Confirmed as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism in 2025, these are the individuals shaping the decisions that undermine democracy.
Summary:
The British-born Sebastian Gorka, recently nominated by Trump to the position of deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism, has a long history of anti-Muslim bigotry and ties to far-right groups both in the United States and abroad. A fervent anti-Muslim activist particularly following 9/11, Gorka first made his career in Hungary, where he was an advisor to Viktor Orbán from 1998 to around 2006. In January 2007, he started his own political party with former members of the antisemitic political party Jobbik. After this endeavor failed, he and his wife Katharine moved to the United States where they worked as national security “experts” in various right-wing think tanks. Around 2014, both of them contributed to the American far-right website Breitbart, co-founded by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon in 2007. When Trump was elected in 2016, both Sebastian and Katharine joined the new administration with Sebastian joining Trump in the White House as an advisor and Katharine joining the Department of Homeland Security. Sebastian was instrumental in advocating for the “Muslim ban” put in place by the administration, while Katharine helped defund Countering Violent Extremism programs focusing on white supremacy. Contrary to the FBI and many federal agencies, Sebastian Gorka has made light of the threat of terrorism from white supremacists, making his position fighting terrorism even more concerning. Sebastian was forced out of his position in the first Trump administration within less than a year after his connections to a Hungarian Nazi collaborationist group were brought to light. Since then, Gorka has become a well-known figure in far-right circles due to his frequent media appearances and for his radio show “America First with Sebastian Gorka.”
In His Own Words:
“Yes, we’re Christians. Yes, we believe that all men are made in the image of our creator. But at the same time we understand that evil is real, that evil lurks in the hearts of man. We are not the lambs of the Bible; that is Jesus, our savior. We are to turn over the tables of the money lenders. We are there when he calls, “Sell everything you own and buy a sword.” That is the Christianity we believe in. Turn the other face is not the message that we believe in. The message of Christ is truth in God. And as a result, I have to say this unequivocally to everyone listening, and it may be tough for some people who think that the church is some Sunday social club, but this administration [Biden’s] is evil. And I mean it. In terms of the heart of darkness, black hearts of evil. Because they know what they’re doing … putting in place a legal system that allows anyone—it could be terrorists, it could be the cartels—to pre-screen and clear themselves as quote-unquote “asylum seekers” … when they get on a plane with my wife, with your daughter.”
–Sebastian Gorka speaking with Steve Bannon, January 25, 2024
“We have to understand that this is a war between the civilized world, the Judeo-Christian West, the greatest civilization the world has ever seen, and the barbarians.”
- Sebastian Gorka on Sky News Australia, November 26, 2024
“Here we have the fruits grown from the seeds of the radical Left of the 1960s. First they tried to ignite in America the kind of violent Marxist overthrow that was attempted on the streets of Paris in 1968, but it failed. They very soon realized that in America, given our unique historic development, our rugged individualism, our individual liberty, and our freedom of speech and religion, this use of Marxist or Maoist tactics would not function in a country like ours.
These individuals—some of whom were terrorists, such as Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, members of the Weathermen Underground— didn’t retire. They didn’t surrender their objective to turn America into some kind of radical Leftist construct when their “Days of Rage” failed in 1969. Instead, they became educators. They became high school teachers. In some cases, like with Ayers and Dohrn, they became tenured professors at otherwise reputable colleges. Why? Because they knew their Trotsky, they knew their Lenin—in fact, they knew what Hitler had taught his acolytes: “If you give me their children, I will control their future.” So they took the indoctrination from the streets into the classrooms. And that is how today we have courses upon courses that have nothing to do with our heritage, with our Judeo-Christian culture, with patriotic American history, with the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. Instead, every college that has federal funding for deans of diversity, courses on gender studies, on so-called “Critical Studies” which is really the criticism of all that is Western and good. They’ve created generations obsessed with environmentalism, which is the god of the atheist Left. We have arrived at the point where you can major in English at otherwise serious universities without ever having studied Shakespeare. This is what the conservative surrendering of education has wrought in America.”
- Sebastian Gorka, The War for America’s Soul
“Look at [New York Times reporter] Maggie Haberman and her acolytes in the Fake News media who immediately have a conniption fit and say, ‘What about Oklahoma City?” What about Oklahoma City? A) That individual is not a jihadi. My comments were about jihadism post-September 11. Second, Timothy McVeigh had an accomplice. Second, by the way, this the one I love, that event was twenty-two years ago. Can you talk to me about the last sixteen years of hundreds of thousands of people killed in the Middle East by jihadis? It’s this constant: ‘Oh, it’s the white man. It’s the white supremacists. That’s the problem.’ No it isn’t, Maggie Haberman. Go to Sinjar. Go to the Middle East and tell me what the real problem is today. Go to Manchester.”
- Sebastian Gorka on Breitbart News Daily, August 2017
“What have those now in power wrought — invoking social justice, but really pursuing the goal of maintaining power after millions of minority illegals are amnestied? The Biden-Mayorkas open borders regime has resulted in 12,000 illegals crossing into America in a single day. More than 60% of the women and girls being trafficked get raped or sexually assaulted. And the horrors don’t stop after the journey. In one harrowing case in Minnesota, authorities say several male illegals kept an 11-year-old girl tied to a bed and raped her. Repeatedly. Yes. That happened in America. I could go on. I could describe how American girls are being raped in high schools by cross-dressing peers. Or how parents are being targeted for investigation as “radical” by the FBI because they are Catholic or don’t want their children to be sexually groomed at school.”
- Sebastian Gorka in Breitbart, October 5, 2023
“If you ever wondered whether or not we are in a culture war, wonder no more. When global platforms invest and distribute shows such as Cuties, which feign innocence but celebrate the sexualization of minors; when the establishment — from the top of the Biden administration to the third biggest brewer in the world — push transgender ideology; when Disney workers themselves protest laws designed to protect minors, it all becomes transparent. But their time has come. From the explosion of new organizations such as Moms for Liberty, predicated on parental rights and the defense of the innocent, to even new gay groups fighting against the sexualization of minors, to both UFC’s Dana White and President Trump buying tickets for employees to see Sound of Freedom and holding private showings with the stars, America is waking up. Will you be part of this new awakening and stand up for the most vulnerable in our world? Start by finding a theater near you to see this crucial work.”
- Sebastian Gorka in Breitbart, July 20, 2023
Coming to America
Sebastian “Seb” Gorka is the son of Hungarian parents who became naturalized British citizens after having fled that country’s anti-Soviet uprising in 1956. While at college, he served for several years until it was disbanded in 1992 in the British Territorial Army in a reserve military unit with counterterrorism responsibilities. That year he moved to Hungary, where he would attempt a career in politics in right-wing and far-right political parties, and tout his “expertise” on television as a counterrorism expert.
Starting around 2008, he and his American wife Katharine Gorka immigrated to the United States, and began working at various think tanks and higher education institutions such as the National Defense University in 2008, Gatestone Institute from 2009 to 2011, and Georgetown University from 2011 to 2013. From 2014 to 2016, he worked as an editor for the American far-right publication Breitbart under the leadership of Steve Bannon, who dubbed the site as the home of the “alt-right.”.
Starting in 2015, the Trump campaign hired Gorka as a political consultant for national security issues, and in January 2017, Gorka was chosen by Trump to be his chief counterterrorism adviser as a part of the Strategic Initiatives Group set up by Bannon. During this short stint in government, Gorka became known for his combative television appearances in defense of Trump, his mysterious role within the administration, and his lack of a security clearance.
Gorka was forced out of his position on August 25, 2017, after Bannon’s departure from the White House. Gorka would return to government again in July 2020 after Trump appointed him to serve as a member on the National Security Education Board, which awards scholarships to students and grants to universities in order to advance the development of language experts and specialists in different regions of the world.
After leaving the first Trump administration, Gorka became a prominent figure in the far-right media ecosystem. From November 2017 to March 2019, he was a contributor to Fox News, which distanced itself from him after an especially radical speech at CPAC that year where he compared Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and claimed that she would “take away your hamburgers.” In 2021, he started hosting a show on NewsMax called “The Gorka Reality Check.” His most important media endeavor, however, was the launching in 2019 of his own nationally-syndicated radio show on Salem Media called “America First with Sebastian Gorka.”
Anti-Muslim Zealotry
Gorka sees the West as being locked in an existential ideological conflict with Islam, and like Stephen Miller and Bannon, Gorka was one of the major figures in the early days of the first Trump administration who pushed hard for anti-Muslim policies such as the infamous 2017 “Muslim ban.” Whereas most experts on radical Islam focus on underlying issues related to poverty, civil strife, alienation, or bad governance to explain why some Muslims become radicalized, Gorka focuses most of his attention on passages from The Quran in order to “prove” the religion is inherently violent. In response to these factors, he has stated that “this is the famous approach that says it is all so nuanced and complicated … This is what I completely jettison.” For him, all of the violence from Islamist extremists is explained by passages in The Quran and rooted in the religion.
Gorka is hardly the “expert” on radical jihadi ideology and counterterrorism that he portrays himself as. Gorka does not speak Arabic or other languages native to the Muslim world and has not spent any time in the Middle East. He has also said that he has no desire to engage with the works of other scholars on the topic of Islam.
Gorka’s dissertation further demonstrates his lack of expertise in the subject which, as actual academics have stated, is not “a work of scholarship.” Professor Dan Nexon from Georgetown University described the dissertation in the following way: “He makes little effort to consider alternative explanations, use anything resembling a proper methodology, adequately source key claims, cite or take seriously more than a smattering of scholarly works, or even sufficiently develop lines of thought. Parts of the dissertation come across as filler. Perhaps they are.”
Other academics have given similar reviews of his dissertation. Gorka’s academic supervisor, András Lánczi, a pro-Orbán commentator who now works at Orbánist institutions such as the pro-Orbán university Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) and pro-regime think tank and survey organization Szazadveg (Century), and writes for the pro-Orbán outlet The Hungarian Conservative, is a political philosopher who refused to respond when asked why Gorka was allowed to pass his dissertation defense, while the other reviewers did not have academic degrees and one was a close family friend.
Just days prior to the August 2017 Charlottesville, Va., Unite the Right rally, put on by white supremacist groups and where a counterprotester was killed by one of them in a car attack, Gorka claimed that white supremacists were “not the problem,” instead pointing the finger at radical Islamist groups abroad. He stated, “Oh, it’s the white man. It’s the white supremacists. That’s the problem.’ No, it isn’t, [New York Times journalist]Maggie Haberman.” He went further saying that there was “no such thing as a lone wolf” and there “has never been a serious attack or a serious plot that was unconnected from ISIS or al Qaeda.” This “analysis” is contradicted by data on domestic terrorism in the United States, which show far-right violence to be more prominent than radical Islamist violence in recent years. The FBI and most relevant federal agencies have stated clearly that white supremacy is the most serious domestic terrorism threat today.
Global Far-Right Activist
Gorka has a long history of ties to far-right groups both in the United States and abroad. Prior to the 2016 election, Gorka had written opinion pieces for the far-right media outlet Breitbart, then led by Bannon who touted it as the publication of the “alt-right,” as the outlet’s national security editor. Following Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, Gorka was first nominated to the position of deputy assistant to the president and strategist for issues related to terrorism and national security as a part of the Strategic Initiatives Group set up by Bannon. After being pushed out of his position in the White House alongside Bannon when Herbert Raymond McMaster joined the administration, he joined the Canadian far-right website The Rebel, often known as the “Breitbart North” known for publishing articles such as “10 Things I Hate About Jews.”
Gorka also has ties to the Heritage Foundation, responsible for organizing the rights-stripping Project 2025 (for more on Project 2025, see the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’s (GPAHE) reporting here). After being forced out of his position in the White House, Gorka was employed by Heritage as an independent contractor to give a series of speeches at the foundation, and invited Heritage President Kevin Roberts, the face of Project 2025, onto his radio show on October 5, 2023. Katharine was also a research fellow for outreach and director for civil society with Heritage from around May 2020 to December 2022. On April 3, 2024, Sebastian Gorka gave a presentation at Heritage alongside his wife Katharine on a book co-published by Katharine and Heritage’s Mike Gonzalez called NextGen Marxism. By this time, Gonzalez and Gorka were referring to the social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s as “cultural Marxism.”
Hungarian Extremist
Abroad, Gorka, who goes by the name Gorka Sebestyén Lukács, has notable ties to far-right groups in Hungary that came to light in 2017 after he was first brought into the White House. Gorka, who is a British-American dual citizen with Hungarian ancestry, became a public figure in Hungary starting in the 1990s. In 1992, he worked with the Strategic Defense Research Institute of the Zrínyi Miklós Military Academy while undergoing his studies at the university, now known as Corvinus University, and in 1998, he served as an official advisor to Viktor Orbán in his first administration until around 2006.
Gorka alongside the former Vice-President of Jobbik Tamás Molnár, 2006 (Source: Forward)
At this time, Orbán and his party Fidesz were a typical European center-right party unlike their contemporary, authoritarian form; however, Gorka became disenchanted with Orbán after his loss in the 2006 election and left to establish his own party called the Új Demokratikus Koalíció (New Democratic Coalition) in January 2007.
He formed the party with former members of the political party Jobbik in January 2007, that was known for their neo-fascist paramilitary group, the Magyar Gárda (Hungarian Guard), which intimidated Roma and other minority groups in the country and was banned by Hungarian authorities in July 2009. While Jobbik has moderated to some extent since that time, for more than a decade, Jobbik was known in Hungary for their antisemitism and a tendency to blame Jews for all of the country’s problems. They became somewhat electorally popular in the 2010 elections that followed the 2008 economic crisis, gaining more than 16 percent of the vote.
When it was formed, Gorka and the other founders of the New Democratic Coalition positioned themselves as a “conservative party” that stood against “corruption” and sought to “bring Christianity into the constitution” (the constitution passed after the fall of the U.S.S.R. was secular). Gorka went on record in 2006 defending the use of the red-and-white-striped Árpád flag, a symbol used throughout the history of Hungary, but which is also controversial due to its cooptation by Ferenc Szálasi’s fascist Arrow Cross movement that collaborated with the Nazis. After the Soviet collapse, the Árpád flag has mainly been used by far-right groups such as the Hungarian Guard.
Gorka is on record supporting the formation of the Hungarian Guard in 2007. In a television interview in August 2007, Gorka referred to it as “a big societal need,” as the Hungarian military was “sick, and totally reflects the state of Hungarian society…. This country cannot defend itself.” Subsequent statements from Gorka’s political party demonstrate that they supported the Hungarian Guard even after the Guard’s extremist views had become known.
Gorka wearing the uniform and medal of the Vitézi Rend (Source: Facebook)
After being nominated to his position in the White House, Gorka displayed even more ties to the Hungarian far right when he “proudly” wore the uniform and badge of the Vitézi Rend (Order of Chivalry) at Trump’s Inaugural Ball. The Order of Chivalry are a group known in Hungary for having collaborated with the Nazis and received property confiscated from Jews sent to concentration camps by the government. Banned by the subsequent socialist government in 1945, two Vitézi Rend groups reemerged in the 1990s, with the “Historical Vitézi Rend” faction that Gorka belongs to upholding all of the same racial supremacist principles as the first iteration of the group. It still includes members with deeply antisemitic views.
While it is possible that Gorka inherited the memorabilia from his grandfather like he claims, he has used the initial “v.,” short for Vitezi, in his name in official documents, including his dissertation and in his biography at the Gatestone Institute, which signifies membership in the organization. Leaders of the Vitézi Rend claimed that Gorka was a life-long member and said that they were proud of Gorka for wearing the medal.
Gorka, who received American citizenship though his American-born wife Katharine, apparently was able to bypass State Department rules that bar members of certain organizations that were “participants in Nazi persecution, genocide, or the commission of any act of torture or extrajudicial killing” from obtaining entry visas to the United States.
Marriage to Far-Right activist Katie Gorka
In 1994, Sebastian Gorka met his future wife Katharine in Romania, who worked at the time for a public policy think tank in New York. The two would eventually marry in Hungary and remain in Europe for more than a decade. After relocating to the United States, both would become active in national security circles and the far-right wing of the Republican Party. Katharine “Katie” Gorka is a republican party activist who heads the Fairfax County Republican Party, and who has held positions in various think tanks, party organizations, and governmental posts.
Katharine, along with Sebastian, is president of the consulting firm Threat Knowledge Group, and was once the president of a now-defunct think tank called the Council on Global Security. Like Sebastian, Katharine has also written in the past for Breitbart. In one column, she defended Republican members of Congress who were denounced by their party for spreading false conspiracy theories about a Clinton aide having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Katharine was a part of Trump’s 2016 transition team, and she served in the first Trump administration as a senior policy advisor in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), starting in 2017, and as press secretary for Customs and Border Protection for two months in 2019.
Like Sebastian, Katharine focused on shifting DHS’s emphasis towards radical Islamist groups at the expense of other forms of extremism. In 2013, she was critical of the Obama administration for seemingly “allowing Islamists to dictate national security policy,” and the administration’s “emphasis on Islam as a religion of peace.” While at DHS, Katherine was involved in the efforts to defund Countering Violent Extremism efforts that focused on white supremacists, so as to reorient the department’s focus back towards Islamist extremists.
