Goodbye Joe

Today, Friday, March 20, 2026, Darrell Castle talks about the resignation of Joe Kent as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center and especially about the ramifications of the letter he publicly released explaining his resignation. Transcription / Notes: GOODBYE JOE Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. I will be talking about the resignation of Joe Kent as Director of The National Counterterrorism Center and especially about the ramifications of the letter he publicly released explaining his resignation. Yes, Joe is gone and I for one will miss him in government because he was not afraid to ask questions and to encourage legitimate investigations into things which didn’t make sense from the official government explanation. First, let’s take a brief look at who he is and how he became Director of Counterterrorism. He was born April 11, 1980, so next month he will be 46 years old. He enlisted in the U.S. Army after 9-11 and made it through Ranger School where he served with the 75th Rangers. He requested special forces where he spent his 20-year army career. He served 11 combat tours in the Middle East wars. In 2018 he left the army and became a paramilitary operative for the CIA. He was married to Shannon and they had two children. She was also a military officer and a navy cryptologist and in 2019 while serving in Syria she was killed by a suicide bomber. If the loss of Shannon was as devastating for him as it would have been for me it’s easy to see why he left military service and tried to enter politics. He ran for the U.S. Congress in 2022 and 2024 winning the Republican primary but losing to the Democrat in his Washington district. He voted for George Bush in 2000 and 2004 but then became more of a Libertarian and supporter of Ron Paul. I thought of him in Libertarian and Ron Paul terms while I was dabbling in politics myself. He liked the anti-globalist, antiestablishment message of Donald Trump and after Trump’s election in 2024 He eventually served as chief of staff to the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. In July 2025 he was appointed Director of the Counterterrorism Center but from the start he had difficulties. I suppose that being on the inside of government exposes one to things that you either accept as part of the team or you become a pain in the butt to those who do. Joe made statements in favor of harsh views of Iran such as if it were up to me I would just take them out so something changed over the course of that year in his views. Well, Joe concluded that a foreign government was somehow complicit in the death of Charlie Kirk and he encouraged Tulsi, his boss, to look into it. When Kash Patel, the director of the FBI found out that Joe was doing that he took him off the President’s Daily Briefing group and he disappeared for a while. He, like Charlie, lobbied the President to resist the advice to go to war with Iran. Whether Joe was correct with the opinions he expressed in his resignation letter, or not it seems now that going to war with Iran was not a very good idea. Why, because you can bomb them ala Curtis Lemay, back to the stone age and they will just crawl out of the rubble and fire ballistic and drone missiles at the ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Ground invasion of Iran is impossible because of the terrain and size of the place but I just read where a Marine Expeditionary Force has boarded an LPH in Japan on its way to the Persian Gulf. I spent some time on LPH ships a little over 50 years ago so I know what those Marines are probably tasked with. The H stands for helicopters and that means the old days of Marines climbing down rope ladders to the landing craft are over. Everything is done by helicopter insertion and you need air superiority for that. I guess they have that except for the danger of some Iranian waiting in a spider hole with a man portable missile. Reports are that the Strait is about 90% closed to international shipping and it is damaging the world economy severely. The President calls on our former European allies but most decline as does NATO. Why would NATO decline to help keep the Strait open since they need the oil as much as anyone. I have a book in my library entitled Statesmen of the Lost Cause. It’s about the southern politicians of the Civil War of course, but it reminds me of the NATO refusal because those countries view it as a lost cause or a fool’s errand. The Europeans apparently view it as a lost cause but I do not because I know what the U.S. military can do especially when things look bad. The Europeans are certainly qualified to speak on lost causes because their entire bureaucracy known as the EU plus UK is a lost cause. They celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin but third world immigration has destroyed the cohesion of the Irish people. What they are really afraid of and angry about is that Donald Trump refuses to bend his knew to their global government run...