Experts: Democrats, DSA using KGB playbook to legitimize socialism  

A former U.S. intelligence officer told Heartlander News that rhetoric employed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and, increasingly, by Democrats is rooted in KGB tactics used to undermine the United States.

The issue takes on increasing importance as an undercover investigation by Townhall.com reveals that California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat and presidential hopeful, described DSA ideology as “a mainstream democratic movement” while on the campaign trail in New Hampshire.

Conservative legal analyst and constitutional scholar Professor Jonathan Turley has documented how Democrats, including Newsom, are increasingly borrowing language from the DSA that claims, among other things, that the U.S. Constitution oppresses people.

“These voices are seeking to remove all of the moderating elements of our system – the safety features that have produced the world’s most successful and stable republic,” Turley said. “They are the very constitutional elements protecting us from the tyranny of the majority, protecting us from ourselves.”

D.W. Wilber, a former U.S. intelligence officer with experience in Eastern Europe, told Heartlander News that Turley’s concerns are valid.

Wilber noted that the DSA platform is largely imported from KGB demoralization language aimed at undermining U.S. society.

“Democrats nowadays sound more like the former Soviet Union propaganda machine,” the former spy and special forces consultant told Heartlander News. “The KGB undermined American exceptionalism and our history and ridiculed our governing documents as little more than anachronisms to a failed ideology.”

Democrats’ leftward shift

Wilber pointed to interviews with, and publications by, KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov that specifically identified issues such as the environment, gay rights, equality between the sexes and pay for first responders as issues the Soviet Union would use to undermine U.S. norms.

Rep. Pat Fallon wrote after the election of New York’s DSA mayor, Zohran Mamdani, warning that Bezmenov spoke in 1984 about the “threat posed by Communist efforts to undermine the institutions, social fabric and values of the United States through means of ideological subversion” fostered by American elites.

“The powers that be within today’s Democratic Party have in fact come to personify these ‘useful idiots,’” said Fallon, R-Texas. “Of course, the modern Democratic National Committee is no longer the party of President John F. Kennedy. Consider that a communist will be the next mayor of the Big Apple. It writes like bad, lazy fiction.”

Wilber also invoked the Kennedy name to demonstrate how much America’s liberal party has changed, from protecting individual rights in 1964 to arguing that group rights supersede individual rights in 2026.

“For decades now the drift leftward of the Democrat Party has been apparent,” he added. “It is no longer the party of Harry Truman or JFK. Even Robert Kennedy Jr., now serving in the Trump Administration, has come to the conclusion that the Democrat Party little resembles the party his father also once championed in Washington.”

Townhall pointed to a PBS interview in which Newsom publicly said Democrats ought to adopt more of the DSA platform.

“If you have these candidates and this platform that is clearly animating the base, energizing turnout, should more of those ideas be worked into the broader Democratic platform?” the California governor and presidential aspirant was asked about DSA ideas.

“I think they are,” Newsom said.

When pressed for details and asked about Democrats’ reluctance to embrace DSA candidates, Newsom said there was very little ideological difference between the two parties.

Newsom called DSA ideology “a healthy dialectic within the party.”

He also mentioned Medicare for All and green energy as ideas on which Democrats and the DSA are aligned.

Experts also point out how the Democrats’ embrace of the DSA gives tacit permission for more radical socialist ideas, such as rewriting the Constitution, outlawing the Senate and the Supreme Court, making the president selected by and responsible only to Congress, outlawing private ownership of corporations, establishing queer and “Feminism for All” ideology, and replacing police and prisons with some unspecified alternative.

Bezmenov had previously warned about the progression from moderate to more radical ideals.

“All the KGB had to do is to slowly and gradually change your attitudes and kill your resistance,” he wrote in The Four Stages of Subversion of a Country.

He noted that the generation of the 1960s is full of “half-baked intellectuals, [who] are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, [and] educational system” who are impossible to remove because they are so entrenched.

The intellectuals have been engaged in a process of ideological subversion, which he called active measures (“aktivnye meropriyatiya” in Russian), that would slowly “change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.”

Bezmenov concluded that it would take another generation – 15 to 20 years – of patriotic and common-sense citizens to reverse the process.

Wilber said that unless Americans take active measures to fight against the takeover of the Democrats by the DSA, the final chapter of America’s representative republic might already be written – funded by foreign socialists, including China.

“Democrat Socialists, armed with millions of dollars of foreign money, along with their Democrat patsies kowtowing to their every demand, are steaming full speed ahead and fully intend to dismantle our Constitutional Republic,” he told Heartlander News.

(Image credit: Gov. Gavin Newsom Press Office)