The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, who said his visit to Russia was partially meant to combat a toxic McCarthyist environment in the US, has found himself on the receiving end of just such a hysteria.
Mainstream media pundits and ‘Russiagaters’ have been up in arms after Greenwald’s trip to Russia, which included taking part in an expert panel on “fake news” and interviews with several media outlets, including RT. Now he is being accused of being a Russian agent, and some go as far as calling him an open supporter of the Kremlin policies, which he is not.
One such attack came from Malcolm Nance, a former US intelligence officer who is a regular fixture of MSNBC, offering his insight on Russia. He also wrote a book called ‘The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West.’
Nance described Greenwald’s visit to Russia as reporting to “his masters in Moscow to help set the record straight about how misunderstood Russia is” and called him “an agent of Trump & Moscow” who helped NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden “defect.”
Considering Greenwald’s long-standing beef with Nance over the latter falsely claiming that Jill Stein of the Green Party had her own show on RT, it’s hardly surprising that The Intercept soon published an article about how MSNBC chooses to ignore demonstrable lies by people to whom it gives air time, as long as it serves the channel’s political agenda.
Confronted by the reaction, Nance said he was honored by the attention and compared Greenwald to Louise Mensch, who is ironically among the more unhinged members of the #Resistance movement in the US that tends to perceive pretty much everyone as a possible agent of the Kremlin.
Nance, of course, did not bother to provide any evidence of his accusations against Greenwald. And neither did Polygraph, a supposedly fact-checking website produced by the US government-funded outlets VoA/RFE, when it claimed Greenwald was a supporter of the Russian government.
“It’s not just criticism - this is an outright slander, potentially legally actionable, that is being committed by the employee of MSNBC [Malcolm Nance] which has pushed this frame of anything connected to Russia being a form of treason, whether diplomacy or person to person engagement,” journalist Max Blumenthal told RT. “If you look at Malcolm Nance's wild statements, including that the United States as a constitutional republic is about to be destroyed by Vladimir Putin, it is pretty clear that he is to intelligence as what Harvey Weinstein is to feminism.”
Greenwald: I came to Russia to combat US’ toxic view on the country
Blumenthal believes that experts get branded as foreign agents for going on RT because “they are usually the critics of American foreign policy. And criticism is not permitted in our supposed democracy.”
“This is all about geopolitics, and people like Glenn Greenwald have been the collateral damage in the revival of McCarthyism, not just Malcolm Nance, but by the entire network MSNBC, which is dedicated to promoting the cynical imperatives of the Democratic Party,” Blumenthal said.
Among others who found the visit to be sinister and in appropriate was Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress. Tanden’s attempt to take the moral high ground was quickly undercut by comments, which pointed out that her think tank didn’t hesitate to take sponsorship money from the UAE, a nation accused of running prisons in Yemen where the brutal mistreatment of inmates takes place.
With critics like this, Greenwald’s argument that the entire anti-Russian hysteria in the US has become quasi-religious has gained more credibility. Nance and Polygraph both gave links to RT articles, presumably as proof of their allegations, but any honest person who bothered to read the text would see nothing of the kind.