by Devin Nunes
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 pamphleteer’s 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
Series Statement
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
Countdown 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 have special exemptions from defamation, slander, and other types of lawsuits on the basis of their being neutral platforms for speech. But time and again they’ve shown an irresistible urge to corrupt the debate by shadow banning, limiting, or outright banning conservative speech for the benefit of Democrats.
Meanwhile, their platforms provide a venue for the Left to make an example of their political opponents, as swarms of activists and their fake bot accounts attack and humiliate people and insist they be fired from their jobs – both well-known personalities and everyday Americans – if they express opinions that contradict leftist ideology.
The Democratic Party itself is now dismissing basic law and order and rejecting American history wholesale. They excuse Antifa and rioting extremists who attack police officers and everyday citizens; they condemn our nation’s founders; they are silent as our statues are torn down; and they even denounce iconic Mount Rushmore as a monument to white supremacy.
In my hometown in California’s San Joaquin Valley, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s punitive response to the virus is creating an underground economy. Forced by extended, drastic, and counterproductive economic shutdowns to choose between obeying the law and feeding their kids, family businesses are covering the windows of their workplaces and conducting business secretly. It’s something I’d have expected to see in totalitarian states like the Soviet Union, not in America, much less in my own hometown.
That is why the 2020 election will be the most consequential election of our lifetime. This will not be a choice between two slightly different options for tax policy or government spending. The choice is between two fundamentally opposing visions of this country’s history and its future.
Joe Biden laid out his vision in his Fourth of July speech. Focusing on the “systemic racism” practiced by Americans for “more than two hundred years,” Biden denounced the racism of Thomas Jefferson and the sexism of the Declaration of Independence. “American history is no fairy tale,” he lectured, as he recounted acts of injustice throughout American history. In a surprising and abrupt change of tone, he ended his dark, depressing remarks by suddenly exclaiming, “Happy Fourth.”
The Democrats are not hiding their intentions. They sympathize with the rioters and statue-topplers, they’re ashamed of their nation and their history, they believe their fellow countrymen are irredeemably racist, and most important, they want to “transform” our nation into something different.
That something, of course, is a socialist country – a governing system with a long track record of failure, despair, and even genocide. It’s a mystery what underlies the Democrats’ belief that socialism will bring about racial harmony – what socialism excels at creating is economic misery like in Venezuela, fascist-style totalitarianism like in China, and murderous purges like in the Soviet Union.
Socialism requires giving vastly more power to the central government and a corresponding restriction on the people’s economic and personal freedom. The only way that transforming a free-enterprise system into a socialist one can improve race relations is if a nation’s people themselves are racist but their elected government somehow is not, and the government manages to impose its enlightened views on the people.
It’s clear this is what the Democrat leadership and the media want people to believe – America is a racist place filled with racist people with a history comprising little more than racism. If they are empowered in 2020, they will act – forcefully – on those false assumptions, and they will do all they can to ensure that opposing views are smothered and banished from the public square and political life.
The socialists’ mania for racism dominates their rhetoric and appeals, but it’s an utterly false portrayal of the America in which I was raised. Nearly all the kids in my San Joaquin Valley schools were from Mexican immigrant families, were descendants of Azorean Portuguese like me, or were “Okies” whose families escaped the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and came to California to work as farmhands. There was a sense of solidarity among all us farming families, regardless of where our parents came from. That harmony is exactly what the socialists are trying to negate and destroy. They lump anyone from south of the border into the artificial category of “Latino,” falsely insisting they all have a common history, culture, and most important, a common struggle against racist oppression in America. Their individuality and family history are stripped away in order to bring them into the socialist fold.
Socialist regimes tend to excel at propaganda. That’s by necessity – socialism is a resentful ideology that exploits and widens class conflict, racial strife, and other social cleavages, pitting countrymen against one another. They have to have an intensive propaganda operation to make this ideology seem appealing. In America today, among the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and the social media barons and tech oligarchs, this propaganda network already exists. This book will lay out the network.
President Trump, Republicans, and the lingering non-socialist Democrats in Congress are the only thing holding back this socialist tide. The choice could not be clearer. If you believe, as I do, that your neighbors and countrymen are not detestable racists but decent, hard-working, generous, and open-hearted people; if you believe that America is a grand experiment in self-rule that is worth preserving and continuing; if you believe that America has led the worldwide struggle for freedom and stood at the forefront of the battle against totalitarian fascism and communism; and if you believe that a million immigrants come to America every year and millions more want to come because they understand America is a land of opportunity and generosity, then on Election Day you must help keep socialist Democrats as far as possible from the levers of power.
And make no mistake, power is what motivates the socialists. Their promises to instill racial harmony and to provide unaffordable, undeliverable, free goods and services are a ruse to achieve power, seize control of the economy, and dictate what you can and cannot do in your personal life to a far greater extent than Americans have ever experienced. Practically speaking, there’s not much difference between socialism, fascism, communism, and other kinds of totalitarianism. They all share a common goal: total government power over the individual.
The Democrats’ socialist fantasies must remain precisely that – mere fantasies. I’m writing this book for the conservatives, independents, and moderate Democrats – the everyday patriots – who can help stem the socialist tide.
It’s up to you to act on the information in this book however you see fit. But reading this book is, in and of itself, an important step. Unlike what you read in the biggest newspapers or on social media websites, these are my unfiltered words coming directly to you, completely outside the suppression and censorship that occurs in the Disinformation Funnel described in this book.
If you want the unvarnished truth about how your information is being manipulated, turn the page.
CHAPTER TWO
Collusion Delusion
WHAT IS THIS?”
That was my reaction in December 2016 when I read in the newspapers that the CIA had changed its assessment of the Russian operation to meddle in the 2016 U.S. elections. I was Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which had been briefed about the Russian maneuvers. But here was an allegedly brand new assessment – which found that the operation specifically was meant to help Trump win the election – that was not briefed to us but instead leaked directly to the media.
I appealed – repeatedly – to the Intelligence Community to clarify the accuracy of these reports. I was blown off and told we’d receive no more briefings on the topic until after they finished writing their Intelligence Community Assessment – which did, in fact, include the reported assessment about Russian intentions.
The whole thing struck me as absurd. No one thought Trump had a chance to win, and it was ridiculous to assume that Putin believed he could get Trump elected with some shoddy social media ads and low-rent spear-phishing attacks on some email accounts. Some of the Russian ads even attacked Trump. The purpose was clearly to sow division in U.S. society and to preemptively weaken the presumed winner, Hillary Clinton. Yet the media was running a steady drumbeat of stories accusing President-elect Trump and his team of having some kind of secret, nefarious relationship with Putin.