Malcolm Nance is a former chief petty officer (senior NCO) in the US Navy. Watch as Tucker Carlson eviscerates the nonsense spouted by Nance, and which was swallowed devotedly by NBC anchor Brian Williams. “This is why we ask you all the time to come on this broadcast” said Williams.
You have to listen to Nance’s concatenation of tropes and babble: “mainstreamed”, “weaponized”, “Bannon”, “John Birch Society”, “fake news”, ” these tropes and memes became the cruise missiles of fake news and disinformation designed .. to take one third of the US population and may have resulted in’ -you guessed it -Trump.
I have seen the same anti-Russian obsession in authors as erudite as Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands, a book you must read, by the way. He has gone completely bonkers on the subject of Russian influence in the last election. I link these two articles because it shows that Tucker Carlson’s calling out of Malcolm Nance and Brian Williams is only a part of the story.
“Somehow they got to choose our president” says Snyder about the Russians (at minute 28:30). I am not disputing that Snyder is right in his suspicions of Russian intentions, actions, and strategies.
The Russians are like a bunch of bears in one’s garbage bins. They raid them, they twist off tops, wreck them, and turn into a garbage -addicted problem. Sometimes you have to chase them off, with guns, if necessary. But the capacity of Russians to undermine democratic institutions abroad is grossly exaggerated. Yes they are a real problem. Yes we have to be vigilant. But Russians are not The Problem. The left has had a major brain seizure on the subject of Trump because it was the event that ought not to have happened.
The average age of death in the United States is declining. The American working class has been devastated by the transfer of jobs overseas and to Mexico. They have been impoverished by the mortgage meltdown of 2008. The opioid crisis is killing dozens of people a day, if not hundreds.
Americans do not need a “disinformation frame” to perceive these events, they need one to prevent them from seeing it.
The curious thing about Snyder is that, for all his erudition, and fancy talk of themes propagated by Facebook, he is only saner version of Malcolm Nance. It is not the American Trump supporters who are in “a total denial of reality”, but rather the Democrats who are in total denial that there is any legitimacy whatever to the people who thought Trump was the better candidate than Clinton.