Why Did Holden Gorka Want a Helicopter?
On July 3, 2017 a 25-year-old man named Holden Austin Gorka was shot and killed by police after attempting to hijack a helicopter in Hillsboro, Oregon. There’s no motive known and the man had no flying experience:
Hillsboro Aero Academy said they aren’t aware of any connection between Gorka and their company. FAA records show there is no one with that name who has a pilot’s license and Countryman also said he wasn’t aware of Gorka having any experience flying helicopters.
However, police said at the time of the attempted hijacking, it seemed like Gorka knew how to operate a helicopter.
It’s worth noting that this happened just six days after a helicopter attack was reported on the Venezuelan Supreme Court.
There are clues in Holden Gorka’s YouTube account. He apparently started watching conspiracy sources like the Alex Jones channel a few months prior.

That Anonymous video doesn’t advocate violence. In fact, it advocates meditation. But it also rails against the elites who are using racial hatred to divide and control us.
My take on horseshoe theory in this case is that we find that same rhetoric on the far right and far left. It mainly differs whether the elites are defined by class (capitalist) or race (Jewish). That he was possibly succumbing to the rhetoric doesn’t tell us which direction he leaned.
There’s little else that’s notable about Holden Gorka on social media, except perhaps this photo of what appears to be a duct tape anarchy symbol on MySpace:

Some people will be alarmed by the photos of him posing with paintball guns and camouflage, but my take is these are pretty typical for a kid with myspace username atvgooddirtbikebetter.

It seems unlikely we’ll ever learn why he wanted that helicopter, but absent any other explanation, a political motive seems possible given his recent interest in conspiracies and the timing relative to the helicopter attack in Caracas.



What happened to Holden is tragic. He went from being a typical young man with interests in gaming and music to a violent criminal in a remarkably short period of time. My wife notes that he was in the right age for onset of schizophrenia. But I think this is something people close to him would have noticed.
Update: I’ve been corrected, that schizophrenia onset is sometimes not noticeable. It also seems possible that Holden did not have had contact with many close friends in the period that preceded the attempted hijacking.
There is a comment posted on one of the news reports with some questionable claims that I haven’t been able to verify. In particular I can find no evidence to support the charge that he was a Trump supporter but some of the other details are true. His Facebook account was disabled before I learned of the incident and it is quite possible that evidence for the claim is gone. I admit when I first read the story my fear was that Holden wanted to give people free helicopter rides. It’s hard to come up with any other political use. If he’d planned a suicide attack he probably would have made his motive explicit in a letter.
So many questions. Google tells me that his father died when he was in highschool and that he considered himself without family. He had a grandmother in Olympia WA, and considered Hawaii to be “home” lived in Texas in May/June moved there after getting a new job for “Landstar” in May, and before that lived in Florida. He was a Trump supporter. He did not drink or use drugs according to himself (facebook) or his friends. He was engaged to be married with the wedding planned to happen this December in the Philippines, not already married as stated by the aunt. He did not live in Oregon, probably never lived in Oregon. Didn’t seem to have friends or family here. Hillsboro is not exactly on I-5 if he was just passing thru… seems odd that he was here in the first place.
I’ve been looking for enough meaning in this story to make it worth posting. There’s just the tragedy of someone dead, and the possibility it is because we’ve lost faith in civil politics and are descending into the madness of tribal fear and hate.
Holden Gorka is a mirror for us. Those on the right who see only violence on the left will find his Anonymous video and duct tape anarchy symbol as proof of what they already know. Those on the left who see only violence on the right will point to the Alex Jones video, paintball guns and allegation of Trump support as proof of what they already know. Meanwhile, the dead man is still dead for reasons no one understands. Our ready-made tribal answers are most likely the problem.
