"When a group of people repeatedly says they will destroy you, sooner or later you should take them seriously.”

Excerpts from Sebastion Gorka's speech at Hillsdale College’s eighth annual Constitution Day celebration in Washington, D.C. on September 19, 2017.

...when I heard the president’s speech on Afghanistan, I knew it was time for me to relocate my desk and my chair. I came in because of my background in counterterrorism and my commitment to defeating radical Islamic terrorism. But when a speech was written for the president, which had that phrase removed, after its use multiple times: in Riyadh, in front of the joint session of Congress, in Warsaw, I knew that the swamp was in ascendance.

...Let’s talk about the deep state. I don’t like the phrase “the deep state.” I think it has a flavor of a conspiracy theory. I love conspiracy theories as fiction. OK? I have a bookshelf of them, but there’s a reason they’re called “theories.” They’re not conspiracy facts. OK? I prefer the phrase “the permanent state.” And that’s not a conspiracy theory. The permanent state is real. And it is a problem when you look at the values that it holds. I wasn’t part of the National Security Council, but I, thanks to some good people in the NSC, I attended numerous meetings on key issues, whether it was “the Qatar crisis,” whether it was “defeat ISIS,” “Muslim brotherhood,” and so forth.

And, to sit … I mean, look. I’m a child of people who escaped Communist dictatorship. My father, at the age of 20, was given a life sentence of being an anti-communist, and spent two years in a prison coal mine. So, I arrived to Washington with a sense that I was adequately cynical. I had no idea.

When you sit inside the Situation Room, or you sit inside an NSC videoconference facility, with members of the inter-agencies sitting at the table, and then out-stations, DIA, CIA, Department of Defense, so on and so forth, and you’re talking about a very important policy issue, at the highest level of U.S. government (policy coordination inside the NSC) and you just listen for an hour, hour and a half. And not one person in the room, or on the outstations, mentions the name of the president, what his objectives are, given the relevant issue, or what he said yesterday in Warsaw, we have a problem, Houston. Especially when you see that happen again and again and again.

And then, it’s left up to me, the guy with the funny accent, to remind everybody in the room, and on the outstations, “You do know what the president said yesterday about ISIS?” Or, “You do what he said yesterday about illegal immigration?” The lone wolf voice had to remind him. That’s the “permanent state.” It’s the GS15, who’s been at the State Department for 20 years, and thinks he knows better than the individual who was elected to run the federal government. This is something that will take years for us to rectify, but we shall.

...And one of the reasons that I decided to assist the president, was in the first five minutes of meeting him in 2015, I realized that this is a man who understands we are at war with a new totalitarian enemy. Global jihadism is a form of totalitarianism. It has a connective tissue; it has a shared gene code with the fascists and the Nazis of the past, with the Communists of the Cold War. Why? Because you cannot negotiate with Abul Bakr al-Baghdadi, just as you cannot negotiate with Hitler. They will either kill or enslave you. Period. When I met Donald Trump, I understood immediately, this is not only a man who understands we are at war; he also wishes to win that war. And that is very refreshing.

...What we have to understand is what China is doing to us in the economic domain. And the rank, abject surrender that our private sector, especially Silicon Valley, and many partitions in this city have demonstrated by saying, “Oh, Chinese money; that’s like anybody else’s money. That’s fine; their money’s green, too.” Wrong. When Apple decides to put its latest artificial intelligence research center in China, that means China has successfully executed economic warfare against us.

...“One Belt, One Road.” They know how to do strategy, and they are executing on that strategy, and the sooner we wake up, the better.

...Ideology is reborn. Not in a bipolar sense, but there is a connective tissue that links Venezuela to Iran, to ISIS, to Russia, to China. They’re not all Communists; they’re not all jihadis. But their one ideological connection is that they all wish to undermine or destroy us. Iran . . . I totally agree that the threat from North Korea is a very serious one, as we heard last night, but Iran is more serious. Why? Because our last administration facilitated a regime that wished to destroy us. $150 billion. Signed a deal that doesn’t stop them from getting nuclear weapons; it mildly delays them.

To quote a survivor of the Holocaust, an old man who’d seen his whole family die in the labor camps and in the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, some facile reporter asked him one day, “What is your take-home from the last six years of the Holocaust? What’s your big lessons learned?” And he said, “Oh, that’s easy. There’s one lesson learned. When a group of people repeatedly says they will destroy you, sooner or later you should take them seriously.”

We need to take Iran seriously. And everybody else, who not only verbally is committed to our destruction, but is working on ways to acquire the capability to effect that destruction.

...There’s a massive palette of true statecraft between isolationism and neo-conservatism. And that’s who this president is.

...the president’s Warsaw speech is a reaffirmation of Judeo-Christian civilizational values, and a statement that we will not export, by force, our political system, but we will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with anyone that shares our Judeo-Christian values, whether it’s Poland, or whether it’s Belgium. Anyone. That’s who the president is.

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