Happy Tuesday! We can’t count the number of times in recent years we’ve heard people yearn for the halcyon days of Edward Murrow, Tom Brokaw, or Walter Cronkite, when Americans of all political persuasions could coalesce around a shared set of facts.

The realities of that era were always far more complicated, but YouGov’s annual “Trust in Media” poll released yesterday may have unearthed a modern-day bipartisan gem: The Weather Channel.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Ukrainian officials said Monday morning the country’s air defenses shot down at least two dozen Iranian-made drones over Kyiv in one of the largest drone attacks yet in Russia’s recent aerial offensive. Falling debris injured at least five people in the Ukrainian capital, and several more were wounded in concurrent attacks on the Black Sea port city of Odessa.
• Iran hanged two men Monday convicted of blasphemy for their involvement in a channel called “Critique of Superstition and Religion” on the Telegram messaging app. The two men, Yousef Mehrad and Sadrollah Fazeli Zare, were arrested in May 2020 and subjected to months of solitary confinement. The hangings—rare in blasphemy cases—come amid a surge of executions by the Iranian regime.
• House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul threatened in a letter on Friday to hold Secretary of State Antony Blinken in contempt of Congress if he does not comply with the panel’s subpoena for information about the Biden administration’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. McCaul is seeking an internal dissent cable reportedly sent by 23 State Department officials in July 2021 warning of the potential collapse of Kabul if the withdrawal proceeded.
• The man who drove his SUV into a group of people at a Brownsville, Texas bus stop over the weekend—killing eight people and injuring 10—was charged with eight counts of manslaughter and 10 counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, Brownsville Police Chief Felix Sauceda said Monday. The 34-year-old defendant has an extensive criminal record, which includes charges of assault and driving under the influence. Police are awaiting the results of a toxicology report to determine if the suspect was intoxicated.

Threats, Threats Everywhere

A quick skim of the intelligence community’s “Annual Threat Assessment” is liable to leave you hiding wide-eyed under the covers. After perusing this year’s 40-page litany of dangers foreign and domestic, Sen. Angus King of Maine had some advice for reporters: “Don’t read it just before you go to sleep.”

Even read over morning coffee, the report offers a disquieting account of how a growing list of foes are already—or could soon be—undermining the United States’ national interests. Lawmakers pressed top intelligence officials for more details at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday, focusing on China and Russia while calling for more attention on drug trafficking and voicing concerns about reauthorizing an intelligence collection authority agencies have used to access U.S. citizens’ information.

Worth Your Time

• Ross Douthat is starting to worry the 2024 Republican presidential primary is going to look a lot like the 2016 Republican presidential primary. “Seven years later, it’s clear that many of the underlying dynamics that made Trump the nominee are still in play,” he writes in his latest New York Times column. “First, there are the limits of ideological box-checking in a campaign against Trump. A campaign against him won’t prosper if its main selling point is just True Conservatism 2.0. Second, there’s the mismatch between cultural conservatism and the anti-Trump donor class. Part of DeSantis’s advantage now, is that he has seemed more congenial to the party’s bigger-money donors. But many of those donors don’t really like the culture war; they’ll go along with a generic anti-wokeness, but they hate the Disney battles, and they’re usually pro-choice. This leads to the third dynamic that could repeat itself: The G.O.P coordination problem, a.k.a. the South Carolina pileup. If you have an anti-Trump donor base dissatisfied with DeSantis and willing to sustain long-shot rivals, it’s easy enough to see how rivals talk themselves into hanging around long enough to hand Trump exactly the sort of narrow wins that eventually gave him unstoppable momentum in 2016.”
• We need a Manhattan Project for artificial intelligence, Samuel Hammond argues in Politico. “It sounds fanciful, but many experts on global risk believe that a powerful, uncontrolled AI is the single most likely way humanity could wipe itself out,” he writes. “At the heart of the threat is what’s called the ‘alignment problem’— the idea that a powerful computer brain might no longer be aligned with the best interests of human beings. It’s a highly technical problem that some experts fear may never be solvable. But the government does have a role to play in confronting massive, uncertain problems like this. In fact, it may be the most important role it can play on AI: to fund a research project on the scale it deserves. There’s a successful precedent for this: The Manhattan Project was one of the most ambitious technological undertakings of the 20th century. Some eight decades later, the need has arisen for a government research project that matches the original Manhattan Project’s scale and urgency. In some ways the goal is exactly the opposite of the first Manhattan Project, which opened the door to previously unimaginable destruction. This time, the goal must be to prevent unimaginable destruction, as well as merely difficult-to-anticipate destruction.”

Speaking of Manhattan Projects…

Presented Without Comment 

C-SPAN: Former Pres. Trump Says U.S. Politicians Are Biggest Threat to Nation

“They said, ‘Who is our biggest threat? Is it China, sir? Is it Russia?’ I said, ‘No, our biggest threat are high-level politicians that work in the United States government like Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, Schumer, Biden, Justice Department. Because that is poisoning our country.”

Also Presented Without Comment

Insider: Chinese Man Jailed for Scaring 1,100 Chickens to Death Amid a Feud With His Neighbor

Toeing the Company Line

• It’s Tuesday, which means Dispatch Live (🔒) returns tonight at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT! The team will discuss the news of the week and, of course, take plenty of viewer questions! Keep an eye out for an email later today with information on how to tune in.
• In the newsletters: Kevin argues (🔒) Americans should vote their consciences rather than strategically, the Dispatch Politics crew breaks down North Carolina’s gubernatorial race, and Nick predicts (🔒) a Trump-Biden rematch in 2024 will do nothing but deepen Americans’ dissatisfaction with the direction of the country. 
• On the podcasts: Damon Preston, a public advocate in Kentucky, joins David to discuss Jordan Neely’s death on the New York City subway last week.
• On the site: Drucker questions reports of Ron DeSantis’ donor exodus, Harvest investigates an American diplomat’s participation in a conference featuring a U.S.-designated terrorist, and Cliff Smith looks at the pernicious isolationism being peddled by a prominent senator. 

Let Us Know

What (or who) do you believe poses the biggest threat to the United States?