Editor’s Note: This is the third part of a multi-part series of an Exclusive Interview with former Deputy Assistant to the President, Dr. Sebastian Gorka. In this series, Dr. Gorka talks about the MAGA platform and current problems in the White House. In part one, Dr. Gorka discussed his freedom from the constraints of the White House and how the president can surround himself with people committed to the MAGA agenda. In part two he discussed what is happening with the Obama holdovers in the White House and lessons he has learned.
Mark Angelides: I know it’s a big topic for yourself: Radical Islam. You mentioned before that the fact that this wasn’t even mentioned in the President’s speech regarding Afghanistan. What strategies do you think that a Jacksonian style government would put into place to deal with the threat of radical Islam in America?
Dr. Gorka: OK, well, look, I highlighted a strategy in my book Defeating Jihad. So, number one, we are looking and I when I use the word ‘we’, this is the MAGA movement, the President, people outside the building…we are looking for smart foreign policy, smart national security.
The only reason I got involved in Breitbart to begin with, I was teaching at the Marine Corps University, the only reason I said yes to Steve with regard to running his national security stuff, is the absolute paucity of national security papers on the right, a couple of years ago in America. Because if you said ‘national security’ and the word ‘conservative’, you were forced to choose between two options, either you had to be an isolationist libertarian who said ‘forget everyone else, I don’t care,’ or you had to be a rabid neo-conservative invading other people’s countries to try and turn them into Nirvana. And I said well that’s asinine, I mean national security’s more than a binary choice between two extremes; we want to be smart about it.
The President thinks it’s fundamentally un-American to invade other people’s countries. This nation was born in rejection of imperialism and colonialism, that’s what the break with King George, was all about. As such, we stand for eternal principles as laid down in 1776’s revolution, based upon natural law, the concept that we are endowed with rights by our creator, not by government, but we’re not going to impose that system upon anybody.
We’ll help other people like us who want to work with us to fight their own wars, but we will not fight their wars for them. That’s the biggest change. So, if you’re Egypt, we’ll help you kill the Jihadis and help you secure your nation but we’re not going to invade Egypt and occupy it like the Bush era and neo-conservatives did with Iraq and Afghanistan. So that’s a massive change, and that’s why the recent Afghan speech, for me, was the catalyst for me moving outside the building.
Domestically, and I talk about this in Defeating Jihad as well. Domestically, we have to understand who the enemy is. Number one, political correctness must be jettisoned and the delightful thing about the President is he’s Kryptonite for political correctness. I mean the first time I met him in the summer of 2015 in his office in New York, you realize that this guy just absolutely detests the antithetical to common sense political correctness that has become out of control in western civilization, so number one, you talk honestly about the threat. You don’t call jihadis, whether it’s the Manchester bombers or 7/7 or Boston or Orlando, we don’t call them poor, poor boys who are alienated from civilization and their fathers didn’t hug them and they’re unemployed. No, they’re evil, they are evil incarnate. And the President has said as such. In front of the leaders of the Muslim world in Riyadh, he called this an evil ideology that must be struck out of the houses of worship and the houses of worship and out of the Muslim community.
So number one, we talk truthfully about the threat and we understand that it is a totalitarian ideology. It’s not some socio- economic victimhood complex, it is a totalitarian ideology which has a connectivity to the Nazis of World War II, to the Communists of the Cold War. No, they don’t worship Karl Marx and they don’t worship Hitler, but they do worship a utopian, religiously fuelled vision of a caliphate and they are totalitarians because unless you bow to them, they will kill you. So, number one, we have to be honest about the threat.
Secondly, domestically, we have to reinvigorate our human intelligence gathering tools. In America unfortunately, we are obsessed with technology. We think the latest widget, the latest piece of technology, the latest algorithm is going to save us. No. This is irregular warfare, at the end of the day irregular warfare is not a function of data mining.
Human intelligence is crucial to effective counterintelligence. We have to prevent these attacks before they occur; it’s no longer a question of mowing the grass, we need to be looking for the individual terrorist. What we have to do is identify, neutralize the ideologues, the people who recruit and pump the ideas out, who distribute the lectures; that’s the center of gravity, the ideology.
Then you have to be very honest about who these people are. We had very effective tools against communists and fascists: if you subscribed to those ideas and acted upon them, you were deemed to be an enemy of the state, deemed to be a threat to all that is decent in Western Democracy; we have to do the same with Jihadis. If you subscribe to propagate Jihadi ideology, you’re a national security threat and should be dealt with as such. and you should be prosecuted for inciting violence.
And then lastly, the long game. Because we can destroy individual organizations whether it’s Al Qaeda or ISIS, but this war will be won when the ideology of Jihad is delegitimized. We’ve got to make the Black Flag of Jihad as repugnant globally today as the Swastika was following our victory in World War 2. This is fundamentally a counter-propaganda war, and with those good Muslims who are on the front line, such as King Abdullah of Jordan, and President el-Sisi in Egypt, we have the requisite individuals who can help destroy the message of Jihadis.
Look out for the final part, tomorrow., where Dr. Gorka discusses the North Korea situation and Brexit right here on Liberty Nation.
