In this episode, we sit down with Sebastian Gorka, host of America First, former strategist for President Donald Trump, and author of “The War for America’s Soul,” to discuss narratives surrounding the Russia-Ukraine War, the fog of disinformation, the Twitter Files, and the politicization of America’s intelligence agencies.
“Sending unaccountable pallets of cash to any country is dumb. I don’t care whether it’s Afghanistan, Ukraine, or whether it’s Iraq. A, it’s not good geopolitics, and B, it smacks of corruption,” says Gorka. “[But] this argument I get from ‘conservatives,’ ‘well, Ukraine is so corrupt.’ Yeah, so is Washington, D.C. Should Chinese tanks be rolling up Constitution Avenue because we have a corrupt administration? Of course not. We are a country made up of people, not politicians.”
Both neocons and neo-Buchananites have taken extreme positions on the Russia-Ukraine War, Gorka argues.
“The sad thing is we don’t have these discussions even on the right—forget about left and right. We don’t have a slightly nuanced discussion about countries invading each other in Europe,” Gorka says.
According to Gorka, the United States must bear part of the moral burden for what has unfolded in Ukraine. “We, the Americans, convinced post-communist Ukraine to give up all its nuclear weapons. To give them to who? To Moscow.”
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview:https://www.theepochtimes.com/sebastian-gorka-on-russia-ukraine-war-narratives-political-prisoners-in-america-and-the-politicization-of-the-intel-community_4984918.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Sebastian Gorka, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Sebastian Gorka:
Thank you, Jan. It’s been a while. It’s great to be back.
Mr. Jekielek:
It really has been too long. You’ve been frequenting a lot of these Twitter spaces.
Mr. Gorka:
It’s not good for my insomnia.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s unbelievable the long hours that some people have put into this whole thing. Of course, part of the reason is you’ve been following these Twitter File releases exposing the weaponization of these agencies who manufacture and create perception.
Mr. Gorka:
Right.
Mr. Jekielek:
Aside from the censorship, there’s another other side. I want to talk about all this. Before we go there, though, something I don’t cover a lot is the Russia-Ukraine War. Part of the reason is this fog of information war that covers all of this, and it’s very hard to understand what’s going on. The propaganda is dominant all over the place. Why don’t we just start with this, and why don’t you tell me what is going on.
Mr. Gorka:
Yes. I would say propaganda, absolutely, but also rank ignorance and dogmatic ideology. Many moons ago before I joined the Trump Administration, I was a professor at the Marine Corps University. Someone called Steve Bannon heard me give a speech about Russia at a conference. Then, he called me to his office and said, “I’d like you to be the National Security Editor for Breitbart.”
I didn’t need another job. I threw out a stupid number. Unfortunately, he said, “Yes.” So, I became the National Security Editor for Breitbart. One of the reasons I actually accepted his offer was because of the paucity of sophisticated, and I don’t even mean sophisticated, just slightly more than Neanderthal thinking when it comes to national security on the Right. For about 20 years now, if you’re a conservative and the issue of national security comes up, you have two options.
You can either be in the Neocon camp, with the Wolf Blitzers of the world, the Doug Feiths of the world, and the Cheneys and say, “We’re going to invade other countries and turn them into democracies at the end of a gun barrel,” which is, of course, absurd. Or, you’re a neo-Buchananite, Tucker Carlson adherent, who says, “Forget the rest of the world. They can go to hell in a handbasket. It’s irrelevant to us.”
My argument is, “It’s a little bit more complicated than that.” There is a whole panoply of options between telling everyone to go to hell, or invading those countries. I would like to see that level of slightly more sophisticated thinking when it comes to geopolitical issues. It is being reflected once again when it comes to Ukraine.
There are either the insane people like Lindsey Graham who say, “Send them U.S. battle tanks and deploy everything possible. It’s the ultimate test of Western civilization.” There are others like Tucker Carlson who say, “This is irrelevant. You are funding a neo-Nazi regime that’s fully corrupt. We should not give a damn about Ukraine, and they can just go up in flames.” No. Absolutely wrong.
This war, which is now past its 300th day, is very important to America. Why? Because former KGB colonels who are thugs and murderers invading any country, be they corrupt or not, is bad, especially a KGB colonel like Vladimir Putin, who for the last 20 years as president has been saying, “Not only Ukraine, but Poland and the Baltic States are illegitimate, fake nations that have no right to exist.” That’s not a good thing to even countenance, let alone allow to happen. On the flip side, sending tens of billions of dollars to Kiev with zero accountability in praxis is also not strategic.
I’ve said this from the beginning, and I wrote this in Breitbart. I wrote a piece saying, right at the get-go after the invasion, “America should be involved, not with troops, not with massive military involvement, but to provide, or to help to provide Warsaw Pact-era equipment from those NATO nations that have it, like Poland and Hungary.” Remember the MIG deal that was on the table, and then shot down by the White House. That makes sense because Ukraine needs weapons it knows how to use. It doesn’t need Patriot missile batteries that nobody in Ukraine knows how to handle. Give them Soviet-era equipment so they can fight for themselves. Give them ammunition because they need ammunition, especially artillery ammunition.
Then lastly, in terms of military involvement, let’s have zero real military involvement for the U.S. or NATO. Because we dominate the ISR domain, the Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance domain, with our satellites, provide Kiev with those intelligence target sets that allow them to extract the most damage on the invading forces by targeting them effectively. That’s what we should have been doing 300 days ago. That’s what we should be doing today. But, the idea that we ignore it or we deploy the 82nd Airborne, neither of those is good geopolitics.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well…
Mr. Gorka:
The sad thing is we don’t have these discussions, even on the Right, forget about the Left and Right. We don’t have a slightly nuanced discussion about, “Yes, countries are invading each other in Europe, what does that mean for America?”
Mr. Jekielek:
You know, of course, I’m Polish.
Mr. Gorka:
Yes.
Mr. Jekielek:
Most of my viewers know very well. One of the narratives that you hear is, “Supporting Ukraine, that’s a globalist position, and that this is what Russia is against.” What I say is, “ Poland is deeply committed to helping Ukraine, and Poland is definitely not a globalist country. Why?” Maybe the question we should ask is, “Why is Poland so committed to helping in this situation? Why is it worried about its border?” You suggested something a bit earlier. What is Russia’s history in the region? That’s also very important.
Mr. Gorka:
You know my story, as a child of those who suffered under communism. My father was an anti-communist after World War II, and was betrayed by Kim Philby, the British double agent, arrested, tortured, and at the age of 20, given a life sentence in a communist prison. He was liberated in the revolution of 1956. I bring a certain perspective to this as a Hungarian, or a descendant of a Hungarian family. Of course, the Poles are supporting Ukraine to the nth degree because they understand that they’re next.
This isn’t necessarily the recreation of the Soviet Union. We know the Russian Federation today has a GDP equivalent to Italy. But let’s remember what Vladimir Putin said about the 20th century. He made the great quote, “The greatest geopolitical tragedy of the last century was the loss of the Soviet Union.” So, if it’s not the recreation of the Soviet Union, it’s the recreation of a quasi-imperial Russia. That’s the history of Russia.
Whether it’s 21,000 Poles murdered in the Katyn Forest in World War II, whether it’s the children that were killed in Afghanistan by mines disguised as plastic toys, or whether it’s a maternity ward in Ukraine being shelled by the Russians today, this is the history of the Kremlin. It may no longer be a czarist regime, but it is an empire because this man acts as an emperor. I’m not surprised the Poles understand, because they’ve been the victims of history for centuries, whether it’s the Germans or the Russians.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s pick up some of the narratives that are out there. One of them is, “This is NATO aggression, pure and simple.” NATO picked up Poland and a whole bunch of other states right on the periphery of Russia. There must be some truth to that.
Mr. Gorka:
Did they pick them up? Let’s dismantle this. Let’s dissect this. This is where the moral equivalency argument comes back. This is Michael Moore and Chomsky saying, “The West is just the East. There’s no difference between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Everybody’s evil.” Garbage, garbage. It may have been the Warsaw Pact for friendship and cooperation, but what was it? These were satrapies. These were captive nations. Hungary did not have an option to join the Warsaw Pact in 1955, and neither did Poland. The Baltic States were swallowed up by Stalin in World War II.
What is NATO? It’s a voluntary association. It’s like joining a club. You can apply for NATO membership, but any nation that applies must demonstrate to the North Atlantic Council, to the extant members, that they bring something of value to the collective defense of the club. They have to contribute to the collective defense. Since when is it our job to say, “Nations like Hungary or Poland should not have been allowed?”
If they want to join, they get to join. That’s not the encirclement of the Russian Federation. Let’s be clear, the whole argument collapses like a house of cards when you say, “Sorry. We’re talking about Russia, a nation with 11 time zones and four-and-a-half thousand nuclear warheads. Is Lilliputian Lithuania joining NATO a threat to the 4,000 nuclear warheads of this nation with 11 time zones that span from Kaliningrad to the Chinese border? Again, it’s ignorance, a woeful ignorance of geopolitics.
Then lastly, there’s a moral aspect. Of course, geopolitics should be something done with cold calculation, but America has always been that shining city on the hill. You know, we are the only nation in the world that is founded on the principle of individual liberty and freedom. No other nation has that. What did we say to Ukraine in the 1990s? Let’s remind everybody. With the Budapest memorandum that was signed by the U.S. government and vouchsafed by the British government, we, the Americans, convinced post-Communist Ukraine to give up all its nuclear weapons to give them to who? To Moscow.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ukraine was the second-largest nuclear nation in the world. It had more nukes than China. It was only second to the Soviet Union. Oh, no, sorry, the third after us. The Soviet Union, America, and Ukraine. We didn’t want them to have nukes. We wanted to control the club of nuclear forces. So, we said, “Give them to the Kremlin, give them back to Russia, and we will vouchsafe your security. We will protect Ukraine.”
What did they do? The idiots believed us. They trusted us, a democratic administration. So, our reputation is on the line because we told them, “Don’t keep the nuclear weapons.” Here’s this tragic reality. There never would’ve been a Russian invasion if Ukraine still had those nuclear missiles. We told them to get rid of them, so we bear a moral burden, as well.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about further narratives.
Mr. Gorka:
Yes.
Mr. Jekielek:
“America has lost its moral high ground.” Look at what has happened. We’re actually going to talk about this later in more detail. There’s a lot of questions about the goodwill of various key American intelligence agencies and law enforcement. “Isn’t all of this just part of this corruption that’s being unearthed?” This is what a lot of people are saying and are concerned with. This is also what the Kremlin is saying.
Mr. Gorka:
Of course, good information operations and good propaganda only works if it is based upon a kernel of truth. If it’s fully fabricated, then it’s easy to shoot down. But yes, we have a very serious problem in this country. For example, as the son of a political prisoner in a communist regime I never believed that I could sit here in America as an American citizen and say, “We have political prisoners.” We have political prisoners less than two miles from where we are sitting right now, Jan.
People who were targeted by the FBI after January 6 and charged with misdemeanors like parading in Congress were kept incarcerated, often in solitary, for more than two years without an arraignment. Now, the U.S. Constitution is clear. Every American, Republican, or Democrat, or Independent, has the right to rapid justice. Two years behind bars before you see a judge is political persecution. So yes, we have a mighty problem today. We have this weaponization of the most powerful intelligence and law enforcement architecture in the world, whether it’s the FBI, the CIA, or DHS, if we look at the Twitter Files.
For me, this is personal. The viewers of your show may not know this. Before I joined the administration, my wife and I ran a company. It was the only company that had an external contract with the FBI for counterterrorism training on ISIS and Al Qaeda. I would travel 10, 15,000 miles a month going from one FBI field office to another FBI field office.
My specialty was Jihadi ideology, and lecturing FBI agents, intelligence analysts, and SOS support staff. I’ve lectured probably more than 6,000 FBI agents and analysts before I joined the White House. For me, every time I arrived at a new field office, the ASAC, the senior agent, would meet me, give me a nice challenge coin for that office, and a little pin for my lapel. I was proud to help the preeminent law enforcement agency in the world.
If the FBI knocked on my door tonight, Jan, I would say, “Go to hell. Talk to my attorneys.” If they lose me, if they lose Sebastian Gorka, who worked in the White House, and who still has a top secret clearance, then we have trouble at the Hoover building. We now have the evidence.
We have an FBI that deploys 20 armed agents in body armor to serve a warrant against a pro-life father of seven, who has had his misdemeanor assault charge, outside an abortion clinic, dropped months previously, but they raid his home as his children are screaming, “Don’t take our daddy away.” That’s fine in North Korea. That’s fine in Venezuela. It is not okay in America. Sadly, that’s what the FBI has become.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is the question that a lot of people have. You mentioned that these are some of the discussions that people are having on the Right. “Was Ukraine a place for laundering American money?” I think right now the tally is $110 billion put towards supporting Ukraine. It’s not clear what the oversight is. These are very real questions.
Mr. Gorka:
Yes, these are. Absolutely. I stand by what I wrote more than 300 days ago when the war started. “Sending unaccountable pallets of cash to any country is dumb. I don’t care whether it’s Afghanistan, the Ukraine, or whether it’s Iraq. A; it’s not good geopolitics, and B; it’s smacks of corruption.” I don’t want to make excuses for anyone. I think Zelensky is a great leader. I think his regime is very problematic.
This is the same country where Hunter Biden received $83,000 from one of the biggest Ukrainian energy companies that was eminently corrupt for a no-show job in a sector he had no experience in. This is the country where Joe Biden extorted the government saying, “I’m going to hold back a billion dollars worth of trade credits if you don’t fire the chief prosecutor, who by the way, is investigating the company that gave my son $83,000 a month for a no-show job.” This isn’t Switzerland. This isn’t Vanuatu. This isn’t Belgium. This is a problematic country, but it is still a geopolitical country, which by the way, has also suffered greatly.
People ask me, “What is the end state of this conflict?” I’ll tell you what the end state is. Ukraine will fight, not to the last man, Ukraine will fight to the last 12-year-old who can lift an AK-47, after the Holodomor in which Stalin killed upwards of six, seven million Ukrainians, and literally starved them to death. Ukraine is not going to negotiate a peace. They will fight forever.
Ultimately, irrespective of the levels of corruption and how stupid, or corrupt, the Biden administration is, there’s one argument I like to make. If 1776 matters to you as an American, as a conservative, guess what? Ukraine is fighting their 1776 by getting rid of despotic influence and invading forces. Be they either red coats or the troops of the Russian Federation, there is an analogy here.
And yes, they’re corrupt, but so is Washington. Washington DC under the current administration is a swamp that is putrid. Does that mean I’m fine with China invading? This is the argument I get from conservatives, “Well, Ukraine is so corrupt.” Yes, so is Washington DC. Should Chinese tanks be rolling up Constitution Avenue, because we have a corrupt administration? Of course not.
We’re a country made up of people, not politicians. If Kiev is corrupt, okay, but there are tens of millions of people. There are children. There are refugees. There is a moral content, as well, which shouldn’t drive everything we do geopolitically. But it is also an aspect that should inform our response. But tens of billions of dollars with no accountability, no, that’s not so smart.
Mr. Jekielek:
There is another narrative, which also has truth to it. In the east of Ukraine, many of those people are primarily Russian speakers. In many cases, they’re Russian. In many cases they’re amenable to some kind of Russian rule. Why not just let those regions be taken, and call it a day?
Mr. Gorka:
On that issue, I will defer to somebody who actually has knowledge on the ground. One of my favorite international podcasts are two former men of the Left. The podcast is called TRIGGERnometry, and it’s co-hosted by Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin. Konstantin was born in the Soviet Union. He’s an ethnic Jew who has married a Ukrainian who visits Ukraine regularly.
I had him on my show recently, America First, where he said even those members of his family who are Russian-speaking, ethnic Russians from the East, after the first three months of this invasion have totally turned on the Kremlin. They are for pro-Ukrainian sovereignty. Now, if that’s what I’m hearing from somebody who actually has family in the region, who’s been there since the war erupted, I tend to give that credence. The idea is that there are ethnic minorities and there are referendums being held. Yes. Referendums run by who? By the Kremlin. Are we seriously going to take at face value a referendum taken by Kremlin forces?
Then lastly, we’ve had a taboo in Europe for 70 years, since the cessation of hostilities in 1945. We said, “Aggrandizement of a nation’s territory through the use of force is illegal.” You can’t just expand territory by invading it and taking it, which is what they did in Crimea, which is what they did in South Ossetia, which is what they did in Abkhazia, which is what they’ve done with the frozen conflict in Moldova. This is the SOP, standard operating procedure. It’s self determination, yes. But the use of force by a greater nation, militarily, to territorially expand, we were supposed to put that to bed after 1945. I don’t care what ethnicity certain individual groups are, taking them by force is never correct.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s often framed as a U.S. proxy war. They’ll say during the Orange Revolution there was a pro-American government installed. There is definitely a significant American influence.
Mr. Gorka:
Absolutely.
Mr. Jekielek:
I don’t think anyone would doubt that.
Mr. Gorka:
Absolutely. I am aware of the idea that it was inorganic, that it was all engineered. Yes, there were problems with U.S. government involvement. Beyond that, there are problems with George Soros and the Orange Revolution kind of NGO activity. At the end of the day, I don’t think you can argue that Zelensky was put in place by external forces that were fully artificial. Again, even if the regime is corrupt, it doesn’t justify a nuclear power invading them. It doesn’t justify the shelling of maternity clinics.
It doesn’t justify what we heard of in Mariupol where families were found in mass graves, tied together with wire, the father, the mother, the children, we’ve seen this all before. We’ve seen this all before. Whether it’s Katyn, or whether it’s Yekaterinburg and what happened to the czar’s family, this is what they do. Irrespective of the entanglements and involvements of others, none of it can ever be used to justify the acts of the Kremlin.
Mr. Jekielek:
Another common thing that I hear from people is, “It’s the threat of the biolabs.”
Mr. Gorka:
Right. The biolabs, which are built by who? It drives me insane that people don’t take a second to do just a little bit of homework. You don’t have to use Google, use another search engine of your choice. Why are there bioweapon labs in Ukraine? Because the Soviet Union built them. We may have helped maintain them, to do research on defense against bioweapons. They were a legacy of what? The Soviet Union. Is it wise to find out what the Soviet Union was doing?
Let’s be clear. The Bioweapons Treaty of 1973 was brought between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Before the ink was dry on those signatures, the Soviet Union built a massive, illicit biological weapons empire. Read the autobiography of Ken Alibekov, who ran Biopreparat. Biopreparat was making anthrax, and was making biological weapons all through the ’70s and ’80s, with leaks and accidents. They were using the territory of other countries like Ukraine.
Back in the 1990s, the U.S. had an idea, “Okay, if Ukraine is now an independent country, and if they have these legacy capacities, why don’t we find out what the Soviets were doing in these labs? Perhaps it will help us create defensive technologies against further attacks, because who knows what’s going to happen with the proliferation of these technologies? Are they going to end up in the hands of Al-Qaeda or other actors? Let’s just find out what they were doing.” Are we really positing that the United States was building biological weapons in Ukraine to deploy against Russia? This hearkens back to the propaganda of the Cold War. Remember, this is now unclassified.
What were we told by a certain newspaper in India in the 1980s? “AIDS. Oh, that’s artificial. That was made at Fort Dietrich by the U.S. Army. That was a U.S. government bioweapon to be used against ethnic minorities in America.” That theory, that absurd conspiracy, still circulates today despite the fact it is now demonstrable that was planted in an Indian newspaper that was actually founded by the Kremlin in India as a propaganda tool.
This is classic Russian disinformation. The fact that conservatives are picking it up and running with it, again, stop with the moral equivalency. Did a murderous regime invade another country and take its territory? Yes. Does that regime have 5,000 nuclear weapons? Yes. Have they done this before? Yes. Is it a threat to all decent nations? Absolutely. Should we be involved with boots on the ground? No. But, just like with the French, remember, the United States would not be a free nation today if it weren’t for other nations.
We may have issues with the French, but if the French hadn’t got involved with their naval forces after 1776, this would still be a colony. There would be no United States. This land mass would be part of the Commonwealth of Great Britain. The French helped the founding fathers establish independence. Just like the French helped us, it is incumbent upon us to help those who are fighting for their freedom to win it for themselves, not to do it for them. The French didn’t fight for us, we did it for ourselves. Likewise, it’s up to the Ukrainians.
Mr. Jekielek:
I want to jump to talking about some of the things that were revealed through the Twitter Files. Before I go there, what has been described as United States imperialism, for example, the 20 years in Afghanistan seems to have not yielded much, aside from an incredible amount of spending, and frankly lives.
Mr. Gorka:
Yes.
Mr. Jekielek:
There is this sense that the U.S. turns out to not be this shining city on the hill that you and I want it to be, and need it to be, and maybe even is compared to other nations. That’s just the reality that a lot of people are facing through these disclosures. They may be asking themselves, “Hey, wait a second.” I’ll just use Russian disinformation as an example. Russian disinformation, as far as we can tell, has basically been a code word for Trump for the last however many years. When you say that, when you use those words, they almost lose their meaning. This is the reality we’re in right now. What do you think?
Mr. Gorka:
I would say to those who call us an empire, “Can you give me an example of an empire that uses force in other countries, and then voluntarily leaves and hands those countries over to nationals of that nation?” It’s a very strange empire, isn’t it? I understand that we can have fatigue with military adventurism in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, but who runs those countries now? Is it some kind of proconsul from America or is it an Afghan president? Is it an Iraqi president?
I would never justify the neo-conservatism of the 1990s. The idea that you can create democracy at the end of a gun barrel is insane. Nations have to want a representative government. You can’t force a representative government on anybody. If they want to live in a tribal system with 36 different languages, let them do that. Let them fight amongst themselves.
What did America do? It perceived a threat. It responded to a threat after 9/11 in Afghanistan and in Iraq. It made some fallacious statements about the connections between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. There were connections. But the idea that a Bathist, secular, Marxist regime would give weapons of mass destruction to a theocratic, Jihadi organization that hated Saddam as much as they hated us, again, is ignorant. It’s ignorant.
A threat was perceived. A faulty threat analysis was used to justify the use of force in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the end of the day, when it didn’t work out, what did we do? Are we still there? Did we say, “This is the 51st and the 52nd state of the United States,” which is what Russia does, which is all the Soviet Union does, which is what real empires do, whether it’s the Roman Empire or the Persian Empire? No.
We said, “Okay, guys. We’ve been here long enough. We’ve killed enough of Al-Qaeda. We’ve destroyed their training camps. We’ve tried to build civil society, with education for women, and stuff like that. It’s not going too well. Why don’t you choose your president, and we’re out of here?” They chose their own government. Empires don’t do that. So again, we need a little bit of sophistication when it comes to analysis that empires don’t invade other countries. Then, let the people of those countries choose their own governments.
Mr. Jekielek:
Just to be clear with Afghanistan, I don’t think the people chose the Taliban.
Mr. Gorka:
No, no, no. I’m talking about when they had their own president, like Karzai. No, I’m not talking about the disasters that happened with Biden’s removal. I’m talking about when we allowed them to elect their own president, Hamid Karzai. The same in Iraq. When that happens, empires don’t do that. Empires don’t allow you to have your own election. What happened with the Taliban, yes, sadly, was not an election. The routing of U.S. forces and the cost of 13 U.S. war fighters murdered in that terrorist bombing was appalling. I’m specifically talking in reference to what happened to the sovereignty of those nations after our military action.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is how we can segue into this part, talking about the realities of our agencies. What people would say is that the Afghani government couldn’t exist without the U.S. support. Effectively, it was a part of the U.S. empire. They would say that about any other scenario, of which there are more than one, that exists in that kind of a structure. This is looking at some of the activities of some of our agencies that are being unearthed with the Twitter Files, not just through Russiagate.
Mr. Gorka:
Right.
Mr. Jekielek:
You know?
Mr. Gorka:
Right.
Mr. Jekielek:
Then the same playbook seemingly applied to COVID, and subsequently other things. This does actually create very real questions for people. What I’m saying is, if there is this Russian and Chinese disinformation, it seems it’s a lot easier for them to do that now.
Mr. Gorka:
Oh, absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt. Let’s look at what we’ve lived through in the last six years—Russian, Chinese, Iranian information operations. They just need to point at what’s happened in the last six years, and maybe embroidered to a minuscule extent. What has happened?
I did a short list on my weekly show on Newsmax of what we, as Americans, have witnessed in six years. A man who was elected by 64 million Americans once, then received more votes than any other incumbent president in history, my former boss, President Trump, was accused of colluding with Russia, was accused of tax fraud, was accused of misogyny, was accused of being Islamophobe, was impeached, not once, was impeached twice after he left office, and was targeted by the Southern District of New York’s prosecutor for tax fraud. Then, he had his home, which is under 24-hour Secret Service protection, raided by armed agents of the FBI on some spurious classified document charge.
By the way, for those who aren’t familiar with it, every president maintains the highest security clearance till they die. Jimmy Carter still has TS/SCI clearance. It’s weird, but he does. What is this idea that the president can’t have classified information, even after he leaves office, especially when he declares the documents related to the Russia collusion hoax are declassified?
There’s only one person in the world who can declassify by fiat, and that is the President of the United States, which he did before he left office. So, if you just look at this string of events, and then the January 6 committee, and then the leaking of his IRS tax records, you can’t say the deep state is now a tinfoil hat conspiracy. It’s real.
Now, God bless Elon Musk, thanks to what we’re seeing in the Twitter File drops. Beyond even the FBI, when the Department of Homeland Security is literally telling the biggest news platform- social media app to delete these accounts, and to delete these tweets, you don’t need a lot of propaganda to say America is in a state of rank corruption. Of course, the conspiracy theories will flourish in this environment.
Don’t get me wrong, we have real problems that have to be looked at in this new Congress that a new Republican president has to get to the bottom of. But that still doesn’t mean that there is moral equivalency between us and a KGB murdering Kremlin, or theocratic murderers in Tehran, or a little rocket man in North Korea. That does not mean there are moral equivalencies between our regimes. That’s the important point.
Mr. Jekielek:
I cover the Chinese Communist Party, as you well know, on the show. We’ve talked about it extensively.
Mr. Gorka:
Yes.
Mr. Jekielek:
I cover the social credit system development.
Mr. Gorka:
Yes.
Mr. Jekielek:
“Hey, this is what we have in America.” What I usually say is, “Well, think of it this way. If we allow this course to continue, yes. That is where we’ll be, but we’re not there yet.”
Mr. Gorka:
Yes.
Mr. Jekielek:
What do you think about that?
Mr. Gorka:
Well, this is a real challenge for me. This is something I’ve been grappling with, especially as a child of those who lived under both fascism as children, and then communism. What is the word for what we are experiencing here in America? Here in America, it’s not the scenario of 1917, in St. Petersburg. It’s not 1948 in China, with the Kuomintang versus Mao. It’s not even North Korea with a cessation of hostilities, and then a DMZ. It’s very different.
This is very much like the frog in the pot of boiling water. We don’t have Laogai. We don’t have gulags here, but we do have cancel culture. You say the wrong thing and you will be canceled, but not by the state. This is important. It’s more of a fascistic model. It’s more like Mussolini with the co-optation of the corporate estate—that Twitter, that Facebook, that Bank of America will acquiesce behind closed doors to the demands of the regime.
Look at General Flynn, 32 years in uniform, director of Defense Intelligence, a combat veteran, American hero, his wife’s credit cards are canceled by her bank because she’s married to Mike Flynn. Now, that’s not George Orwell’s 1984. It’s some kind of composite. It’s some kind of hybrid where a private actor de-persons and deletes an individual for their political identity, not because they received the email from the White House, but because Mike Flynn’s wife deserves it.
So, I don’t know. Maybe, together we can struggle to find out what the new taxonomy is, what the new label is. This is communism or fascism, by osmosis, by transmogrification. It’s not revolutionary. It’s not by use of overt military force. It’s by the co-optation of power voluntarily in the private sector, in the party, and in the government.
Mr. Jekielek:
And, held together by what? By ideology in part and I suppose by financial interests as well.
Mr. Gorka:
It’s a very good question. Ideology on behalf of the political actors who are overtly political, whether it’s the DNC, whether it’s the Biden administration, or whether it’s the embedded ideologues at places like DHS or the FBI. On the flip side for the private sector is fear. Why does Coca-Cola, why does IBM, why does Microsoft give money to BLM?
I really don’t believe the CEOs of these companies are hardcore Marxists. It’s a protection racket. “We give you money, and you won’t come after us. You won’t accuse us of being misogynist members of the white patriarchy.” It’s fear on behalf of the corporations. “Here’s $5 million for BLM, for CRT training. Leave us alone.” So, it’s all of these things combined.
Mr. Jekielek:
And, it’s not universally applied. There’s millions upon millions, upon millions of people in this country that have no idea. They would listen to what you just said and say to themselves, “This man is crazy.”
Mr. Gorka:
“It’s not true.” Right. They say, “It’s not true.”
Mr. Jekielek:
We live in a free country, a land of great opportunity.
Mr. Gorka:
Right.
Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve had these opportunities. I’m an immigrant, and look what I’ve been able to accomplish.
Mr. Gorka:
Bootstraps.
Mr. Jekielek:
They’d actually be right, to some extent.
Mr. Gorka:
Until their daughter comes home from school and tells them, “A man was naked in the girls’ changing room, and he says he’s a girl.” You’re right, most people are normal. They’re not like you and me, Jan. They don’t eat, drink, and sleep politics. They’re sane.
We are mired in this. We’re addicted to it, or what have you. We see what’s going on. If you’re an average American, what’s your biggest concern? Making the car payment at the end of the month and making sure your kids have got a new pair of shoes for the next semester at school, which is as it should be.
I’m convinced of the fact that the transgender extremism, which is again actually a Neo-Marxist, Frankfurt School evolution of Left wing politics, is the denial of truth. If you read George Kennan’s, “The Long Telegram,” he said, “What is truth for the Soviet Union? It’s whatever the party deems to be useful as truth.” Again, these are all connected.
Mr. Jekielek:
Correct.
Mr. Gorka:
The transgender extremism saying, “Chromosomes don’t matter. A 14-year-old girl can have her breasts removed and become a boy. If you dare call her a girl, we will cancel you,” is going to be the red pilling of America. Tens of millions of people are going to say, “Excuse me?” Boston Children’s Hospital is doing hormone replacement therapy to transition young boys as young as 14. This is nuts.
Mr. Jekielek:
Here’s another one of these red pills. Millions of readers of The Epoch Times were people who realized one day after 2020 that the government had these powers of coercion telling you where you can go and what you can do, and then making sure what gets put in your body.
Mr. Gorka:
Right, and copied from China. Let’s be clear. If you look at Fauci, and if you look at the CDC, there was a template for what they were doing. They were saying, “China’s doing it right, locking down millions of people, closing businesses.” They willfully chose the CCP’s inhuman, dictatorial measures for response to a virus, which by the way, came from China, from that biodefense lab in Wuhan. I think you’re right.
These two moments, these two damascene moments that will red pill tens of millions, are the transgender extremism that denies reality, and people saying, “Oh, my gosh. What happened in America? A nation built on freedom, rugged individualism, the pioneer spirit, they forced people to close their businesses down so they couldn’t feed their children.” God willing, that will be the moment, or will be the blue touch paper on the fireworks, that makes people wake up to say, “Yes. That Gorka guy, or that Jekielek guy, not too crazy.” And, subscribe to Epoch Times. God bless you guys for doing what you do. Seriously, you and your colleagues at Epoch, Kash and everybody else, you are the epicenter of helping to wake up millions.
Mr. Jekielek:
So, very, very much appreciated. At this point, we’re going to finish up here. The only route I know to help try to make things better is truth telling.
Mr. Gorka:
Yes.
Mr. Jekielek:
I don’t know other ways. I’m not a very political person as much as I feel like I’m forced to imbibe all this stuff.
Mr. Gorka:
They’ve made everything political. Can I be clear here? People who say, “I’m not political,” “Tough.” When they’re putting masks on your children in school, that’s a political reality. The Left made everything political. You have no choice. You can’t separate yourself from politics. This is a very important thing to understand, for the viewers.
Mr. Jekielek:
In this kind of a reality where many Americans are actually very much demoralized, have lost faith in their governing bodies. Thereby much more susceptible to this actual disinformation from foreign actors who are doing it in overdrive. I know this for a fact, because I see the China stuff coming out all the time. How do we face this?
Mr. Gorka:
Three things. Number one, recommit yourself to the truth. Only the truth matters. Which means number two, never ever censor yourself. This is one of the biggest things you can do. Whether it’s on Facebook, whether it’s the water cooler at work, whether it’s the local barbecue, if you find yourself with the urge to not say something because you think it might get you in trouble, but it’s the truth, you must say it even louder.
You don’t have to get aggressive, but never ever censor yourself. I think it was Vaclav Havel who said, or Solzhenitsyn, “One truth told by one man can collapse a whole empire of lies.” That’s true. That’s true. Then lastly, whether you like it or not, you must get politically engaged. Everyone has a role to play, and most importantly, locally.
Look, I worked in the White House. It’s cool to work in the White House. It’s cool to be a senator or congressman, but really those things don’t matter. Our founding fathers understood, de Tocqueville understood, politics is really local. It’s about community.
My wife, Jan, detests politics, detests it to her marrow. But, when our local library, which has an $8 million budget started running drag queen story hours for children, she said, “What? On my tax dollars, not happening.” She ran for local office to stop the grooming of young children. If my wife, who detests politics, can stand up to the plate, I don’t care where you live. You can live in California, Massachusetts, I don’t care.
You have a role to play. Get politically engaged. Don’t just listen to my radio show. Don’t just watch Jan’s show. Don’t just read Epoch Times. Use it as fuel to get engaged, because it is up to us. We can be the shining city on the hill again, but only if every single one of your viewers and The Epoch Times readers gets engaged. That’s the lesson of the 20th century.
Mr. Jekielek:
Seb Gorka, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show again.
Mr. Gorka:
Thank you, and happy New Year to all of your viewers and listeners.
Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Sebastian Gorka and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
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