"Malcolm, I can't overstate how troubling I find this," MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi noted. "History is littered with lots of examples, starting before World War II, actually going back hundreds of years, but World War II or Rwanda or the Balkans, where leaders said this, they said if those people take power, there will be violence, they will do something to you, they will take your privileges away."
"That is the root of the weaponization of culture," Velshi concluded.
"You're absolutely right, this is the dictator's playbook," Nance replied.
"This is what happens when an elected leader decides that they are going to use the levers of power and the power of fear to split their nation and to actually pit one group against the other," he explained.
Nance is the author of the new book, The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West.
"I worked the Rwanda mission when Radio Mille Collines -- the broadcast channel in Rwanda -- was extorting people to seek out their neighbor, to find the cockroaches," Nance recalled.
"We have an intelligence term for this, it's called 'eliminationist rhetoric.' And I'm not saying it has gone all the way there, but Donald Trump uses this," he explained.
"Let's talk about Bosnia, let's talk about Germany in 1931, that was actually about religion, that was about someone else's religion and what they're gaining at your expense," Velshi noted. "I'm not making the argument that's the direction in which we are going, but when the leader of a country tells people that I'm fighting for you and your religion and they're not, I think that's incredibly dangerous."
"It's extremely dangerous," Nance agreed. "You referenced Bosnia, another mission that I performed, where Slobodan Milošević literally went back 600 years to justify the mass murder of Croatians and Bosniak Muslims."
"This is dangerous for any leader," he continued. "We need to defend democracy and not listen to this type of eliminationist rhetoric."
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