Malcolm Nance.  The Plot to Hack America:  How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election.  New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016.

Malcolm Nance speaks Arabic.  We know because he tells us – multiple times.  His bio on Wikipedia, over which Nance may be presumed to have exercised some influence, mentions his Arabic achievements twice.  It even mentions what language classes Nance took in high school.  Perhaps this emphasis occurs because Nance's undergraduate degree (yes: it was in Arabic!) proceeded from an external program, Excelsior College, after Nance received his honorable discharge from the U.S. Navy, and represents academic credit for life experience.  Of course, I'm guessing about the reason for this Arabic emphasis, and I'm not guessing in Arabic.  At any rate, it is on the firm basis of his Arabic fluency that Nance grounds his complete mastery of all things associated with espionage, geo-political strategy, and national security.

Okay.  I admit it.  I'm a jerk to mock Nance's educational pretensions – or would be if Nance weren't constantly asking for it.  His irrelevant Arabic exerts an enormous influence over the tone of his masterwork, The Plot to Hack America.  There is a self-conscious snootiness pervading the entire text, a miasma of thick self-affirmation.  Malcolm Nance is an expert.  He's an expert who esteems expertise.  If his presentation is shy in the evidence department, the reader is not allowed to express doubt.  After all, the reader is just a reader, whereas the guy he's regarding with skepticism is an expert.  You know – one who speaks Arabic.

Nance's expert analysis is by now pretty standard speculative stuff.  As always with the meme – "The Russians are stealing my underpants and hacking my election!" – there is no evidence.  The conclusions of experts are substituted for evidence.  You have to accept these conclusions.  Asking for the evidence is like being a global warming skeptic.  It is just not done.

Thus, the importance of Nance's book lies not in the evidence it presents, but in its early publication.  Nance's version of the Russian interference hoax was rushed into print before the 2016 presidential election in an attempt to pull a stumbling, drunken Hillary over the finish line first.

It didn't work.

Nance devotes an astounding amount of space to saying what Putin, Trump, and Julian Assange would have thought and done – without feeling any urge to show that they actually did think and act in these ways.  This trend reaches the top of its crescendo when Nance tells us that Putin "must have" been terrified by Hillary's empty words about support for Ukraine against Russian aggression.  In other words, Putin must have been afraid of what Hillary would have done when the Russians invaded Crimea.  Two steps separated from reality, Nance insists he is on the trail of a brilliant revelation.  Putin must have, would have wanted to stop Hillary at all costs!  Do we have any evidence that Putin did feel this way?  Well, no.  But he must have!

Nance's certainty is rooted in the ludicrous assumption that the Obama-Hillary axis proved itself tough-minded, in contrast to Trump's supposed vacillations.  Nance achieves self-deception on this score by simply dumping all contrary evidence down the handy memory hole.  Hillary's Russian reset button?  Never mentioned.  Obama's breathless schoolgirl whisper, caught on mic before the 2012 election, to Dmitry Medvedev?  Never mentioned.  The red line Obama drew in the Syrian sand and then failed to enforce?  Never mentioned.  Obama and Hillary are never viewed as the pansified leftists they actually were.  They are portrayed as steely-eyed cold warriors fighting the good fight long after spineless conservative have surrendered to the Comintern. 

Here's the trick.  About two thirds of the way through, Nance revises his approach – but only in mode of expression.  What Putin or Trump or Assange would have thought or done earlier in the narrative, he definitely did think or do at the end of it.  No additional evidence has been presented; it's just so.  The reader is supposed to accept Nance's definitive conclusions precisely because Nance has already told him what these characters would have done.  Reliance on this procedure is remarkably prescient, since it's exactly the procedure employed by Trump's accusers in the year since.  Like our intelligence community – seventeen agencies or only three; what's the difference? – Nance reaches conclusions in the brazen absence of any proof.  Hey, just take his word for it!  He speaks Arabic!

There's something else of entertainment value in the book – and once again it derives from Nance's claimed intellectual supremacy.  Despite the high school language classes he took back in the day, Nance is not completely literate in his native language.  He commits an amazing number of solecisms.  It's hard for the reader to keep up.

I'll present just three examples.  Nance tells us that Trump "enamored" Putin – that is, that he fell in love with him.  The proper construction is not to enamor but to be enamored of.  Nance confuses an egoist with an egotist.  And finally, in abusing the deplorables, Nance says The Donald "knows the mind of the wrestling-loving, under-educated, authoritarian-admiring white male populous."  Well, Malcolm, I do love professional wrestling, especially the kind that Trump demonstrated in the Republican primaries.  I hold more degrees than you do, and from more prestigious institutions, and a lot of Trump supporters hold more degrees than I.  And I know the difference between "populous" and "populace."  Since you don't, maybe you should hire a competent copy-editor.

Let me close with an absolutely glorious inconsistency Nance produces without even stopping to shout, "Allahu akbar!"  Nance makes a point of quoting Ian Fleming: "Once is happenstance.  Twice is coincidence.  Three times is enemy action."  His point is that if blah-blah-blah occurs rather than just blah-blah, we can assume that them Russkies are up to no good.

However, what happens if we apply this standard to Hillary's career as secretary of state?  After all, ISIS flourished under her watch, Syria erupted, and Libya was lost.  Egypt would have been lost, too, after Obama and Hillary did the unthinkable and sold out our ally Mubarak.  Thank God for el-Sisi!  Hillary helped initiate new mass migrations of third-world Muslim men into Europe – and North America.  Is there a grade below "F"?  Do three Fs constitute a triple F?  If so, Hillary's official performance merits a whole paragraph of Fs.  Is this happenstance?  Coincidence?  Or enemy action?

Also, Hillary has been surrounded by mysterious deaths.  Vince Foster, Ron Brown, Seth Rich – the list goes on and on.  Far be it from a non-Arabic-speaking scribbler like me to promote conspiracy theories, Russophobic or otherwise!  However, if Ian Fleming's wisdom applies here, then clearly something is amiss with Crooked Hillary's private and public lives, and some conspiracy theory is definitely suggested by the facts in the Case of Mrs. Clinton.

Hasn't this embarrassing point even occurred to Nance?

I'll take my answer in Arabic.

Tom Riley is widely known as a poet of the formalist school and is the author of Translations from the Ogrish.