| | | | | Mentioned in this edition: Chris Rufo, Tucker Carlson, Scott Jennings, Tucker Carlson, Jeff Bezos, Kari Lake, Sohrab Ahmari, Al Qaeda, US terrorism threats, the Biden-Harris failures, and more. | | Have tips? Send them to me at ari@upward.news |
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| | | 🔎 WHAT WE'RE WATCHING | | 🌴 Chris Rufo is heading to Mar-a-Lago to present President-elect Trump's team with an ambitious plan to defund universities that cling to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. Rufo, known for exposing critical race theory (CRT), gender ideology, and DEI practices, wants to tie federal funding to merit-based policies, slashing support for schools prioritizing race-based initiatives. He played a key role in Trump's 2020 executive order banning CRT in the federal government and now aims to eliminate affirmative action altogether. | 📰 Conservative commentator Scott Jennings has joined the Los Angeles Times editorial board as part of owner Patrick Soon-Shiong's push for balanced viewpoints. Jennings, who currently makes waves as a conservative CNN panelist, aims to represent right-wing voices often ignored by mainstream media, while Soon-Shiong is promising clearer distinctions between news and opinion. This move reflects a broader trend toward including conservative perspectives in major outlets such as the Washington Post, where owner Jeff Bezos recently said he's "super optimistic" about seeing what Donald Trump can do as president. | 📱 Trump's TikTok Dilemma: The Supreme Court and President-elect Donald Trump hold TikTok's fate in their hands as a US ban looms. A January 19 deadline requires TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, to divest the app or face removal from US markets, just one day before Trump takes office. Trump has promised to save the app, arguing it preserves competition in a market dominated by Meta. However, conservatives remain divided over TikTok; some see it as a national security threat tied to the Chinese Communist Party, while others view it as a platform vital for free speech and outreach to younger voters. | 🗻 Tucker Carlson's nicotine pouch brand, ALP, is gaining ground as a conservative alternative to Zyn, which Carlson criticized for its parent company's donations to Vice President Kamala Harris and focus on "woke" DEI initiatives. A recent survey found that over 86 percent of nicotine pouch users are likely to switch to ALP, signaling a major shift in the market. |
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| | | 🔴 WHO WE'RE WATCHING | Kari Lake is in talks to join Newsmax. The two-time failed Arizona office-seeker is reportedly in "active negotiations" with the right-wing news channel for an on-camera position. Before running for governor in 2022 and the Senate in 2024, Lake was a prominent news anchor in Phoenix for Fox 10. | Sohrab Ahmari is coming on as Unherd's US Editor. Having recently co-founded Compact Magazine in 2022, the populist-right writer is now leaving the publication for the UK-based political and cultural outlet. | Elijah Moorman is set to become Daily Caller's new CEO. |
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| | | Dr. Sebastian Gorka on the unprecedented terrorism threats facing America | | Dr. Sebastian Gorka is a national security expert, military analyst, and author who served as a deputy assistant to President Donald Trump in 2017. He is currently the nominee for senior director for counterterrorism in the upcoming Trump administration. | This interview was edited for clarity. | Ari: You've been tapped to be the senior director for counterterrorism in America. Coming in after four years of having mass migration through a wide open border, we've heard about different threats like Hezbollah coming through the border. What are your top priorities in this role? | Sebastian: Well, they're the priorities of the president of the United States to make sure that all Americans prosper and are safe. Of course, it's going to be for the president and for his border czar Tom Holman to secure the border, to actually give us national sovereignty once more. | Then, under the directorship of the new national security advisor, to identify all the domestic threats to the safety of US citizens, whether they are from inimical nation-states such as China or North Korea or Iran, or whether it's non-state actors like Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, ISIS, Hezbollah, that have been secreted into the nation as millions and millions of illegal aliens were led into the country by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden — it will be making sure that events like September 11 or October 7 cannot happen in America. | Ari: What has to be done differently in the next administration, maybe even different than Trump's first administration, to make sure that events like those never happen? | Sebastian: Well, it would be inappropriate of me to give details as to specifically what will be done differently after January 20; President Trump will make those policies clear, as well as National Security Advisor Col. Waltz. | What I'm looking to do is to leverage what I've done for the last 30 years to explain and now make part of our policy an understanding of the threat environment based upon the ideology of global jihadism under the Obama years — and this was just on steroids, under Biden-Harris, we had this utterly fallacious diagnosis of the terror threat. | Saying that terrorism is a function of a lack of education and poverty is utter, complete garbage. If you look at the 9/11 hijackers, the majority of them were well-educated, middle-class graduate students — medical professionals like Ayman al Zawahiri, who commanded them, along with bin Laden. | These are not stupid people from the ghetto. These are advanced, educated individuals who subscribe to an ideology of jihadism, and we have to understand the power of that ideology. | I will be very much focused on making sure everyone in the intelligence community, our federal law enforcement, and our partners at the state and community level, understand that this is an ideological enemy that wishes to kill members of Judeo-Christian civilization. | Ari: I'm really glad that you brought that up because it seems like when I was growing up, everyone was very alert about the threat of global jihadism. Then something happened during the Obama years, and even under the Biden administration, where, for some reason, people shifted their focus away from that threat. | They felt that it wasn't a problem anymore, that maybe there were things to focus on at home. How should the average American think about the threat of global jihadism? | Sebastian: Well, look, as I outlined in the first book I wrote that propelled me to the White House, defeating jihad, the threat to the nations of Western civilization has to be understood in the correct context. | This is another totalitarian ideology, so there's a reason that some people use the phrase theocratic or fascistic Islam or fascism. Why? Because there's connective tissue between fascism, nazism, communism, and global jihadism. | Yes, it is religiously motivated, in terms of the interpretation of the Quran by people like bin Laden, Zawahiri, and so forth — and you know, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan, Al Banna, the ayatollahs — but it is a totalitarian ideology. Either you submit yourself to the will of the jihadi movement, or you must be subjugated or killed. | It's very, very clear what Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Hezbollah say: if you're a Jew, if you're a Christian, you must be enslaved or killed. And if you're an apostate, if you're a Muslim who dares to disagree with their version of Islam, you are at the top of the target list. This is the reality of the enemies we face. | As a survivor of the Holocaust once said, if a group of people persistently say they want to kill you, you should listen to them, and you should take them seriously. What I've done for the last 30 years is analyze the ideology and read the materials of Al Banna, Qutub, and bin Laden. If you want to understand an enemy, you must understand their belief system if you are to defeat them. | Ari: Talking about global terrorism, one of the biggest threats we have is Iran, and there's been a lot of talk about how Trump is going to approach them. Do you have any thoughts on the right approach — something "diplomatic" or an approach with the same strength Trump showed them in his first administration? | Sebastian: It's not about diplomacy when a regime preaches from the pulpit every Friday that you must be destroyed because you're the great Satan along with the little Satan, Israel. This is a mind-blowing question: what diplomacy can you have with a regime that wishes to destroy you? | And this is unclassified — we know the Iranian regime has sent hired guns, a Pakistani national who was paid by the Iranian regime to try and kill President Trump. What diplomacy do you do with a regime that wishes to murder the president-elect? There is no diplomacy that can function. | And you know, what are we going to do in the next four years? You will see what the president will do. You will see what National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio do. | But let me be very clear about what we did in the first administration. It was probably the proudest moment in my career, when I was called into the Oval Office, along with Steve Bannon and the cabinet. President Trump called Steve and me his heavies, and he said, "Tell these guys and gals why we're going to kill the Iran deal" — you know, Obama's JCPOA Iran deal that literally released billions of dollars to a regime that is the greatest sponsor of government-sponsored terrorism in the world today. | President Trump didn't need to hear it from us; he just wanted us to deliver it in front of the cabinet, and we did, and we explained why. It doesn't stop the mullahs from getting a nuclear weapon. It's bad for Israel, bad for the Middle East, and it endangers the lives of American citizens. | And sure enough, the following week, President Trump killed Obama's Iran deal. So, you know, yes, Iran is, remains, the largest state sponsor of terrorism, and every decent person, whether they're a Jew, whether they're a Christian, whether they're an atheist, should wish for the people of Persia and the minorities that live in Iran to live in a free Iranian state. | This government is not about intervention. President Trump is not some kind of neocon interventionist. He demonstrated his very, very surgical use of force for the first four years of his administration. But he does wish the people of that nation to live in freedom, and as long as that regime is in power, the people of that benighted country do not live in freedom. | Ari: What about the situation in Qatar? I know that under the Biden administration, especially dealing with Hamas, they tried to do so "ridiculously diplomatically," as you said. | What are your thoughts on also dealing with the other acts of terror happening around Iran and in its circle? Is it just a matter of cutting off the head and dealing with Iran, and then those problems will go away? Or will it require still dealing with entities like Hamas, whose leadership might be living and thriving elsewhere? | Sebastian: Look, I'm not going to steal the thunder of the president or Secretary Rubio or the president's newly announced Middle East peace envoy, so you can interview them — but I will say that the Abraham Accords will be revivified. | What President Trump did, along with Jared [Kushner] and Jason [Greenblatt], his envoys in the first four years, was absolutely historic — numerous Muslim and Arab nations finally normalizing relations, not just with Israel, but with the United States. | We're going to resurrect that, and we welcome other parties to the table, but they have to be acting in good faith. So I'm not going to talk about specific countries because that's not my remit. If people want to have a good relationship with America, then President Trump will be open to that. But it has to be in good faith. | Ari: I'd like to also ask you, while we're on this topic, about Ukraine and the war there, and I know that— | Sebastian: I'm not going to talk about that. I'm the nominee for counterterrorism. | Ari: Totally understand. I know that you have a prolific knowledge of the threats to the West. Right now, Europe is inundated with this problem of illegal migrants, also with completely different ideologies. | Given that conservatives in America seem to share a common understanding of how to address this issue, what are your thoughts on how Europe should approach this problem? | Sebastian: It would be inappropriate for me to comment on specific countries, but let me just give you an example from my childhood. I grew up as the son of real refugees — not fake refugees, as we've seen flooding across the non-existent border under the Biden-Harris regime. | And I grew up in an incredibly heterogeneous part of West London. In a school of 600 boys — there was one — one of my fellow classmates, who could actually prove he was English, English going back several generations. Everybody else was the child of immigrants or an immigrant themselves. | I was the child of Hungarian refugees. My best buddies were Polish, Indian, Pakistani, Jamaican, you name it. However, every single one of us felt ourselves to be British. I was born in the UK, and I was proud to be a Brit before I became a legal immigrant to the United States and a US citizen. That, I think, is the model for any nation. | There has to be some commonality of identity and understanding. Otherwise, what content is there to the identity of a nation? If you can't define a common value system to being French or Belgian or Swiss or German or British or American, then what does the word American or French mean? It means nothing. It is nugatory. It has no meaningful content. | So, if anyone wants to have a healthy, functioning nation, they have to think about what it means for that nation to have specific values. And if people who come to that country, wishing to be citizens of that country, do not share those values, then that's going to be a problem for that nation in the long term. | Ari: How much of the threat of terrorism is related to the mass migration that's happening in Europe and America? Are those inextricably related? | Sebastian: Well, just do the thought experiment. For the last decade, the US military has had something called the Red Team function next to a combatant commander, a theater commander. There will be an officer, there will be a team who is there to think like the enemy. | So if you're in PACOM, if you're in the Pacific, you are trying to think like the Red Army of the People's Republic of China. If you're in the Middle East, you're trying to advise the commander in terms of what the enemies like Al Nusra, Hezbollah, and Hamas are thinking. | If you put yourself in the position of a bad guy, if you're a terrorist organization or a narco-terrorist organization, if you're the head of a cartel, if you're a leader of ISIS-K or Al Qaeda, or even if your North Korean intelligence — and you know that the American government under the personage of the — quote, unquote — border czar, Kamala Harris, and the dotard in the White House, Joe Biden. | If they advertised to the world four years ago that we are opening the borders, what are you going to do if you hate America, if you wish to do harm to America, and if there is no functional control of the border — that everyone is welcome through that border? What are you going to do? I mean, it's not rocket science. You're going to secrete your operatives, your terrorists, your cartel members, and your enemy intelligence agents into that stream. | We know from Biden government figures that 8 million illegals came through the southern border in the last four years; if you add the gotaways — people who weren't interacting with any of the authorities who came across the border — you can at least double it to 16 million. If only one percent of them are enemy agents, members of non-state threat groups, those are divisional-size assets. | So we will be inheriting a very, very serious threat environment. But under President Trump, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Tom Homan, and John Radcliffe at the CIA, we are going to, finally, after four years, take our oath of office seriously to the American people and secure our country. | |
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