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From Dan’s show notes:

The so-called “peace plan” that Trumpworld floated for Ukraine—and which the Europeans are presently attempting to rebuff politely—is so breathtakingly bad that one hardly knows where to begin. We tried anyway. The most obvious obscenity is structural: a deal made over Ukraine’s head, without informing America’s European partners, and in open adoption of the Kremlin’s talking points. It grants Russia the fruits of its aggression; it forces Ukraine to accept elections on a timetable dictated from abroad; it demands demilitarization at the very moment Europe needs the Ukrainian military as its forward line; and it places no reciprocal constraints on Russia, which remains a full dictatorship.

Claire described it, with justification, as a Russian rearmament plan. I noted that it carries eerie echoes of Munich: a small democracy forced to cede territory while great powers congratulate themselves for “restoring order.” The difference is that in 1938, the Americans could claim distance and ignorance. In 2025, we know exactly how appeasement works out.

Claire wondered why the American public is not in the streets (which I said I’m not surprised about). That absence is itself a data point—a sign of what a decade of Russian disinformation, political exhaustion, and digital fragmentation has done to the Western psyche. I said many Americans have internalized the message that Ukraine is a faraway country which matters little to their lives.

Beyond that, I argued, many are overwhelmed by the complexities of today. When a society loses confidence in its ability to understand the world, it becomes ripe for manipulation by those who offer simple answers and strong heroes.

Which brought us to the second topic: X’s (accidental?) disclosure of the true locations of masses of accounts. For years, enormous pro-MAGA accounts posing as down-home patriots—“MAGA Nation,” “Dark MAGA,” “IvankaNews”—were actually being run out of Eastern Europe, Thailand, Nigeria, and other curious locales. And the same pattern extended to Gaza, where “eyewitnesses” allegedly reporting from displaced-persons camps were, in reality, posting from Bangladesh, Russia, the UK, Afghanistan.

If you missed it earlier, earlier today I cross-posted this summary of the imbroglio by Caroline Orr Bueno:

* X just accidentally exposed a vast covert influence network targeting Americans. How a new X feature led to the most sweeping public exposure of covert foreign activity on a major platform since 2016.

Back to Dan:

It was all obvious in retrospect. But seeing it exposed—by Elon Musk’s own platform of all things—was still stunning. These weren’t random fakes but rather coordinated political operations, the digital equivalent of foreign agents seeding Western politics with venom. And because Western democracies place much stock in public opinion, and public opinion now forms on platforms we don’t regulate, the manipulation has a direct line into policymaking.

I argued that these platforms function as utilities and must be regulated as such.

From there, we turned to Geoffrey Hinton, who in recent interviews has begun sounding more like Oppenheimer than a benign innovator. Hinton, one of the godfathers of AI, is now warning that we are approaching a level of technological disruption faster than any society can absorb. He isn’t a crank; he is as expert as it gets. And his concern is not only about job displacement—which he believes will outpace the economy’s ability to create new roles—but also about systems that may manipulate users, deceive them, or behave in ways their creators do not understand.

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