Reminder: live discussion
snyder.substack.com
Dear Friends,
This is just a quick reminder that our next live discussion (for paid subscribers) will take place this Friday (today) at 11:30am. The theme will be the first year of the war, but you should feel free to raise other questions. Discussion means a thread, not a video feed. If you are a paid subscriber you should get a prompt by email to join just before the appointed time. Looking forward!
TS
I’m going to proffer an extended setup for crucial questions for the Professor. Please select what you believe is most relevant to the discussion.
We are seeing exposed for the first time in America the outsized power of a propaganda giant like Fox Media Corporation in promoting and amplifying lies and a narrative that causes citizens to distrust elections (the foundation of our young but longest-standing pluralistic democracy) and also destructive to democracy writ large.
Tristan Harris, co-founder and executive director of the Center for Humane Technology (https://www.humanetech.com/), recently interviewed Marc Faddoul, co-director of Tracking Exposed — a nonprofit investigating social media algorithms and their influence on our lives (https://tracking.exposed/about/)-.
Unsurprisingly, this episode centers on TikTok and how it changed itself one day before Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This change in algorithmic modification, coupled with TikTok’s AI, gave Putin an outsized ability to shape the narrative about the invasion by inverting the model.
A MUST LISTEN: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-undivided-attention/id1460030305?i=1000602448155
We know now Fox shared confidential Biden campaign data with Jared Kushner and the Trump team (I won’t go all wonky, but understand what this data is and how crucial its confidentiality is to campaign strategy) — one can only presume it not only landed in GOP strategists hands but perhaps in the hands of MBS or Putin or Xi to help Trump gain an advantage over Biden in the 2020 Presidential Election. Maybe, all the more reason the Trump camp was incredulous about the Biden victory. If you think you’ve cheated your way to victory WITH your competitor's data, how stunned would you be to learn you lost anyway?
My point is we MUST rationally and logically presume Trump WILL be the 2024 Republican Presidential nominee from a national security perspective. From a national security perspective, we then MUST assume he WILL cheat to win. It's the ONLY way he evades prosecution from the mounting avalanche of litigation.
I know what keeps me up at night. What keeps you concerned with how we navigate the next 613 days until the 2024 Presidential Election and help Ukraine win this war against Russia? Can they, will they be able to return to 1991 territory boundaries?
How can we help democracy at home; help Ukraine defend democracy abroad; help the people of Moldova stay strong; help mitigate attacks on the people of Moldova, Mexico, and Taiwan?
(An Aside:) What is happening in Mexico is not hitting the mainstream media. President Lopez Obrador, aka AMLO, is also waging an assault on democracy set to collide with the 2024 Presidential Elections in Mexico IF they occur. Mexican citizens have already taken to the streets in protest.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/mexico-president-lashes-thousands-protest-democracy-rallies-rcna72531
I have a question for the Professor that I hope I will have the time to ask directly. I've just looked at a lot of the readily available historical narratives one can find online about the founding of Russia in Western Europe beyond Wikipedia, including on Websites of Universities etc ; and quite a lot are failing to make the distinction and case, that Professor Snyder makes so eloquently, that NO link at all exists between the Kyiver Rus and the Russian Empire founded in 1721. How did that happen? How did so many institutes got this so wrong?