00:00:43.840Full details on example policies at SelectQuote.com slash commercials.
00:00:47.320This is a KGB officer who persecuted Christians for a living and is a thug and a murderer.
00:00:54.220I still don't understand how anyone who has at least a triple-digit IQ can say the Russian Federation and Putin are the good guys.
00:01:06.180What do you make of the fact that a lot of people on your side are celebrating a 21-year-old who has stolen secret documents and they're calling this person a whistleblower?
00:01:19.820Worse than that, they're calling him a hero.
00:01:22.080So, my fear is that they are whispering sweet nothings in his ears saying, you're the guy, you're the guy.
00:01:30.920And he's being exploited by the establishment rhino class.
00:01:36.900And I'm sorry, Ron DeSantis doesn't have the balls or the maturity to do it.
00:01:43.720So, for me, the reason I am voting for President Trump and supporting him, I need somebody to come back into the city and burn the corrupt shithole to the ground.
00:01:56.260Hello and welcome to Trigonometry on the road from the USA.
00:02:14.540And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:02:19.820Our fantastic and returning guest today is an author, counter-terrorism expert and, of course, former Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States, Dr. Sebastian Gorka.
00:02:41.580A lot of our audience do not, and one of the things they won't know about you is the background, the backstory, your family's history that informs a lot of your views.
00:02:50.480So, tell us who are you, Seb, and what has been your journey through life?
00:02:54.360Well, my journey through life is informed by who my parents were and what they suffered during World War II and after World War II.
00:03:01.540So, my parents were kids in Hungary, in Budapest, suffered under Nazi occupation at the end of the war.
00:03:10.220And then after the war ended and communism was imposed, my father was a young college student who wanted to resist the new regime, created a secret student organization of Christian students who were patriots.
00:03:23.960Eventually, he was betrayed by Kim Philby, one of the greatest traitors of that Cold War period, one of the Cambridge Apostles, was arrested at the age of 20, tortured, and given a life sentence in a communist jail.
00:03:40.420He served six years, two years in a prison coal mine, two years in solitary, and then was eventually liberated by the Freedom Fighters of 1956.
00:03:48.280He escaped to the West with a 17-year-old daughter of a fellow prison mate, who ended up as his wife and my mother, and they made it to the UK.
00:03:56.460I was born and raised in the UK. My first language was Hungarian.
00:04:00.460And then, when the war fell, speaking Hungarian, having a bit of a background in national security, because I served in the British TA in the Intelligence Corps,
00:04:10.940I got a job working for the first freely elected Hungarian government in the Defense Ministry.
00:04:14.940So I packed up, moved from London to Budapest, spent five years in the Hungarian government, met my wife in Europe, an American,
00:04:23.020started doing some work in counterterrorism for the American government, doing a training course out of Germany after 9-11.
00:04:31.240And then, one morning in 2008, literally, my wife and I woke up and said,
00:04:36.660It's time to go. We've done our dues. We've tried to help Hungary get back on track, moved to the US, ended up as a professor of irregular warfare and counterterrorism for the Pentagon,
00:04:46.700wrote a book called Defeating Jihad on the ideology of groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, and that propelled me to the White House to work for President Trump.
00:04:54.380Now, I do a daily radio show called America First, three hours of political commentary, and a weekly TV show for Newsmax called the Gawker Reality Check.
00:05:04.840So that, in a very, as brief as I can make it, is my trip, and my thing is strategy, politics, conservatism, and understanding the threats to the good guys in the West.
00:05:15.440Well, we'll talk about all of that, and when we were on Rogan last year, having come from here, actually,
00:05:20.980I described you as the Trump attack dog, which I think is fair. You have a reputation for that.
00:05:26.100I think the telegraph called me Trump's pit bull.
00:05:29.800Right. That's a great way of saying it, too. And we're going to get to President Trump later,
00:05:34.500but actually, we wanted to start by talking to you about, A, national security and foreign affairs,
00:05:42.080but, B, also what is happening within the conservative movement and the right around those issues.
00:05:47.980So what have you made of the way that some people have responded to Putin's invasion of Ukraine on your own team?
00:05:56.520So before I joined the White House, I was teaching for the Marine Corps,
00:06:01.600and at the same time, I was moonlighting as national security editor for Breitbart.
00:06:06.200I didn't need the job. Okay, Bannon saw me speak somewhere, invited me for a chat, said,
00:06:11.520Will you be my national security QC guy? And I said, Not really interested.
00:06:15.800And I threw out a stupid number, and he said, Yes. And that's when you go, Oh, crap. Okay.
00:06:20.720So the reason I was, in principle, interested in doing that, what, 10 years ago,
00:06:27.540was because of the paucity I saw on the right of serious discussion on national security.
00:06:33.560Because back then, you had two options.
00:06:35.300If you are a conservative in America, you could be a crazy neocon saying,
00:06:41.460Let's invade places and turn them into democracies at the end of a gun barrel, which is lunacy, right?
00:06:46.340The Wolfowitz's of the world, the Bush administration.
00:06:48.820Or you could be an isolationist and say, Screw everybody.
00:07:14.780Today, 10 years later, it is by magnitudes worse on our side.
00:07:20.420It is, this is perhaps beyond everything the left is doing to this country, in my estimation.
00:07:25.840Open borders, millions of illegal immigrants, fentanyl poisonings, on and on and on the economy.
00:07:30.460For me, the thing that galls me the most every single day, and I have people on my Twitter feed, you know, get in touch with the radio show,
00:07:38.380who call themselves conservatives or Republicans, and who say things like,
00:07:46.760Vladimir Putin is the savior of Western civilization and a great Christian.
00:07:52.700And I'm going, you do know, you don't have to be a Cold War child like me, but you do know this is a KGB officer who persecuted Christians for a living and is a thug and a murderer.
00:08:05.980And people are saying, oh, well, he's justified in invading Ukraine because we provoked him.
00:08:34.220We had this discussion over cigars last night.
00:08:36.620I still don't understand how anyone who has at least a triple digit IQ can say the Russian Federation and Putin are the good guys.
00:08:47.780So we have, to answer your question in brief, we have a lot of bloody work to do to educate people on my team about the reality of geopolitics today.
00:08:58.260And you don't have to be a geek about it like me, just the facts.
00:09:04.100Well, let's do that then, because the interesting thing is that I think, as you say, not a lot of people are educated on either way.
00:09:11.980What is the national security interest for this country in supporting Ukraine?
00:09:16.960So you can answer that at a very prosaic level that is intuitive, and then you can go to the geopolitical level.
00:09:23.940The prosaic one, look, everybody's gone to school, okay?
00:09:27.460Or everybody's been a member of a club or the Boy Scouts or the football team or what have you.
00:09:42.920If you don't stand up, if somebody doesn't stand up to a bully on the playground or in Eastern Europe, the bully proceeds to continue to bully the vulnerable.
00:09:54.240The idea that whatever reason or excuse is provided, a nuclear-tipped nation with 11 time zones can break a taboo that has been in place since 1945 in Europe,
00:10:09.580which means you must not aggrandize your territory through use of force, is dangerous to every decent nation, every decent person.
00:10:18.380And if you want to go to the wonkish level, do your homework about Vladimir Putin or any aspect.
00:10:35.160It wasn't Condoleezza Rice and George Bush that built the biolabs.
00:10:40.220So get a little bit of your factual ducks in order.
00:10:43.640But specifically, a little bit of homework, who is Vladimir Putin beyond a KGB officer, a siloviki, a member of the nomenklatura's national security enterprise?
00:10:54.020He's a man who, since becoming president for 21 years, has been giving speeches about the illegitimacy of Ukraine as an independent nation,
00:11:02.660the illegitimacy of the Baltic states, the illegitimacy of Poland as an independent nation,
00:11:08.560that all should be subsumed into the Rodina, into Mother Russia.
00:11:12.460And you think, well, those are the states that border Russia.
00:11:18.580Those are the states who are fully paid-up members of NATO.
00:11:22.240So you think this won't have consequences?
00:11:25.640That a man who has already proven that he will keep his promises to use force, to take territory,
00:11:32.100wants to take Poland, the Baltic states, he must be sent a message.
00:13:21.040You read the 14 points of the Washington Treaty.
00:13:24.300It just says, you must have a representative democratic government and you must contribute to the collective defense of the club.
00:13:31.720Okay, well, if Poland wants to join, if Hungary wants to join, if Ukraine wants to join, why does another nation that's outside of the club get to have a veto?
00:13:43.920I mean, imagine if you're into movies, right?
00:14:41.680So the obvious, you know, I agree with you on a lot of stuff, obviously.
00:14:44.860But the obvious counter argument to this is if Mexico wanted to join the Warsaw Pact, would America just let that happen?
00:14:50.840Well, that's a Cold War context, right?
00:14:55.840So America would do its damnedest to stop that.
00:15:02.540But there would be no moral or other justification for us to invade Mexico to stop that.
00:15:10.160We would cease to be America if we said Mexico has decided, if there's a referendum, if it's not some kind of dictatorship, if Mexico decided, the idea that, what, we're going to invade you to stop you doing something you voluntarily want to do?
00:15:26.120We might use force if what happened in Afghanistan happened in Mexico.
00:15:32.380What happened in Afghanistan at Christmas of 79?
00:15:35.040The Spetsnaz were deployed, went in and assassinated the prime minister.
00:15:38.700And then the tanks rolled in and said, oh, Afghanistan is now part of the, you know, the broader association of—
00:15:46.980So, you know, it's, again, what is missing with these arguments is the moral content.
00:15:52.340It's the obvious fallacy of the Chomskyite-Michael Moore moral equivalency that, you know, the West is just another version of the East, or NATO is just another version of the Warsaw Pact.