including a plurality of 44% of Democrats, shared this view, with a partisan split having emerged during the 2016 presidential campaign. The sharper distaste among the Democrat population stands in contrast to the prior history of American public opinion on Russia, as Republicans were formerly more likely to view Russia as a greater threat. In May 2017, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said on NBC's Meet The Press that Russians were "almost genetically driven" to act deviously. Freelance journalist Michael Sainato criticized the remark as xenophobic. In June 2017 Clapper said that "[t]he Russians are not our friends", because it is in their "genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed, to the United States and western democracies." Yuliya Komska in The Washington Post took note of a Russiagate-awareness media project featuring Morgan Freeman and James Clapper and wrote that its "hawkish tenor stokes blanket Russophobia that is as questionable as the Russian state media's all-out anti-Americanism." In June 2020, Russian American professor Nina L. Khrushcheva wrote: "Normally, I would not side with the Kremlin. But I cannot help wondering whether the Russophobia found in some segments of America's political class and media has become pathological." In July 2020, academic and former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul spoke about "combatting Russophobia", appealing to US officials and journalists to cease "demonizing" Russian people, and criticizing propagation of stereotypes about Russians, Russian culture and Russian national proclivities. He, and some other commentators, have argued that the US media doesn't make enough distinction between Putin's government and Russia and the Russians, thus effectively vilifying the whole nation. On 2 July 2020, the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans, released Fellow Traveler, an ad saying in Russian with English subtitles that "Comrade Trump" had been "chosen" by Vladimir Putin and had "accepted the help of Mother Russia." The ad featured communist imagery such as the hammer and sickle, as well as photographs of Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and Soviet leaders from Stalin to Mikhail Gorbachev. Eliot Borenstein, Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU, has criticized the Lincoln Project's "Russophobic" ad, saying: "How would we feel about a two-minute video filled with Stars of David, men in Orthodox garb, sinister snapshots of Bibi, and soldiers in tanks, all to the tune of “Hava Nagila”? If that doesn't make you uncomfortable, I'm not sure what to tell you." The Wall Street Journal