Gorka Fumes Against the Left in New Counterterrorism Strategy
Sebastian Gorka released a new counterterrorism strategy on Wednesday, targeting “violent left-wing extremists,” “extreme transgender ideologies” and “violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist.”
As with many things coming out of the Trump administration, the messenger must be considered in the message. At a press briefing Wednesday, Gorka responded to a question about the impact the war in Iran could have on terrorist threats by calling criticism of the war “testicularly contested,” describing it as a “low-T approach to threats against the United States.”
Low-T refers to low testosterone and is a term used by influencers in the extremely online manosphere. Much of the new national counter-terrorism strategy is in the same vein.
“We have assets outside of the hard security realm in the information space that may have atrophied in recent years or been used for partisan political purposes,” the strategy states. “These groups were previously disarmed and now need to be reinvigorated to demoralize and delegitimize terrorist groups and those who support them. »
The strategy identifies three groups as primary terrorist threats to the United States: drug cartels and gangs, “legacy Islamic terrorists,” and left-wing radicals, including “anarchists and anti-fascists.”
It’s the latest example of the Trump administration sweeping relatively innocuous left-wing political views into a broader definition of domestic terrorism. In National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), the White House directed federal law enforcement to prioritize those with views such as “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” in investigations of domestic terrorism cases. This was brought to fruition, TPM exclusively reported, through material support for terrorism cases brought against leftists accused of criminal acts in nationwide legal proceedings.
The new counterterrorism strategy released Wednesday echoes the terminology of NSPM-7 and the broad transformation of disfavored political views into potential threats.
“In addition to cartels and Islamist terrorist groups, our domestic CT activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist,” the strategy states. “We will use every constitutionally available tool to map them in our country, identify their members, map their connections to international organizations like Antifa, and use the tools of law enforcement to operationally cripple them before they can maim or kill innocent people.” »
The document ignores right-wing extremists who, studies show, have caused more casualties in domestic terrorist attacks in recent decades. Studies from more recent periods suggest that this may be changing.
Instead, the document argues that the Biden administration used counterterrorism authorities to systematically target conservatives. There is no evidence of this happening; To the contrary, the Trump administration has done more than any other U.S. administration in modern history to formulate political views it disagrees with as a basis for targeting by law enforcement.
In Gorka’s world, the result is that “while real threats have been ignored or underestimated, Americans have witnessed politically motivated assassinations of Christians and conservatives by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”
The strategy comes after ProPublica published a story last month about how Gorka, the counterterrorism czar, repeatedly claimed for most of the year that he was “close to” releasing a plan to combat terrorism. None had been released. On Monday, ProPublica reported that Gorka accused the journalist of publishing a “putrid hack.” The strategy was released on Wednesday.
