NAZIS IN RUST BELT?

GORKA IN ERIE

A politician with multiple confirmed ties to white supremacists and neo-Nazis is giving a talk in a former synagogue close to Pittsburgh, less than two weeks after the mass shooting in a synagogue there, on the eve of the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a pogrom that took place in Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938, in which 267 synagogues and over 7,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed or damaged and over 100 Jewish people died.

Here are some facts followed by a detailed report:

• Sebastian Gorka, a Hungarian-American political analyst, is a former Deputy Assistant to Donald Trump and a former editor of the Breitbart News.
• Gorka’s appearance in Erie follows his book tour promoted by his publisher Regnery Publishing, founded by and associated with the Regnery family known for its 70 years of pro-racist and Nazi sympathies.
• William Regnery founded America First, a committee that opposed the US involvement in the World War II. His son, Henry Regnery, published Nazi apologists after the World War II, and nephew, Bill Regnery, now funds the National Policy Institute and its president neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. Bill Regnery and Richard Spencer have working and personal ties with Alexander Dugin, an ultra-right ideologist close to the Kremlin and Hungarian radical right and anti-Semitic politicians. Gorka has ties to the Hungarian nationalist politicians and officials, including the foreign minister and prime minister Victor Orban close to Putin.
• Gorka’s wife, an advisor for the Department of Homeland Security, is a cousin of a longtime chairman of the Heritage Foundation, an organization that reportedly staffed about 60% of Trump’s administration and claims to provide the agenda for it, including such actions as leaving the Paris Climate Accord and UNESCO, repealing Net Neutrality, reshaping National Monuments and many more. The Heritage also contracted Sebastian Gorka as a foreign policy speaker.
• The Heritage was founded by late Paul Weyrich, the architect of American religious right political movement, known for his anti-Semitic and anti-LGBT views. He worked closely with a convicted Hungarian Nazi war criminal. He also had longterm ties and a pro-Putin Russian-American operative with whom he co-authored pro-Putin articles and opened think tanks.
• The Heritage receives significant funding from the Mercer family that also funds and supports the Breitbart News, Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopolis. Gorka is close to Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopolus and another Mercers’ appointee, Michael Flynn, a former National Security Advisor who pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI about contacts he had with the Russian government during Trump’s presidential transition.
• Gorka’s tour during midterms is similar to the activities of Weyrich’s adviser executive, a convicted Hungarian Nazi, who was recruiting voters for Republicans in the US in the 1950s — 60s, appealing to the Nazi sympathizers.
• In Erie, Gorka is speaking at Jefferson Education Society, a non-profit tax-exempt center funded by a local gambling organization, founded by a sex offender and managed by the president who studied in Russia and is married to a Russian who attended an elite university in Moscow.

WHO IS SEBASTIAN GORKA?

NATURALIZATION, SECURITY CLEARANCE AND ACADEMIC CREDENTIALS QUESTIONED:

• Gorka Sebestyén aka Sebastian Gorka was a Deputy Assistant to President Donald Trump in 2017 even though he failed to obtain the security clearance necessary for work on national security issues. On August 25, 2017, Gorka left the White House, just a week after Steven Bannon, the former Breitbart chairman.

Left: Trump and Gorka in Hannity Show on terrorism. RIght: Gorka posing with a gun in the Department of Justic.

• Four Democratic senators accused Gorka of failing to note on his U.S. citizenship application that he had belonged to a neo-Nazi organization in Hungary. The omission, if proved, would have implications for his US citizenship received in 2012.
• Gorka’s academic credentials were challenged by the national security experts in the US. Gorka’s Ph.D. dissertation on terrorism was supervised by Andras Lanczi, rector of Budapest’s Corvinus University, is not an expert on counter-terrorism but, notably, is considered an unofficial ideologist for the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, known as Putin’s ally.

Left: Source. Right: Source.

CONSPIRACY THEORIES SUPPORT

• In March 2018, Gorka appeared in a TV segment on the so-called “deep state” that was produced by a reporter who had previously worked for the Russian propaganda network RT. The US’ largest owner of television stations, Sinclair Broadcast Group, mandated that its outlets run this segment, thus widely introducing “deep state’— a popular conspiracy theory in some circles that longtime career public servants in the government are working to subvert the U.S. government. Trump has repeatedly complained about “deep state.”
• Gorka was paid $40,000 by the MAGA Coalition, a political group associated with conspiracy theories surrounding the 2016 murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, and a theory known as “Pizzagate,” which holds that Hillary Clinton and other high-level Democrats ran a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria.

ISLAMOPHOBIC VIEWS

• The FBI terminated Gorka for his over-the-top Islamophobic rhetoric. Officials familiar with his lecture said Gorka taught law-enforcement officials there is no such thing as mainstream Muslims — only those radicalized and those soon to be radicalized. In a February 2012 speech to the Westminster Institute think tank, Gorka said that Osama bin Laden could be considered “the Martin Luther of Islam.”
• Gorka positions himself as an expert on Islam but had not lived in a Muslim country and does not speak Arabic.
• Gorka has close ties and shares views on Islam with Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who failed to report to the Pentagon the payment of $30,000 from RT (formerly Russia Today), the Kremlin propaganda channel, in 2015 and that he lobbied for Turkey in 2016 while holding the position of a senior Trump campaign adviser.

Left: Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Sebastian Gorka. Gorka is holding Flynn’s book “Field of Fight,” which he published in summer 2016. Flynn has come under fire for work he was doing on the Turkish government’s behalf while serving as an unofficial advisor for the Trump campaign in 2016. Facebook / Sebastian Gorka. Right: Gorka and Flynn in Trump Tower.

NEO-NAZI/ANTI-SEMITIC CONNECTIONS HISTORY IN EUROPE

• In the early 1990s, Gorka worked along the anti-Semitic and anti-American former Deputy Minister of Defense, Ernő Raffay.
• Gorka worked for and published twelve articles in an anti-Semitic weekly, Magyar Demokrata. In 2004, the US State Department testified before Congress that Magyar Demokrata routinely publishes anti-semitic articles and holocaust denials.
• On October 19, 2003, Tamás Molnár, later far-right Jobbik Party’s Vice Chairman, organized an event in to discuss the future of “Hungarian National Radicalism,” a Hungarian neo-Nazi movement. Prominent far-right activists were invited, including Gorka.

Left: “The event poster depicted an angel wrapped in a US flag with EU stars around him and Hungarian Stalinist symbols in the background. The Hungarian far-right is equally anti-Communist, anti-American and anti-EU. They believe that Hungary should revive its mystical eastern past, the Turul, the connection with the Turkish and Kazakh people and the Aryan brotherhood with the Iranian people. They called for a fight against worldwide Zionist conspiracy, or what the Hungarian far-right frequently called at that time, ‘the New-York Tel-Aviv axis.’” Right: Gorka and Jobbik’s ex-vice-chairman Molnár announce their political movement in Budapest in 2006. Hungarian Spectrum.

• In 2007, Gorka co-founded a political party New Democratic Coalition with three former members of the far-right Jobbik party.
• Jobbik party is known for its anti-Semitic and racist views and its enthusiastic support and embrace of Putin’s Russia, as well as its ties with the Kremlin’s main ideologist Alexander Dugin. In May 2013, Dugin invited Jobbik’s leader, Gabor Vona, to present a lecture in Moscow. During this visit, Vona met several leading Russian politicians for discussions including topics such as the EU as the “traitor” of the European continent. In his lecture, Vona siad that “Russia represents Europe much better than the EU countries” and that “Russian leaders now consider Jobbik as a parner,” write Umut Krokut and Emel Acali in their article Deciphering Eurasionsim in Hungary in a seminal book on Dugin, Eurasianism and the European Far Right.

Right: Dugin and Vona in Moscow State University. Photo from Jobbik website. Left: Jobbik demonstration.

• Dugin is a neo-fascist philosopher, who has ties to virtually every American white supremacist leader in one way or another. This list includes Richard Spencer, David Duke, Matthew Heimbach and more.

NEO-NAZI NEAR YOU: SEPTEMBER, 2017

• “Alexander Dugin is a Russian ultranationalist and former adviser to Sergei Naryshkin, a key member of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party who was appointed Russian foreign intelligence chief in 2016,” writes Tom Porter in Newsweek.

KNOW YOUR NAZIS — AND THEIR BACKERS

NEO-NAZI/ALT-RIGHT CONNECTIONS IN THE US

Gorka’s books are published by Regnery Publishing, a publishing house that was founded and owned by a family with known sympathies to the Nazis.

Gorka’s books published by Regnery. Screenshots from the Regnery Publishing website.

For three generations, Regnery family has been a force in right-wing politics.

During the World War II, William H. Regnery was a founding member of the America First Committee, dedicated to maintaining American neutrality towards Nazi Germany.

After the war, in 1947, his son Henry Regnery founded Regnery Publishing. The first pamphlets he published criticized the harsh treatment of the former Hitler’s Axis countries.

The right-wing press since then published conservatives including Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, David Horowitz, Mike Pence and Donald Trump. The last Regnery left the managing position with the company in 2000s.

Screenshots from Regnery Publishing website.

Since 2005, Henry Regnery’s nephew, William (Bill) Regnery funds an open neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, the director of the National Policy Institute, an ultra-right think tank that promotes the concept of ethnostate. His other enterprise, is The Occidental Quarterly (TOQ), a racist, pseudo-scholarly journal.

A rare video appearance of Bill Regnery at the dinner with NPI and Richard Spencer to honor and celebrate to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. “We hear about bringing us together,” says Sam Dickson, white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan lawyer, during his address to the alt-right audience. “I hope all of you will banish in your minds any desire to be brought together because to turn the tired old slogan around, ‘Divided we stand, united we’ll fall.” Dickson is known for his pro-Putin views and opinions such as “I’ve always seen Russia as the guardian at the gate.” He also gave a speech at a nationalists gathering in St. Petersburg that ended with a cry in halting Russian: “God save the czar!”

REGNERY —RICHARD SPENCER — ALEXANDER DUGIN

In October, 2014, Alexander Dugin, Richard Spencer and William Regnery were scheduled to speak at a neo-Nazi and ultra-fight forum “European Identitarian Congress” in Budapest but under the orders of the Hungarian government, Dugin, who was supposed to be a lead speaker, was declined an entry visa, Regnery was arrested at the airport and deported the next day, and Spencer was detained for 72 hours and banned for three years from the visa-free Schengen area of European countries, which includes most of the European Union.

MILO YIANNOPOLIS — STEVE BANNON — SEBASTIAN GORKA

Gorka is a friend of the Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó, known for his extreme Euroskeptic views and hiring Sebastian Gorka, Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos as consultants and speakers.

Left: Sebastian Gorka and Milo Yiannopoulos. Right: Milo Yiannopoulos with Richard Spencer and other white supremacists doing a Nazi Salute to America the Beautiful song. Watch video here.

GORKA, HIS WIFE AND THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION

Gorka’s wife, Katharine Fairfax Gorka, is a cousin of Thomas A. Saunders III, chairman of Heritage Foundation since 2005. Heritage, Trump’s favorite think tank, is known to staff the Republican presidents' administrations.

Approximately 70 former Heritage employees worked for the Trump transition team or as part of the administration. Katharine Gorka served as an adviser to the chief of staff of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and is currently a policy advisor at DHS. She is known to downplay the threat of white nationalism and promote Islamophobic views in DHS. In August 2017, after the wake of the white-supremacist rally and counterprotest in Charlottesville, Katharine Gorka was instrumental in defunding counter-terrorism groups: withdrawing $400,000 grant from Life After Hate, a group that works on deradicalization of extremists, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and $393,800 grant form the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a community group working on fighting terrorism.

Heritage also hired Sebastian Gorka to give “a series of five foreign policy speeches to Heritage audiences,” after he lost his position in the White House.

HERITAGE FOUNDATION AND ITS IMPACT

Heritage released a booklet for Trump’s first inauguration anniversary, stating that Trump had embraced two thirds of Heritage’s agenda, including the following measures:

• leaving the Paris Climate Accord
• repealing Net Neutrality
• reshaping National Monuments
• preventing taxpayer money from funding international groups involved in abortion and ending funding to the United Nations Population fund
• increasing Military Spending (planned $54 billion increase)
• reforming temporary assistance for needy families program
• opening off-shore drilling on federal lands and commencing federal land coal leasing activities.
• withdrawing from UNESCO (the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization)

PAUL WEYRICH

The Heritage Foundation was founded by Paul Weyrich, “the architect of religious right political movement,” in 1973.

Paul Weyrich: I don’t want everybody to vote. It is not won by majority.

Weyrich also founded conservative groups that have tremendous influence on national and international politics for the last 30 years, including The Free Congress Survival Committee (CSFC), American Council for the Exchange of Views between Legislators (ALEC) and the Council on National Policy (CNP.) Together with Jerry Falwell, he founded the Moral Majority. His think tanks have introduced the Chicago School of Political Thought, better known as neoconservative, into American politics. Another group with the ideology similar to Weyrich’s was the ultra-right Christian Dominionists / Fundamentalists, today known as Evangelicals.

Weyrich has ties to neo-fascist and racist groups including the Nazi Northern League through British eugenicist Roger Pearson, a member of the editorial board for the Heritage Foundation and a former operative of the Pioneer Fund, a fund for eugenics studies, founded in 1937 and modeled after the Nazi’s program, according to the independent researcher Patrick Simpson.

Evangelicals and the Kremlin: A history of collusion

WEYRICH — LASZLO PASZTOR

Weyrich’s adviser, the Heritage Group Board member and the chairman of the Foundation for the Republican Council Heritage Groups was a convicted Nazi collaborator Laszlo Pasztor.

In the US, Pasztor led the ethnic outreach and built a voting base for Republicans by recruiting the Eastern European Bloc immigrants with ultra-right and Nazi sympathizer views, according to the Huffington Post.

Gorka’s current national tour aiming at reaching out to the white supremacists and alt-right for Trump is reminiscent of Pasztor’s recruitment of Nazi sympathizers for Nixon. Notably, both are supported and funded by the Heritage Foundation.

PAZSTOR — ARROW CROSS NAZI PARTY

During World War II, Pasztor had served as a youth member of the Hungarian Arrow Cross, party that actively collaborated with the Third Reich, was in power from October 1944 to March 1945 and is responsible for the elimination of 10,000–15,000 of Hungarian civilians of Jewish and Roma descent and deportation of 80,000 to Austrian concentration camps in Austria. Pasztor served as a liaison between the Hungarian Nazi party and Berlin; he served in the Berlin embassy of the Hungarian Arrow Cross movement. Arrow Cross’s founder Ferenc Szálasi, was captured by American troops on the last day of the war and was tried, convicted and executed for war crimes in March, 1946.

Left: Ferenc Szálasi and Hitler. Right: The Shoes on the Danube Ban. Memorial to the victims of Arrow Cross in Budapest. It honors 20,000 Jews who were killed by fascist Arrow Cross militiamen in Budapest during World War II. They were ordered to take off their shoes, tied together, and shot at the edge of the water so that their bodies fell into the river and were carried away. The shoes were later sold and used by the militiamen.

Szálasi, awarded the members of the Arrow Cross party by a nobility title and the land seized from the Jews sent to the concentration camps and killed.

Szálasi wearing the “dress uniform” of the Arrow Cross Party, along with the medal worn by members of the Arrow Cross to indicate membership.

GORKA — ARROW CROSS

In a 2007 video, Gorka declared his support for a paramilitary group with an affinity for the Arrow Cross regime, the Magyar Gárda(Hungarian Guard). Hungarian Guard was also a Jobbik party’s Stormtroopers unit. It was formally banned in Hungary two years after Gorka left the country, in 2009. The decision was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights. According to the Hungarian Free Press, the late Congressman Tom Lantos, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor, introduced a bill in Congress, in 2007 “to prevent the admission of any member or leader of the Magyar Garda into the United States.”

GORKA — VITEZ REND

Arrow Cross party got the idea of awarding its members with a nobility title and land from another Hungarian organization, Vitéz Rend. It was founded in 1920 by self-admitted Anti-Semite vice-admiral Miklos Horthy who came to power in Hungary after World War I. He established the Vitéz Rend to award the veterans of the war with a nobility title “vitéz” (“valiant,” abbreviated as “v.”) and land. The title was inherited and passed on from father to a firstborn son. The Vitéz Rend did not admit Jews.

During World War II, Horthy’s Hungary joined Hitler’s Axis. Horthy adopted Nazi-inspired anti-Jewish laws. Real estate taken from Jews was awarded to the members of the Vitéz Rend. Horthy’s regime is responsible for the deportation of 460,000 Hungarian Jews to concentration camps and gas chambers.

Horthy and Hitler.

The order was disbanded at the end of World War II. Since then a number of private associations have worked to restore the order. The most notable of them is the Historical Order of Vitéz.

The U.S. State Department lists this order among organizations having been “under the direction of the Nazi government of Germany” during World War II. The members of Vitéz Rend, as per the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual explanation, “are presumed to be inadmissible” to the US under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

In 2017, Gorka appeared on the Fox News on the evening of the presidential inauguration wearing a badge, tunic, and ring of the Order of Vitéz as a deputy assistant to the President of the United States.

“I have never been a member of the Vitéz Rend. I have never taken an oath of loyalty to the Vitéz Rend,” Gorka told later to online Jewish magazine Tablet.

However, in 2017, three Vitézi Rend officials told The Forward that Sebastian Gorka was one of their order, “a full member of the organization” “sworn in.”

Several prominent locals of Piliscsaba, a small town with the population of 7,500, in which Gorka unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 2006, alleged to the NBC News that Sebastian Gorka was, indeed, a member of Vitézi Rend, “saying emphatically that Sebastian Gorka made no effort to hide his membership.”

Gorka did sign his 2008 doctoral dissertation as Sebastian L. v. Gorka. (“v.” for Vitéz.) In June 2011, Gorka testified in front of the House Armed Services Committee, presenting himslf as Dr. Sebastian L. v. Gorka.

According to Hungarian Free Press, Sebastian Gorka received their “vitéz” ranking after 1990. The Order granted Gorka’s father, Paul Gorka, the title in 1979 in recognition of his resistance to the post-war Soviet occupation of Hungary.

Left: Sebastian and Katharina Gorka at the inaugural ball. Gorka is wearing badge, tunic, and ring of the Order of Vitéz. Right: Badge of Vitez Rend.

According to Haaretz, if Gorka is the member of Vitez Rend and did not disclose his membership entering the US and applying for the citizenship, his immigration status is compromised. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual specifies that members of the Vitéz Rend “are presumed to be inadmissible” to the country under the Immigration and Nationality Act.”

Elite Nazi-allied order from Hungary claims Trump adviser Gorka is a sworn member

PARENTS: PAL AND SUSAN GORKA

A Vitez Rend spokesman said Pal Gorka was a senior Vitezi Rend lieutenant for the western Hungarian city of Sopron and its surroundings, which is considered “an advanced level.” As Eva S. Balogh, the editor of Hungarian Spectrum, points out there are discrepancies between the original English version of Pal Gorka’s memoirs Budapest elárulva(“Budapest Betrayed”), published in Great Britain in 1986 and its Hungarian translation from 2002. The paragraphs describing his encounters with the Jewish people are missing from the Hungarian version.

The Metamorphosis of Sebastian Gorka

Pal Gorka’s memoir identifies him on its cover as “v. Gorka Pál”, where the “v” is an abbreviation for the title vitéz.

According to the NBC News, “in the 1980s, Sebastian Gorka’s mother, Susan Gorka, worked as a translator for David Irving, the discredited British historian, sentenced to three years on prison in Austria on charges of denying the Holocaust. A British judge ruled in 2000 that Irving was a “Holocaust denier… anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.” Irving talked about his warm working relationship with Susan Gorka.

WEYRICH — LOZANSKY

Curiously enough, the convicted Nazi and member of Arrow Cross party Pazstor and other neo-Nazi and racist personalities were not the only working connections of Paul Weyrich, the founder of Heritage Foundation.

Weyrich worked closely with pro-Putin Russian-American Eduard Lozansky, a former Soviet dissident with reported history of the KGB ties.

Investigative journalists Grant Stern and Patrick Simpson published a detailed report of Eduard Lozansky extensive connections and actions in the US.

How One Man Influenced The Republican Party’s Transformation Into The Grand Old Putin Party

• After the fall of the USSR, Edouard Lozanky created the American University in Moscow. The office is located next door to the Heritage Foundation Moscow office, as discovered by Patrick Simpson.

Read the original of the article in The Washington Times.

• In 2001, Weyrich and Lozansky co-authored an article, stating that Putin “has demonstrated real leadership, pulling Russia to support the United States and providing more help than many traditional American allies in what seems to be the most important international battle of the 21st century” and that “one could say without exaggeration that Russia under Mr. Putin has become a de facto American ally,” and suggesting close cooperation with Putin.

LOZANSKY — ALEXANDER DUGIN

According to Patrik Simpson’s research, Lozansky (like neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and white supremacist Bill Regnery) “has a long and extensive relationship with Alexander Dugin, hosting him at influential conferences in 2004 and 2005, along with red-brown propagandist Aleksandr Prokhanov, Rodina leader Dmitri Rogozin, and other éminences grises of the U.S. and Russian far-right.” In 2008, Lozansky joined Dugin for a conference with far-right figures and appeared together on the TV program “Three Corners” for a discussion on the merits of “soft power.” A week after the Crimea crisis touched off in April 2014, Lozansky attended a conference with Dugin, discussing the role of media in the “New Cold War.”

The connection would be surprising, considering Lozansky is a Jew, if not for his collaboration with Weyrich and Pazstor. Several photographs of Lozansky, Weyrich and Pazstor were deleted from the Internet since 2017.

HERITAGE — THE MERCERS — BANNON

According to the NYT, Rebekah Mercer’s family foundation has donated Heritage $500,000 a year since 2013. Rebekkah Mercer, who works for the Mercer Family Foundation and was on Trump’s transition team, also picked Michael Flynn for the national-security adviser position.

Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager at the time, hired CA for data-analysis services during the presidential campaign, “in deference to the Mercers.” Robert Mercer, the co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies LLC, invested about $5 million in CA and owns 90% of CA. Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, was the Vice President of the board of CA and had a stake in the company that he valued at $1 million to $5 million. Michael Flynn has reported .is paid advisory position at Cambridge Analytica. The Mercers are reported to have some business and personal connections to Russian oligarchs close to the Kremlin,

WHO IS INVITING GORKA?

JEFFERSON EDUCATION SOCIETY

Jefferson Education Society (JEC) is “Erie’s think tank for community progress.” JEC is located in a former Congregation Brith Sholom in Erie, PA.

Jefferson Education Society.

FUNDING, TAX ISSUES AND GRANTS FROM GAMBLING

• Since 2009, Erie County government has given the JES a total of $117,000, with a big portion of this money allocated to the staging the Perry 200 celebration in 2012–13.
• Since 2011, JES received $572,642 from the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, which distributes part of the local share of gambling taxes, according to GoErie.
• JES has failed to get an exemption from property taxes and has a delinquent property tax bill of about $92,000, but is working on a deal that could get some or all of that amount forgiven.

FOUNDER: SEX OFFENDER

Recently deceased William P. Garvey, a founding president of Jefferson Educational Society, in 2004 had been accused of sexually abusing boys when he coached youth basketball at the school for St. John the Baptist Church in Erie in the 1960s and 1970s.

He served as president of the Jefferson Society from its founding in 2008 until June 2018, when he became the chairman of the board. Garvey, who started teaching at Mercyhurst University in 1962, retired as the school’s president in 2005 after he was accused of sexually and physically abusing minor boys. Also, two men said Garvey had sex with them in the early to mid-1980s when they were minors.

PROTESTS

Gorka’s lecture at the Jefferson Educational Society is drawing criticism from the local activists and residents of Erie. According to PA House Republican Caucus protocol, “a statewide advocacy group is requesting that JEC cancel a scheduled appearance next week by former White House aide Sebastian Gorka, who has sparked controversy for comments about Islam and white supremacy and has denied links to a far-right Hungarian group with Nazi ties.”

“The Jefferson Society’s president, however, said Gorka’s appearance will go on as scheduled. Ferki Ferati said Gorka “will be able to offer a keen understanding of the first two years of the Trump presidency” and that the organization has “an unwavering commitment to present all sides of important issues and topics.”

WHO IS FERKI FERATI?

An Albanian refugee from Kosovo, Ferki Ferati came to Erie in 1999 as a refugee. Ferati received his Master’s in Public Administration from Gannon University and bachelor degree from Mercyhurst University, majoring in Intelligence Studies and minoring in Russian Studies. According to an interview with Ferati, he spent a year studying in Russia and got married there. His wife is a graduate of an elite Moscow High School of Economics.

Left: Ferki Ferati and William Garvey. Ferki Ferati’s public Twitter post. Right: A screenshot from the book “Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America” By James Fallows, Deborah Fallows.

ERIE RESIDENTS SPEAK UP

Thomas J. Gamble Jr, an Erie resident wrote, “I am writing in regards to the Jefferson Educational Society’s decision to bring Sebastian Gorka to Erie as a speaker for their upcoming Global Summit event…The decision to bring Gorka to Erie is in direct opposition to the Jefferson Society’s stated goal of “promoting civic enlightenment.” Fostering dialogue between individuals with differing viewpoints is important, and my opposition to Gorka is not due to his political affiliation, it is rather the fact that giving a disreputable extremist a platform in our city is not an opportunity to create a conversation, it is a normalization of hate speech and a grave disservice to our community.”

OPINION

This seemingly impossible mix of the radical right, religious and former Communist “ideologies” exist because this story is not about ideas, concepts and world views, really. The talk about values covers up the struggle for power and money. The “abortion” and “free speech” concepts are equally used as a front for power-seizing moves.

The systems of beliefs also become the tools to manipulate, brainwash and control people. The goal here is to split the opposition, weaken resistance and demoralize the population. Paul Weyrich learned the skill to “divide and conquer” at a seminar for young Republicans. The NKVD/KGB/FSB used this ancient principle since the Bolsheviks came to power. Dugin targets communists and fascists. His books read differently in every language.

Logic, rationale and common sense require a point of reference, framework or rules and fail in the face of this shifted reality, where “nothing is real and everything is possible.”

An honest debate with a fascist cannot happen. A dinner with cannibals is dishonorable and dangerous.

*All facts and photos are in public domain and available through Google. Links to the original sources are included.

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