Zee Era Of Fox News Giving Sebastian Gorka A Pity Paycheck Is OV-UH

But what would NAPOLEON have done?

Former Trump administration hanger-on and all-around definitely not-a-Nazi (he's NAZI-ADJACENT, OK?) Sebastian Gorka has cut his ties with Fox News, where until this weekend he'd been on the payroll as a "national security strategist." Gorka got the gig in November 2017, a few months after getting shitcanned-or-resigning from the Trump White House, where nobody was really sure what the fuck he even did. Gorka told the  Hollywood Reporter the decision to leave Fox was entirely his because he's just so busy working on a new daily radio show for rightwing outlet Salem Radio, plus doing commentaries for Sinclair Broadcasting. So far, Fox News hasn't made any comment on his departure (beyond confirming it in general terms to The Wrap), because since when is it any of YOUR business, you nosy thing you?

Gorka told the Hollywood Reporter he'd definitely continue to appear on his pal Sean Hannity's program, and other Fox broadcasts, "as a free agent as my new schedule permits." He's leaving Fox on his own terms, you see, because he's simply such a busy guy:

"  I decided not to renew my contract since I have a new nationally syndicated radio show and a position with Sinclair TV which obviated a new arrangement with FNC," he said in an email.

Gorka even appeared on Jeanine Pirro's program Sunday night after the news of his departure broke, billed as a radio host and "author."

Since January, he's been hosting a radio program with the incredibly creative title, "America First With Dr. Sebastian Gorka," not that he has any insecurity at all about his dubious Hungarian academic credentials. OK, it's not that they're that hinky -- we bet lots of people have PhD committees that include family  friends, two of whom only have Bachelor's degrees themselves. But for a laugh, we invite you to read this fun review in Foreign Policy  of Gorka's "Islam is VERY BAD" dissertation from 2007, and its very up-to-date sourcing:

Sometimes the results are unintentionally amusing, as when he makes claims about the state of terrorism studies in 2007 based on a book chapter written in 1988 — which itself uses field surveys conducted in 1982 and 1985. Twenty-two years is an eternity in most scholarly fields, but this means his claims about the state of the field are sourced to a period before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Oklahoma City bombing, the emergence of al Qaeda, the Good Friday accords, the conflicts of the North Caucasus, 9/11, the attack on the Parliament of India, and the American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Other parts are just plain weird. He includes a brief and pointless survey of past "apocalyptically motivated terrorism." It discusses only   the Zealots-Sicarii, the Assassins, and the Thugs . This is something of a cliché in histories of terrorism, and his account of the latter two groups comes almost entirely from a 1998 book called Warrior Cults: A History of Magical, Mystical and Murderous Organizations . This section showcases a pattern found elsewhere in the dissertation: Gorka drops a footnote indicating that relevant material comes from a particular source unless he indicates otherwise. He then proceeds without additional references, leaving the reader in the dark as to how to check his research. At least in some places, this leads him to pass  off direct quotations from source material as his own language.

We think it's very nice of author Daniel Nexon not to actually call that plagiarism -- but maybe in Hungary you don't have to distinguish between stuff you wrote and your sources' writing. It might be bigoted to suggest otherwise.

"Dr." Gorka had himself a really big weekend before this latest news broke. On Friday, he warned the annual House Of Crazypants convention that the Green New Deal will steal your moo-cows and moo-cow byproducts:

They want to take your pickup truck. They want to rebuild your home. They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved.

Stalin's anti-hamburger and pickup truck agenda may well have been documented further in Gorka's dissertation, for all we know. Later Friday, Politico published that terrifying exposé on the early chaos of the Trump administration's foreign policy (as opposed to its mature, seasoned chaos now), noting Gorka's penchant for randomly wandering into National Security Council (NSC) meetings.

Gorka, would show up at random meetings, even though it was never clear whether he had the proper security clearance, and he would often raise unrelated points. One former White House official recalled Gorka saying such things as, "'If you look at what Napoleon did …' and we'd all be like, 'I don't even know how to respond to that.'" (Asked for comment, Gorka told a POLITICO reporter, "Take a long run off a short pier, you utter hack.")

That li'l charmer.

And to top it all off, while he was at CPAC, Gorka got yet another parking ticket on his manly Alpha Male 4-cylinder Ford Mustang, which we imagine gets embarrassingly good gas mileage for a guy who insists climate change isn't real. Washington Post photographer Evy Mages documented for the ages the latest parking misadventure of the car with the very tough ART WAR vanitiy plates:

ART WAR!!!!!! https: //t.co/xxrznlbtgc

— jordan (@jordan) 1551472034.0 

Gorka was also caught in 2017 doing Sun Tzu Parking on a sidewalk, as defenders of Western Civilization must sometimes do when they're in a hurry to fight off the Saracens.

Despite @ArlingtonVA laws prohibiting this behavior, I came across this car that had just been parked on the sidewa… https: //t.co/hXdRfrFmRM

— Bilsko (@Bilsko) 1509480512.0 

When Mediaite editor Aidan McLaughlin asked the Dragon Of Budapest for comment Sunday night about cutting ties with Fox News, the great man of history and scholarship emailed back to accuse McLaughlin of being in a "drug-induced haze," then said in another email, "You really are obsessed with me aren't you. I'd be flattered if you weren't a washed-out hack." Gorka told McLaughlin to see his Twitter bio for his current job information, but when McLaughlin reminded Gorka he'd blocked him, Gorka wrote back with three separate emails:

Wow. What a pro.
So you don't have any friends or coelagues [sic] either.
So sad ..

Followed by:

So Mr. Lonely: I have 2 new gigs.
Ask someone to google it for you.

The intellectual lion of the right closed the exchange with,

FYI I'm blocking your email address too.
Ta ta.

You ask us, that's a guy who's clearly FAR too busy to waste his time on Fox News.

[ Hollywood Reporter / The Wrap / Oregonian / Foreign Policy / Mediaite / Mediaite ]

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