When he was campaigning, President Trump reassured some skeptical voters that he had "the smartest, the sharpest, the greatest minds," and "the best people" on his team. Samantha Bee asked, rhetorically, where all those people are now that he's in the White House. And on Wednesday's Full Frontal, she focused on one of those "best people," senior counterterrorism adviser, Fox News regular, and "Trump whisperer" Sebastian L. v. Gorka. "Gorka's got a cruise ship magician's facial hair and the president's ear," she said.
"So who is Sebastian v. Gorka, and how the heck did he get promoted from Breitbart panic blogger to presidential national security adviser?" Bee asked. The answer to the second part of the question is almost certainly his frequent, jihad-panic-stoking appearances on Fox News, but as for the first part, he's a British-born self-proclaimed counterterrorism expert who got a doctorate from a Hungarian university a few years ago. "I am not a counterterrorism expert, but people who are think Gorka is full of shit," Bee said. "It turns out Dr. Gorka has published as many papers in peer-reviewed academic journals as Dr. McStuffins: Zero."
"Trump's ISIS expert has never lived in a Muslim-majority country," Bee noted, and "he doesn't read or speak Arabic." In fact, "for his thesis, Gorka read the Quran in English, and some secondary sources, and watched Charlie Wilson's War, which makes you an authority on Islam in much the way that watching a Chinese bootleg of Rogue One makes you an astronaut."
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He was born and raised in London, but "members of the Hungarian far-right nationalist movement were super psyched when Gorka celebrated inauguration night going on Fox News wearing the regalia of the Hungarian Order of Vitézi, which the State Department lists as a Nazi-linked group," Bee said. "Gorka claims he never swore allegiance to the Vitézi group, whose members adopt a lower-case v as a middle initial," she said, but "Gorka's right-wing bling" isn't the real issue here. "This is not playtime now. Shit is real, and the White House needs real counterterrorism experts, not a poor man's Stewie Griffin whose extremist nonsense could get people killed." Watch the NSFW, not-fair-and-balanced Gorka primer below. Peter Weber
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