Sebastian Gorka released a new counterterrorism strategy on Wednesday, singling out “violent left-wing extremists,” “extreme transgender ideologies,” and “violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”
As with much that comes out of the Trump administration, the messenger needs to be taken into account with the message. At a press briefing on Wednesday, Gorka replied to a question about what impact the Iran war might have on terrorist threats by calling critics of the war “testicularly challenged,” describing it as a “low-T approach to threats to the United States.”
Low-T refers to low testosterone, and is a term used by extremely online manosphere influencers. Much of the new national counterterrorism strategy reads in a similar vein.
“We have assets outside the realms of hard security in the informational space that were allowed to atrophy in recent years or were used for partisan political purposes,” the strategy reads. “These were previously de-weaponized and must now be reinvigorated to demoralize and delegitimize terror threat groups and their enablers.”
The strategy names three groups as the main 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 anodyne left-wing political views into a broader definition of domestic terrorism. In National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), the White House told federal law enforcement to prioritize those with views including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” in investigating domestic terrorism cases. That has been operationalized, TPM exclusively reported, via material support for terrorism cases brought against leftists accused of criminal wrongdoing in prosecutions nationwide.
The new counterterrorism strategy released Wednesday echoed NSPM-7’s terminology and broad folding of disfavored political views into potential threats.
“In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national 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 reads. “We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”
The document ignores right-wing extremists, who, studies show, have stacked up more casualties in domestic terrorist attacks over the past several decades. Studies focusing on more recent timeframes suggest that may be changing.
Instead, the document argues that the Biden Administration used counterterrorism authorities to systematically target conservatives. There’s no evidence of that happening; rather, the Trump administration has done more than any other American administration in modern history to make political views with which it disagrees the basis for targeting by law enforcement.
In Gorka’s world, the result is that “as real threats were ignored or underplayed, Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”
The strategy comes after ProPublica ran a story last month focusing on how Gorka, the counterterrorism czar, repeatedly claimed for the better part of a year that he was “on the cusp” of releasing a blueprint for going after terrorism. None had been released. On Monday, ProPublica reported that Gorka accused the reporter of publishing a “putrid piece of hackery.” The strategy was released on Wednesday.
