Senator Elisa Slotkin (D-MI) recently posted a video of herself, Mark Kelly (D–Senator, Arizona), Jason Crow (D–Representative, Colorado), Chris Deluzio (D–Representative, Pennsylvania), Maggie Goodlander (D–Representative, New Hampshire), and Chrissy Houlahan (D–Representative, Pennsylvania) to Twitter. After introducing themselves, these individuals took turns reading the following statement:
We want to speak directly to members of the military and the intelligence community who take risks each day to keep Americans safe.
We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now. Americans trust their military, but that trust is at risk. This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens like us.
You all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad. We have some right here at home. Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.
You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.
We know this is hard and that it’s a difficult time to be a public servant. But whether you’re serving in the CIA, the Army, or Navy, or Air Force, your vigilance is critical.
And know that we have your back, because now more than ever, the American people need you. We need you to stand up for our laws, our Constitution, and who we are as Americans. Don’t give up, don’t give up, don’t give up.
Don’t give up the ship.
Not mentioning the Marine Corps is important, as it means that either none of these people knew the United States has a Marine Corps, or that whomever the message was intended for does not include the Marine Corps.
There is nothing actionable in the video, and while it is awfully clear that the supposed threat to the Constitution is the Trump Administration, the video avoided calling Trump a ‘threat to the Constitution’ by name. It just heavily implied it.
These congresspeople knew exactly how far they could go without getting prosecuted.
A remarkably similar pattern to the Slotkin video can be found in the CIA’s 1954 operation to remove Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, in an operation known as PBSUCCESS.
The removal of Árbenz began with a coordinated information campaign aimed specifically at the Guatemalan military and intelligence services. The CIA understood that if the officer corps could be persuaded that Árbenz represented a constitutional danger, or that he might soon issue “unlawful” commands, the presidency could be isolated without a single shot being fired.
The first phase of PBSUCCESS consisted of messaging. CIA analysts and psychological operations officers crafted narratives portraying Árbenz as compromised, reckless, and aligned with foreign interests. These messages were not delivered by American operatives, but by a carefully selected group of Guatemalan political elites, former officials, and civilian influencers who served the same function the six American legislators serve in the Slotkin video: the public face of a broader effort.
These individuals made public statements praising the Guatemalan military for its “constitutional role,” warning of “threats to the republic coming from within,” and reminding officers that their oath required them to refuse “orders that violated the law or the nation’s founding principles.”
Nothing in the statements was technically actionable. The wording was deliberately cautious, crafted to sit precisely on the legal line without crossing it. The intent was not to accuse Árbenz of illegality outright, but to prime military leaders to assume that any future order they found disagreeable might be illegitimate.
The target audience was not the general population. It was not even the whole military. The messaging was directed at specific branches: key Army units, the Guatemalan Air Force, and the intelligence services. Certain units known for loyalty to Árbenz were ignored, just as the Slotkin video conspicuously omits any mention of the United States Marine Corps.
As the operation progressed, officers began to interpret routine presidential directives through a lens of suspicion. Rumors circulated that Árbenz was preparing unconstitutional actions, that he was preparing to arm civilian militias, and that he was acting under foreign influence. These were rumors the CIA deliberately seeded and amplified through radio broadcasts and friendly newspapers.
By the time a small exile force led by Carlos Castillo Armas rebelled, the damage had already been done. When Árbenz issued orders to resist the rebellion, officers hesitated. Some refused to follow his orders at all, and others complied minimally such that whomever won, they would not get in too much trouble.
The effectiveness of the operation was confirmed in CIA after-action reports.
Analysts noted that the messaging campaign succeeded, not by persuading the military that Árbenz had actually become a tyrant, but by persuading them that it was their duty to judge for themselves whether his orders remained constitutional.
This structure of political actors delivering a narrowly targeted message to the military, warning of “domestic threats,” emphasizing the duty to refuse “illegal orders,” and doing so in legally cautious but unmistakable language, is the same structure we see echoed in the Slotkin video. The language is nearly identical, and omitting the Marine Corps was a red flag.
The Slotkin video is so eerily similar to what the CIA did in Guatemala that it would be reckless not to think Slotkin, herself a former member of the CIA, was not brushing the dust off that old playbook.
Nor is Guatemala the only time the CIA has done this. We also have Iran in 1953, Chile in 1973, Ukraine in 2014, and around 10 other times that are publicly documented.
The CIA Toolkit: A Structure, Not a Theory
When the CIA sets out to influence the political direction of another country, it begins by shaping perception. Every successful regime-change effort the Agency has conducted around the world has followed the same underlying structure. The names of the countries and the ideological justifications change, but the architecture remains the same.
What follows is the basic toolkit the CIA designed and refined through decades of foreign regime-change operations.
The first step is narrative domination. A government cannot defend itself once the population no longer trusts its institutions, so the CIA always begins by shaping what people believe. This involves media seeding, selective leaks, anonymous intelligence sources, journalists who serve as conduits for psychological operations, and the strategic placement of stories designed to shift public sentiment before any actual confrontation occurs.
If you control the flow of information, every subsequent step becomes easier.
The second component is manufactured delegitimization.
Here, the target is portrayed as corrupt, compromised, reckless, mentally unstable, or aligned with foreign adversaries.
The CIA does not need to prove any of these claims. It just needs to establish a presumption of unfitness.
Once the population and, critically, the officer corps begins to accept the possibility that the leader is unfit, corrupt, and dangerous, every action the leader takes can be framed as illegitimate. Delegitimization weakens every other form of political authority.
The third step is legal pressure and institutional fragmentation. This phase does not require convictions or legal victories. It requires only that prosecutors, courts, parliamentary inquiries, and intelligence agencies are used in parallel to surround the targeted leader with perpetual investigations.
Even if the legal actions are baseless or stall out in court, the existence of constant proceedings creates an impression of an embattled and embittered leader, perhaps on the verge of collapse. The lawsuits shape public psychology. Falsehoods are repeated and built upon until the public believes them to be true.
The allegations don’t have to be true, and it is not necessary for everyone to believe them. As long as the narrative spreads, and damage is done.
The fourth component is election engineering. Contrary to common belief, this rarely involves ballot-stuffing. More often it involves disqualification, smear campaigns, intimidation of donors or supporters, procedural rule changes, and coordinated pressure from NGOs or international observers.
Most elections are close such that if the CIA can move public opinion by just three percent, it controls the outcome.
That’s not to say cheating is off the table. Random sampling is accurate enough that insiders know who is going to win by 2:00 AM on the night of an election. If additional ballots need to be injected, one candidate might suddenly surge in counting in statistically improbable ways at key locations.
The fifth tool is crisis creation.
No regime-change operation proceeds without a trigger event. When natural crises do not arise on schedule, crises are engineered. These can include riots, economic panics, waves of selective leaks, sudden national security threats, or coordinated media narratives that turn routine events into existential emergencies. Crisis creates an emotional environment in which extraordinary measures appear inevitable.
The sixth step is the installation of an acceptable regime.
The CIA does not necessarily seek a popular replacement. It seeks a compliant one. The ideal successor is a leader who aligns with institutional interests and who will not disrupt existing power arrangements.
Sometimes this means supporting a strongman. Sometimes it means elevating a technocrat. Sometimes it means backing a coalition. Sometimes it means putting in place a senile old man.
The common denominator is that the new leadership is predictable.
Finally, once the transition is complete, the CIA engages in post-coup narrative laundering. This is the final and often most important phase.
The media retroactively reframes the entire operation as a heroic defense of democracy. The previous leader becomes a villain. Any irregularities that occurred during the transition are recast as necessary acts of civic virtue.
The new regime is celebrated as the restoration of normalcy, and the public memory of how the shift occurred is rewritten in real time.
Time Magazine ran an article showing how a ‘well funded cabal’ saved the country.
This seven-part toolkit is in the public sphere, visible in CIA documents, Senate investigations, and the academic literature on American covert operations. As uncomfortable as it may be to acknowledge, the structural resemblance between this toolkit and the political maneuvers we have witnessed inside the United States over the past decade is impossible to ignore.
The Toolkit Applied Domestically
When you place the last decade of American politics beside the architecture the CIA has used overseas, the parallels are obvious enough that you have to look away not to see them.
The sequence is not identical in every detail, but the underlying structure in terms of the order of operations, the institutional incentives, and the psychological conditioning, matches the toolkit with eerie precision. The Slotkin video is simply the latest example of a pattern that began long before 2024.
Note that once a step begins, it continues such that things that fit within one step may occur after other steps have also begun.
The first step was narrative domination. Beginning in 2016, a steady stream of leaks, anonymous sources, intelligence briefings, and news stories appeared in perfect alignment. Former intelligence officers took on high-profile roles at CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, serving as both pundits and conduits.
Russia-gate functioned as the foundational delegitimizing narrative. Every selective leak, every breathless headline, and every fizzled “bombshell” helped in establishing an atmosphere of suspicion.
The “51 intelligence officials” letter regarding the Hunter Biden laptop stands as perhaps the most brazen example. It was presented as an unbiased national security warning, yet it was orchestrated behind the scenes and delivered with precise electoral timing by people who knew it was a lie.
The second step, manufactured delegitimization, escalated the attacks.
Trump was framed as a Russian asset first, then a racist (along with every other form of -ist), then a dictator, then a fascist, then a national security threat, then a pedophile, and finally as someone whose future commands might be unlawful.
Everything Trump did or said was spun in only the worst light possible. The word ‘could’ was weaponized such that anything possible became portrayed as imminently likely.
Every action Trump did was portrayed as illegal, and in many cases unconstitutional. Trump was accused of being friendly with dictators, of wanting to let Russia invade the rest of Europe, of being in Putin’s pocket. The list goes on and on such that Trump was made to look like a uniquely horrific human being.
The third phase was legal warfare.
Starting in 2017, Trump became the most investigated political figure in American history. Civil actions, criminal actions, congressional inquiries, special counsels, state-level cases, and intelligence investigations appeared in parallel, all running simultaneously, all creating the continuous impression of impropriety. Whether any of them produced meaningful results was irrelevant. The objective was to create an unending legal fog.
Such tactics mirror those used in Brazil against Lula, Ukraine against Tymoshenko, Italy during the Mani Pulite prosecutions, and South Korea during its political purges. The point of legal warfare is not a conviction (although if you throw enough lawsuits in friendly venues with friendly judges, you might get lucky). The point is paralysis.
Trump spent much of his 2024 campaign in court.
Election engineering followed. Rules shift, NGOs coordinate pressure, and strategic censorship hides behind “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.”
Joe Biden announced publicly that he would use ‘every constitutional means’ to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2024 election (his administration deciding what is ‘constitutional’), and the Biden Administration spent several billion tax dollars on ‘get out the vote’ campaigns through NGOs aligned with the DNC.
Every institutional change, no matter how small, tilted the landscape in ways that favored one outcome and disadvantaged the other.
Crisis was the next stage, and the summer of 2020 looked indistinguishable from the street-mobilization phase of a color revolution, in spite of the fact that we were in the middle of an epidemic, with Covid-19 lockdowns across the country.
Cities burned, Federal buildings were surrounded, police departments were overrun or ordered to stand down, and autonomous zones were created that declared themselves independent from the United States. National Guard units were deployed or held back based on political calculations.
Intelligence briefings shifted narratives whenever earlier claims failed. Public fear was sustained through cycles of selective information, and the atmosphere of crisis was treated as proof that drastic action was necessary.
In other countries, the CIA has relied on similar cycles of unrest to soften the population for a political transition. The resemblance was not subtle.
The installation of an acceptable regime came next.
Joe Biden was framed as the “return to norms” candidate, a familiar post-coup stabilization message. Every major institutional actor, from the intelligence community to the mainstream press to the NGO network, celebrated his victory as a restoration of order.
The language was managerial. The “adults were back in charge,” and stability had returned. The phrasing echoed the rhetoric used in countries where a CIA-supported government replaces a leader deemed unstable or disruptive.
Finally, the United States entered the narrative laundering phase.
The period from 2016 to 2021 was reframed almost overnight. The media portrayed the years as a dark aberration. Institutions that had abused their authority were painted as heroic defenders of democracy. Misconduct was sanitized. Actions that would have been unthinkable in prior decades were retroactively justified as noble necessities, and the CIA began preparing for 2024.
I said this earlier, but it is worth repeating: Joe Biden openly promised to use ‘every constitutional means’ to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2024 election. He openly told the public that he was weaponizing the Federal Government to win reelection.
Thanks to a horrific debate, that weaponization failed, but the regime-change operation against Trump resumed even before he entered office again, culminating in the Slotkin video.
The Missing Ingredient: America’s Built-In Immunity
Foreign governments do not have the American system of checks and balances, or institutional gridlock built into their constitutional architecture.
Our Founders designed a system in which competing authorities grind against one another. Our founders feared concentrated power more than anything else, and did not trust government, even when running it themselves, so they fractured it into competing branches, each with the ability to slow or frustrate the others.
They also fractured it into a Federalist system, with a Federal Government that was constrained to only certain, specific, enumerated powers. Everything else was left up to the states or the people as individuals. Put simply, power constrained is power refrained, and our system was designed to push as much power as possible, as locally as practical.
This gridlock often feels like dysfunction, but it acts as a firewall, preventing rapid institutional change and frustrating attempts to overthrow political authority. Our system prevents, or at least hinders, the concentration of power.
We don’t do a very good job following our system anymore, and in fact our law schools now teach that it is unconstitutional to follow the Constitution, through a sleight of hand called the ‘living interpretation,’ in which the Constitution is not defined by what it says, so much as by what the Supreme Court thinks it should say at any point in time. This is a common-law system that is completely at odds with the American founding, and yet it is what the vast majority of those studying Constitutional Law in our Law Schools are now taught.
In spite of this, we still have safeguards, such as the First Amendment, that other nations do not have, and that makes it far more difficult for the United States to be subverted than it is for other nations.
It’s not perfect, and it does not protect us completely from authoritarianism in other countries.
The EU, Canada, and other nations with no such safeguards don’t just censor speech and lock up dissenters, but also tell our social media companies that they will fine them out of existence unless they play along. Because of this, Facebook and Twitter now severely restrict the ability of anything with off-network content to spread, and particularly from ‘untrusted sources.’ Many content providers (myself included) have seen the number of viewers coming from those platforms drop by over 90%.
China prohibits media companies from having any access to their market at all unless they voluntarily submit to Chinese censorship, both in China, and here at home.
This sort of thing is perfect for the CIA, as it prevents media houses the CIA can’t control from growing, and to the degree that the CIA can work with China, it allows the CIA to do through China what would be illegal for it to do on its own.
Had the United States been Guatemala in 1954 or Chile in 1973, the political maneuvering we have witnessed over the past decade would almost certainly have produced a complete regime transition. The fact that it did not is a testament to the Bill of Rights.
Our system resisted because it was designed to resist. It is not that the playbook was not being used, but that America’s constitutional structure is uniquely resistant to it.
Why This Is Happening Now
There was a moment late in Joe Biden’s Presidency during the West Africa Coup Crisis, where Joe Biden was on ‘vacation’ (after he was removed from the election he basically retired) and Kamala Harris was on the campaign trail, when one of our major drone bases was in jeopardy. Someone was clearly calling the shots from the Situation Room, and yet Joe Biden remained on vacation, and Kamala Harris remained on the campaign trail. Even CNN began asking who was in charge.
The answer should have become the news story of the century. White House insiders actually told the press that a team, “far more competent than either Biden or Harris” was running the country.
One might ask: If there was a team “far more competent than either Biden or Harris,” why didn’t any of them run for office in 2024? The Democrats knowingly nominated unfit candidates in both 2020 and 2024, and the media never mentioned it. The media in fact continuously lied about Biden’s mental capacity.
Back to the question of why now.
The short answer is that we did not elect Kamala Harris, so the team ‘far more competent than either Biden or Harris’ was suddenly out of power.
Bernie Sanders sued the DNC in 2016 for rigging the primaries, and the DNC’s defense was that the DNC leadership, and not the primary process, picks the candidate. Joe Biden was getting blown out in 2020 until he carried Super Tuesday under suspicious circumstances, and then in 2024, those who wanted to primary Joe Biden were quite literally kicked out of the party, only for Joe Biden to nominate Kamala Harris on his way out the door.
The DNC refused to even have a primary.
If you want to find a Presidential election the Democrats lost, and accepted having lost, you have to go back to 1988. Every single time they have lost since then, they have called the President ‘illegitimate.’ That’s 37 years of election denial.
They have also questioned the legitimacy of other elections, whether it’s Stacey Abrams losing the Georgia governor’s race in 2018, Bill Nelson’s 2018 Florida Senate race, or any number of other contests Democrats insisted would have gone their way ‘if only the election were fair.’
When we look at George W. Bush, his father once ran the CIA. George W. Bush was a Republican, but he was also an insider.
Ronald Reagan was tempered by his Vice President, George H. W. Bush. Nixon was eventually tempered by, and then replaced by Gerald Ford, who was also an insider (and who put George H.W. Bush in charge of the CIA).
As Allied Commander of Europe for WWII, Eisenhower was one of the primary architects of the CIA, and as President, he turned the CIA into the active, global power it is today.
Before Eisenhower, to get a Republican President you have to go all the way back to Herbert Hoover.
Put that history together and the only two Republican Presidents who did not come from the CIA (or were immediately adjacent to it) were Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump.
Many historians now argue, and substantial evidence suggests, that Nixon was forced to resign through what was effectively an intelligence-driven regime-change operation. At best, the CIA was opportunistic in making sure Nixon resigned, after the fact, and now with Donald Trump we have all the earmarks of another CIA regime-change operation.
Richard Nixon did not trust the CIA. He believed it had become too powerful, and he believed it massaged intelligence to manipulate the President. Donald Trump primarily uses private intelligence services for the same reason. He does not trust the CIA either.
Barack Obama, in the meantime, used to tell the heads of his intelligence services what he wanted their intelligence to say. General Michael Flynn was, in fact, fired as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency for continuing to give actual intelligence to Obama, after repeatedly being told to make up whatever ‘intelligence’ Obama asked for.
Barack Obama, incidentally, was not the first President to tell the intelligence services what intelligence he wanted them to find. That’s how George W. Bush justified invading Iraq.
Trump later made Michael Flynn his National Security Advisor, and the FBI destroyed his life and career 24 days later.
What was Michael Flynn’s supposed crime? In an FBI interview Flynn thought was a casual conversation, he misstated the timing of a call. The FBI agents did not believe Flynn gave the wrong time intentionally, but it did not matter. He was charged with lying to FBI agents, forced out of public service, and prosecuted into bankruptcy.
Why now? Because Trump is the first President since Nixon to question the supremacy of a team ‘far more competent than’ whomever was actually elected.
The last Democrat President to question the autonomy of the CIA, or to threaten to reign it in, was John F. Kennedy.
You read that correctly. Since the CIA’s inception, only three Presidents have tried to gain control over it: John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump.
The Consequences
A country cannot deploy the tools of regime change against its own citizens and still claim to be a constitutional republic. Once those tools are turned inward, the consequences are not theoretical. Elections become suspect and outcomes lose credibility. Once the public cannot tell whether results reflect the voters or the operators, legitimacy collapses, and a republic only exists so long as people believe in it.
This ties directly into the civilizational pattern I have laid out elsewhere: civilizations do not fall because they are defeated; they fall because they forget their First Principles.
When those who hold power no longer see themselves as bound by the restraints that define the country, decline becomes a timeline, and though the American system is strong, it is not indestructible.
The remedy is not despair. The remedy is to restore what has worked in the past, beginning with real due process rather than legal warfare dressed up as justice.
We need the presumption of innocence to be more than a slogan, and particularly when accusations only emerge in election years.
We need to return to our Constitution, not as a ‘living document’ whose meaning is unbound to its wording, but as the Supreme Law of the Land that defines and restrains the Federal Government. There is little reason to corrupt a government if it lacks the powers people want to buy. Limited government is the best protection against corruption, and local corruption is far more expensive to do at scale.
What bothers me most is the arrogance of the people who think they are “far more competent than” whatever name happens to be on the door. The video from Elissa Slotkin, Mark Kelly, Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan was so close to Operation PBSUCCESS in structure and tone that anyone who has studied that period will notice the similarities immediately. They think we are either too lazy or too stupid to notice.
Regime-change tactics only work when the public accepts the system as-is. They fail the moment the public refuses to play along, and if enough people can be brought to see the agency behind the curtain actually calling the shots, we can bring the CIA to its knees.
There is a temptation to call this sedition, and if CIA involvement (or involvement of any intelligence agency) can be proven, heads could roll. More likely, no such evidence exists. Furthermore, going after large swaths of the CIA could spark an actual coup.
Understand that it is not just the Slotkin video. This has been going on since it became evident Trump beat Hillary Clinton.
I’d love to see the guilty charged, but it is not likely going to happen.
All we have to do is keep voting for people who come from outside that system. Trump may not be able to entirely rein the CIA in, but he can make big inroads, and if the next President is also from outside the machine, that person can continue to dismantle what will be a weaker system.
As long as we keep voting for people who come from outside the system and who have a firm belief in our Constitution, our liberty will eventually be restored.
That alone shuts down the machine.
