The Reason the Left Tried to Drop a JDAM on Joe Kent's Nomination for Counterterrorism Center Director

As with Trump, the left has gone after Kent with a ferocity seldom seen against candidates in the rest of the country. It took a person with the intestinal fortitude of a former Green Beret special operator and CIA paramilitary hero to withstand the wicked and withering attacks. It's easy to depict an opponent as a  <checks notes>  Nazi, when what he did was carry a gun in defense of his country, for eleven deployments.

Kent is a Gold Star husband, a widowed special operator with two motherless boys to raise, which, as an aside, didn't engender sympathy from the usually emotionally incontinent leftists in his district. Kent's deceased wife, Shannon, was a bona fide hero in her own right, who worked with special operators in Syria—after American troops were ordered to withdraw from the region by Trump 45. Mark Milley and Ambassador James Jeffrey defied orders—their maniacal ideations and delusions of grandeur had real-world consequences for Joe Kent, as it turns out. Indeed, Kent might have a thought or two about big shots not following the commander-in-chief's orders.

Through it all, the affable yet deadly serious Kent stayed in touch with his Washington, D.C.-based special operator and CIA connections as he settled into his Yacolt, Washington home, with his kids. He got remarried in 2023. When he lost his congressional race in 2024, Kent had work options, but they weren't as satisfying as doing big things. Trump called and offered him a job. 

The left, however, went to the barricades to end Kent's nomination to the directorship of the National Counterterrorism Center. Kent beat them.

Democrat/leftist activists were apoplectic that Kent called for BLM and Antifa rioters to be treated like the domestic terrorists they are. So, naturally, he was depicted as a Nazi. We know this because the discredited fallen Southern Poverty Law Center, and the balsa wood-constructed faux group known as the Western States Center, wrote scathing letters about how Kent was all of the terrible "ists" and "phobes" that should keep him from polite society— if your baseline understanding of the world is like Antifa's, that is. 

Thankfully, normal people in the Senate voted 52-44 to confirm him. That's a landslide when it comes to Trump appointees. North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis voted against the war hero because Kent thinks the government might have had something to do with the riot on January 6, 2021, a nuance that eluded Tillis.

But, to understand why Kent is so dangerous to the Thom Tillises and the left, one must only see this colloquy with Democrat Senator Mark Warner during his confirmation hearing. Kelly asked Kent about why the counterterrorism designate alleged that there were likely government actors who had something to do with the rioting on January 6, 2021.

And Kent matter-of-factly told the senator that the intelligence community under President Trump is already investigating the federal government's involvement in fomenting the violence on J-6.

The intel agencies run ops on innocent Americans, and Joe Kent has been calling them out on it since day one.

J6, the Whitmer Kidnapping, etc.pic.twitter.com/NHCaBPelVH

— The Conservative Alternative (@OldeWorldOrder) July 31, 2025

After all we've found out in the past few days about the Hillary Clinton and Intelligence Community operation against Donald Trump, Kent is exactly the guy I want watching bad guys. And we all know who they are.

If you can't see the problem, you're not looking.