Nothing says “take domestic terrorism seriously” quite like promoting the MSNBC loony toon who called on the Islamic State to bomb a Trump property in Istanbul.
Democratic lawmakers hosted MSNBC political analyst and self-proclaimed intelligence “expert” Malcolm Nance Wednesday to testify on behalf of a House Judiciary Committee hearing titled “The Rise of Domestic Terrorism in America.”
Nance’s appearance was about as enlightening as one would expect of an “expert” of his caliber.
“The 2008 election of President Barack Obama would be a watershed moment that would start the consolidation of the disparate wings of the domestic violent extremist movement,” said the cable news pundit, adding, “but the 2016 election of President Donald Trump gave them a tribal chieftain they could all rally behind.”
Nance also spoke at length about Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the book that inspired the attack.
“Most right-wing extremists have poorly formed cells with limited capacity or knowledge of terrorist operations,” said Nance. “However, many veterans in the military could lend in-depth operational planning and improvised explosives skills to any group. These groups may be amateur but can demonstrate devastating capability if not detected in time.”
That’s good and all, but let’s hear it from an authority who is not himself a paranoid clown and sucker for conspiracy theories.
Nance is, after all, the same pundit who claimed falsely in 2018 that MSNBC’s Joy Reid was the victim of a shadowy right-wing smear campaign after her old homophobic and Islamophobic blog posts were unearthed.
“Clearly there is a Discredit & Humiliate campaign afoot. Apparently all progressives are secretly anti-gay bloggers. This has Wikileaks & AltRight written all over it. Expect more,” declared the intelligence “expert.”
Later, after it became clear that Reid herself had authored the blog posts, Nance offered a mealy-mouthed defense of his initial assertion, saying:
What that tells me is there was a meta-narrative within their world which has decided that this is how Joy Reid is going to be seen within that alt-right world. It’s essentially a hammering point they use to attack all of their critics. It’s like Hillary Clinton and the e-mails. You understand how they craft their messages. I see those craftings, and I tend to see them a lot faster than the news media does.
Pressed by the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner to answer the question, Nance offered this: “Well, I’m attuned to intelligence activities. You know, I wrote a whole book on ISIS information warfare as we studied it over multiple years. So that was about something that had nothing to do with the Russians, but it has to do with the alt-Right and people who just didn’t like Joy Reid. So, yeah, I stand by that.”
Then, in 2016, after Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s hacked emails appeared online in a massive WikiLeaks information dump, Nance declared the leaked materials “forgeries.” They were not forgeries.
“Official Warning,” he said. “#PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries and #blackpropaganda not even professionally done.”
The “black propaganda” to which Nance referred was a fake speech by Clinton featuring references to “bronies,” the nickname given to male fans of the cartoon My Little Pony. The author of the obvious gag, by the way, said he never intended for the joke to be linked to WikiLeaks.
There’s more. In 2017, Nance tweeted a picture of Trump Towers Istanbul with the following caption: “This is my nominee for first ISIS suicide bombing of a Trump property.” He later deleted the tweet. Earlier than that, in 2016, Nance claimed Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein had a show on the Kremlin-operated Russia Today, giving life to the theory that Stein may have colluded with Moscow to siphon votes from the 2016 Democratic ticket. Stein has never had a show on Russia Today.
You get the point.
Let’s have that national conversation about the dangers of conspiracy theories and political paranoia. And let’s start first with MSNBC’s bench of “expert” conspiracy theorists.
