Dr. Sebastian Gorka, former deputy assistant to President Trump, joined SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Monday’s special Labor Day edition of Breitbart News Daily to discuss whether Antifa should be recognized as a terrorist organization and the impending revocation of DACA amnesty for illegal immigrants.
On the question of whether the U.S. government should formerly declare Antifa a terrorist organization, Gorka cited a 2016 report from the Department of Homeland Security that classified the organization’s activities as “domestic terrorist violence.”
“The fact is that it is an organization that espouses the use of violence for political purposes,” he said. “That’s terrorism. When you say it’s okay to use violence against unarmed civilians for your own political purposes, that is the textbook definition of terrorism.”
“We know they come to their gatherings armed to the teeth,” he continued. “We look at what has happened in the last year, year and a half, and it is the normalization of violence on the left.”
“Let’s not get lost in the historic details. The KKK, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, they’ve been around for a long, long time. They are anathema to a democracy. They are to be expunged from normal discourse, but they’re not a serious threat. They’re small numbers. I mean, apparently, there’s maybe 6,000 members of those organizations in a country of 330 million,” Gorka argued.
“But now, we have the left involved in what? Five police officers killed in one day last year. We have an individual who came to kill multiple, to assassinate multiple Republican congressmen at a baseball field not very far from your studios. And that was by a Bernie supporter. Then we have a Jill Stein supporter knife to death two people on a train in Oregon,” he recalled.
“If there is a rising tendency to political violence in America, it is on the left, and we have to deal with it as quickly as possible,” he declared.
Kassam quoted a defense commonly heard from Antifa apologists that it represents more of a “belief system” than a centrally organized group that could be labeled a terrorist organization.
“Yeah, but when they issue manuals on how to use violence before they go to an event, who’s writing those manuals? Are they just springing fully formed out of someone’s forehead magically? This isn’t Greek mythology. Somebody is organizing them,” Gorka countered.
“I hate conspiracy theories because they are theories, but when they are organized – when they all wear the same uniform, where they all mask themselves, and use the same tactics, and follow a playbook – that doesn’t happen organically. That is a function of pre-planning. So wherever the organizational hub is, the center of gravity, whether it’s regional or whether it comes from one central provider of tactical advice, this is an organization. Just look at the way it behaves,” he contended.
Gorka said he does not favor an outright ban on Antifa.
“We have to do what we did before. We have to penetrate these organizations to find the ringleaders, and when people advocate for the specific use of violence, that is a crime, and those people should be prosecuted,” he said.
“Your broader point is well-taken,” he told Kassam. “Look, you have just written the book on no-go zones, the threat to our Western Judeo-Christian civilization from those who wish to destroy it. But you know, being strategic is prioritizing threats. The largest threat we face is from those who have a religious totalitarian narrative to undermine us from the inside and use force, but we cannot ignore those who also deny – I mean, these are kissing cousins. They’re linked.”
“If you are anti-Western civilization, I don’t care whether you’re pro-sharia law or you’re pro-anarchy,” he elaborated. “Both of those things are bad for the democratic republican system we have created. It’s not a binary option. It’s not either-or: either we deal with leftist violence or we take terrorism seriously. All of them have to be dealt with.”
Turning to reports that President Trump plans to repeal President Barack Obama’s DACA amnesty for young illegal aliens and their families, Gorka advised waiting to find out if the initial reporting on Trump’s plans is correct, and seeing how it plays out in Congress.
“Look at what the president won on,” Gorka said. “He won on three key issues: fixing the economy, crushing ISIS, and the wall – and when we say ‘the wall,’ that means immigration and illegal immigration and stopping it.”
“This is something that will have to be dealt with head-on. It’s not going to go away. As such, I’m not worried. As somebody who was in the White House a week ago, Steven Miller, God bless Steven Miller, as long as he’s in the building, this will be dealt with,” he predicted.
Kassam and Gorka mocked the way children are deployed to sentimentalize the immigration argument and shut down debate. “It’s always the ‘children.’ The 42-year-old DACA ‘children,’” Gorka chuckled.
He noted that DACA is frequently mischaracterized in media reports as “legislation,” but it was, in fact, merely “guidance” from within the Obama administration.
“This can be changed. It’s not even a law that sunsets. It’s ‘policy guidance,’ and as such, you could just let it revert to the way it was. At the end of the day, forget about the technicalities of this measure. The principle that drives everything behind the Trump administration and the Trump campaign were questions of sovereignty,” he noted.
“This is what people don’t understand,” Gorka explained. “There is a philosophy, and it’s to do with sovereignty, and that’s why the Trump phenomena is linked to the Brexit phenomena. The idea that being an American citizen is a ‘right’ is fallacious. You have no right as a foreigner to be an American citizen. That’s what must inform our debate.”
“We’re not here to punish people unnecessarily. It’s about rule of law. And this isn’t even a piece of legislation that has to go to Capitol Hill. It’s something that can be dealt with administratively. ‘Have faith’ is what I say to the listeners. ‘Have faith,’” he said.
Speaking from his perspective as a non-citizen resident of the United States, Kassam noted that policies like DACA which reward illegal immigrants tend to undermine legal immigration by making a mockery of the hard work necessary to immigrate properly.
“You could even say this connects to Antifa,” Gorka responded. “You’re normalizing illegal activity. When you start to normalize things that are detrimental to the larger community writ large, that way lies political suicide.”
“Not just for the GOP,” he added. “The GOP still doesn’t understand what happened on November the 8th. I’m talking about the future of the nation.”
“One of the Antifa cries, their pathetic childish cries they have, ends in the phrase ‘no more USA.’ What does that tell you? This is how all these things are linked. No more USA. That’s linked back to what Hillary Clinton said during that speech she gave to that group of bankers that we got hold of the text, and we got hold of the audio. What did she say? ‘The whole hemisphere should be without borders.’ What does that mean? What does the word ‘America’ mean, then, if there are no borders? It means nothing. It ceases to exist as a concept in any way, shape, or form,” Gorka warned.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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