No, You’re The Terrorist, You Terrorist!
Sebastian Gorka was counter-terrorism czar during the first year of Trump 1.0, but got shitcanned as swiftly as he had been hired. Don’t call it a comeback. In America, anyone (who’s a bootlicking white man willing to serve evil) can Forrest Gump their way to success. Back in the fold of Trump 2.0, Gorka just authored the White House’s new “counter-terrorism strategy.”
People who study counter-terrorism—not my people, btw—called it “largely slop,” “utterly unhinged,” and an “exercise in gaslighting, partisanship and obsequiousness.” It’s notable mostly because it targets leftists as a priority, building on NSPM-7. That’s both flagrantly anti-democratic and a waste of resources. Ken Klippenstein is all over this if you want to read more about the genuine threat posed to all of us if the language in the document is to be taken seriously.
What I want to draw attention to though is the absurdist way in which anyone who takes peace, democracy, or equality seriously is being designated a threat.
In an interview rolling out the document, a reporter from the right-wing Daily Caller asked Gorka about the Iran war and whether that will cause more terrorism. Even MAGA journalists apparently understand that if you want to prevent terrorism, you ought to avoid actions that precipitate terrorism. Gorka replied by calling that a “Low T approach” and accusing anyone who thought that way of being “testicularly challenged.”
I’m as unsurprised as I am embarrassed for this pudgy Dracula wannabe. You see, Gorka was a D-list celebrity cartoon character during his previous stint in government. So much so that he was actually on that Cameo app. I’ll never forget a delicious piece Dan Nexon wrote back in 2017 just roasting Gorka’s lack of expertise in anything at all: “Sebastian Gorka May Be a Far-Right Nativist, but for Sure He’s a Terrible Scholar.”
And yet.
To call Gorka’s counter-terror imaginary a farce is at once obviously true and terrifying in its real-world consequences. You can feel that in your bones when you read about how CT operations work now. The LA Times just had a piece depicting the cold-blooded, Palantir-enabled illegal assassination of someone in Lebanon:
every time Ahmad Turmus looked up, it seemed to be circling over him, like an all-too-patient bird of prey. So when the phone rang as he was visiting family one Monday afternoon in February, Turmus wasn’t too surprised that the person speaking accented Arabic was an Israeli military officer.
What surprised him was the question. “Ahmad, you want to die with those around you or alone?”…
When he hung up, his face changed, family members told The Times. He told them the Israelis were after him, and that they should leave the house and let him die alone. They pleaded with him to try to escape, to give him some disguise so he could leave.
But Turmus refused. He went to the door. “They know my face. There’s nothing we can do against this,” he said. His wife was walking in as he left, but he didn’t acknowledge her, family members said, so she wouldn’t try to stop him. He got in his car, started it up, and drove off. Less than 30 seconds later came the shriek of the two missiles that lanced through Turmus’ car.
The piece reads like lethality porn—propaganda trying to subtly terrorize us with tales of Israeli and US tech-enabled ruthlessness. But it vivifies what we’re up against.
Anyone struggling for human liberation—or even just a less shitty world—has to contend with the power and unaccountability of the modern national security state. The techniques perfected during the War on Terror were limited by scope and capacity—fascist targeting of certain types of brown-and-bearded people, but not everyone. Targeting everyone wasn’t even possible.
Gorka’s mangled understanding of the world solves for the scope limitation, ensnaring anyone who’s not a fellow bootlicker. AI, meanwhile, solves for the capacity problem, allowing for the surveillance, control, and repression of anyone, at scale, and with ever-shifting criteria for targeting.
We have not only let our national security states act with impunity; we have allowed them to get way too powerful. Now, an unqualified racist, ignoramus with deep sexual insecurities is providing strategic direction to the most lethal oppression machine ever known and laughing at us all as he gives interviews to an overly credulous, despot-laundering media apparatus.
Do you see a problem here?
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