Dr. Sebastian Gorka made his final appearance as national security editor for Breitbart News on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily–and his first as deputy assistant to President Donald Trump.
In his new capacity, Dr. Gorka naturally addressed the biggest news of the day, President Trump’s executive order on immigration and refugees. SiriusXM host Alex Marlow pointed to a Rasmussen poll that found 57 percent public support for the supposedly outrageous order.
“It’s quite remarkable, Alex, how the media elite – what we call the ‘chattering classes,’ or what Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national security adviser, called the ‘echo chamber’ or the ‘sounding box’ – they really still don’t understand what happened on November the 8th, and how the backbone of America, the common man, the average voter simply wants to see a return to common sense,” Gorka said.
“We are at war with global jihadism,” he continued. “We’ve arrested or killed more than 125 ISIS terrorists in America since the Caliphate was redeclared two-and-a-half years ago, from Mosul. They want things like the Berlin attack, the Nice attack, the double Paris attacks, not to happen on U.S. soil. So they understand that we need to review all our immigration policies and build a wall. It’s really that simple, Alex.”
“Your critics on the Left would say this is about seizing the moral high ground for the next terror attack. What is your response to that?” Marlow asked.
“I would say playing politics with the safety of American citizens is reprehensible,” Gorka replied. “The fact is, we know that ISIS has declared in English, in its publications, in its videos, ‘We will use the refugee streams and mass migrations to insert our jihadis into your cultures.’ We know at least one of the attacks in Europe involved an individual with refugee status, traveling on a false Syrian passport. These are not matters of opinion. These are the cold, hard facts.”
“What we need to recall is, we’ve had here, even in the United States, the Boston attack,” he said when Marlow asked about terrorist actions carried out by refugees. “I worked on the Boston attack for the Department of Justice as an expert. Remember, these individuals came from the former Soviet Union. They came as refugees or asylum seekers. They went through the system and were approved.”
“Likewise, you look at San Bernardino, another individual who went through the system and was approved. And at the time – just think about this – the federal authorities looking into her visa application couldn’t look at her public Facebook pages! That was deemed an intrusion of privacy. That by itself tells you we have to review the system,” he said.
Gorka strenuously denied allegations that Trump’s immigration policies are rooted in xenophobia.
“There’s just one argument that destroys this accusation of any kind of xenophobic intent behind this executive order,” he said. “If this had anything to do with a specific religion, if this had anything to do with Islam, how is it that the most populous Muslim nation in the world, Indonesia, is not one of the seven nations affected? How is it that the largest Arab Muslim nation in the world, Egypt, is not on the list? Surely they would have been included. No, this is about real threats from nations where groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS are active. It’s about national security, Alex.”
Marlow asked if there was “any potential for more countries to get added to the list.”
“Well, the irony is, we are using the list that was developed by the last administration because the last administration realized that these are the primary nations of concern,” Gorka replied. “Why? Because if you look at Syria, Iraq, Libya, that’s where ISIS was created. If you look at al-Qaeda that people forget is still out there, they are incredibly active in countries like Yemen and Somalia.”
“Strategy is the art of prioritization,” he explained. “We have prioritized. That’s why we started with this seven. And it is the President’s prerogative to add or remove countries from this list because the 1950s act says it is the President who decides who comes into this country, based on which standards. That is his mandate.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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