Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters

When he was a right-wing pundit, senior State Department adviser Frank Wuco claimed that Muslims “by-and-large” will “subjugate and humiliate non-Muslim members of their societies” and that their core faith purportedly instructs them that they can’t “coexist peacefully with other religions.” He also pushed conspiracy theories about the Obama administration and said that “societies and nations for millennia have suffered greatly” for LGBTQ acceptance. 

The Washington Post reported on November 27 that Wuco is now a senior adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance. The publication added that during a 2016 radio appearance, Wuco had “suggested dropping nuclear bombs on Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks.”

Wuco, a retired naval intelligence officer, previously worked as a conservative pundit and radio host before joining the Department of Homeland Security in January 2017. As a DHS senior adviser, he helped implement Trump’s orders to the agency, including his ban on travelers from some Muslim-majority countries.

Media Matters reported on Wuco in March 2017 and noted that he had a history of making anti-Muslim remarks, including stating on Fox News in 2014 that banning visas from “Muslim nations” is “one of these sort of great ideas that can never happen.” 

CNN’s KFile unit also examined Wuco’s history, finding that he pushed “claims that former President Barack Obama’s memoir was ghostwritten by former anti-Vietnam War radical Bill Ayers, that former CIA director John Brennan had converted to Islam and that Attorney General Eric Holder had been a member of the Black Panthers.” 

The following are some of Wuco’s anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ remarks as a right-wing pundit. (A summary of Wuco’s anti-Muslim remarks previously appeared in a January 2018 Media Matters post.)  

Wuco praised the surveillance of mosques as key to finding “out what’s going on” in the Muslim community. During a November 2015 Fox News appearance, Wuco said that a “mosque surveillance” program is key to finding “out what’s going on behind the walls” of “mosques and Islamic reading centers.”  He added that after the cancellation of a mosque surveillance program in New York City, he “can only hope that some of these programs continue with other agencies.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 11/14/15, via Media Matters]

Wuco: Muslims “by-and-large” will “subjugate and humiliate non-Muslim members of their societies” and enact Sharia law. Wuco warned on his now-defunct radio show website that “Muslim populations by-and-large will become enclave societies that, first, resist assimilation and then, will make every effort to establish independent rule for their enclaves under Shari’ah law.”

Every place we find friends, stalwarts, allies, we find the menace of jihad, which will necessarily result in violence to counter the position of a large Muslim population living under “other-than-Muslim” rule. Muslim enclaves in the UK and Canada, ahead of themselves on laboring to establish Shari’ah law for themselves, are only now beginning to experience what successive Philippine governments have faced for over a century. While perfectly happy to subjugate and humiliate non-Muslim members of their societies (just ask Christians in Egypt or Indonesia how easy life is), Muslim populations by-and-large will become enclave societies that, first, resist assimilation and then, will make every effort to establish independent rule for their enclaves under Shari’ah law, using violence to secure what they believe to be their divinely revealed right; the eventual subsuming of all that lies outside the dar al-Islam (house of Islam), until all is within it; until all is consumed by Islam in preparation for God’s final judgement of man. Those who have made the obligation to this commitment are shockingly large in number; they have just begun; and, they believe they are active participants in God’s final prescription for the salvation of all humanity. Not sure the lights inside the Beltway are on, on this one. [Need To Know, 2/27/10, via Internet Archive and Media Matters]

Wuco: “If you’re a Muslim, you believe” that “violence and warfare against unbelievers” is “prescribed by God.” Following the June 2016 mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, FL, Wuco told Breitbart.com of shooter Omar Mateen: “There’s nothing radical about him at all. He is a Muslim who is following the strictures of Islam and its guidance and prescriptions for violence and warfare against unbelievers. … If you’re a Muslim, you believe it’s being prescribed by God and it’s being ordained by the wisdom of Muhammad.” [Politico, 2/7/17; YouTube, 6/13/16, via Media Matters]

Wuco: “Right-thinking” Muslims “engage in jihad” because of their religion. Wuco said of Islam during an interview on an internet radio program: “If you’re a right-thinking Muslim, the inspiration, the motivation, to engage in jihad doesn’t come from Al Qaeda, or doesn’t come from Inspire magazine. It comes from God himself.” [The Liberty NewsCast with Willie Lawson, 4/30/13, via Media Matters]

Wuco: “The assertiveness of Muslim communities in western nations is becoming so pronounced. … You don’t even need ISIS in Sweden.” While speaking on a radio program, Wuco warned that Muslims are infiltrating communities in Western nations: “The assertiveness of Muslim communities in Western nations is becoming so pronounced. … You don’t even need ISIS in Sweden, you’ve got every day run-of-the-mill Muslims in massive communities protesting and becoming violent with the Swedish government, saying that they’re going to take over the country. This isn’t even ISIS. These are just peace-loving Muslims who have been allowed to immigrate into these countries.” [The Dougherty Report, 1/18/16, via Media Matters]

Wuco in 2014: Halting visas from “Muslim nations” is one of “these sort of great ideas that can never happen.” During an August 2014 Fox News program, Wuco responded to comments from Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) about a ban on visas from the Middle East, saying that the proposed policy is “one of these sort of great ideas that can never happen. … You’re just not going to stop the visa application process into this country from Muslim nations in a blanket type of policy.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 8/28/14, via Media Matters]

Wuco frequently delivered presentations “as a fictional character he created named Fuad Wasul,” who had a “heavy Arabic accent.” HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias wrote in March 2017:

Wuco’s dim portrayal of Muslims has also veered into the bizarre.

During his work as a security consultant and radio host, Wuco often gave presentations as a fictional character he created named Fuad Wasul ― a “committed jihadist” escaped from an American military prison to help westerners understand what motivates Muslim fighters.

Wuco, who is from Florida, would role-play as Wasul, delivering the presentations with a “heavy Arabic accent,” according to a 2008 Florida news report.

“If you think you’re winning this war, if you think that you’re defeating jihad, you’re wrong, dead wrong,” Wasul (Wuco) once told a room full of civilian analysts working for military intelligence at MacDill Air Force Base. [HuffPost, 3/16/17]

Wuco said “the true nature of Islam … never intended to coexist, to complement, to mingle with other faiths.”

FRANK WUCO: I’m afraid that President Obama is horribly mistaken in his tendency to believe, take at face value everything he learned from his Muslim friends in Chicago, largely an incredible group of apologists and vehement anti-Israelis, anti-Jewish, segment of the population. Whatever he learned when he was in Indonesia, which may not have been much, because he was a fairly young fellow when he was there at the time.

But I believe it’s culminated in a critical misunderstanding of the true nature of Islam, which was never intended to coexist, to complement, to mingle with other faiths. It is clearly stated in the law, in the traditions, in the Quran, that Islam is here to abrogate all faiths that came before, was sent to abrogate and cleanse the corruption of the Jews and the Christians that are found in the previous scriptures. So Islam abrogates all prior scriptures. Islam abrogates all prior faiths. And the goal of jihad, the goal is to bring as much of the living world, of the material world into the Islamic system as possible before the final day of judgement. So, for us to assume that the reason that the jihadists do what they do is only because they’re emotionally angry with us is really an insult to the commitment to jihad, if i’m the jihadist. [Blog Talk Radio, The Willie Lawson Show, 8/10/10]

Wuco: It’s “Muslim propaganda” that Islam is “a religion that seeks cohabitation and tolerance and peace with non-Muslim faith groups and nationalities.”

ERSKINE: So, that’s why we’re having problems with a lot of the Christians being persecuted again in Egypt, and a lot of the situations that are going on right now in the Middle East. So this was nothing that we should have been cheering about as so many in the news service were doing.  

FRANK WUCO: Well, part of the reason is that so many have bought in hook, line, and sinker into the Muslim propaganda, particularly generated by the Muslim Brotherhood, that this is a — yeah, it’s a religion that seeks cohabitation and tolerance and peace with non-Muslim faith groups and nationalities and it just simply is not true. To say that Islam is willing to coexist peacefully with other religions and other sort of nationalities, if you can have such a thing in Islam, is really antithetical to what the Quran and what Sharia law teaches. [Erskine Overnight, 7/21/12] 

Wuco claimed that “societies and nations for millennia have suffered greatly” for LGBTQ acceptance. While speaking with Wuco on his program in May 2016, radio host Charles Butler linked then-President Barack Obama’s decision to allow transgender individuals to serve in the military — which Trump has attempted to rescind — to “paganism, hedonism, bestiality, Sodom and Gomorrah.” Wuco replied by claiming that the “patterns are clear. Societies and nations for millennia have suffered greatly … not from just from a biblical, spiritual standpoint, but just from a human engineering standpoint in their ability to sustain a order and a society with no cultural center and no moral center. So this is a pattern that will repeat itself.” [The Reality Check, 5/10/16, via Media Matters] 

Wuco on transgender people: “I wouldn’t want to spend five minutes inside their heads … [it’s a] horrible existence.” Wuco said on a radio program in May 2016: “How often do you hear or see or encounter somebody who suffers from this malady — and I have deep sympathy for people like this. I wouldn’t want to spend five minutes inside their heads, it’s got [unintelligible] horrible existence. How many of them made this transformation and all of a sudden they’re happy?”  [The Reality Check, 5/10/16, via Media Matters] 

While discussing transgender people, Wuco remarked that it would be “great” to pretend to be transgender to “go into the women’s shower” at the gym. Wuco stated of transgender people and bathrooms: “What a great thing this can be if transgender can just be, rename it just whimsical transgender and one day on a whimsy, you’re at the Y, or you’re at the gym, and you just, ‘I feel like, I feel like being a woman today, I’m going to go into the women’s shower.’” [The Reality Check, 2/1/16, via Media Matters] 

Wuco appeared on a radio show where the host twice used an anti-gay slur; he did not respond to the use of the slur. Wuco repeatedly appeared on Butler’s show. During one of Wuco’s appearances, Butler twice called two people whom he allegedly encountered at a hotel “faggots.” Wuco did not directly respond to the slurs. After Butler said that Wuco had to go, Wuco stated before signing off: “Charles, you take it easy, my man.” He appeared again on the show after Trump’s election in November, which was shortly before he got his senior job at DHS. [The Reality Check, 5/10/16, via Media Matters] 

CNN: Wuco “mocked the LGBT community.” CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, Chris Massie, and Nathan McDermott reviewed “more than 40 hours” of Wuco’s conservative talk radio show and other media appearances and found that Wuco had “mocked the LGBT community,” “criticized gay-straight alliances in high schools,” and said “that gay people hijacked the word ‘gay’ from happy people and that he was going to reclaim the word.” [CNN, 12/14/17] 

Photo credit: Ceci Freed/ Media Matters