MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow can’t let an election go by without wheeling out the usual cadre of tired old neocons, with the latest to appear on her show being former State Department official Victoria Nuland. As expected, she sought to lump Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Vladimir Putin together in a segment on ‘disinformation’ this week.

“He’s at it again!” Nuland claimed of Putin, resurrecting talking points heavily featured in the prior two elections as well. She accused Musk of being in essence a useful idiot of the Kremlin, allowing Putin to use “sophisticated tools” on his X platform to ‘interfere’ and influence voters. “And he has more sophisticated tools… He’s got a brand new, very powerful tool, which is Elon Musk and X,” Nuland claimed of Putin (and by extension Trump, according to her talking points).

NEW: Victoria Nuland makes sweeping allegations about Russian election interference, implicates @elonmusk — “[Putin’s] also got a brand new, very, very powerful tool, which is Elon Musk and 𝕏.”

Nuland openly longs for the days of US Govt/Twitter 1.0 censorship collusion:

“In… pic.twitter.com/5qR5PzYvfu

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) October 29, 2024

“In 2020, the social media companies worked hard with the U.S. government to try to do content moderation, to try to catch this stuff as it was happening. This time, we have Elon Musk talking directly to the Kremlin and ensuring that every time the Russians put out something, it gets five million views before anyone can catch it,” Nuland continued. And then she warned: “Trump is taking Putin lessons, as autocrats around the world are.”

Maddow, for her part, added: “For the United States to not be the leader of the free world, but rather in effectively a sort of ‘Axis’ with the dictators of Russia and China, and North Korea.” So clearly Maddow wanted to escalate the claims to put Trump in league with all dictators of the world, absurdly enough.

“For the United States to be allied with those countries instead of our traditional alliances — I’m not sure people have absorbed the magnitude of what you’re describing there,” Maddow followed with.

Aaron Maté, an indepdent journalist who has spent years debunking key Russiagate talking points, issued the following commentary in reaction to the Nuland-Maddow interview segment…

* * *

For a third consecutive presidential election, Russiagate propagandists are accusing Russia of manipulating Americans into not voting for their preferred candidate. Here, Victoria Nuland complains that Twitter is no longer partnering with the US gov’t to censor stories — what she calls the “content moderation” that we saw “in 2020.”

This is a reference to censoring journalism on Hunter Biden’s laptop based on the CIA lie that it was “Russian disinformation.”

Speaking of Russia and election interference, Nuland is well-versed in practicing it: as a senior State Dept. official, she was instrumental in funneling the Clinton-funded “Steele dossier” into the FBI. She personally authorized the early July 2016 meeting where Steele gave an FBI agent his dossier, which helped kick off the multi-year Russiagate scam.

Robert Kagan has resigned from the Washington Post editorial board after disclosure that the Washington Post would not support Kamala Harris. Here he is with his wife, Victoria, Nuland! pic.twitter.com/Zx8AnAHrjs

— 👠 Laura #Covfefe 👠 (@mwenger1993) October 25, 2024

* * *

And another commenter wrote that “Nuland openly longs for the days of US Govt/Twitter 1.0 censorship collusion.”

“Free speech on X is under constant assault — their information monopoly has been destroyed in an election cycle — and they desperately want the Twitter 1.0 censorship regime back.”