☕️ REGIME CHANGES ☙ Friday, March 21, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

JFK files explode, Trump drops 3 blockbusters: DOE shutdown, swamp procurement chokehold, and mining revival—media stunned, Reagan’s ghost grinning, history rewriting itself; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! It’s exactly two months into the Trump presidency, only 60% of the way to the first 100 days. The whole ‘first 100 days’ gimmick has been smashed to smithereens at what can only be described as the surreal speed of deep state war. Today’s special edition focuses first on the explosive JFK files story, as the New York Times quickly comes ‘round to our point of view; President Trump signs three blockbuster orders so powerful the corporate media is still trying to figure out a narrative to oppose them; Reagan’s ghost signs in relief as Department of Education ordered to close down; the federal noose tightens around agency pocketbooks; and Trump injects jet fuel into America’s anemic domestic mining operations.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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The ‘radical’ theory I proposed yesterday —that the JFK disclosures aren’t really JFK assassination disclosures so much as disclosures of intelligence agency corruption — picked up steam yesterday, rounding the track with an impressive quarter-mile lead in early racing. The first striking example appeared in the New York Times, headlined “Were the Kennedy Files a Bust? Not So Fast, Historians Say.”

Our theme from yesterday, of the declassified files’ alternate historic importance, began right in the sub-headline: “The thousands of documents posted online this week disappointed assassination buffs. But Cold War historians are finding many newly revealed secrets.”

The historians —who already knew a lot— were described as being shocked to their cores. “I didn’t think I’d live to see it,” one told the Times. “This opens a door on a whole history of collaboration between the Vatican and the C.I.A., which, boy, would be explosive,” another said.

The article wasted no time providing an example—a 1973 “Family Jewels” memo written by Walter Elder addressed to then-CIA Director William Colby. Here’s how the Times described Elder’s memo:

Calling the disclosures “remarkable,” the Times described how, collectively, the newly unredacted documents described CIA malfeasance on a global scale, including coups and election interference (!).

For example, another now-unredacted 1967 report by the CIA’s inspector general disclosed the agency’s 1961 assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo — including the names of all the CIA agents involved in the plot. Other documents revealed CIA efforts to interfere in elections in Finland, Peru and Somalia, which had previously been relegated to ‘conspiracy theory’ status, or were even entirely unknown before now.

There was also new information about CIA’s involvement in failed and successful coups in a devil’s inventory of countries, including Brazil, Haiti (!), and what is now Guyana. The CIA has been meddling in the whole world.

Other now visible passages revealed, among other salacious details, that nearly half the political officers in American embassies worldwide were working for the CIA. “That’s … astonishing,” Dr. Logevall, a Harvard historian working on a multivolume Kennedy biography, lamely said, grasping for adequate words.

🔥 The 1973 memo that began the story warned Director Colby about Elder’s “sinking feeling that discipline has broken down.” Discipline has never recovered. Elder’s memo listed too many examples to recount them all. But my eye was drawn to this particularly shocking part of paragraph four, which described two operations, without stating whether the operations had only been planned or actually went forward:

Those two astonishing sentences are unthinkably evil. Let’s start with the proposal for a paramilitary strike on the Chi-Com nuclear plants.

I need hardly emphasize that a paramilitary strike on a nuclear power plant is one of the most reckless and highest-risk actions imaginable, both strategically and environmentally. Attacking a nuclear installation is an act of war on steroids— far beyond bombing an enemy’s military base.

It isn’t rocket science (or nuclear science, for that matter). To cite a contemporary example, even amidst the hottest of wars, Russia has always assiduously avoided attacking Ukraine’s nuclear power plants.

The victims of such an operation would not so much have been the enemy communist governments as their innocent civilians. Striking a nuclear facility risks radiation leaks or even a Chernobyl-like meltdown, depending on the reactor type and how it’s hit. Fallout could easily spread across borders, irradiating major water supplies and poisoning civilians and military personnel alike— including even U.S. allies and neutral countries.

It is difficult to conceive how this could be spun as anything but madness. Nuclear plants are heavily fortified— striking them without causing radiation leaks is nearly impossible. Sabotage, cyberattacks, or other strategies might be slightly less reckless, but a direct paramilitary strike is begging for a disaster.

But perhaps most ominous and least moral of all, this kind of attack on a nuclear facility could easily escalate into a full-out global thermonuclear war. It’s like playing Russian roulette with civilization itself. At minimum, the Chinese would feel morally justified in conducting tit-for-tat covert counter-attacks against American nuclear plants, leading to an escalating conflict causing unimaginable suffering and long-term environmental destruction.

As for the proposed covert chemical weapons attacks against Cuban and North Korean rice fields, well, I described the moral hazards inherent in this kind of starvation operation yesterday. Targeting food supplies is especially shocking because it constitutes a form of biological or environmental warfare, which would have caused severe humanitarian fallout.

Rice is a staple food. Targeting rice crops is an unthinkably cruel war crime. It would have led to mass hunger, malnutrition, and civilian deaths, disproportionately harming children and elderly folks. The CIA’s profoundly unethical plan would be inherently immoral under Just War Theory, which requires nations to discriminate between military and civilian targets.

The CIA’s unmasking continues. Yesterday, the White House announced that around 16,000 more pages are waiting in the wings, to be digitized and posted online “in the coming days.”

🔥 But even more consistent with our developing theme that the disclosures were meant to grease the skids of doom, preparatory to scattering the CIA to the winds, as Kennedy wanted, was an unredacted 1961 memo written by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., one of Kennedy’s top aides. Schlesinger wrote the memo right after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, warning President Kennedy about the growing power of the CIA and calling for it to be reorganized.

Kennedy didn’t live long enough to act on Schlesinger’s advice.

All the examples I’ve cited so far were mentioned in the Times’ article. As Yeats famously wrote in his poem The Second Coming, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

The CIA’s empire is falling apart before our eyes.

But, before heaping lauds on the Times’ editors for honesty, while it mentioned all these unsavory details, it stopped far short of pointing out any wrongdoing. It was only a limited hangout. A desperate one, certainly, but just a frantic effort to whitewash the shocking revelations as weird historical curiosities.

The real story was not about who shot JFK. The real story was about what the Agency has been doing ever since — and maybe even before. These aren’t assassination files; they’re indictments slipped into the historical footnotes.

The same journalists and academics who spent decades scoffing at “conspiracy theories” are now blinking at declassified documents like deer in the high beams of truth. “Oh wow, the CIA really did meddle in Finnish elections?” Yes, Sparky. Finland. Somalia. Peru. Haiti.

It’s not a list of vacation destinations; it’s a rogue’s gallery of subverted democracies.

🔥 Let’s revisit the disclosure that half of the U.S.’s overseas political officers were CIA. Half! That’s spy-state infiltration, not diplomacy. It confirms what foreign governments have long suspected, but couldn’t prove — that the Department of State is often just a tuxedo over Langley’s camo gear.

In theory, the State Department is supposed to run foreign policy—crafting diplomatic positions, negotiating treaties, and managing relationships. That’s what the Constitution envisions: the president sets the tone, and State does the talking. But in practice —especially from the early Cold War onward— the CIA obviously ran a parallel, often contradictory, covert foreign policy under the table, free from public scrutiny or even effective oversight from Congress.

Now we much better understand one of the most puzzling elements of Biden’s late-term negotiations in the Middle East. The failed discussions over a Gazan ceasefire were being brokered by CIA —not the State Department— and nobody even seemed to think there was anything at all unusual about that.

Remember this bizarre New York Times headline, published two days before Trump took office?

Apparently, the half of State Department who were real diplomats and not covert agents were just slowing things down, so CIA went ahead and took over directly. The headline’s reception was surreal. No alarm bells. No questions. Just acceptance. The Beltway bunch didn’t even blink, because this is normal now.

The State Department is doing diplomacy on the record. But the CIA is running the world off the books. That, my friends, is the deep state, exposed.

But that wasn’t all.

🔥 Shortly before Fox fired him, Tucker Carlson ran a segment where he —rightly, in my view— portrayed Richard Nixon as a Reagan-level, wildly-popular president who was politically assassinated by the deep state. Namely, the CIA.

At the time of his comments, Tucker drew a parallel between the successful soft coup against Nixon and the deep state’s attacks against President Trump. Notably, Tucker recounted how, just before the Watergate scandal burst open like a rotten water bag, Nixon told CIA Director Richard Helms that he knew who really killed Kennedy, implying that the CIA had been involved.

According to reports of the meeting, Director Helms sat, stonily silent, saying nothing.

For his trouble, far-left Media Matters promptly labeled Tucker a five-Pinnochio 'conspiracy theorist.’

But, and I bet you can tell where this is going, newly unredacted records from the JFK dump at least partially vindicated the now-independent Fox anchor, proving that four of the seven Watergate “burglars” were either then-present or former CIA agents (hat tip Kyle Becker):

In fairness, this is not enough evidence to conclude the CIA orchestrated the takedown of another populist president who was skeptical of the agency. But it cracks open the door. It raises questions that demand answers. It shifts the burden back to the CIA and confirms long-believed but long-sneered-at ‘conspiracy theories.’

Each additional disclosure forces a crack in the CIA’s iron wall of secrecy. The spy agency’s structural integrity is collapsing. As public pressure mounts, and the CIA’s power over the government frays, we’ll soon begin to see calls from an emboldened Congress for major reform.

And remember: We are only at the beginning. More JFK files are on the way. Behind those lie the promised files on RFK’s and King’s assassinations. And we haven’t even heard about the missing Crossfire Hurricane binder yet, even though that is what Trump was frantically working to declassify during his last tortured days in office back in 2021.

You’d better believe that missing binder is sitting somewhere on the disclosure timeline. And the Swamp knows it. This is only going to hurt for a very long time.

Yet, oddly, it feels like healing.

As the Times’ historian noted, I never expected to see anything like this in my lifetime. Draining the Swamp for good seemed more improbable than getting a coherent, unscripted sentence out of Kamala Harris after noon on a workday.

Yet here we are— it is happening. However surreal it may be. The ropes holding up the CIA’s parachute are fraying. I suspect that what is coming will be a wholesale rewriting of history, as the Swamp’s previously unseen tentacles are hauled out of the deep ocean and its connections to everything we thought we knew are finally exposed.

What looked like isolated scandals—JFK, RFK, MLK, Watergate, foreign coups, Trump—may begin to reassemble like a shattered mosaic, forming a much darker, much clearer picture of what really shaped the postwar American century.

History isn’t being written. It’s being unredacted and re-written.

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I couldn’t leave today’s post without mentioning the least-covered story in today’s corporate media headlines. Of major media, only the British BBC ran a clear headline this morning: “Trump signs order to dismantle US education department.” You may have hoped, but did you ever think you’d live to see it? Yet more historic surreality.

CLIP: President Trump signs executive order to dismantle the DOE (0:41).

President Trump signed the long-coveted executive order yesterday, surrounded by smiling schoolchildren seated at desks signing their own little executive orders. During the signing ceremony, the President praised newly confirmed Education Secretary Linda McMahon, saying he hoped she would be America’s last education secretary, and promising he would soon find “something else” for her to do.

Afterward, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.) announced plans to bring legislation aimed at completely closing the department. It’s a long shot, since Republicans still need 60 votes to beat the Senate filibuster, but still.

Trump’s short order directed Secretary McMahon to "take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure" of the department, and to return authority of education matters to state and local governments. Even if the department is not formally shuttered, the Trump administration can strip DOE’s funding and staff, like it did with USAID.

The order’s policy statement recounted the DOE’s miserable record of failure. “American reading and math scores are near historical lows,” it said, adding that “70 percent of 8th graders were below proficient in reading, and 72 percent were below proficient in math.”

“Ultimately,” the order said, “the Department of Education’s main functions can, and should, be returned to the States.”

But that wasn’t all!

🔥 President Trump signed three executive orders yesterday, keeping up the blistering pace of DOGE reform. His second game-changing EO was also widely ignored by mockingbird media, but was reported by Federal News Network under the bland headline, “Draft EO would make GSA the center of most common buys.”

Titled “Eliminating Waste and Saving Taxpayer Dollars by Consolidating Procurement”, the new order requires for the first time all government purchasing to flow through the General Services Agency. It was wonky, but no less revolutionary.

Right now, agencies all run their own purchasing departments. That is obviously inefficient, but more importantly, it conceals waste and abuse in the detritus of a thousand unconnected databases and individualized processes. Under cover of disorganization, agencies can dole out lucrative contracts to favored friends and political patrons.

Centralizing federal procurement under GSA is a direct assault on swampy patronage networks. No more fiefdoms, no more “coincidentally awarded” contracts to somebody’s brother’s solar startup in Loudoun County. It was the bureaucratic equivalent of forcing every pirate to check in at Port Royal.

The Wild West period of federal purchasing is now ending. For the first time in modern history, the government will maintain a centralized, transparent database of government purchases of all domestic goods and services. To help, DOGE developers have designed an AI tool to help purchasing agents timely review and approve purchase requests.

DOGE’s consolidated software and AI system could potentially be an unhackable audit trail highlighting favoritism like a neon mole stuck on a naked mole rat.

It wasn’t just reform, it was revolutionary infrastructure.

🔥 Rounding out the trifecta, Trump’s third and longest order was titled, “Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production.” The BBC reported the under-covered story yesterday, headlined “Trump uses wartime powers to boost mineral production.”

The order —signed personally, not by AutoPen— invoked the President’s emergency powers under the Defense Production Act, waiving reams of regulations and permit procedures, and expediting extraction of America’s “critical minerals.”

I guess he got tired of waiting for Zelensky to sign that rare minerals deal. Haha, just kidding. The order was carefully drafted. My guess is it was prepared well before Trump took office.

Trump’s minerals order installed a pacemaker in the heart of one of America’s most dangerous strategic vulnerabilities: our deep dependence on foreign adversaries —chiefly China— for the critical rocks powering everything from smartphones to fighter jets. By invoking the Defense Production Act to fast-track domestic mining, the order bypassed decades of bureaucratic inertia and green tape. It launches a wartime-level, urgent effort to secure the critical supply chains essential for our national security.

It’s not just about minerals. The geopolitical implications are staggering. In one personally-signed stroke, the U.S. has nimbly repositioned itself to challenge China’s near-monopoly on rare earths, reduce our reliance on unstable global markets, and reassert control over the key raw materials underpinning 21st-century progress.

It was also a major step toward world peace. Trump’s minerals order could significantly de-escalate tensions over Taiwan— by undercutting one of the key strategic drivers behind the conflict: China’s near-total control over critical mineral supply chains.

Most of Washington’s urgency to defend Taiwan stems not just from vague notions of democratic solidarity, but from the island’s practical role in semiconductor production and the region’s grip on rare earth elements essential to America’s tech and defense sectors.

By fast-tracking domestic mining, and reducing dependency on Chinese exports, the executive order starts cutting off the economic fuse that makes Taiwan a geopolitical powder keg. A self-sufficient America is a less desperate America— one that can afford diplomatic deterrence instead of being dragged toward military confrontation.

Biden couldn’t do things peacefully because he was politically shackled to his green constituencies. For his administration, more mining on U.S. soil was simply off-limits—sacrilege to the climate faithful. Ironically, to most environmentalists, a war over Taiwan is better than a domestic dig site.

Trump ended the argument with a stroke of the pen: we’re developing America’s resources, not starting World War III. By invoking his emergency powers to unleash critical mineral production, he didn’t just break the regulatory logjam—he pulled the plug on the false choice between ecological purity and geopolitical survival.

Altogether, the three new orders constitute three more body blows to the administrative state. Couple them with the JFK files blowtorch being taken to the deep state, and yesterday wasn’t just a big news cycle.

It was regime change.

Have a fabulous Friday! Then scamper back here tomorrow morning, for another delicious and nutritious serving of essential news and commentary, Coffee & Covid style.

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