Devin Nunes - Countdown to Socialism

ENCOUNTER BROADSIDES

In the late eighteenth century, pamphlets like the one you hold in your hands electrified the colonies and helped to forge American democracy as we know it. These small books were read aloud in taverns, churches, and squares across the colonies, where they made the case for independence and informed the roiling debates over issues threatening the new nation. Encounter Broadsides seek to revive the pamphleteers sense of urgency and rhetorical skill to provide ammunition for intelligent debate on the urgent questions of our time. Encounter Broadsides make the case for ordered liberty and democratic capitalism at a time when they are under siege from a resurgence of collectivist sentiment. Read them in a sitting and come away knowing the best we can hope for and the worst we must fear.

Table of Contents

Countdown to Socialism

CHAPTER ONE

Outside the Swamp

A FTER HIS 2008 ELECTION, Barack Obama promised to transform America. The current Democratic candidate for president, Obamas former vice president Joe Biden, is promising the same.

Were going to beat Donald Trump, Biden tweeted this spring as rioters razed and looted American cities. And when we do, we wont just rebuild this nation well transform it.

When the Democrats say theyre going to transform America, we should take them at their word. Thats how high the stakes are. Were fighting for our home, our country, America and our opponents promise theyre going to change it fundamentally.

Americans know whats at stake. I hear their concerns first-hand.

On July 2, 2020, I was stuck in Washington, D.C., dealing with the fallout from the Democrats latest addition to their Russia collusion hoax it began with a New York Times story purporting that President Trump had been briefed and failed to act on intelligence showing that the Russians were offering bounties to Afghan fighters to kill U.S. troops. As these things tend to do, the story fell apart quickly, as it emerged that Trump was never briefed on the topic and the Pentagon announced the intelligence had not been corroborated. But that didnt stop the media pile-on as they tried to gin up yet another TrumpRussia scandal.

I was glad to fly out of D.C. that afternoon. The Democrats had canceled weeks of voting in the House and allowed for proxy voting for members who were too afraid of the Coronavirus to come to D.C. and cast votes themselves. Whether votes were occurring or not, the Capitol was like a grim ghost town. During the few weeks when votes were called, it always felt good to leave for my home in Californias San Joaquin Valley, an amazing agricultural region that I call the breadbasket of the solar system because it grows more than three hundred different crops.

Due to a flight delay, I spent the night of July 2 in Dallas, so I went to a restaurant for dinner. Several strangers came up to me. They all asked me variations of the same question: is our country going to be okay?

I got the same question repeatedly the next day, when my family and I began the Fourth of July holiday with dinner in an RV park in Central California. It was a patriotic group there, with scores of American flags and Trump flags flying from their vehicles. But the uneasiness was obvious. They, too, wanted to know if America as we know it is going to endure.

Americans already see the nature of our current struggle. I wrote Countdown to Socialism as a roadmap to ready us for what lies ahead. In it I document the destructive events of the last four years and the dark forces driving them, leading to this defining moment in our history. The book looks at the political arena as well as the media and social media environments where much of our fight is unfolding. I pay special attention to the Russia collusion conspiracy theory, which has done enormous damage to American society, our governing institutions, and to so many individuals.

Perhaps more important, the collusion hoax, perpetuated by the media, government officials, and political operatives, has become the model for a series of information operations from the Kavanaugh nomination to the phony impeachment process that target not only the president and his supporters but also the liberties and legacy of the American way of life. The purpose of this book is to warn of the dangers that face us and to define in detail the nature of the fight and our opponents.

At a time when socialist radicals are rioting, attacking the police, and tearing down statues of Americas founders across the country, its not unreasonable to ask if the America we know will survive. Violence is plaguing the streets of many of our cities, and local authorities seem either helpless or outright supportive of the chaos.

These spasms of revolutionary destruction are typical of socialist movements. They view any nations past as a continuous story of oppression that only ends with the socialists seizure of power. So-called liberation, then, is synonymous with total destruction of the past. In Maos Cultural Revolution, the radicals sought to eliminate the four olds: old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. Obviously, if you successfully eliminate those, theres nothing left of the previous way of life. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge launched a similar attempt to introduce so-called year zero, when history would begin from scratch under the socialist regime.

America, a free nation with the most advanced and successful economy in world history, seems like an unlikely place for this kind of total warfare against a countrys own past. But in recent years, the Left has wholly rejected the fundamental principles that bound Americans together and allowed us to work out our differences democratically and peacefully. They now reject free speech, a fair voting system, private property, and the rule of law. They dont dare yet admit it publicly, but as youll see in this book, their policies and rhetoric are incompatible with any of these principles as we understand them today.

As Chairman and then Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, I saw this first-hand as I fought to expose the Russia collusion hoax. There is a long-standing, bipartisan understanding that the intelligence agencies should be non-partisan and non-political. The politicization of intelligence agencies always leads to disaster. Its a hallmark of banana republics and authoritarian regimes that politicized intelligence leaders spy on political opponents and then try to orchestrate their arrest or dismissal from office.

And thats exactly what happened with the Russia collusion hoax politicized elements of the Intelligence Community targeted their political opponents, used false information to propel investigations and get spying warrants, and leaked a flood of bogus evidence, all designed to drive President Trump and his team from office. Although many Democrats in Congress may have believed the conspiracy theory at first, at some point it became clear to all of them that this was a gross abuse of our national security apparatus. Yet instead of condemning this abuse as antithetical to a democratic republic, the only misgivings I hear from Democrats is regret that the plot to oust Trump failed.

With what will the Left replace America? Socialism and one-party rule under the leftists now masquerading as Democrats.

With their Green New Deal and Medicare for All proposals, the Democrats are vowing to engineer a massive, fundamental expansion of the governments role in the economy. These two programs alone, if implemented, would be giant steps toward socializing the economy, constricting the private sector and the free exchange of goods and services, and placing vast new powers in the hands of central government bosses and the permanent bureaucracy.