The War for America's Soul Read online

  Praise for

  THE WAR FOR AMERICA’S SOUL

  “Sebastian Gorka is a force of reason, a force of nature, and a force for American freedom. Dr. Gorka doesn’t just talk the talk, he walks the walk—from the radio microphone to the Rose Garden. The War for America’s Soul is a patriot’s action guide to battling the Trump-hating radical Left, Beltway elites, and media saboteurs. Get off the sidelines and get on the frontlines. Buy this book!”

  —MICHELLE MALKIN

  “Take it from someone who has been on the inside, who understands the fight we are currently in, and who knows what must be done to save our country. Dr. Sebastian Gorka’s latest book, The War for America’s Soul, leverages the former White House strategist’s expertise, driven by his determination to preserve what made America great in the first place.”

  —MARK LEVIN

  “2020 is a choice between socialism and liberty. Sebastian Gorka understands the true threat and what my father is doing to stop those who wish to subvert America. Read The War for America’s Soul if you want to help save our Republic.”

  —DONALD TRUMP JR.

  “America is under attack from the inside by those who wish to destroy the nation our Founders gifted us. Sebastian Gorka is a fighter who knows the stakes and the seriousness of our predicament as a nation. Read The War for America’s Soul if you love America and want to help.”

  —JUDGE JEANINE PIRRO

  “Sebastian Gorka is one of the clearest, most consistent, and most eloquent defenders and explainers of the Trump phenomenon—and he has played that role with courage and good humor despite being vilified and slandered by the Left. Here, he uses that experience to throw light on the current battle for our culture and delivers a work of insight and encouragement for everyone who wants to see America rediscover its founding ideals.”

  —ANDREW KLAVAN

  “In this spirited defense of the Trump presidency, administration veteran Sebastian Gorka connects the illegitimate progressive efforts to abort the Trump presidency to a larger and multifaceted elite project of transforming America into something that the Founders never intended and most Americans simply do not want. Gorka will have none of it—and he offers a lively invitation to join him in saying NO.”

  —VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

  “Dr. Sebastian Gorka knows a thing or two about taking on totalitarians. And now, with The War for America’s Soul, he teaches you how to do the same with the radicalized Left. This book is a strategic battle guide for how to wage the culture war in America and ensure victory in 2020 and beyond.”

  —KATIE PAVLICH

  Dedicated to every Patriot who helped take back America by voting for a total outsider on November 8, 2016

  M.A.G.A.

  FOREWORD

  BY DENNIS PRAGER

  I had never heard the name Sebastian Gorka until I came across it in the Forward, a left-wing newspaper. Ever since I was a graduate student of Communist Affairs at the Russian Institute of Columbia University’s School of International Affairs, I have always read the left. At that time, I regularly read Pravda, the Soviet Communist newspaper. After graduate school, I read English language equivalents published in America. One of the earliest and most important revelations of my life was that there was essentially no difference between Pravda’s positions and those of the left in the United States—on America, the world, and just about every other topic.

  To this day, I read left-wing journals and writers at least as much as I do conservative journals and writers. That’s why I regularly read the Forward. So, I came across a Forward article that asserted there was a high-ranking figure in the Trump administration with a pro-Nazi past: a man named Sebastian Gorka.

  I am a Jew who has spent much of his life fighting for Jews and against antisemitism. When I was twenty-one-years-old, the Israeli government sent me into the Soviet Union to smuggle in Jewish religious items (banned, as all religious items were, by the Soviet regime), and, even more importantly, to smuggle out names of Soviet Jews who wanted to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Almost the only way Jews were allowed to leave the Soviet Union was at the personal invitation of another government, usually Israel. As a young Jew who was committed to Israel, Jews, and Judaism, had attended yeshivas until college, and who, as a bonus, spoke Hebrew and Russian, I was precisely the type of person the Israelis wanted for such an endeavor.

  Upon returning to America, I immediately became a leader in the movement to save Soviet Jewry. Shortly thereafter, I wrote an introduction to Judaism (The Nine Questions People Ask about Judaism) that is still published and read. I also taught Jewish history at Brooklyn College, and fought antisemitism on the left and right.

  I cite all this so that the reader understands how much it would disturb me as a Jew and as an American to even imagine that a pro-Nazi was serving in the highest echelons of the American government.

  But I was not disturbed by the Gorka article in the Forward. The reason is that fifty years of reading and listening to the left has taught me that truth is not a left-wing value. Truth is a liberal value, and truth is a conservative value. But it has never been a left-wing value. When leftists write or say anything, they do not ask themselves, “Is this true?” They ask, “Is this effective in destroying opponents?”

  Nevertheless, having no information on this Sebastian Gorka, I could not counter what I assumed—but did not know how to prove—was a smear.

  Then, about a month later, on March 17, 2017, the venerable Jerusalem Post published a masterful piece—“The ‘Forward’ Is Dead Wrong, Gorka Is a Defender of Israel, Jews”—that proved the Forward article about Gorka was a lie.

  The Jerusalem Post authors’ conclusion? “The Forward could not find a single shred of evidence suggesting that Sebastian Gorka has ever done or said anything even remotely antisemitic.”

  In fact, the authors made clear, not only were Gorka and his family not antisemitic, they were profoundly pro-Jew. I then spent a considerable amount of time on my national radio show reading from the Jerusalem Post and defending this man, Sebastian Gorka, against the terrible charge of antisemitism.

  I did so for a number of reasons:

  First, I was taught from a very young age something every yeshiva-graduate knows by heart—the Talmudic moral principle, “Whoever humiliates his neighbor in public, it is as if he murdered him.” It was drummed into me that God regards the smearing of a human being’s name as a form of murder. That’s why I have tried never to do this in thirty-five years as a radio talk show host. It is why, for example, during the Clinton presidency, I forbade callers from telling a Monica Lewinsky joke on my show. She, too, is created in God’s image, I kept reminding my listeners.

  Second, aside from outright Holocaust-denial, as pure an evil as I know of, nothing cheapens the Holocaust and Nazism as much as falsely using the labels “Nazi” and “antisemite.” If decent people are Nazis and antisemites, then Nazism and antisemitism aren’t so bad.

  Third, I have a visceral hatred of lies. More than any other awful thing, a lie makes evil possible—indeed, inevitable. This is a major reason why it is so important to fight the left.

  Sometime later, I received a message from Sebastian Gorka, movingly thanking me for defending him. I had no idea he even knew I had done so. And he has frequently done so ever since in speeches and on his radio show. This has deeply touched me. And that, too, has a reason. In a lifetime devoted to issues of good and evil, I have concluded that gratitude is the mother of goodness. Grateful people are almost always decent people, and the ungrateful are almost always awful people. (That is another reason the left is so destructive: it promotes ingratitude. In fact, it could not exist without it.)

  Sebastian
Gorka loves America. Many conservatives and liberals do. The left loathes it. That’s why they want to “fundamentally transform” it, as candidate-for-president Barack Obama announced five days before the 2008 election. By definition, one does not love what or whom one seeks to fundamentally transform. If your spouse wants to fundamentally transform you, he or she doesn’t love you.

  But unlike many other conservative and liberal Americans who love America, Sebastian Gorka understands the left’s threat, that it poisons everything it touches—art, music, universities, high schools, the sexes and their relationship to one another, marriage, America, Europe, Judaism, Christianity, football, women’s soccer, and even late night television shows.

  I divide good people into three groups: fighters, those who help the fighters, and those who do nothing. The latter is the biggest of the three, while the first is the smallest. Sebastian Gorka is, of course, in the first category.

  He loves America because, among other things, he loves liberty. He knows from the terrible pain of his own family’s experiences with Nazism and communism how precious and fragile freedom is. And he understands better than most the imminent danger posed to our freedom by the left.

  That’s why he needs to be heard and read.

  * * *

  Dennis Prager is the president of the internet-based Prager University, which garners a billion views a year, the majority by viewers under thirty-five year of age. He is a nationally syndicated radio show host and columnist. His most recent book is the second volume of The Rational Bible, his five-volume commentary on the Torah.

  PROLOGUEWHAT THE LEFT HAS WROUGHT

  Connecticut is not known for its reliably pleasant weather. As one of New England’s six constituent states, its winters are bleak and gray, and its summers very often wet. So in the Gorka family preparations for our oldest child’s May graduation from Trinity College in Hartford, we hoped for the best, but prepared for a rainy day in the mud. We needn’t have.

  When we arrived at the campus, it was a truly beautiful day. There were hundreds of chairs lined up in rows on the grass in front of the grand graduation stage on one side of the quad. Down the hill from the quad, there were dozens of marquee tents for the newly minted alumni and their loved ones to celebrate under after receiving their diplomas. It all looked most impressive and celebratory. Yet I had mixed feelings.

  Of course, I was overwhelmingly proud of our daughter. Thanks to her grades, she would be graduating summa cum laude and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, America’s most prestigious honor society, founded in 1776. But her academic achievements were not the main reason for our inordinate pride. Instead, it was her unbelievable work ethic, her indomitable spirit, and most of all, the way she had handled great hardship.

  In addition to being an A student, our Julia was an athlete. She started rowing in high school and eventually became co-captain of her crew team at Trinity, which meant that along with the brutal 5:00 a.m. training sessions, she had to manage all the drama that attends a female sporting community at college. On top of her responsibilities with the team and her studies, she took on multiple jobs: as a manager at the college coffee shop, as a teaching assistant for four of her professors, and as a tutor at the Trinity Writing Center, helping struggling students with their papers. Not only was she establishing herself as an independent young woman with an innate desire for financial independence, she was serving others. Then there was the accident.

  One of the student houses was to hold a celebration for the new school year, and Julia was invited. It was one of those rare days of decent weather in Hartford, so the festivities were moved out onto the three decks attached to the three floors of the building. Just as Julia stepped out onto the top deck, thirty feet up, the whole structure came away from the wall. The deck she was on pancaked onto the two lower decks, which were also populated with celebrating students. The result was thirty young men and women broken and distraught, entangled in the ruins of the deck structure. Soon thereafter, after first responders had taken her to the Emergency Room, we received the dreaded call from our daughter: “I’m in hospital. There’s been an accident.”

  The truly incredible thing was that not one student died. Julia’s close friend had been on the bottom deck and was in the gravest condition with multiple broken bones and fractures, including her hip. It easily could have been far worse, as the decks had been illegally constructed and weren’t properly anchored to the building, despite being college property. Julia had no bones broken but had severely injured one leg—her knee and ankle—with nerve damage along most of her thigh. As a result, she wouldn’t row for at least a season. And that’s not to mention the psychological effects of losing all sense of safety as she felt the deck collapse under her and saw her friends fall thirty feet to the ground and land on top of each other. But incredibly she would not allow this awful experience to slow her down in any way. Not for a moment.

  We suggested that she come home for a season, recuperate with us, and then go back to school when she was physically and psychologically ready. But no. She stayed at Trinity and persevered, despite having to use crutches to get from class to class. She is a truly incredible young woman. But her hard times were not over yet.

  Originally a proud theological institution, Trinity has gone the way of most institutions of higher learning in America and Europe. Instead of focusing on the values, traditions, and history of our great Western civilization, the great works of the “dead white men” who brought us science, law, democracy, and free markets, Trinity has joined the ranks of those schools that see our Judeo-Christian heritage as being defined more by racism and misogyny than the truth.

  A tiny handful of professors, however, remained undaunted by the rise of the “Gender Studies” and “Sustainability” mafia, and responded by creating a new institution at Trinity, called the Churchill Institute, the purpose of which is “to encourage, in every way possible, serious teaching, learning and scholarship about Western Civilization and to promote a vigorous discussion of its preservation and future trajectory.”1 Hardly controversial, you would think. But you’d be wrong.

  Soon after its establishment, the Churchill Institute offered Julia a student fellowship to work there and run several of its projects. This would be her fourth job at the school! After much rumination, she agreed. This decision to associate with an organization that supports our national and civilizational heritage would be used against her in the weeks before her graduation on that sunny day in May.

  You should know that Trinity College is home to Johnny Eric Williams, a man I refuse to dignify with the title “professor” because of his extremist views and despicable actions.

  This person is meant to teach sociology to the young people attending the school. Instead he is a proud purveyor of bigotry and race-based hatred.

  Famous for his pronouncements on social media, Williams has stated that simply being white is an act of “terrorism,” and that “all self-identified white people (no exceptions) are invested in and collude with systemic white racism/white supremacy.”2

  Most outrageous and despicable of all was what he said after James Hodgkinson, a volunteer for the Bernie Sanders campaign, took a rifle, a handgun, and a hit-list of Republican politicians to a baseball diamond in Northern Virginia with the intent to murder as many as he could of those present at a practice for a charity game. Almost taking the life of Congressman Steve Scalise, he was killed by two brave members of the Capitol Police. Williams tweeted that the ambulance crews who rushed to the shooting should have “#LetThemF*ckingDie.”3

  Apart from a brief hiatus from teaching, this vile individual has paid no penalty for his racism or death-wish extremism. He still teaches at Trinity, with the president of the college defending him under the banner of “academic freedom.” Note: Williams and the college president, Joanne Berger-Sweeney, are both black. Ask yourself what would have ensued had they both been white, and Williams had made public statements to the effect that, “Blackness is terrorism
.” I doubt his academic freedom would have saved him from being summarily fired, tenure or no tenure.

  This last piece of the puzzle provides context for what happened next to Julia and what transpired on the day of her graduation.

  A month before the big day, the Churchill Institute was targeted by a small group of vocal students who managed to have it formally disapproved by the Trinity Student Government. Why? Well, because the Churchill Institute’s mission—“to encourage, in every way possible, serious teaching, learning and scholarship about Western Civilization”—celebrates the values upon which America and the West were built, and so challenges the ideology of “identity politics” and victimhood that are the bedrock of left-wing politics and academe today. And because she was associated with the Institute, our daughter Julia came under attack as well. Just before her graduation, a social media campaign was launched against Julia, using her name and picture, and posters were placed around campus stating: “This is the face of Racism. This is the face of White Supremacy.”

  Imagine this happening to your daughter. Imagine this happening to you, as a young person in college. Imagine this happening to someone, like my daughter, who not only doesn’t have a racist fiber in her being, but who, as part of her law and policy studies in school, focused explicitly on helping the most disadvantaged women—often minority women—who are abused and end up financially destitute thanks to the actions of their reprobate husbands or partners. Leftist activists aimed their hatred at Julia just days before her graduation—and what did the school do? Nothing.

  I contacted Trinity College president Berger-Sweeney to express my concerns and highlight the protection she had afforded an avowed bigot on her faculty, Johnny Eric Williams, and I contrasted that with the utter lack of response to the harassment Julia had received. She replied with a noncommittal email full of empty liberal nostrums. Since then, I found out that the campus police had almost immediately identified the students behind the hate campaign, but when the culprits’ left-wing credentials became known to the school, one of the deans forced the officer in charge to quietly drop the whole investigation. Apparently, “social justice” doesn’t apply to conservatives.