Intelligence expert Malcolm Nance spoke to MSNBC about the ways in which the Russian government are able to wage a war against a country without even firing a shot.
Host Maria Teresa Kumar noted that President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans seem to have taken up the playbook of Russia and created their own propaganda machine. As a Russia propaganda expert, Nance agreed, saying that the plot Russia concocted in the early 2000s, the Gerasimov Doctrine, handed Trump and his team the plan.
Nance explained that it was a tactic Russians used where they combined an information warfare strategy where they flood a country with so much misinformation that a country would welcome an invasion without a war.
"That didn't really happen" in the United States, Nance explained. "What the Russians did in the year 2016 is they created an information bubble in which the Trump campaign was seen as friendly and then, the Trump data team took that information, including stolen information from the Democratic National Committee, and created their own information sphere. Once the Russian bubble was popped after the 2016 election, the Trump team took the ball and ran with it. The Russians barely have to do anything."
Nance explained that the Trump team and their control over conservative television stations like Fox News and OAN enabled them to indoctrinate their own followers into believing some of the most insane things ever crafted, "to the point where they view it."
He talked about a kind of radicalization that gives Trump's supporters the confidence their actions are not only patriotic but that "violence is the only solution and they're carrying out a second Lexington, a second Concord, as your other guests said, 1776 2.0."
"They think they're restoring the United States, despite the fact they are physically attacking the United States, and believe me, the way that ammunition prices went up within the last year on the public market, I think these people really believe they're going to affect the revolution at some point," said Nance.
Earlier in the conversation, Nance addressed Virginia Republican Glenn Youngkin holding up the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a "peaceful protest" and treating items used in the attack as their own kind of religious relic or a "talisman" as Nance characterized. "As if it's going to give them some connection deeper to Donald Trump."
"It all flies in the face of their own storyline, their story arc in which it was Antifa and Black Lives Matter that carried out the attack," said Nance. "Now, on some signs, we see them actually not only recognizing that they've carried out this event but, as I said in the video, a peaceful protest at the Capitol and now carrying an American flag, which took part in that. It's absolutely disgraceful that any of this is happening. But what you're seeing, it is a strategy by the Republicans and Trump play out where they're now embracing the popularism of that violence."
See his full take in the video below: