MSNBC’s Reid Repeats Debunked Attack on Gorka’s Non-Existent Nazi Ties

MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid asserted on Sunday that Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka has ties to a Nazi organization in his birth nation of Hungary — a charge that was largely debunked months ago.

“Foreign Policy magazine now reports Donald Trump has assigned a White House team to target [the Iran] deal,” began Reid. “Now several NSC staffers, according to Foreign Policy magazine, are expected to be involved including Steve Bannon — the Alt-Right, the white nationalist entity within the right wing [sic], and Sebastian Gorka, whose associations include a Nazi entity in his father’s home country,” said Reid.

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The accusations of Gorka’s supposed Nazi ties stem from his father. Gorka’s father received the Vitézi Rend, a Hungarian order of merit, for his anti-communist activities in the 1950s.

Established originally in 1920, the order’s Nazi association comes from the fact that many of its members supported the Nazis during the World War II. However, many of its members also opposed the Nazis during the second world war. One such man was Vilmos Nagy de Nagybaczon, a military officer named Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Institute, an official Israeli body that memorializes heroes and victims of the Holocaust. Nagybaczon worked in the Hungarian high command to oppose Nazi German efforts targeting Jews in his country.

The original order was disbanded following the second world war and the Soviet conquest of Hungary. The award Gorka’s father received is a resurrected version of the order, awarded by an organization called the Historical Order of Vitéz.

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Of course, historical or geopolitical facts don’t seem to matter to MSNBC’s Reid. Last week, Reid tweeted, “Donald Trump married one American (his second wife) and two women from what used to be Soviet Yugoslavia: Ivana-Slovakia, Melania-Slovenia.”

Slovakia was never part of Yugoslavia. Moreover, Ivana Trump, contrary to Reid’s association, was born in the Czech Republic and is ethnically Czech. This might not matter to Reid, but it matters to Czechs and Slovaks.

As for Melania, while she is indeed from Slovenia, which was indeed part of Yugoslavia, Slovenia was never part of “Soviet Yugoslavia.” Communist Yugoslavia, unique for Eastern Europe at the time, was never part of the Warsaw Pact and was independent from Moscow — it was never Soviet.