by Jacob G. Hornberger

August 6, 2026

With the soaring popularity and electoral success of democratic socialists, the question naturally arises: Will the CIA employ its power of assassination to rectify this problem?

Let’s keep in mind some important facts:

1. The CIA wields the power to assassinate communists. This omnipotent power was manifested as far back as the early 1960s, when the CIA secretly conspired with the Mafia to assassinate Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro and, in fact, made repeated attempts to assassinate him. It is undisputed that Cuba had never attacked the United States. The CIA-Mafia conspiracy to assassinate Castro and the repeated attempts to assassinate him were based entirely on the fact that Castro was a communist.

2. One might point out that a socialist is different from a communist. But in the minds of many people, including the CIA’s commander-in-chief, Donald Trump, socialists and communists can be one and the same thing. For example, just recently, after electoral victories of democratic socialists, Trump repeatedly described them as “hardcore, godless communists” and declared that Democrats had “skipped socialism” and “went right to communism.”

3. During the entire Cold War racket, which lasted for some 45 years, both the CIA and the Pentagon were convinced that communists posed a grave threat to U.S. “national security.” As the core entities that form the U.S. national-security state, both the Pentagon and the CIA have always wielded the omnipotent power to deal with threats to national security, including through assassination. Thus, while much of the U.S. government’s anti-communist crusade during the old Cold War racket was designed to kill American communists through starvation by preventing them from securing employment, lurking in the background was always the Pentagon-CIA power of assassination.

4. In fact, under our national-security state form of governmental structure, both the Pentagon and the CIA wield the omnipotent power to assassinate anyone that they consider poses a threat to national security. Moreover, it is the Pentagon and the CIA that make the final determination as to who constitutes a threat to national security. No other branch of the federal government, including the Supreme Court, wields the power to second-guess the Pentagon and the CIA when it comes to assassination.

5. Consider the Pentagon’s recent assassinations of more than 200 people in boats on the high seas near Venezuela. Those assassinations are ostensibly based on supposed violations of U.S. drug laws, even though any evidence of incrimination is kept top secret. But it really doesn’t matter what rationale or what evidence is used to justify the assassinations of those boat people. The fact is that the Pentagon and the CIA wield the omnipotent power to assassinate them regardless of justification or evidence. Again, none of the other three branches of the federal government — executive, legislative, and judicial — wields the authority to second-guess or stop such assassinations.

6. Consider the conspiracies to assassinate — or the actual assassinations of — Chilean Gen. Rene Schneider, Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani, American accused terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage American son Abdulrahman, Congo leader Patrice Lumumba, Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngô Đình Nhu, Dominican Republic president Rafael Trujillo, and American scientist Frank Olson.

7. The CIA secretly participated in Operation Condor, one of the biggest assassination (and kidnapping and torture) programs in history.

8. There is also the Pentagon-CIA assassination of President Kennedy, which some Americans are still loathe to acknowledge, notwithstanding the fraudulent autopsy that the national-security establishment conducted on JFK’s body just a few hours after the assassination. As I have emphasized many, many times, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. It necessarily convicts the national-security establishment of the assassination itself. See my book The Kennedy Autopsy.

In fact, the JFK assassination is instructive because it was Kennedy’s resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which left Cuba permanently in communist hands, followed by his Peace Speech at American University in June 1963, in which he announced his intention to establish peaceful relations with the communist world, that motivated the national-security establishment to take him out so that he could be replaced by the fierce anti-communist Lyndon Johnson. See: JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.

Thus, there is no question but that the U.S. national-security establishment wields the omnipotent authority to assassinate democratic socialists. The only question is whether the Pentagon and the CIA will deem them sufficiently large threats to national security to justify their assassinations. If so, one can rest assured that the assassinations will be committed covertly, such as in the form of suicides, “patsies,” or accidental falls from buildings.

There is one overarching point about all this that Americans should be fully aware of: There is no possibility whatsoever that people who live under a governmental structure in which some officials wield the power of assassination can legitimately be considered a free people, no matter how much they convince themselves otherwise.

Our American ancestors understood this point perfectly, which is why the Constitution called into existence a limited-government republic and did not delegate the power of assassination to the federal government. To make certain that federal officials got the point, our American ancestors enacted the Fifth Amendment, which expressly bars U.S. officials from taking any person’s life without due process of law.

Of course, all that went out the window when the U.S. government was converted to a national-security state after World War II as part of the old Cold War racket. But nothing is inevitable. Americans might yet decide that they would rather live in a genuinely free society and restore their founding governmental system of a limited-government republic, one without the omnipotent, totalitarian power of assassination.