One of MSNBC’s most prolific peddlers of conspiracy theories is here to tell you all about the dangers of conspiracy theories. How's that for expertise?

MSNBC contributor and self-declared U.S. intelligence “expert” Malcolm Nance, who has made a comfortable living in the Trump-era writing about Russia’s supposed control of the White House, spoke recently with the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner.

In the interview, aptly titled “Malcolm Nance on the Danger of Conspiracy Theories,” Chotiner pressed the intelligence “expert” about the time he defended MSNBC host Joy Reid’s hilariously absurd assertion that time traveling cyber bandits had hacked her personal blog and retrospectively uploaded homophobic articles bearing her byline.

When Reid alleged in 2018 that she had been the victim of a far-reaching cyber conspiracy, Nance rushed to her assistance, tweeting, “Clearly there is a Discredit & Humiliate campaign afoot. Apparently all progressives are secretly anti-gay bloggers. This has Wikileaks & AltRight written all over it. Expect more.”

Chotiner, who has a gift for gutting his subjects with their own words, asked Nance, “Do you stand by this?”

The MSNBC contributor responded:

There are people who have an agenda on Joy Reid. Every time Joy Reid tweets on a Saturday morning or even comes on television, go through her timeline and see how many people come out who are from the alt-right — not from the left, not from the libertarian left, not from the L.G.B.T.Q. community, but from the conservative right — who come out and say, “Joy Reid is a homophobe who just destroys her information, forges her information.”



What that tells me is there was a meta-narrative within their world which has decided that this is how Joy Reid is going to be seen within that alt-right world. It’s essentially a hammering point they use to attack all of their critics. It’s like Hillary Clinton and the e-mails. You understand how they craft their messages. I see those craftings, and I tend to see them a lot faster than the news media does.

The New Yorker reporter stayed on target, asking, “So, you stand by that?”

“Well,” said Nance, “I’m attuned to intelligence activities. You know, I wrote a whole book on ISIS information warfare as we studied it over multiple years. So that was about something that had nothing to do with the Russians, but it has to do with the alt-Right and people who just didn’t like Joy Reid. So, yeah, I stand by that.”

OK, let's pause for a second and remember the events of 2018.

Reid was found to have authored several anti-gay articles more than 10 years ago for her now-defunct personal blog, the Reid Report. She reacted by lying. She denied authoring the blog posts, claiming instead that a shadowy cabal of cyber sneaks hacked the Reid Report with the intention of framing her with “manipulated material.”

Reid reportedly even requested the aid of the FBI in hunting down the alleged malefactors. She even trotted out a supposed outside “expert” who claimed to have “discovered that login information used to access the blog was available on the darknet.” The “expert” claimed also to have found evidence that the supposed cybercriminals hacked the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and maybe even the Library of Congress. Reid’s outside “expert” later dropped these claims. Reid herself eventually issued a non-apology, saying, “I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me.”

Chotiner noted Reid’s non-apology in his interview with Nance, to which the MSNBC contributor responded, “I don’t know. That’s up to her — go ask her."

"But, you know what?" Nance asked. "That was Joy Reid and her past. We all have digital footprints back there, but me talking about the alt-right attacking her, that’s real.”

Those goalposts have shifted so far back that I am not even sure if we are playing the same game anymore.

“But you don’t think that there was any ‘there there,’ so to speak?” asked Chotiner of Reid's cyber hackers lie.

“You know what?” responded Nance. “I’m going to tell you something that I tell everybody. I am a former cryptologist from the National Security Agency. If there is anything that I personally can assure you as an American citizen, it’s that there is nothing in this world that is digital that cannot be manipulated.”

Chotiner also confronted the MSNBC contributor over his past assertion that some of the 2016 WikiLeaks DNC email dumps contained “forgeries.” (There is nothing to back this assertion, and it does not appear to have been made by any of the Democratic officials who had their emails compromised.)

The Chotiner interview includes this passage:

You think the Podesta e-mails were forged in some way?



I never said the Podesta e-mails were forged, and I have tried to educate the country on it.



“Official Warning,” you tweeted. “#PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries and #blackpropaganda not even professionally done.”



There were. There were. Black propaganda is when you have something that is a piece of disinformation or misinformation or even crafted and fabricated information that is inserted into a stream of real information. That is the definition of black propaganda. What I said was that the Podesta package has misinformation, disinformation, and black propaganda. This was what I got from Julian Assange, right? Who swears nothing that he put out came from the Russians. He swears nothing that was ever done had any black propaganda in it or was disinformation. On the first day, there was a piece of black propaganda that was inserted in there not by whoever sent that package but by an alt-righter in the United States who did a clumsy edit of one of those e-mails and then put it back into that data stream like it was real. I never said the Podesta e-mails were forged, and I have tried to educate the country on it.There were. There were. Black propaganda is when you have something that is a piece of disinformation or misinformation or even crafted and fabricated information that is inserted into a stream of real information. That is the definition of black propaganda. What I said was that the Podesta package has misinformation, disinformation, and black propaganda. This was what I got from Julian Assange, right? Who swears nothing that he put out came from the Russians. He swears nothing that was ever done had any black propaganda in it or was disinformation. On the first day, there was a piece of black propaganda that was inserted in there not by whoever sent that package but by an alt-righter in the United States who did a clumsy edit of one of those e-mails and then put it back into that data stream like it was real.

Chotiner added this hilarious note to the text: "The “black propaganda” Nance referred to in his tweet was created by an Internet prankster, who posted a fake speech by Hillary Clinton that included references to “bronies,” male fans of the cartoon “My Little Pony.” The author said he never intended the post to be linked to WikiLeaks."

But anyway, remember, folks: Conspiracy theories are dangerous, except when I'm the one spreading them.