I am baffled that White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka gets so little attention from the media.
It isn’t for lack of material, which is a rare blend of both cry-laugh funny and substantively alarming. Gorka is like a theater kid version of Henry Kissinger, the same inflated ego but with a flair for the flamboyant: bragging he’s stacking terrorist corpses “like cordwood” after they’d received "eternal justice" from the Trump admin’s "hammers of hell”; his convertible with a vanity plate “ART WAR” (in reference to Sun Tzu); the Hercule Poirot pocket squares and mustachios; the Bond villain monologues delivered in a faint British accent.
Amusing as it all is, the theatrics are in service of a worldview that regards just about anyone who looks or thinks differently from him as some kind of threat to Western civilization. You’d think he was auditioning to be the *Oberführer *of something that has nothing to do with America.
The Trump administration has already sought to stigmatize transgender people as a hotbed of violent extremism, as I reported on last year. The U.S. government’s official national counterterrorism strategy, authored by Gorka earlier this year, explicitly mentions “extreme gender ideologies” as an example of a “violent secular political groups” that will be prioritized for “identification and neutralization,” as shown below.
Gorka’s fingerprints are also on Trump’s national security order NSPM-7, which directed federal agencies to root out extremism on “gender,” among other things deemed hostile to “traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” But the document does not explain how exactly it defines extremism on gender, leading some to think it was just a war on trans people.
Gorka recently suggested that the government’s war on “gender extremism” encompasses more than just trans people.
In a little-noticed ▶interview on Rabbi Michael Barclay’s podcast last month, Gorka warned of the “internal threat” to America, listing “mentally imbalanced transgender, nonbinary extremists” among them. (Nonbinary refers to people who identify as neither male nor female.)
That is the first ever reference to non-binary extremism by a national security official, as far as I can tell.
Here’s Gorka’s full remark in context:
“Whether it’s jihadists, whether it’s cartels bringing in fentanyl, killing, you know, hundreds of thousands of Americans, whether it’s members of the DSA who wish to get rid of the presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court. You know, whether it’s the external threat or the internal threat, whether it’s the mentally imbalanced transgender, non-binary extremists who literally walk into a Catholic church and murder little children at the Annunciation Church.”
Gorka is referring to the August 27, 2025 attack on Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. Robin Westman, 23, fired more than a hundred rifle rounds through the church’s windows during an all-school Mass held to mark the first week of classes, killing two young children — before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The FBI investigated it as an act of domestic terrorism.
But the shooter was transgender, not non-binary. Westman, who had legally changed names in 2019, left behind videos and writings that prosecutors said expressed hatred toward nearly every group imaginable. The acting U.S. attorney put it more bluntly: the shooter “appeared to hate all of us.” I’m hard pressed to see how Westman’s gender identity had anything to do with it.
In fact, I tried to find any evidence of a record of non-binary violence, and the only case I could come up with is the Zizians.
The Zizians are a small offshoot of the Bay Area “rationalist” cult that formed around the writings of Jack “Ziz” LaSota, and they have been linked by prosecutors to six killings across California, Pennsylvania and Vermont — among them a Border Patrol Agent shot during a Vermont traffic stop in January 2025. Maryland prosecutors last year described LaSota as the leader of an extremist group. Many of the group’s members are transgender or other nonconforming genders.
The group is definitely dangerous and extreme in their views; but those views are fixated on things like veganism, artificial intelligence and theory of mind stuff — not gender.
The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates roughly 2.1 million American adults as transgender — about 0.8 percent of the country — and puts nonbinary adults at around 1.2 million. This is the population Gorka has folded into a category alongside cartels and jihadists.
Gorka and company are obsessed with any sexual (and political) identities that don’t embrace guns, God (his God), and a Czarist love of the old world.
He put this bluntly in his appearance on Barclay’s podcast, saying:
“The question of our age is very simple: Does the West have the will to fight and defeat those who wish to destroy our civilization?”
The “West” that he’s referring to is threatened, Gorka says, not just by those who believe things he doesn’t agree with, but also by those who don’t believe in anything. That’s Gorka’s definition of groups like sexual predators, not as criminals, but as another extremist group invented under Trump: the “nihilist violent extremist,” which I reported on last year.
Just this week, the FBI announced the first-ever minor to be federally charged for “nihilistic violent extremism” — a 17-year-old from Maine, found to have committed acts of juvenile delinquency including conspiring to sexually exploit a child, distributing child sexual abuse material, cyberstalking and interstate threats. The Bureau says it is now investigating more than 500 “NVE” operatives nationwide, a number it says is on the rise, up from 350 investigations last December.
While the teenager’s crimes obviously merit criminal prosecution, does this really rise to the level of a terroristic threat to national security?
Gorka thinks so. What is bizarre about this official with President Trump’s ear is that this extremist can chatter on without anyone in the press noticing. He’s a high-level government official!
Society, Gorka says, is in “a war to the death where only one side can win: the forces of light and goodness, or those who really are working for the destruction of our civilization.”
It’s pretty obvious who the real extremist is here.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
