A December Personal Update

Russiagate Retrospective: Of Course Malcolm Nance is a Grifter

Editor's note: this article is a revised version of a lengthy Mastodon thread I originally posted on the morning December 4th, 2019; you can find additional sourcing for this piece by clicking through to the thread and scrolling to the bottom.  

Readers searching for recent examples of my regular writing are encouraged to check out my recent review of David Neiwert’s “Alt-America: the Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump” over on my image/book blog at Can't You Read.

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As those of you who've been reading my writing for a few years are no doubt aware, I was among the earliest and most vociferous skeptics of the "Russiagate" conspiracy narrative pushed in mainstream liberal media; primarily to ensure that nobody got fired for punting a highly winnable election against a reality TV show fascist billionaire whose catch phrase is, I kid you not, "you're fired."

Furthermore, I feel it’s fair to say that my ongoing analysis of the "Russiagate" saga has, in the light of history, proven to be among the most accurate available online; specifically because I never argued that Trump wasn't a crook, didn't take bribes and wasn't actively attempting to obstruct investigations into his administration - just that he wasn't a Russian asset, hadn't committed treason and that Vladimir Putin hadn't rigged (or significantly influenced) the 2016 election.

As you can likely imagine if you were online during the height of the "walls are closing in" phase of the neoliberal fever dream that is Russiagate, as a result of expressing these opinions (even on my tiny little website) I was attacked, smeared and repeatedly gaslit by a fairly broad cross section of the "Russiagate Conspiracy Complex" community online - of which one of the most prominent members was former US Naval cryptologist and frequent MSNBC guest Malcom Nance; a man who I had the misfortune of interacting with several times online between late 2016 & 2018.

 

I don't want to spend too much time going over old flame wars with a trash-fire propagandist like Nance but just to give you an idea of the measure of the man we’re talking about here; I will mention that during our argument I referred to him as a "spook" in reference to his career as a naval intelligence officer. Astoundingly, Nance responded by feigning obliviousness and pretending I had called him a racial slur; even though the context was obvious and the actual onboard nickname for Cryptologic Technicians in the Navy is "spook."

In light of this prior incident and others like it, I couldn't help but crack a few broad smiles when I read this November 24th, 2019 interview-cum-evisceration of Nance by the New Yorker's resident interrogation specialist Isaac Chotiner - deliciously titled "Malcolm Nance on the Danger of Conspiracy Theories" of all things:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/malcolm-nance-on-the-danger-of-conspiracy-theories

The interview/interrogation itself is a marvelous read in which Chotiner carefully reels the openly defensive Nance in with a few softball questions, before trapping him inside his own prior statements and exposing the NatSec grifter's constantly shifting definitions of intelligence terminology and moving the goalposts that frame his often completely absurd and wholly fabricated accusations. The whole thing is in a word, delightful and I strongly encourage interest observers to read all of it. As such I'm not going to waste a lot of energy reviewing every single thrust and parry in the interview, but I would like to zero in on a few answers Nance gives that line up with arguments I made back in early 2017; mostly because at the time of course I was called a crypto-fascist, a liar and literally a Russian agent by #TheResistance (including Nance himself as I recall) for making these same arguments - my how things change in the light of time and evidence, don't they?

First up, in response to a question about whether or not Nance is arguing that Donald Trump is an actual agent of the Russian state, our intrepid intelligence analyst flatly says "no." This is interesting to us because as Chotiner points out, Nance has repeatedly called Trump a “witting asset" of the Russian government, Russian intelligence or Russian President Vladimir Putin. At this point Nance desperately sputters into a long and complicated equivocation on the difference between a "witting asset" and an "agent" in spook-speak, but absolutely none of it is convincing whatsoever and it’s very clear he’s splitting hairs to cover his own backside in this situation.

This of course repeats a long pattern of New Cold War conspiracy liberals constantly moving the goalposts further and further away from their initial claims that launched the neoliberal fever dream we now know as "Russiagate." The accusation spread across virtually every major news network and periodical was that Trump is a Russian agent, a willing Manchurian candidate and literally working for Putin to undermine America, weaken Pig Empire hegemony and punish Hillary Clinton - and it's an accusation Nance clearly made a lot of money pushing, at least if his book sales are any indication.

It really doesn't matter what professional American spies understand "witting asset" to mean; the fact is Nance knew what calling Trump a puppet of the Russian government was going to imply to the American public and he said it anyway, repeatedly - his complicity in spreading the conspiracy theory and his efforts to profit from public interested in that conspiracy theory, could not be more apparent; and as you'll see below, this is not the only way he pushed the lie that is the "Russia" part of "Russiagate."

After a long interval where Nance hides behind his former profession as an intelligence office, babbles about “sourcing” and insists that he's not responsible for the analysis he gives on TV (only that found in his books) Nance responds to a question about whether or not Donald Trump committed treason with Russia by once again admitting "no" and providing the exact same legal justification I've been giving for three years. Namely, you can't have a legal charge of treason as defined under the US Constitution without the nation being at war because “aiding and comforting an enemy” is not a mere expression of speech; we don’t have “enemies” because we're not at war – with Russia or anyone else for that matter.

This is of course all well and good for Nance to admit now, after his #TheResistance friends gaslit numerous left wing media observers (like myself) for... reading the US Constitution, but the simple truth is that Nance is once again playing word games here to avoid accountability for his wild accusations and fear mongering. He has absolutely used the specific word treason (despite clearly knowing how the law works in this area, as the writing in his books indicates) and literally on the day the Mueller report was to be released, Malcolm said that it would reveal treason exceeding that of Benedict Arnold - you don't bring up Benedict Arnold, the most infamous traitor in American history, if you're not talking about REAL treason for f*ck’s sake.

Nance then goes on to falsely deny claiming that Wikileaks was working with Russia to rig the 2016 election, and to equivocate about his claims that homophobic blog posts by Joy Ann Reid (herself a member of the Russiagate conspiracy brigade) were a result of Russian hacking, before finally exposing himself completely as a liar when his infamous "black propaganda" tweet, designed to discredit the completely, 100% authentic Podesta emails, finally comes up. At this point Nance tries to escape this jam by once again pretending "black propaganda" is a term of art in the intelligence community that somehow random civilians are supposed to know already, and then purposely conflates the Podesta leaks with an unrelated hoax post on Twitter (about Hillary Clinton's Goldman Sach's speeches) that had nothing whatsoever to do with the again, 100% real leaked emails in the Wikileaks Podesta dump. Even though Choitner doesn’t bother to press the advantage, the metaphorical drawing of blood is unmistakable - clearly Nance was lying then and clearly despite his excuses today, he's still lying now.

In summation I think it’s fair to say that if you can read the whole interview without realizing how completely full of sh*t Nance is, I've got some swampland in Florida to sell you real cheap; the obvious level of open mendacity behind this sociopath's now full-time grift is simply staggering – nobody in America should take Malcolm Nance seriously ever again. And how did Nance himself respond to this scathing critique in the normally benign interview column of the New Yorker? By attempting to loosely connect Chotiner to Russia, through Glenn Greenwald and suspected (by Nance) Russian spy, NSA leaker and American hero Edward Snowden of course:

https://twitter.com/MalcolmNance/status/1199027909073260546

While I certainly won't deny I found a certain joyful vindication in reading Chotiner's evisceration, the simple truth is that this article itself is far too little and far too late.  Over the past three years, millions of people have read Nance's outrageous claims and due to the author’s former work in U.S. Intelligence and National Security, believed them. By contrast, perhaps at best a few thousand people will read this article exposing Malcolm Nance as a dishonest grifter and an unrepentant fabricator; and even fewer of those readers will actually remember or care.

This too will be a familiar pattern to those who've spent any amount of time tracking the ongoing unraveling of Russiagate - from more than fifty mainstream media stories that eventually turned out to be lies, to a Mueller investigation that found precisely none of the treason the mad Bircher fools who sold this lie promised, to even Rachel Maddow's recent admission in court that using the words "really literally is paid Russian propaganda" to attack a conservative think tank was just hyperbole – this is all pretty much par for the course in the American public discourse. In the end it’s hard to ignore the fact that Russiagate has long since accomplished all of the goals its architects hatched it to achieve - defense spending is up as the West adopts a perpetual war footing with Russia, mainstream media has garnered billions of dollars worth of consumer interest tracking this daft spy novel and absolutely nobody who was ultimately responsible for punting a winnable election to a moron fascist who literally hung out with a teen sex slaver for years, lost their job or was held accountable at all. 

Truly then it can be said that at least in this instance "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” - the same as it ever was.

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

Fear, Loathing and Mayonnaise in the 2020 Democratic Party Nomination Contest

Editor's note: this article originally appeared as a lengthy thread posted during November 21st, 2019 on my Mastodon account - there may be a few reference links I didn't feature here, that appear at the bottom of that thread if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Over the past few months, I've extensively covered the US corporate "liberal" media's clear attempts to influence the outcome of the 2020 Democratic Party nomination process in excruciating detail.

From NY Times smears designed to make the Sanders campaign look like a sexual harassment factory, to endless hours of coverage defending Palooka Joe Biden's racist babbling and on through the nonexistent coverage of a bigoted Liz Warren surrogate, a clear pattern of anti-Bernie bias has emerged. While this bias often expresses itself it many different and subtle forms, I think at this point it's safe to say that the pattern has been clearly demonstrated and the American corporate media is openly (and increasingly frantically) trying to influence the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest against Sanders - and in favor of candidates who are perceived by the liberal establishment as capable of beating Sanders. 

Clearly the machine is no longer sure that Joe Biden is such a candidate either.

This brings us to the “liberal” corporate media coverage surrounding an unlikely rise in the “First in the Nation” state polls of neoliberal candidate-like substance Pete Buttigieg; who will hereafter referred to in this space as Dollar Store Macron, or Mayo Pete - as befits his soulless, plastic & relentlessly focus-tested politics. To note that Mayo Pete has become the mainstream liberal establishment's latest "Great White Hope" is both not a metaphor and indicative of their open desperation.

If at this point you are still blissfully unaware of who Dollar Store Macron is, or precisely why I would describe his politics as "plastic and soulless" I'd encourage you to take a moment to stop and read this excellent profile of Mayo Pete by Nathan J Robinson over at Current Affairs - a piece recommended by  Noam Chomsky himself:

All About Pete

To learn more about the super villain factory Mayo Pete used to work for, a corporation called McKinsey & Company; check out this article by an anonymous former employee of the company, also published at Current Affairs: 

McKinsey & Company: Capital’s Willing Executioners

Finally, if you're still on the fence about whether or not Dollar Store Macron is an objectively terrible candidate for both the nomination and the office of POTUS, please read this extremely detailed and well sourced Twitter thread by user @niktaylorde for more information:

Why You Shouldn't Vote For Pete Buttigieg - A Thread

In other words, Pete Buttigieg is not only a terrible candidate for the labor class, but also a reasonably horrible human being - not that you'll really hear much about any of this in the media of course; the fact that he's young, gay and currently skullf*cking a "catchy" Panic At the Disco track to generate false enthusiasm at his campaign events, is pretty much as far as the corporate media's analysis is going to go when it comes to Mayo Pete.

This is unfortunate for the American voter because the Dollar Store Macron campaign has a serious problem that not only makes his campaign nonviable in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest, but could imperil his general election chances even if he somehow managed to win - Mayo Pete is currently polling below "raisins in potato salad" with African American voters; depending on which poll you examine, we're talking about a number between zero and one percent, literally.

Why? Well if you believe the insinuations of obtuse Buttigieg campaign spokesperson Lis Smith, it's because African American voters are homophobic; a narrative that even Dollar Store Macron himself has since (wisely) rejected:

Sharpton: 'We don't have an epidemic of homophobia' in the black community

  

Of course, that didn't stop the Buttigieg campaign from quietly leaking a focus group study that explicitly said Pete's sexuality is why black voters don't like him, back in October:

Buttigieg focus groups found being gay ‘a barrier’ for some black South Carolina voters

For a more accurate (and less "objectively racist") picture however, let's turn to The Intercept's Ryan Grim to study an example of the staggeringly tone-deaf, low-key racist way Mayor Pete has approached winning over African American voters in the run up to the 2020 Democratic Party primary season: 

The Problem with Pete Buttigieg's "Douglass Plan" for Black America

Whoa boy, so let's get unpack this for a moment here:

Mayo Pete, a man who is already haunted by anger over a court battle brought on by the South Bend, Indiana mayor's firing of a black police chief for recording his racist co-workers, and accusations of racist policies in his "model college town" of South Bend, is reaching out to black voters with a policy program named after cherished African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass - and amazingly enough, that's only strike one here.

Efforts to promote the Douglass Plan revolved around a published list of 400 prominent South Carolinians who were behind the plan, but this too demonstrated a willful attempt to mislead and deceive by the Buttigieg campaign. The list was represented as consisting of prominent African Americans, and yet almost half of the names on it were from white voters. The list also featured a cover letter that by use of the phrase “there is one presidential candidate who has proven to have intentional policies designed to make a difference in the Black experience, and that’s Pete Buttigieg” strongly implied the signers had endorsed Dollar Store Macron for the Democratic Party nomination; that wasn't true either - in fact, some of the "signers" worked for the Sanders campaign and others didn't even mean to endorse the Douglass Plan itself, let alone Mayo Pete.

When asked about this discrepancy directly the Buttigieg campaign offered up the wholly unserious answer that the so-called signers were sent an email encouraging them to "opt out" of endorsing the plan; you probably don't need me to tell you that this is absolutely *not* how endorsements work in American politics but as a side note, I'd like to point out that only a soulless cockroach McKinsey consultant would try to use the Columbia House Records scam to swindle endorsements from black leaders.

The final cherry on top of it all, and indeed the only part of this whole sad saga that received any significant amount of attention in the mainstream media at all, was that the Buttigieg campaign included a photo of a black woman who hadn't endorsed anything or anyone, had no connection to the campaign and had no idea why she'd been used in Dollar Store Macron's promotional material - because she's from Kenya. 

Pete Buttigieg says he was unaware that stock photo on his website depicted a Kenyan woman

And therein lies the crux of my argument and the definitive proof that the corporate "liberal" media is openly campaigning for anyone but Bernie in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest.

Imagine just for a moment the absolute righteous fury that would have consumed "liberal" mainstream pundits and influencers if it was Bernie Sanders who'd lied about African American endorsements to prop up his credentials with black voters? Imagine if it had been Bernie who'd responded with "Ma'am, I’m not asking for your vote" when confronted by a distraught African American voter about a police shooting of a young black man in the city he served as mayor? What if Bernie had started his political career by forcing out a black police chief on behalf of clearly racist cops inside the South Bend power structure?

Keep in mind that we're talking about the same guy here, Dollar Store Macron is responsible for all of these actions.

Frankly, you really don't even have to imagine - contrast the utter silence on Mayo Pete's (at best) obtuse honky nonsense, with the mainstream media dogpile Sanders was subjected to when he advised a young African American man to focus on not getting shot first, when pulled over by the police; after a question I won't describe as "unfair" but tragically, I cannot say there was a possible "good answer" for.

All throughout the 2016 primary process we were told by "Very Serious People TM" in the liberal media that African Americans, in particular black women, were the most important demographic in the electorate, and that a Democrat victory would not be possible in either 2016 or 2020 without the support of non-white voters. Specifically this narrative was used to hammer Bernie's campaign as supposedly "too white, and out of touch" or perhaps even outright racist - the last of which is absurd.

Now, today we find that the polling numbers show Sanders has*the* most diverse group of supporters, while pumped-up chosen "Bernie Slayers" like Elizabeth Warren and now Dollar Store Macron are driven by the same "too white, out of touch" voting demographic that supposedly rendered Bernie unelectable - and the response from the mainstream "liberal" media has been literally some combination of excuse-making apologia to go with complete and utter silence.

Of course none of that is to say that Dollar Store Macron hasn't been in the news; corporate "liberal" media in a America are falling all over themselves to type up a 255 respondent poll with dodgy methodology and an admitted 6.1% margin of error that shows Mayo Pete up an astounding +15% and leading New Hampshire - this of course pairs nicely with an equally dodgy recent poll from Iowa that once again showed Buttigieg leading, this time up by a mere (and implausible) +14%. Even that coverage demonstrates a considerable amount of bias; after all the media is hardly mentioning that Pete is dropping a massive amount of money to try to win one of these two (mostly white) "First in the Nation" primaries, or that if he doesn't win at least one of them the puffed up narrative (again aided by this same "liberal" media) surrounding his presidential aspirations is going to look like a pathetic punchline - instead, the corporate media would rather continue to attack Bernie Sanders.

Like all truly good lies however, there was a tiny bit of truth in the mainstream media's smearing of the Sanders campaign - it is in fact awfully hard to win a national election as a Democrat with only white voters, and doubly hard to win a Democratic Party nomination contest by that same measure; the trick is that this isn't a problem for Bernie (who appeals to young people and women especially across all demographics) it's a problem for candidates like Mayo Pete and Pow Wow Chow Liz Warren.

Furthermore, if one presupposes that most of the people reading this are in fact not racists and would prefer to live in a word where the fight against racism is undertaken seriously, the fact that the liberal media cynically used cries of racism to burn down the Sanders campaign, but has hardly chirped a note about the kind of cracker nonsense Mayo Pete's campaign is engaging in, represents a troubling continuation of longstanding enabling of structural racism by affluent liberals and Democrats.

The truth here is that no matter how hard the so-called "liberal" mainstream media in America tries to shove Mayo Pete into the spotlight and generate a plausible theory by which he can become president, Dollar Store Macron isn't going to win the 2020 Dem Party nomination contest - and it's not because he's gay, or because black people aren't thankful enough for his casual displays of obtuse racism; it's because he f*cking sucks as acandidate and bougie "liberal" pundits are getting desperate.

- Nina Illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

 

Article Analysis: the Bernie Blackout is Very Real

Editor's note: this article originally appeared November 19th, 2019 on my Facebook page - if you're looking for source materials, check out the comments section of the original article. For my latest book review "Why You Should Read Thomas Frank", please click here.

MSNBC Is the Most Influential Network Among Liberals: And It’s Ignoring Bernie Sanders

In today's edition of our ongoing article analysis feature, we're going to take a look at what I personally feel may be the most important piece of political media analysis released so far in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination cycle.

Throughout this nomination contest and the last Democratic Party primary season in 2016, supporters of the Democratic Socialist Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders have argued that mainstream corporate media in America has not only purposely avoided covering the Sanders campaign but what coverage they have offered has been dishonest, disingenuous and highly slanted towards negative (and often erroneous) conclusions about Bernie, his supporters and his campaign.

Well, if this November 13th, 2019 article about MSNBC's Democratic Party primary coverage by Branko Marcetic over at In These Times is indicative of the larger industry, it's now empirically possible to say Sanders supporters are *right* about the #BernieBlackout and it is instead the establishment media minions who called their complaints a "conspiracy theory" who now have some explaining to do.

Drawing on the tradition of extremely granular media analysis popularized by books like Manufacturing Consent and to a lesser degree, data science websites like FiveThirtyEight, Marcetic conducts a detailed examination of extremely blatant biases in MSNBC's coverage of the three leading Democratic Party nomination candidates in August and September across the network's top six prime time political shows; those three candidates of course being Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

As will likely come as no surprise to astute political media observers in America, it turns out that not only do MSNBC's top political analysts talk about Bernie Sanders less than Elizabeth Warren and far less than Joe Biden, but also that coverage of Bernie Sanders on MSNBC's flagship shows is far more likely to be negative than that of the other two candidates - which is pretty remarkable when you realize that one of the two months In These Times looked at featured a very real Joe and Hunter Biden corruption scandal that ties into the ongoing Trump impeachment and has itself driven an infinite number of whackjob Republican-endorsed conspiracy theories in what passes for the "mainstream" right wing media these days.

What really separates Marcetic's analysis in this article from the work of "data guys" like Nate Silver however, is his deep drilling into the specifics of MSNBC's coverage above and beyond the raw numbers to examine precisely *what* the network is saying about each of the three candidates, and the picture is not pretty. Far from a mere bias against Sanders, these clip by clip and argument by argument examples demonstrate that as a whole MSNBC's flagship political shows, their hosts and the vast majority of their guest pundits are actively campaigning against Bernie Sanders. Of course while that conclusion may not come as much of a shock to American leftists, it bears noting here that just a few months ago virtually every corporate media outlet in America accused the Sanders campaign of propagating Trumpian conspiracy theories when the Senator from Vermont had the audacity to suggest he and his supporters weren't getting a fair shake in the mainstream "liberal" media.

With meticulous attention to detail, Marcetic has logged numerous smears, misrepresentations and at times, even outright falsehoods disseminated in the network's war against Bernie, all the while pointing out key gaps in the coverage of any news events that could be perceived as somehow positive for the Sanders campaign. Perhaps even more alarmingly, this In These Times investigation clearly demonstrates that in MSNBC's quest to shut out Sanders and draw Liz Warren to the center, the network has largely abandoned coverage of policy proposals, agenda statements or action plans presented by literally *any* of the candidates whatsoever - as far as the network is concerned, this election is about an endless wave of breaking primary polls and while they're happy to inform you that Liz Warren "has a plan for that" they apparently have no intention of telling you what that plan might be.

The simple truth is that this is the "16 negative articles about Bernie Sanders in 16 hours on the Washington Post webpage" of the 2020 nomination cycle and unfortunately it appears to have slipped under the radar because mainstream media has no interest in sharing coverage from a nominally left wing media organization like In These Times.

Naturally there will be those who complain about the narrow scope of the study, and point to what they feel is "equally slanted" coverage in left wing publications like Jacobin, or Current Affairs but as Marcetic's data demonstrates, these people are being largely disingenuous. The numbers don't lie and MSNBC not only has a dominant hold on the liberal cable news market, but the network is particularly influential with age sixty-five and older viewers who are far more likely to vote in primaries than any other age demographic.

Due to its size and ubiquity in the public discourse, MSNBC is driving national opinions about the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest on a scale that dwarfs every outlet the American left has to access that same discourse - and the network is openly and demonstrably driving those opinions against Bernie Sanders. Try to keep that in mind the next time Chris Mathews wants to lecture you on the need to respect your elders in the party or Larry O'Donnell has opinions to share on the importance of a "free and *fair* press."

As even famous American author Ernest Hemingway eventually learned while trying to avoid relentless CIA harassment during his retirement in Cuba - it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

- nina Illingworth



Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!