New Counterterror Strategy Eyes Tucker Carlson

Administration deems anti-Trump right wingers terrorists

Sebastian Gorka

Two right-wing figures — Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes — have been named as possible domestic terrorists, according to the Trump administration’s top counterterrorism official.

Sebastian Gorka, himself a former right-wing influencer turned National Security Council principal, has been making his rounds on conservative media, giving interviews little-noticed by major media to describe the meaning and purpose behind the President’s new National Counterterrorism Strategy (which I reported on previously).

Between grandiose monologues about his vision of a crusade to save Western civilization from “anti-American” and “anti-Christian” extremism, Gorka let slip that the administration’s war on “domestic terrorism” isn’t just aimed at the left. It targets anyone who isn’t in line with the broader MAGA agenda. While Trump’s national security directive NSPM-7 clearly singles out the left with its list of so-called terrorism indicators, many of them could describe people on the right as well.

Gorka says that the new Counterterrorism Strategy, which is his brainchild, identifies three groups as the counterterrorism priorities for the administration: narco-terrorists, islamist terrorists, and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists.” Nowhere in the document does it mention right-wing extremists; and while that might have led those on the right to believe they are immune, Gorka’s remarks make clear that they are not.

Asked by Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow if there’s any “right-wing terror” or “extremism” threat, Gorka replied by pointing to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and streamer Nick Fuentes — both of whom have become vocal critics of the Trump administration — arguing they aren’t actually conservatives anyway. Here’s the exchange:

MARLOW:  “ I wanna get your thoughts on any right-wing terror … Do you regard it as a threat at all or anything that's important to be considering right now?”

GORKA: “…I'm not sure that Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson are conservatives. If you are lauding Sharia law, if you are saying that there are Muslim states that seem to be better qualitatively than America in terms of freedom and prosperity, I'm not sure that means you're part of the conservative movement.  So if you remove those individuals and you understand that they're not conservatives, what's left?”

Gorka’s charge that Carlson lauds Sharia law is, to put it lightly, ridiculous.

Here’s what Carlson actually said:

CARLSON: “But you go to a country like Japan or the Emirates or Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and you see that when people are self-confident, when they’re really pleased with what they’re doing, and they believe their system is the right system — that self-confidence results in a kind of welcoming attitude. So you'll be sitting at dinner in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and you'll say, you know, I just, I'm really kind of pro-Jesus, like I'm a Christian. They’ll be like, ‘That’s so great!’

HOST: And they don’t have the same beliefs?

CARLSON: No, they’re Muslims. It's a country governed by Sharia law! — [laughs] — I mean, and they're like, ‘That's great!’

Is Carlson naive for mistaking his Four Season’s experiences in whatever Gulf monarchy with an egalitarian society? Absolutely. But “lauding Sharia law?” Come on.

I’m an absolutist when it comes to free speech, for the right and the left (and anyone inside or outside that spectrum). Gorka as a government official has no business sticking his nose into whether people define America in the same way he does.

And let’s be real: none of this is actually about extremism. It’s about the fact that Carlson, like Fuentes, recently broke with Trump — bitterly — over the Iran War. That's the real offense. So now they’re being cast as extremist threats. But to avoid alarming conservatives, the administration can't just say that — it has to first strip them of their conservative credentials, redefine them as something foreign-affiliated and dangerous, and then go after them.

That’s how the terrorism two-step works: the Trump administration just asserts that a right-winger isn’t really a right winger and then it can say it doesn’t target right-wingers. This is literally the No True Scotsman fallacy (No Scotsman puts sugar in his tea / But Ian from Glasgow does / Well, no true Scotsman does). That, in a nutshell, is how NSPM-7 can be weaponized against the right without calling it that.

You don’t have to like Carlson or Fuentes (an open anti-Semite who is quite easy not to like) in order to see that. Consider, for a moment, the rhetoric that likely fueled Gorka’s freakout.

Carlson has called Trump’s Iran war “the single biggest mistake Trump, or any American president, has made in my lifetime.” He has slammed the strikes as “reprehensible and immoral,” insisting the war “doesn’t serve American interests in any conceivable way” and suggesting it happened “at the behest and then the demand of Israel.”

When Trump ordered strikes on Iran, Fuentes said in a social media post: “NO WAR WITH IRAN. ISRAEL IS DRAGGING US INTO WAR. AMERICA FIRST.”

You can imagine why Fuentes feels so strongly about Israel.

Taken together, that’s the substance Gorka is trying to launder out of the “conservative movement” by redefining Carlson and Fuentes as something else: in Carlson’s case, a Sharia fan.

At this point you might be wondering why none of this has been reported — a question big mouth Gorka answers in an interview with actor-turned-media commentator Dean Caine about the National Counterterrorism Strategy. Gorka beams about how little negative coverage the media have given the Strategy, calling it “delicious.”

Gorka said:

“I did a kind of press call when we released the strategy. 50 articles were written that day about the press call. Only one of them from those putzes at Politico was even slightly negative... We are moving so fast, they just can’t keep up with us, which is delicious.”

Here Gorka is mostly right — the media really have been asleep at the wheel on this story.

I say “mostly” because I wrote a negative story about the Strategy, which he apparently didn’t notice. Maybe he’ll notice this one.

— Edited by William M. Arkin