Countdown to Socialism

Devin Nunes

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781641771870
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The Democratic Party has changed beyond recognition. Once the party of anti-communism and tax-cutting under President Kennedy, it is now dominated by a surging socialist movement and led by a presidential candidate who vows to "transform" America. On a near-daily basis, the Democrats are issuing radical proposals to socialize medicine, industry, and higher education. So how can the Democrats win elections when their agenda is so far to the left of the American people? That's easy—it's because the means of public debate are being manipulated. In Countdown to Socialism, Congressman Devin Nunes exposes the nexus between the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and the social media corporations. These three entities cooperate to blast out the Democrats' message and downplay their extremism while suppressing and censoring conservative points of view. Tens of millions of Americans are only seeing one side of the debate. The information they get from newspapers and social media is not "news"—it's carefully manipulated content designed to help one political party and punish its opponents. In the run-up to the most consequential election of our lifetime, read this book to learn how your information is being skewed and regulated to force America onto the path to socialism.

CHAPTER ONE

Outside the Swamp

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

“We’re going to beat Donald Trump,” Biden tweeted this spring as rioters razed and looted American cities. “And when we do, we won’t just rebuild this nation – we’ll transform it.”

When the Democrats say they’re going to transform America, we should take them at their word. That’s how high the stakes are. We’re fighting for our home, our country, America – and our opponents promise they’re going to change it fundamentally.

Americans know what’s 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 didn’t stop the media pile-on as they tried to gin up yet another Trump–Russia “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 California’s 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 America’s founders across the country, it’s 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 nation’s 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 Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the radicals sought to eliminate the “four olds”: old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. Obviously, if you successfully eliminate those, there’s 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 country’s 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 don’t dare yet admit it publicly, but as you’ll 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. It’s 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 that’s 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 government’s 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.

Simultaneously, the Left is working hard to skew the playing field so that once they gain untrammeled power – which they hope to do through the 2020 elections – it will be permanent. At both the state and national levels, they are working hard to fundamentally change the voting system by abolishing the Electoral College, greatly expanding mail-in voting, enfranchising felons, legalizing vote harvesting, lowering the voting age, and allowing current non-citizens to vote through mass amnesties and other means. All these proposals have one thing in common: they will increase the Democrats’ vote count.

Meanwhile, the Democrats know they can rely on 90 percent of the media to protect and defend them. In the Trump era, the mainstream media is operating like the Democratic Party’s Pravda, the Soviet newspaper that “reported” on the Communist Party’s infallible righteousness. The Russia collusion hoax, the Coronavirus, the riots – the media’s coverage of every major story of the Trump presidency is filtered through the prism of their loathing for this president and conservatives in general.

For example, in a major effort to destroy the foundations of America, the New York Times published the “1619 Project.” Already adopted as part of the curriculum in numerous American schools, the project falsely ties the founding of America to slavery and maliciously twists our fundamental American ideas about liberty into racism.

This horribly biased information environment is amplified by the big tech companies.

Twitter, Facebook, and Google are all leftwing companies that actively suppress conservative news sources and opinion. Many of these companies...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Statement
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1: Outside the Swamp
• Chapter 2: Collusion Delusion
• Chapter 3: The Fake News Complex
• Chapter 4: The Disinformation Funnel
• Chapter 5: Information Desert
• Series Page
• Copyright Page