CIA Director John Ratcliffe in a pensive moment
“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak." - Sun Tzu
By James Howard Kunstler - November 24, 2025
You understand, don’t you, what the aim was of the “Seditious Six” politicians who made last week’s now-notorious video suggesting that US military personnel should refuse the president’s orders if they deemed them to be “illegal?” This was the old Lefty game of provoking the authorities to react intemperately so they can be labeled “fascist.” It’s like the old schoolyard game of the kid who goes I’m touching you. . . I’m touching you. . . until the touched kid explodes. . . so the toucher can then say, look, he’s hitting me!
And they certainly succeeded in pissing-off the president enough for Mr. Trump to suggest they could be hanged for their little prank — though he was probably incorrect about the legal niceties therein.
That members of the out-party in Congress and the Senate must resort to this kind of skylarking japery tells you how desperate they are. The organizer, Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, is a former CIA officer. Is she in communication regularly with any of her former colleagues at the Agency? And did she coordinate any part of her prank with them? I bet DNI Tulsi Gabbard could find out and let CIA Director John Ratcliffe know so he can fire their ass.
The intel bureaucracy remains a hotbed of resistance to the swamp-draining project underway since 01/20/25. The swamp creatures like their swamp fecund and fetid as it has been, with the rich revenue stream it is used to feeding on, and Mr. Trump has done much to change that. Alas, the CIA remains the most implacably opaque major operation in government. It insists that its activities require secrecy, and the awful downside is that the Agency has run without real oversight since its inception after the Second World War. Gawd knows how many John Brennan clones are still lodged over in the Langley, VA, HQ.
Of all the celebrated new appointees in the agencies, Mr. Ratcliffe has been the least visible. He went into the job with very promising credentials, having served as DNI in the last months of Trump 1.0. He must know where a whole lot of bodies are buried (some of them actual bodies) but the public has heard squat from him all year.
Surely Mr. Ratcliffe must also know by now who in the CIA was scheming along with John Brennan to perpetrate RussiaGate, and who was on the leak-line to the news media. He must know how Adam Schiff coordinated impeachment No. 1 with CIA agent Eric Ciaramella, then Intel Inspector-General Michael Atkinson, Col. Alexander Vindman, and Lawfare ninjas Norm Eisen, Mary McCord, and Andrew Weissmann. He must know who in “Joe Biden’s” White House was coordinating the 92 felony prosecutions against Mr. Trump with DA Alvin Bragg and AG Letitia James in New York and DA Fani Willis Fulton County, GA.
He must know how BLM and Antifa were allowed to burn down Minneapolis in 2020, and riot in scores of other places. He must know what agencies and what persons in them coordinated the Covid-19 operation and which foreign entities were involved. (Was it the US military, as many suspect, and how, if at all, did freelance players such as Bill Gates and George Soros’s myriad organizations fit in the picture?) And how is the machinery of the Democratic Party entangled in the workings of US intel? (Prime suspects: Sen. Mark Warner and his staff.)
You can say much the same thing about FBI Director Kash Patel and his Deputy Director, Dan Bongino. They were apparently horrified by the rot they encountered there on taking office earlier this year. What is so difficult about firing people, even a whole lot of people? And why wouldn’t you say you are doing it? Likewise, Pam Bondi, at her resistance-infected DOJ?
My bags are packed, I’m ready to go. . . .
Mr. Trump had a rough week working through his “divorce” from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Both of them behaved rather badly; he the usual name-calling; she playing up to the cluster-B ignoramouses on The View, and then resigning from Congress in a snit (walking away from Daddy). The Epstein Files legislation she was twanging on the president about got passed in a flash and signed, but it contained rules that can easily be used to keep key documents suppressed. The suspicion will linger that it’s all about protecting Israel, and thereby stir-up continued animus against the Jews.
Mr. Trump had a ju-jitsu session in the Oval Office with NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, the avowed communist jihadi — putting the young insta-celebrity pol off-balance by acting all nice and accommodating. “I want him to do a great job. . . “ “We agree on a lot more than I would have thought. . .” “It was a great honor [to meet him]. . . .” the president declared on his Truth Social account. Stand by on what any of that means.
And now, as we plunge into Thanksgiving week, comes the Ukraine peace proposal. Everybody knows it is a recognition that Russia is grinding toward victory in any case, and carrying-on further slaughter and destruction on-the-ground is insane. But then, Ukraine’s ruler, Mr. Zelenskyy, is insane (probably high on drugs, too), and the EU leadership is insane seeking to start a war with Russia that it has zero ability to prosecute — and nevermind whatever the obdurate defenders of the UK’s sclerotic empire think they’re doing to keep the Ukraine War going. But, bottom line: there’s a good possibility that the war will be over before Christmas, and the world will be better off for that.
With all the above going on, America needs . . .
[SNIP]
