICE: It's a very strange story and suggests that dirty tricks were not confined to the Nixon administration. What we found here, there is a circumstantial case to be made that a lot of this points back to former White House officials, people like Sebastian Gorka. It's very odd that Ben Rhodes and Colin Call were the alleged targets of this operation. They were not the architects of the Iran deal. Yes, they worked on it. But they were the focus of Sebastian Gorka. If you look at what he said during this time, he consistently harps on these two individuals and then just last night, we learned from a UK paper and from "The New Yorker," that this intelligence agency, this intelligence firm, was focusing on these very two individuals. You add those two things up, and his fingerprints appear to be all over this. There's a lot we don't know, but we need to find out more.

Here's video of what Price is talking about:

In this video from #Hannity, May 2017, #Gorka mentions Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl, right around the time they were both being investigated by #BlackCube. #trumprussia #resisthttps://t.co/Rpdm7qGguo

— Barry Thomas Goldberg (@barrytgoldberg) May 7, 2018

Colin Kahl and Ben Rhodes noticed their names being targeted at the same time:

But, but what about the "Rhodes-Kahl Nexus"? Certainly Dr Gorka, PhD can get his Breitbart buds to write about that! https://t.co/auqN5qUreo

— Colin Kahl (@ColinKahl) May 27, 2017

and now, Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl are fighting back:

CONFIRMED: The Israeli intel firm Black Cube used to go after Harvey Weinstein’s accusers also targeted me & @brhodes (& our families).

Lots of new details in this new @RonanFarrow piece. https://t.co/T2ERbnYSMu

Was this authorized by the Trump White House? 1/10

— Colin Kahl (@ColinKahl) May 7, 2018

Why would someone feel the need to do this to win a debate about the merits of the Iran Deal? What message does this send to people entering into public service? https://t.co/uI3ORTnlJ6

— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) May 6, 2018

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/10/26/fcc_eliminates_rules_preventing_media_consolidation

major decision by the Federal Communications Commission Tuesday eliminated a decades-old rule that ensures community residents can have a say in their local broadcast TV station. This comes as the FCCannounced plans Wednesday to abolish long-standing media ownership rules. Opponents say these changes will accelerate media consolidation, allowing massive corporate media companies, such as the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group, to buy up and control even more local stations. We speak with Andy Kroll, senior reporter at Mother Jones magazine, whose story in their new issue is titled “Ready for Trump TV? Inside Sinclair Broadcasting’s Plot to Take Over Your Local News.”

---

major decision by the Federal Communications Commission that eliminates a decades-old rule that ensures community residents can have a say in their local broadcast TV station. The regulation is known as the “main studio rule,” and it requires broadcasters to have a physical studio near where they have a license to transmit.

This comes as the FCC also announced plans, at a hearing Wednesday, to abolish long-standing media-ownership rules, including limits on how many stations or newspapers one company can own in a single market. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai testified Wednesday during a congressional hearing.

AJIT PAI: If you believe, as I do, that the federal government has no business intervening in the news, then we must stop the federal government from intervening in the news business. And that is why, this afternoon, I shared with my fellow commissioners an order that will reform our media ownership rules and help pull the government, once and for all, out of the newsroom. We will vote on this order at our November 16th meeting.

The marketplace today is nothing like it was in 1975. Newspapers are shutting down. Many radio and TV stations are struggling, especially in smaller and rural markets. Online competition for the collection and distribution of news is even greater than it ever was. And just two internet companies claim 100 percent of recent online advertising growth. Indeed, their digital ad revenue alone this year will be greater than the market cap of the entire broadcasting industry. And yet the FCC’s rules still presume that the market is defined entirely by pulp and rabbit ears.

AMY GOODMAN: But opponents say these changes will accelerate media consolidation, allowing massive corporate media companies, such as the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group, to buy up and control even more local stations. Earlier this year, Trump’s FCC appointees revived a regulatory loophole that could allow Sinclair to buy 42 TV stations from Tribune Media Company, on top of the more than 170 stations it already owns. The deal means Sinclair stations would reach about 72 percent—almost three-quarters—of U.S. households.

This comes as former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly has reportedly been negotiating for a position with Sinclair Broadcast Group. O’Reilly secretly settled a sexual harassment claim for $32 million in January, the sixth and by far the largest such settlement during his tenure at Fox, from which he was fired.

For more, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by Andy Kroll, senior reporter at Mother Jones magazine, where he’s written extensively about the FCC. His latest story in the current issue is headlined “Ready for Trump TV? Inside Sinclair Broadcasting’s Plot to Take Over Your Local News.”

Andy, welcome back to Democracy Now! You know, a lot of the meme going around is that Trump just can’t get anything done, but it sure doesn’t look that way at the FCC this week. Can you talk about what’s happened?

ANDY KROLL: Well, at the FCC this week, as you described, the commission voted along party lines—three Republicans voting in favor, two voting in opposition—to eliminate the main studio rule, this rule from about 80 years ago saying that a local TV or radio station needs to have its studio, its primary studio, in or near the community it serves. And that served a number of purposes, not only for the community to be able to interact with that station, but also tethering that station to the community in which it’s reporting the news and delivering some value to the people who watch it. That rule has been eliminated.

And then, as we saw in the clip that you just showed, the chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, a Republican, former staffer to Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general, has said that there is a whole bunch more deregulation in the works. This comes in a year, since President Trump’s inauguration in January, in which the FCC has consistently knocked down one barrier after another to enabling a massive deal frenzy, a consolidation in the broadcast business, which is exactly what companies like Sinclair want, going forward, so that they can gobble up as many TV stations around the country as they can, and basically dominate the local news business.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Andy, before we get to Sinclair Broadcasting, I wanted to ask you about the context of this attempt—or, in fact, the overturning of the main studio rule. It’s been in effect, as you said, for several decades. Has any other administration attempted to overturn it?

ANDY KROLL: No. The rule has been tweaked over time, on several occasions, to, what they say, modernize it. But the substance of the rule, having that studio in the community where the viewers, where the people who depend on that TV or radio station is, that has not changed over time. And the supporters of the rule say there’s a very clear reason for that. Yes, it’s true that with email and with social media you can send a message to your TV station, but the rule also gave that sense of locality. It gave that connection in the newsgathering and in the—you know, just the connection to a community that is so vital to local news. And that has been a bedrock of broadcast television for nearly 80 years and has gone unchallenged under Republican administrations and under Democratic administrations. And now, under President Trump and with Commissioner Pai at the FCC, that rule is ancient history.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Andy, before—could you explain, because—as a result of overturning this rule, all of these different stations, TV stations and radio stations, can be increasingly consolidated. Now, one of the companies under which these stations have been consolidated is Sinclair Broadcasting. But this media organization, very few people know about. So could you tell us about this broadcasting channel?

ANDY KROLL: Yeah. I like to say that Sinclair Broadcast Group is the most influential media organization that most Americans have never heard of. It owns nearly—owns or operates nearly 200 local TV stations around the country. It has a tremendous influence over the local news business.

And it marries that influence, that size, reaching into 40 percent of households right now, with a unabashed conservative and pro-Trump agenda. You see that in the kind of programming that Sinclair produces and sends out to its local stations. These are called “must-run segments.”They take, you know, basically, a shamelessly pro-Trump message, repeating talking points of the administration’s through its commentators, and putting that into the local news.

And as you mentioned earlier, Sinclair is eyeing a deal to acquire 42 new stations around the country, giving it a reach to almost three-quarters of American households. So this is a massive broadcast company, set to get even bigger. And it has a distinct conservative viewpoint that it is intent and bent on projecting out to the millions of people who watch its television channels.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean when you say “intent and bent on.” Your headline of your piece, “Ready for Trump TV? Inside Sinclair Broadcasting’s Plot to Take Over Your Local News.” What are the edicts being handed down?

ANDY KROLL: Well, Sinclair is a pioneer in what’s known as the “must-run segment.” This is a segment that is produced by Sinclair’s corporate headquarters here in the D.C. area and also in Maryland, that it produces, and then it sends out to its stations around the country—again, almost 200 of them—and says, “You are required to run this 90-second commentary or this two-minute editorial.” That content, that is being distributed out around the country, has a very clear, unequivocal conservative, partisan bent to it and, frankly, a pro-Trump bent to it.

You know, the lead political analyst, if you could call it that, atSinclair is a man named Boris Epshteyn, former Trump campaign aide and a former Trump White House aide, who left the administration and immediately went into this role at Sinclair. His segments are called “Bottom Line with Boris.” They are distributed, and they are required to run every day at Sinclair stations. And these are basically Trump talking points. And, I mean, you can go on YouTube, you can watch all of his clips in a row. They are 100 percent toeing the Trump line. And if they’re not that, they’re softball interviews with Trump administration officials.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I mean, of course, people might know who Boris Epshteyn is, because during the campaign he was one of his spokespeople, always interviewed on TV. This is one of Boris Epshteyn’s recent commentaries.

BORIS EPSHTEYN: It is important to note that voter fraud goes beyond stealing or miscounting ballots. Intentionally improper voter registration is absolutely a type of voter fraud. The Commission on Election Integrity has gotten to work. … The extent of voter fraud in our elections has been hotly debated between the left and the right. The president’s commission has been established to come up with a factual, impartial answer to that question. The states should do everything within their power to cooperate with the commission. And that’s the bottom line.

AMY GOODMAN: And that is required by every station to run, Andy Kroll?

ANDY KROLL: That’s correct. You are—

AMY GOODMAN: This is—

ANDY KROLL: Yes, that’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: This is another clip from a Sinclair station, featuring former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka. The show was broadcast earlier this month.

SEBASTIAN GORKA: You do not make legislation out of outliers. Our big issue is black African gun crime against black Africans. It is a tragedy. Go to Chicago. Go to the cities run by Democrats for 40 years. Black young men are murdering each other by the bushel.

AMY GOODMAN: “By the bushel.” That’s former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka referring to “black African [gun] crime” on “black [Africans],” saying black men are killing each other “by the bushel.” Andy Kroll?

ANDY KROLL: Sebastian Gorka, of course, another alumnus of the Trump White House, who, upon leaving, went immediately to Sinclair and is now a talking head at Sinclair. So you see this trend of Trump officials going to Sinclair Broadcast Group and then them being put on the airwaves and either pushing a completely crazy message, that Sebastian Gorka just did, on a segment that was supposed to be about guns in America—

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, I think “outright racist” is a very—

ANDY KROLL: Outright racist, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —more accurate way to describe it.

ANDY KROLL: Yeah, it’s hard to find the words to describe what that was. You have Boris Epshteyn, as well. His segment, that we just listened to, is basically advocacy for the Trump administration in its deeply flawed, inept supposed commission on investigating voter fraud, which, of course, in most cases, doesn’t exist.

So, you have this message, and you have stations around the country that, in a lot of cases, just want to do local news. But as they come under the Sinclair umbrella, they are being told by headquarters, “You will run these segments.” In Boris Epshteyn’s case, Sinclair doubled down and tripled the number of times that Boris Epshteyn was required to be run by its stations. And so, this is the progression we’re seeing this year. So we’re only seeing a more pro-Trump message, at the same time that Sinclair is looking to gobble up more stations and consolidate its control.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, could you talk, Andy, about the founder of Sinclair Broadcasting Group, David Smith?

ANDY KROLL: Yeah. David Smith is a media mogul with an incredible amount of sway over what goes on on the local airwaves. He’s not well known on the level of, say, a Rupert Murdoch, for instance, even though the two men would, I think, consider themselves contemporaries or competitors.

David Smith built a small family company that had three TV stations, starting in the mid-’80s. They were based out of Baltimore. And he—by finding ways around the law and taking advantage of ways that the law was changed—in this case, deregulated—in the past few decades, he has grown Sinclair into this conservative TV behemoth that it is today, and one that stands to get even bigger if the Tribune Media merger goes through.

David Smith, longtime donor to mostly Republicans, though Democrats, as well, who are in a position to help his company. And today, you know, he throws a party for a Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas. He travels in a, you know, elite, rarefied group of Republican supporters. He’s even bragged about dining at the White House with the president. So he is right at the top of a Republican-industry-donor pyramid, if you will. But he has managed to avoid the amount of attention that, say, a Rupert Murdoch or some other international media moguls that we do of have attracted.

AMY GOODMAN: And the merging of Sinclair and Tribune? I mean, these are the smaller local stations that dot the United States, you know, crisscross the United States.

ANDY KROLL: That’s right. The deal would give, again, 42 television stations from Sinclair—or from Tribune into Sinclair. It would add more of those dots on the map, as you mentioned. Right now, Sinclair has no presence in Colorado. This would give it a major presence in Colorado. But it would also bring stations in the three largest media markets in the country into the Sinclair company: New York, WPIX; KTLA in Los Angeles; and WGN, one of the most famous broadcast companies in America, in Chicago. So this would really seal Sinclair’s position as the sort of dominant broadcast company—and, of course, given that many more tens of millions of people who would be potentially seeing Boris Epshteyn, Sebastian Gorka, potentially Bill O’Reilly.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, when we were talking about Sebastian Gorka, just to understand, as he’s talking about black African violence here in the United States, who he is, the whole controversy around him wearing that pin at the inauguration, of the Vitézi Rend, the newspaper The Forward reporting members of the Vitézi Rend elite order confirmed Gorka took a lifelong oath of loyalty to the Hungarian far-right-wing group, listed by the U.S. State Department as having been under the direction of the Nazi government of Germany during World War II. I mean, just the significance of what is being required by these local stations to run all over the country?

ANDY KROLL: Yeah. And Gorka is—if you watch that clip, or the roundtable that that clip comes from, which is available on Sinclair’s website, I mean, Sebastian Gorka is more or less given an open mic to say what he thinks about, in this case, quote-unquote, “guns in America.” We see where he took that theme. But he was a foreign policy aide in the Trump White House. He was not a domestic policy expert. He was not someone working on the issue of guns, for all that we know. And yet he is just given this platform, as he has been on several other occasions with Sinclair.

The company seems to have no qualms, given the background that you describe, the fantastic reporting that The Forward has done on his past. They seem to have no problem giving him that platform, just as they reportedly seem to be considering an arrangement with Bill O’Reilly, someone who, as you mentioned, has settled sexual harassment claims for tens of millions of dollars when he was at Fox News, to the point that Fox fired him.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain that last part. What do you understand is the state of these negotiations? And have they been stopped by this latest news of his $32 million settlement with a Fox host for sexual harassment?

ANDY KROLL: What I’ve heard and what I’ve seen reported in the past week is that there are negotiations underway between Sinclair and O’Reilly around either—whether it would be bringing him in as a host or a commentator or some kind of arrangement or partnership between O’Reilly having his own—potentially his own program, his own platform, and Sinclair as the megaphone, if you will, projecting that program, projecting O’Reilly out, using its empire of stations. Now, Sinclair has denied that it is talking with O’Reilly, and has repeatedly done that, though the reporting, that doesn’t go for the official comment from Sinclair, would suggest otherwise.

I will say that I, you know, have talked to people in and around Sinclair, and among the rank and file, if you will, there is kind of shock and disgust that—in light of O’Reilly’s sexual harassment settlements and all the allegations at Fox, that Sinclair would be thinking about considering a partnership with him has a lot of people there upset, concerned about their futures, whether they want to work there if Bill O’Reilly joins the company in some capacity.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Andy Kroll, we want to thank you for being with us. We’ll certainly link to your piece. Andy Kroll, senior reporter at Mother Jones magazine, where he has written extensively about the FCC and Sinclair Broadcasting. His piece published this week, we’ll link to, “Ready for Trump TV? Inside Sinclair Broadcasting’s Plot to Take Over Your Local News.”

===

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/stephen-miller-:{captain-odious:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:-last-major-alt-right-figure-trumps-white-house

fter torch-bearing white nationalists marched in Charlottesville last month and a peaceful counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was murdered by a neo-Nazi, the leaders of the black, Hispanic, Asian and progressive caucuses in Congress sent a letter to President Trump. They asked that he fire White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller.

They wrote:

Americans deserve to know that white nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis are not in a position to influence U.S. policy.

It's hard to believe it somehow became necessary to write such a thing to the president of the United States about his high-level White House advisers, but it did. All three of those men have affiliations with or connections to white supremacists, "alt-right" groups and neofascist organizations. In the wake of those horrifying events in Charlottesville, and the president's insistence that the neo-Nazi marchers included "very fine people" and that anti-fascist protesters had created many of the problems, it seemed important to go on the record with this request.

As it happens, Bannon was exiled from the White House shortly afterward and Gorka followed a couple of weeks later. The press reported that they were both let go as part of a staff reorganization by John Kelly, the retired general who had come in to replace the hapless Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff and put an end to the chaos that had characterized the Trump administration from the beginning. For their part, Bannon and Gorka insisted that they had made the decision to leave because they believed they could better serve Trump from the outside. Let's just say that didn't sound convincing.

Most political observers, even many conservatives, were relieved. Gorka was an embarrassment, a man who literally wore medals associated with Nazi collaborators to the inauguration. The Daily Beast reported this week that he had landed a new job working for a pro-Trump super PAC called the MAGA Coalition, which is best known for its promotion of conspiracy theories, notably "Pizzagate," the imaginary child-rape ring allegedly run by Hillary Clinton out of a Washington pizza parlor. Gorka told Laura Ingraham on her radio show on Tuesday that the group plans to run primaries against "fake conservatives."

We know where Steve Bannon went. He's back at Breitbart making Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell miserable and plotting the apocalypse. Most observers saw Bannon as the most sinister presence in the White House, a white nationalist Rasputin with special access to Donald Trump's id. It was assumed that getting rid of Bannon meant that Kelly had removed the main influence that stoked Trump's darker impulses.

===

see steven miller

When TV news viewers saw Trump adviser Stephen Miller accuse Jim Acosta of harboring a “cosmopolitan bias”during Wednesday’s news conference, they might have wondered whether he was accusing the CNN White House reporter of an excessive fondness for the cocktail made famous on “Sex and the City.” It’s a term that’s seldom been heard in American political discourse. But to supporters of the Miller-Bannon worldview, it was a cause for celebration. Breitbart, where Steve Bannon reigned before becoming Trump’s chief political strategist, trumpeted Miller’s “evisceration” of Acosta and put the term in its headline. So did white nationalist Richard Spencer, who hailed Miller’s dust-up with Acosta as “a triumph.”

Why does it matter? Because it reflects a central premise of one key element of President Donald Trump’s constituency—a premise with a dark past and an unsettling present.

So what is a “cosmopolitan”? It’s a cousin to “elitist,” but with a more sinister undertone. It’s a way of branding people or movements that are unmoored to the traditions and beliefs of a nation, and identify more with like-minded people regardless of their nationality. (In this sense, the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine might have been an early American cosmopolitan, when he declared: “The world is my country; all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”). In the eyes of their foes, “cosmopolitans” tend to cluster in the universities, the arts and in urban centers, where familiarity with diversity makes for a high comfort level with “untraditional” ideas and lives.

For a nationalist, these are fighting words. Your country is your country; your fellow citizens are your brethren; and your country’s traditions—religious and otherwise— should be yours. A nation whose people—especially influential people—develop other ties undermine national strength, and must be repudiated.

One reason why “cosmopolitan” is an unnerving term is that it was the key to an attempt by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to purge the culture of dissident voices. In a 1946 speech, he deplored works in which “the positive Soviet hero is derided and inferior before all things foreign and cosmopolitanism that we all fought against from the time of Lenin, characteristic of the political leftovers, is many times applauded.” It was part of a yearslong campaigned aimed at writers, theater critics, scientists and others who were connected with “bourgeois Western influences.” Not so incidentally, many of these “cosmopolitans” were Jewish, and official Soviet propaganda for a time devoted significant energy into “unmasking” the Jewish identities of writers who published under pseudonyms.

What makes this history relevant is that, all across Europe, nationalist political figures are still making the same kinds of arguments—usually but not always stripped of blatant anti-Semitism—to constrict the flow of ideas and the boundaries of free political expression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, has more and more embraced this idea that unpatriotic forces threaten the nation. As Foreign Policy put it in 2014:

“The new theme of Russian politics [is] the conflation of loyalty to the Kremlin with patriotism. It says much that dissidents at home, from journalists failing to toe the official line to protesters on the streets, are castigated either as outright ‘foreign agents’ (every movement, charity, or organization accepting foreign money must register itself as such) or else as unknowing victims and vectors of external contamination — contamination, that is, from the West, whose cosmopolitanism and immorality Putin has come to see as an increasing threat to Russia’s identity.”

That same notion has characterized the politics of the former Soviet bloc. In Hungary, the president of its Parliament has repeatedly denounced his political opponents as “people without a country,” loyal only to values like freedom, contemptuous of tradition and religion. Its prime minister, Viktor Orban, has openly advocated for “illiberal democracy” and launched a campaign against the Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros. In Poland, the reigning Law and Justice Party sees the nation besieged by dangerous influences.An article last year in World Press succinctly summarized the situation:

“In the party’s propaganda the country is in ruins, its economy robbed blind by international capital, while the foreign ownership of some newspapers and other types of mass media outlets made Poland into a colony, infecting Poles’ minds with rootless cosmopolitanism. … What is at stake is Polish Christian national values that must be protected at all cost, namely the linguistic and religious homogeneity of the country. Only Poles should reside in Poland, and a proper Pole must be a Polish-speaking Catholic.”

In one form or another, such sentiments have been at play in the politics of the Netherlands, Germany, France, and (in less blatant form) in the Brexit vote in Great Britain last year.

And they undergirded much of Trump’s campaign. One of its central premises was that “globalists,” regardless of ideology or party, were undermining American interests—by bringing low-skilled workers to our shores, by building factories in other lands, by letting international financial institutions grow rich while hollowing out American cities and towns.

“We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon,” Trump said in his inaugural address. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be—always—America First.”

To be clear: Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller would angrily wave away any suggestion that they are echoing the sentiments of anti-democratic political movements, much less anti-Semitic dog whistles. But there is no evading the unhappy reality that to label someone a “cosmopolitan” carries with it a clear implication that there is something less patriotic, less loyal … someone who is not a “real American.”

So maybe the next time Miller wants to duel with an obstreperous reporter, he might consider going back to “elitist”—that’s a real homegrown insult.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/03/the-ugly-history-of-stephen-millers-cosmopolitan-epithet-215454

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/06/12/qatari-crisis-shows-grave-implications-trump-s-twitter-account/216873

President Donald Trump’s staffers have excoriated the media for covering the president’s tweets and for questioning his use of the platform, claiming that "it's social media," not official government policy. However, the Qatari government’s bewildered reaction to Trump’s tweets criticizing the Persian Gulf state over terrorism financing, followed by the president contradicting his secretary of state’s call to ease a recent blockade against Qatar by other Arab nations, demonstrates that journalists should ignore White House staffers’ admonishments and treat Trump's social media comments as presidential statements.

On June 5, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and deputy assistant to the presidentSebastian Gorkamade television appearances where they lectured journalists about their coverage of the president’s tweets. When hosts on NBC’s Today and CNN’s New Day asked Trump’s staffers about tweets he had sent earlier that morning, they derided the hosts for their, as Conway put it, “obsession with covering everything [Trump] says on Twitter.” Gorka also repeatedly told his interviewer that the interviewer was “obsessed” with Trump’s tweets and tried arguing that “a hundred characters is not policy. … It’s not policy. It’s social media.”

Enter the sudden diplomatic crisis between Qatar, which hosts America’s largest military base in the region, and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Several Arab nations cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and cut off access routes to its territory because of the nation’s supposed support for radical Islamist groups. Trump reacted to the volatile situation by posting a series of tweets taking credit for the move to isolate Qatar -- while also explaining why he uses social media to communicate:

gone? nope

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/5/1/headlines/sebastian_gorka_ousted_from_white_house_amid_reports_about_links_to_nazi_allied_group

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/report-gorka-vitezi-rend-andras-horvath-piliscsaba

The spokesperson for a Hungarian ultranationalist group, whose founder oversaw the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews during World War II, said he was "proud" to see White House counterterrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka wear the group's medal, as he did at an inaugural ball on Jan. 20.

"When he appeared on U.S. television ... with the medal of the Vitez Order ... it made me really proud," Vitezi Rend spokesman Andras Horvath told NBC News, the network reported Saturday.

Gorka has said that he wears the medal in honor of his late father, who was a member of the group, and his struggle against the post-war communist rule of Hungary. Horvath told NBC that Paul Gorka, Sebastian's father, was at "an advanced level" of the Vitezi Rend, also called the Order of Vitez.

The current White House staffer pointed NBC to a statement he gave to the online publication Tablet, in which he denied ever being a member of, or pledging loyalty to, the order.

That statement, made to Tablet on March 16, came after another publication, The Forward, reported that two leaders in Vitézi Rend told them that Gorka was a sworn member of the order.

Hungarians who used to know Gorka, including a local political ally of his, also told NBC that Gorka was a member of the order, though the network clarified they did not offer any proof aside from their recollection of him making no effort to hide his membership.

"Everybody knew that he was member of the Order of Vitez," Csaba Gáspár told NBC. He ran against Gorka for mayor of the small town of Piliscsaba in 2006. He came in second place, Gorka came in third.

''I knew that Sebastian Gorka was a member of Vitezi Rend, even then," geologist Gabor Solti told the network. He ran for town council on Gorka's ticket in 2006.

Solti eventually served as mayor of Piliscsaba from 2009 to 2010, NBC reported, and Gáspár served from 2010 to 2014....

no link

wife on a landing team

KATHARINE GORKA, A CONTROVERSIAL national security analyst who specializes in discussing the threat posed by Muslims to the United States, has complained bitterly that the Department of Homeland Security trains its agents — falsely, in her opinion — that Islam is a “religion of peace.”

Now, Gorka will have a chance to help Donald Trump remake the department. On Tuesday, she was selected by Trump to be part of the DHS “landing team” that will meet with Obama’s DHS officials to manage the handoff to new leadership.

Gorka, the president of a think tank called the Council on Global Security and the president of Threat Knowledge Group, a consulting firm, is a well-known figure among anti-Muslim campaigners.

Gorka argues that defeating terrorism depends “upon our being able to call the enemy by its proper name: Global Jihadism.” She has pushed legislation to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group and impose sanctions on its “affiliates, associated groups, or agents.”

The affiliated groups mentioned in the legislation include mainstream civil rights organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America.

Gorka also writes about Islam for Breitbart News, a website described by its former executive chairman Steve Bannon as a “platform” for the white supremacist “alt-right” movement. Bannon is one of Trump’s top advisers. In one 2014 column, Gorka wrote that when “Presidents Bush and Obama both publicly declared Islam to be a religion of peace,” it “struck a sour chord for many,” and that “American and Western leaders have preemptively shut down any debate within Islam by declaring that Islam is the religion of peace.”

In another column, she defended five members of Congress, including then-presidential candidate Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., who were widely denounced by their own party leaders for spreading conspiracy theories in 2012 after they accused a top Clinton aide of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and called on President Obama to investigate.

Gorka claimed that the New York Times had “provided proof of Muslim Brotherhood influence” after it published an exposé on how Gulf-state monarchies were funding U.S. think tanks.

Katharine Gorka is married to Sebastian Gorka, another Breitbart contributor and former policy consultant to the Trump campaign. Sebastian Gorka has accused mainstream Muslim civil rights organizations like the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Council on American-Islamic Relations of using “subversive tactics” and having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

Speaking to the Family Research Council in June, Sebastian Gorka called the religious profiling of Muslims “a synonym for common sense.” When asked by The Intercept about Trump, Sebastian said Trump “is no fan of political correctness, he knows we are at war, and he wants to win. And my golly gosh isn’t that a refreshing attitude!”

When the Trump administration recently refused to acknowledge how Jews were the primary and specific targets of the Holocaust, it was White House deputy assistant Gorka who called the controversy over that decision as “asinine.” Perhaps it is no coincidence then that Gorka — who was born in London to Hungarian émigré parents — has repeatedly been photographed wearing a medal associated with the Order of Vitéz, an overtly anti-Semitic chivalric organization that collaborated with the Nazi regime during World War II.

Writing for Policy Mic, Tom McKay offered some additional context on the order’s founder, Miklós Horthy:

Horthy, the Hungarian regent that [the order] supported, held a profound animus for the Jews of Hungary. “Concerning the Jewish question, for all my life, I have been an anti-Semite,” Horthy once wrote. His government allied with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, enacted anti-Semitic laws, brutally cleansed Hungarian Jews, enslaved others in work details and collaborated with German authorities to deport them to death camps.

“Many supporters of the Horthy regime were enamored by the Nazis and Hitler, and the ‘knights’ were especially so,” Balogh told LobeLog. “After 1948, one wouldn’t have bragged about his father being a ‘vitéz.’ Lately, however, especially since 2010, it has become fashionable again to boast about such ‘illustrious’ ancestors.”

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/key-trump-adviser-has-disturbing-ties-anti-semitic-groups

Gorka, who was named deputy assistant to the president in January and who worked for Steve Bannon at Breitbart, collaborated with members of a neo-Nazi political party in Hungary and even wears a medal associated with the nation’s Nazi collaborationist regime during World War II.He’s also on Bannon’s controversial Strategic Initiatives Group, a pseudo think tank within the White House that is likely an attempt to supercede the National Security Council when it makes recommendations that Bannon and Trump don’t like.

A recent investigation by Forward details how Gorka has close ties to far-right Hungarian nationalists. In 2007, he collaborated with former prominent members of the deeply anti-Semitic Jobbik Party in Hungary to form a new political party, the New Democratic Coalition, which failed to take off. Gorka also published articles in a racist and anti-Semitic newspaper and attended events with “some of Hungary’s most notorious extreme-right figures,” Forward discovered.

There is no question that the Jobbik Party is overtly anti-Semitic. The party was formed in 2003 and went on to ride a nationalist wave in Hungary. In 2013, Al Jazeera put out a shocking documentary on rising fascism in the country that has a nationalist leader, Viktor Orban, who is sympathetic to the far-right wing of the nationalist spectrum (and whom Gorka advised). The film relates how neo-Nazi paramilitary militias intimidated and even murdered Roma people, sometimes occupying Roma villages. The country also had de facto labor camps where Roma were forced to do manual labor for less than the minimum wage.

The last time Roma and Jews were sent to labor camps, the Nazis were doing it.

“Hungary’s fascist past is undergoing a makeover,” says the narrator. Rallies in central Budapest commemorate the Nazi SS units that helped Hungary send hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths at Auschwitz.

In 2012, one Jobbik member of parliament proposed a bill to create a registry of Jews in Hungary. Gorka’s collaboration with fierce bigots like those in the Jobbik Party, along with his previous political work in Hungary, elevated a far-right, racist ideology, spreading hate and anti-Semitism. Now he’s working in the White House.

Donald Trump has often had a strange aversion to explicitly calling out anti-Semitic acts, which have quickly increased since Trump won the presidency, despite having a son-in-law who is Jewish and a daughter in Ivanka who converted. The president has come under scrutiny after failing to name Jews as victims of the Holocaust and taking days to say anything about a rash of bomb threats to Jewish synagogues and community centers and vandalism at Jewish cemeteries. Most recently, Trump appeared to imply that these anti-Semitic attacks were the "reverse,” staged to make Trump and his supporters look bad.

Some think one reason for Trump’s troubling silence and conspiracy theories is that he doesn’t want to alienate some of his biggest fans, who are neo-Nazi members of the racist so-called alt-right. Another possible explanation is that anti-Semitism coming from the heart of his administration is guiding his moves.

The influence that Gorka, also an Islamophobe, has in the Trump administration is troubling considering the hateful and bigoted company he keeps there. Bannon is a prime example of hate, but another key adviser, Stephen Miller, is a young and outspoken nationalist and Islamophobe (who’s Jewish). Before joining Trump’s campaign, Miller worked for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom Bannon credited with laying the groundwork for America’s populist nationalist movement long before Trump entered politics.

Bannon has sought to ally the Trump administration with far-right nationalist movements in Europe, including those in England, France and Austria. Breitbart has an office in London and is setting up branches in Paris and Berlin, seeking to propel nationalism in those countries in much the same way it does in the U.S.

Trump’s top adviser has commended Vladimir Putin for Russia’s nationalism, saying that “strong countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong neighbors.” Hungary, a fiercely nationalist country with an increasingly friendly relationship with Russia, would fit that description.

Hungary just began building a second wall at its border with Serbia and Croatia to keep out migrants, having already built a barbed wire fence there in 2015. (Breitbart London cheered the fence’s “effectiveness” that year.) The government is suing the European Union for imposing a refugee quota on Hungary. Orban wants to ban all refugees in his country, having said that migrants are “poison” and that “every single migrant poses a public security and terror risk.”

Unsurprisingly, Orban called Trump’s security policies “valiant.” After Trump’s inauguration, Orban sent the new president a congratulatory letter praising his policies of border control and migration. The two nations have “a historic opportunity to shape the future together,” he wrote. Trump responded by saying that the U.S. and Hungary can overcome challenges “through partnership” and achieve “common goals.”..

In his first days as president, Donald Trump has added two Breitbart staffers to his administration, highlighting his bond with the populist right-wing news outfit formerly run by his chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Julia Hahn,who covered immigration issues for Breitbart through an aggressively anti-immigration lens, has been named special assistant to the president, a source with knowledge of the matter told CNNMoney.

Sebastian Gorka, the site's national security editor and a policy consultant on Trump's presidential campaign, has joined the Trump White House in a yet-to-be-announced role, a source with knowledge of the matter confirmed. Business Insider, which was first to report the move, said Gorka will likely have a role on Trump's National Security Council.

The Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment regarding the hires. But the moves indicate that Breitbart, which praised and defended Trump throughout his campaign, now has an open door to his White House.

Hahn's hire also threatens to antagonize House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republicans at a moment when they are looking to establish common ground with the new administration.

A former executive producer for Laura Ingraham, Hahn gained notoriety at Breitbart for attacking Ryan on immigration policy. In December 2015, she and Bannon co-authored an article titled "Paul Ryan Betrays America" in which they accused Ryan of "a total and complete sell-out of the American people masquerading as an appropriations bill."

When Hahn asked a panel of lawmakers around the same time if they would support a suspension of Muslim immigration into the United States, Rep. Raul Labrador, an Idaho Republican, shot back: "I don't answer questions from you, because you are not a truthful reporter."

Gorka, who has been with Breitbart since 2014, is the author of "Defeating Jihad" and served as a paid policy consultant on Trump's presidential campaign. He was also a Fox News contributor up until his appointment in the Trump administration.

At Breitbart, Gorka was an aggressive critic of President Barack Obama's handling of ISIS and other terrorist groups, often arguing that the Obama administration empowered America's enemies.

Gorka is also awaiting a court hearing in Arlington County Criminal Court relating to a January 2016 incident in which he was stopped by Transportation Security Administration officers for going through security with a 9mm handgun in his carry-on bag. That incident was confirmed by TSA and by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which confiscated his weapon and charged him with a weapons offense.

Court filings show that Gorka is now awaiting adjudication in Arlington County Criminal Court after accepting a guilty verdict without admission of guilt, or what's known as an Alford plea. The court date is scheduled for February 3.

Gorka, his defense attorney, White House press secretary Sean Spicer and White House spokesperson Hope Hicks all did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding Gorka's pending court appearance.

cnn

===

wikifluff

Sebastian L. Gorka (Hungarian: Gorka Sebestyén) is a national security professional specializing in irregular warfare, including counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. He is a full-time Professor of Strategy and Irregular Warfare and Vice President for National Security Support of the Institute of World Politics^[2] in Washington, DC and the Chairman of Threat Knowledge Group. Previously he served as the Major General Matthew C. Horner Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University.^[3] He is a founding member of the Council for Emerging National Security Affairs^[4] and has served as the Associate Dean for Congressional Affairs and Relations to the Special Operations Community at the National Defense University. Gorka is also currently affiliated with USSOCOM’s Joint Special Operations University, and ^[5] is a regular instructor for the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School in Fort Bragg, as well as the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. He has testified before Congress^[6] on the threat of ISIS and Global Jihadism and briefed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Intelligence Council, the National Counterterrorism Center and the Commandant of the Marine Corps.^[7] Born in the United Kingdom to Hungarian parents, Gorka became an American citizen in 2012.^[8]

Gorka is the author of 2016 New York Times bestseller ^[9] book, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War published by Regnery.^[8] He is a two-time recipient of the US Department of Defense Joint Civilian Service Commendation, first awarded to him the by US Special Operation Command.^{[10][non-primary} ^source ^needed]

[hide]

Early life and education:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Sebastian Gorka is the son of Paul and Susan Gorka who escaped from Communist Hungary during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He was born and raised in the U.K. where he attended St Benedict's School, Ealing and received his first degree from the University of London.^[7]

Gorka married Katharine Cornell Gorka on July 6, 1996 in Hungary.^[11]

Gorka is a graduate of the University of London where he received his Bachelor of Arts honors degree in Philosophy and Theology. At university, he joined the British Territorial Army reserves, serving in the Intelligence Corps. ^[12]

He holds a Masters in International Relations and Diplomacy from the Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration. After that institution was renamed the Corvinus University of Budapest, he went on to study for, and receive a Ph.D. in Political Science, writing a dissertation on the strategic differences between the politically motivated terrorism of the Cold War and religiously motivated terrorists such as Al Qaeda.^[13]

Gorka was also a Kokkalis Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.^[citation ^needed]

Gorka was detained January 2016 at the Ronald Reagan Airport in Washington D.C. for attempting to board a plane with a handgun in his luggage. Gorka was charged with a weapons offense.^[14][15]

Career:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, Gorka left the U.K. to work in the first freely-elected government of the newly democratic Republic of Hungary. In Budapest he served in the Ministry of Defense for 5 years working on international security issues and Hungary’s future accession into NATO.

In 1997 Gorka was awarded the second Partnership for Peace International Research Fellowship at the NATO Defense College in Rome.^[16]

In 1998 Gorka was awarded the Kokkalis Fellowship at Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government. At Harvard he became one of the founding members of the Council on Emerging National Security Affairs, CENSA.^[4] Before starting the second year of his public policy fellowship, he was hired by the RAND Corporation in the fields of transatlantic security and counterterrorism. In 2000 Gorka moved back to Budapest to establish and head the Center for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Democracy, where he continued his work on security.^[citation ^needed]

After the September 11th attacks of 2001, Gorka became a public figure in Hungary when he was asked by Magyar Televízió, the Hungarian National Television Corporation, to provide live commentary on the events occurring in the United States, and then later in Afghanistan and around the world as part of the Global War on Terror. One year later he was asked to serve as an official expert on the parliamentary investigatory committee created to uncover the Communist background of the new Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy. It had been revealed, soon after the 2002 general election, that Medgyessy, who had served in the Communist government prior to 1989, had been an undercover officer in the Secret Police, the organization which had maintained the previous dictatorship and helped crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.^[17] Gorka rejected Medgyessy's claims of having not spied on people when he was a secret policemen.^[18]

After the committee's mandate elapsed, Gorka and his wife Katharine Gorka established The Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security, an independent think-tank. The group focuses on issues of international security and democratic transition in post-dictatorial regions. Katharine Gorka had been the director of the USAID-funded Democracy Network program for Central and Eastern Europe. All through the 1990s and early 2000s, Gorka was a contributor to the Jane's Defence Weekly group of publications out of the U.K., writing for Jane's Intelligence Review and others.^[citation ^needed]

In 2004, Gorka joined the faculty of the new US initiative, the Program for Terrorism and Security Studies (PTSS), a Defense Department-funded program based out of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmsich-Partenkirchen, Germany.^[19] At the same time Gorka began to teach for USSOCOM's Joint Special Operations University, MacDill Air Force Base. He served on the faculty of the PTSS until he and his family moved to the United States in 2008. In America Gorka joined the US Defense Department as a professor for the National Defense University, Fort McNair, Washington D.C. There he taught on the ASD(SOLIC)-funded Masters Program in Irregular Warfare and Counterterrorism as part of the Combating Terrorism Fellowship Program,^[20] where he was named Associate Dean of Congressional Affairs and Relations to the Special Operations Community. Gorka then left government service in order to assume the privately-endowed Major General Horner Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University.^[3] In August 2016, he joined The Institute of World Politics on a full-time basis as Professor of Strategy and Irregular Warfare, and also serves as Vice President for National Security Support.^[2]

With his wife, Katharine Gorka, he also runs the private Virginia-based company Threat Knowledge Group. TKG provides training and strategic support to the armed services, the FBI, elements of the US Intelligence Community, and state and local law enforcement.^[21] He is co-author and editor of several reports through TKG.

Between 2011-2013 Gorka taught US National Security and Foreign Policy for Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy.^[5]

Since 2014 Gorka has acted as editor for National Security Affairs for the Breitbart News Network.^[22]

Since 2015 he has maintained TheGorkaBriefing.com, a site which hosts his public analyses and media interviews.^[23] Gorka has appeared on the BBC and CNN, and is a regular guest on the FOX News Channel, the FOX Business Network, WABC’s the John Batchelor Show, the Sam Sorbo Show, and the Lars Larson Show.^[citation ^needed]

Policy Positions:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Gorka presenting his testimony, "Ten Years On: The Evolution of the Terrorist Threat," to the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, June 22, 2011

In his articles, Congressional testimony,[[24]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Gorka#cite_note-:0-24) and his 2016 book, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War,^[8] Gorka claims that since 9/11 America has become superb at applying force against high value terrorist targets, whether through the use of drone strikes or Special Operations raids, but is still losing the war against what he terms the "Global Jihadi Movement" (GJM). This lack of success is the result, according to Gorka, of America failing to counter the ideology of Global Jihadism and the Obama Administration's belief that terrorism is the result of unemployment and lack of education instead of ideology.

Gorka has argued^[25] that America acts astrategically due in part to the influence of the Cold War. According to Gorka, This lack of strategic behavior has made decision makers and strategists reactive instead of proactive and fundamentally incapable of prioritizing American national interests.

Gorka has claimed that Carl von Clausewitz's writings (or flawed interpretations of his works) have had a negative impact on the Western understanding of unconventional warfare.^[26]

In the post-2001 debate between the pro- and anti-Counter-insurgency (COIN) circles, Gorka has argued that COIN and FM 3-24, or the so-called "Petraeus Manual", were un-American approaches and fatally flawed choices for both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gorka has frequently criticized^[27] the intrusion of politics and what he describes as political correctness into counterterrorism practices and policies. Gorka has claimed that both the Bush and Obama administrations have excised mention of religion when analyzing and discussing the terrorist threat, which he says has made America less capable of defeating groups like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. Gorka has advocated the teaching of works of key Jihadist theorists within the military and law enforcement communities and the inclusion of their Enemy Threat Doctrine within the intelligence cycle.^[24]

Publications:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War (ISBN 978-1-62157-457-6), Regnery Publishing, 2016.
With Katharine Gorka, "ISIS: The Threat to the United States," Threat Knowledge Group, November 2015
"Understanding the Enemy" in Special Warfare, Volume 27, Issue 2, April–June 2014.
With David Kilcullen "An Actor-Centric Theory of War" in: Joint Force Quarterly 60, January 2011.
With Christopher Harmon, Andrew Pratt (Co-editors) Toward a Grand Strategy Against Terrorism (ISBN 978-0-07-352779-6), McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2010.
With David Kilcullen “Who’s Winning the Battle for Narrative? Al-Qaida versus the United States and its Allies” in: Influence Warfare, Edited by James J. F. Forest, Praeger, 2009.
"Understanding history's seven stages of Jihad" in: CTC Sentinel 2, 10, October 2009.
With Stephen Sloan "Contextualizing Counterinsurgency" in Journal of International Security Affairs 16, Spring 2009.
Content and End-State-Based Alteration in the Practice of Political Violence since the End of the Cold War: The difference between the terrorism of the Cold War and the terrorism of al Qaeda: The rise of the “transcendental terrorist”, PhD dissertation, 2007.

Congressional Testimony:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Subject Matter Expert Briefing, House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, US Congress, January 8, 2016^[6]
Ten Years On: The Evolution of the Terrorist Threat , House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, US Congress, June 22, 2011^[28]