If you want to become a White House aide on any particular issue, Sebastian Gorka has provided a roadmap. It doesn't include earning any real respect among your peers in the field (counterterrorism, in this case). Instead, you find an issue that plays on people's unfounded fears, like "Jihad!" Then you find a platform for your fringe ideas like he did at Breitbart, you frequent Fox News, and found a few organizations no one has heard of. Voila! Gorka did go the extra step of writing an NYT bestseller, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, but his work still isn’t taken seriously by experts in national security. Allegra Kirkland writes:
Some foreign policy and counterterrorism experts declined to speak to TPM on the record because of Gorka’s position in the new administration. But others characterized him as a peripheral figure whose hardline ideas about Islam and the threat posed by the Islamic State terror group place him firmly outside the mainstream.
“I’d heard the name once or twice but he’s not a major figure in the field. He’s not someone whose work one needs to know to be conversant in these issues,” Stephen Biddle, an adjunct senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor of political science at George Washington University, told TPM.
Biddle added that Gorka is not “in the reasonable mainstream.” Omid Safi, director of Islamic Studies at Duke University, was much more biting in his assessment, labeling Gorka’s book “propaganda.”
“He opines on everything from the Koran to Mohamad to jihad to Islamic history to contemporary politics but does so in a way that is inaccurate, sloppy, superficial, bigoted and ideological,” Safi said.
Gorka used to appear regularly on the radio show of noted anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney.
Gaffney has heavily promoted the conspiracy theory that members of the Muslim Brotherhood have infiltrated the U.S. government and argued that the Council on American Islamic Relations, a civil rights group, is affiliated with terrorists.
Gorka has made the same arguments himself. He has also said that accepting Muslim refugees would be “national suicide” and that religious profiling of Muslims is a “synonym for common sense.”
But now he spends his days peddling Donald Trump's “foreign policy” and infamous Muslim ban. While he can't retract his book, he has conveniently taken down his personal website and that of a "think tank" he founded, Threat Knowledge Group.
"The Threat Knowledge Group has closed and its website will be offline until further notice," reads the site.
Who needs a website when you've got a seat at the White House and the pr*sident's ear?
