Malcolm W. Nance > Quotes

“The 2016 cyberattack was not just another case of simple Kompromat - meddling in the political affairs of a satellite nation or an individual dissenter. It was a direct attempt to hijack and derail the traditional processes and norms that held the United States together for more than 240 years. The attempt was even more brazen due to the apparent belief that Putin assumed that he and his oligarchy could charm, groom and select a candidate, then with the right amount of cybercrime and enough organized propaganda they could actually choose a president of the United States to do their bidding.”
― Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election

“The false information must be logical, believable, and acceptable to gain the confidence of the target population of an adversary nation. Like all good lies, the material must be crafted to play to the biases and accepted norms of the target audience, even if the information is horrible or distasteful to others not of that tribe.”
― Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West

“When did the Q-Anon ideology start to really infect the Republican base? One of the first times that Donald Trump officially interacted with Q-Anon supporters was when Q-Anon user @MAGAPILL posted a Trump “accomplishment” list. Trump responded in a November 25, 2017, tweet less than a month after the first Q drop: “Wow, even I didn’t realize we did so much. Wish the Fake News would report! Thank you.”10 Most important, the retweet contained a link to MagaPill, a site loaded with conspiracy theories associated with Q-Anon.11 Millions of Twitter users saw Trump’s praise and clicked the link. This introduced Q to the entire MAGA audience.”
― Malcolm W. Nance, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency

“Trump’s well-known hatred of federal agencies was steeped in his fear of being investigated for his real estate holdings and financial relationships with foreign governments.”
― Malcolm W. Nance, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency

“The Russian goal was to quickly harness the power of personal access that social media gives and craft metanarratives and distribute in such a way that the enemy population can be turned against their own government. Opinion polls, news coverage, and street talk can be shifted by changing the perception of the populace. Social media not only weaponizes opinion, it gives the attacker the ability to act as puppeteer for an entire foreign nation. Two Russian information warfare officers wrote a treatise describing the combat effects of weaponized news and social media: “The mass media today can stir up chaos and confusion in government and military management of any country and instill ideas of violence, treachery, and immorality, and demoralize the public. Put through this treatment, the armed forces personnel and public of any country will not be ready for active defense.”1 Additionally, the Russians make no distinction between using these activities in wartime and “peace.” The Russian Federation will deploy information warfare and propaganda persistently in a constant effort to keep adversaries off balance. When it comes to information warfare, such distinctions of peacetime and wartime fade away.”
― Malcolm W. Nance, The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West

“During the 2016 election, the Trump campaign employed overt information-warfare tactics through intelligence firms like PsyGroup and Cambridge Analytica.16 PsyGroup’s proposal called Project Rome was presented to Rick Gates, who represented the Trump campaign; it offered “intelligence & influence services” for $3,210,000.17 It also proposed recruiting online influencers to disseminate Trump’s message to fringe “deep web” locations. Parscale was a man who knew the power of the internet. He was linked to Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner and the infamous Cambridge Analytica company.18 Cambridge was a data-mining and message-amplification firm that ran a program that analyzed social media users and crafted highly specific messaging that would appeal to each individual user’s biases, likes, and hobbies. They mastered how to weaponize a person’s inner racism or bigotry. For example, they could identify a white, rural, conservative gun enthusiast who drove a Ford truck based on Facebook posts and buying preferences. That user would then be flooded with messages on illegal immigrants and white families murdered by “urban” Blacks and photos of Ford trucks flying Trump flags. Cambridge also took and amplified Russian-intelligence-crafted themes extolling the glory of Trump. Through the firm’s effort to read social media down to each person’s tastes, it made every Republican in America consume highly targeted Russian memes and themes as nothing less than God’s honest truth.”
― Malcolm W. Nance, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency

“Former acting Director and former Deputy Director of the CIA, Michael Morell has served six presidents—three from each party—and has voted for both Democrats and Republicans. He has kept his politics to himself throughout his thirty-three year intelligence career, until now. He takes a dim view of the entire Russian constellation of “coincidences” that surrounds Donald Trump. We may recall the U.S. intelligence community’s observation that “coincidences take a lot of planning.” The Trump coincidences seemed to bear the hallmarks of the sword and the shield of the FSB.”
― Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election

“Alex Stamos, Chief Security Officer of Facebook, told Congress that the RF-IRA spent more than $100,000 on Facebook political ads between June 2015 and May 2017.5 This amounted to approximately 3,000 ads from 470 fake accounts and pages. A quarter of these ads were “geographically targeted” with an uptick in 2016 over 2015.6 Stamos stated that the “behavior displayed” was intended to “amplify divisive messages.” In addition to these numbers, Stamos said that accounts with “very weak signals of a connection” or “not associated with any known organized effort” amounted to $50,000 spent on approximately 2,200 ads, including ads purchased from US IP addresses.7”
― Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West

“Imagine two global cyberwars being waged secretly against America and our political establishment incapable of passing a law or allocating funds to stop it because the legislators have already been influenced by a foreign power.”
― Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election

“It takes religious-level faith to buy into predictions that never, ever come true.”
― Malcolm W. Nance, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency

“Trump proved himself a physical coward by feigning bone spurs and receiving deferments five times from service in Vietnam,”
― Malcolm W. Nance, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency

“Due to their meddling, activities which were considered routine politics in America are now suspect.”
― Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election

“The 2016 presidential election was already surreal—a former reality TV host fueled by white backlash had completed a hostile takeover of the Republican Party—before the bears emerged.”
― Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election

“Prussian philosopher Alexandre von Humbolt. “The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.”
― Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West

“The ideological heart of the neo-Nazi movement consists of the Fourteen Words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”
― Malcolm W. Nance, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency

“This is pure ISIS-like self-radicalization. One could call them Vanilla ISIS.”
― Malcolm W. Nance, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency

“In the end, Putin won with the aid of Americans who had turned on their own values. The news media assisted greatly by elevating stolen innocuous emails from an insecure party server to a national crisis in which the victims were treated suspiciously. To Trump supporters it validated everything they ever suspected about Hillary Clinton—she hid emails, which meant she was a liar. No matter that Trump voters elected a man who openly embraced white supremacy, rejected diversity, abhorred global engagement, ignored his own corruption, and enlisted his own family and staff as royalty to be worshipped. Trump voters saw these traits as perks. They viewed nepotism, largess, and excess as virtues of a business and political shark. If he vocally stood against virtually all gains America had made in equality and global economic expansion since 1964 and it got him elected, then all the better that he hold those positions. By all means necessary was Trump’s apparent motto for the 2016 election. Russian intelligence lived by that motto too. The spies of the Red Square were shameless enough but the real scandal was that Team Trump saw nothing wrong with it. Trump voters had blindly elected him despite knowing that Russia had intervened in the electoral process. They cared not that Trump’s own surprising level of slavish devotion to Putin was suspicious. It. Did. Not. Matter. Trump had created a cult of personality in the white lower class so that they worshipped his every word and challenged the veracity of anything negative said against him. This worked out well for Putin. For the”
― Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West

“There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel. —Vladimir Ilyich Lenin”
― Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election

“Nance’s Law: Coincidence takes a lot of planning.”
― Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West

“Nance’s Law of Intelligence Kismet: “Coincidence takes a lot of planning.”
― Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election

“The only reason the murder of George Floyd was not swept under the thin blue rug was because a citizen filmed his death.”
― Malcolm W. Nance, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency

“In their minds, they needed to support President Trump by resisting any liberal agenda to combat the virus.”
― Malcolm W. Nance, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency

“However, despite the enormous digital territory and huge number of Internet users, only a few users of what is called the “Surface Web” are aware of or actively observe what goes on in quite a different layer of the Internet. The data stored in another layer are not accessible to the majority of users. This is called “The Deep Web,” which is data traffic not picked up by the algorithms of search engines. Then, there is the “Dark Web,” where sites are intentionally encrypted and usually accessed by someone knowledgeable about how to find and get onto such sites. Typically, these sites are engaging in forbidden activities ranging from drug sales to weapons or hitman transactions. In order to see the sites on the “Dark Web,” a user must have a specialized browser like Tor, The Onion Router.”
― Malcolm Nance, Hacking ISIS: How to Destroy the Cyber Jihad

“With that said, Operation LUCKY-7 had its cut-out. The FSB’s Information Warfare Management Cell (IWMC) would create a false flag source to feed Assange the data taken from the DNC and any subsequent hacks through Guccifer 2.0. Assange was desperate to be relevant and the IWMC was going to create a new era where his own hatreds and agenda could be skillfully manipulated by the FSB’s active measures officers, while the cyber teams would keep him well fed. Assange was primed to do LUCKY-7’s bidding and now only needed the data they had stolen. WikiLeaks was now a wholly owned subsidiary of the FSB and essentially the cyber equivalent of a Laundromat, a Russian laundry —ready to clean and give a white appearance to the dirt.”
― Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election

“If we cannot be properly reimbursed for the tremendous cost of our military protecting other countries, and in many cases the countries I’m talking about are extremely rich. Then if we cannot make a deal, which I believe we will be able to, and which I would prefer being able to, but if we cannot make a deal, I would like you to say, I would prefer being able to, some people, the one thing they took out of your last story, you know, some people, the fools and the haters, they said, “Oh, Trump doesn’t want to protect you.” I would prefer that we be able to continue, but if we are not going to be reasonably reimbursed for the tremendous cost of protecting these massive nations with tremendous wealth . . .Then yes, I would be absolutely prepared to tell those countries, “Congratulations, you will be defending yourself.”14”
― Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election

“Trump set the tone for how Republicans should characterize Cheney from here on out:”
― Malcolm W. Nance, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency

“The decades-long NRA disinformation campaign has effectively convinced almost all gun owners of this myth.”
― Malcolm W. Nance, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency

“posing this question in either/or terms misses the complexity of the issue.”
― Malcolm W. Nance, They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency

“According to analysts, 666 Fifth Avenue had about a 30 percent vacancy rate and only generated about half of its annual mortgage. It was rumored that the largest tenant was planning to move out. A Canadian company named Brookfield Property Partners took a ninety-nine-year lease on 666 Fifth Avenue. Brookfield paid the rent for the entire century-long lease, upfront, which amounted to about $1.1 billion—removing Kushner’s biggest financial headache (a $1.4 billion mortgage on the office portion of the tower due in February 2019). Brookfield got its financing for this deal from a $750 million mortgage from ING Group, a Dutch multinational and financial services corporation, and a $300 million mezzanine loan from Apollo Global Management.9 However, the Qatar Investment Authority, the government-run agency that made decisions about the nations’ financial investments, bought a $1.8 billion stake in Brookfield Property Partners. As the second largest shareholder, they had a lot to say about what should be purchased; in this instance, they apparently used Brookfield to bail out 666 Fifth Ave. This investment was a godsend to Kushner, who was now out of debt just as Qatar was suddenly no longer blockaded by Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, crown prince of Saudi Arabia (known colloquially as MBS), and his allies.”
― Malcolm W. Nance, The Plot to Betray America: How Team Trump Embraced Our Enemies, Compromised Our Security, and How We Can Fix It

“Rykov had been watching Trump’s Twitter feed and said in a private message that if he wanted to run for president “Russia will help you.” Trump responded with a picture of himself on his executive jet giving a double thumbs-up.”
― Malcolm Nance, The Plot to Betray America: How Team Trump Embraced Our Enemies, Compromised Our Security, and How We Can Fix It