[TTP:  This article is from Friday, and quite short, but the news is so delightful that it may just make your entire week!  I know it did ours.]

We've seen Israel and the United States take out a lot of Iran's leaders.

The two countries have also been pounding away at their military capacity.

They've decimated their Navy, and they've taken over their skies.

"Never before has a modern, capable military, which Iran used to have, been so quickly destroyed and made combat ineffective," Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared.

So on one level, they've already largely succeeded in taking down the military.

But how do you help the people along in rising up and overthrowing their oppressors?

There's a new report that shows the Iranian people may have figured out a brilliant answer to that question, with the help of Israel.

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Anthropic AI, until very recently, occupied a privileged position within the technological architecture of the United States national security apparatus.

The company, founded by former artificial intelligence researchers and lavishly financed by Silicon Valley capital, developed an advanced family of large language models known as Claude.

These systems were designed to ingest vast oceans of data, synthesize intelligence, assist engineers, support cyber operations, and accelerate the decision making processes that increasingly define modern warfare.

Because of these capabilities, Claude became the only frontier artificial intelligence (AI) system authorized for use within certain classified Pentagon environments.

It was used for intelligence analysis, research inside national laboratories, cybersecurity tasks, and complex logistical modeling.

Yet by early March 2026 the very same technology once welcomed into the digital bloodstream of the American military was abruptly expelled.

The Department of War formally designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” ordering contractors and agencies to begin phasing the system out of defense related work.

The reason was neither espionage nor foreign ownership nor a catastrophic data breach. The problem, according to senior Pentagon officials, was ideological contamination embedded within the software itself.

When officials speak of “polluting” the supply chain in this context, they are not referring to environmental damage or corrupted hardware. The word describes something far more insidious. A military supply chain must be doctrinally neutral.

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John Solomon is reporting on previously suppressed information indicating that, as early as 2020, we knew the Chinese were trying to interfere in our elections, and that this intelligence was covered up.

The burning question is, of course, why that happened.

Solomon’s report is based on a 7April 2020 National Intelligence Council Assessment. That report reads in part:

“We assess that China and Russia are increasing their ability to analyze and manipulate large quantities of personal information in ways that will allow them to more effectively target and influence, or coerce, individuals and groups in the United States and allied countries. Their cyber espionage efforts have helped them acquire bulk data.”

“Adversaries almost certainly are already applying data-analysis techniques to hone their efforts against US targets.’

“Chinese intelligence officials analyzed multiple US states (redacted) election voter registration data…”

This is particularly troubling because the date of this report dovetails with the cover-up of the actions of the Chinese-affiliated election service company Konnech.

In 2022, the election security nonprofit True the Vote broke the story that a company called Konnech in Michigan was storing data on American election workers on servers in China.

True the Vote leaders Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips were, of course, ridiculed by the so-called mainstream press.

Then …

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In all the tens of millions of words that have been written by the mainstream media about the Trump-Russia collusion story, in all the hundreds of names that have appeared within those often-breathless filings, one name almost never appears: Kevin Clinesmith.

No, Clinesmith doesn’t appear in any of the four books — Fear, Rage, Peril, and War — written by the so-called Dean of Investigative Journalism, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward.

Nor does Clinesmith appear in The Divider, the ostensibly serious 725-page book about the entirety of Donald Trump’s first term by former New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker and his wife, New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser.

I have a theory as to why this might be: because the mainstream media can’t account for what Clinesmith did.

Clinesmith, a well-placed Trump-hating FBI lawyer, pleaded guilty in 2020 to having falsified evidence on an application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

What, exactly, did Clinesmith do? He doctored an email saying that Page had been a CIA source to indicate just the opposite — that Page had not been a CIA source.

That warrant was ultimately approved by a FISA court judge, and it allowed the Obama administration to spy not just on Carter Page but on candidate Donald Trump and his entire team during the 2016 campaign.

And its three successive renewals allowed the FBI to continue spying on Trump during his presidency.

So when you ponder the term “abuse of power,” don’t think about Watergate and Richard Nixon. Instead, think about Crossfire Hurricane and Barack Obama.

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[TTP:  Parenting the citizens (and politicians) of the future is hard, especially in the Age of the Screen. Here is an excellent essay to assist in navigating this supremely important mission.]

Mary Shelley learned to read by tracing the letters of her mother’s name on a gravestone.

Behind London’s St. Pancras Old Church, the young girl would run her fingers over the markings: “Mary Wollstonecraft,” the writer, philosopher, and women’s suffrage campaigner who died giving birth to her.

Raised by her father William Godwin, Shelley’s childhood was marked by radical ideas at the dinner table, the tensions of a complicated family life, and a taste for the eerie that she harbored from her earliest years.

In 1816, at just eighteen, she accompanied the poet Percy Shelley to a Lake Geneva villa where Lord Byron, the celebrity poet who had just fled England in disgrace, had gathered a small circle of friends.

Volcanic ash from Mount Tambora had blocked out the sun, so they resolved to stay indoors to write ghost stories. Carrying with her a fascination with experiments showing dead creatures twitching in response to electric charge, Mary wondered what it might be like to be switched on rather than born.

Her story, Frankenstein, took this idea to its logical conclusion. If the scientific showmanship of the day could produce a being through technical wizardry, then the fruits of this creation would exist as a child without childhood.

For someone who never met her own mother, a book about life without formation seemed like a fitting project.Frankenstein is often read as a tale of hubris…but it is a story about a man who refuses to become a parent as much as a man who wants to play God.

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[TTP:  The Shield of the Americas summit was notable in many ways, but there was a small side story that was particularly sweet. Here’s your feel-good story of the week.]

On Saturday,Donald Trump and Marco Rubio hosted the Shield of the Americas summitin Doral, Fla.

In case you missed it, it was the meeting of several members of the Trump administration with 12 right-leaning heads of state from countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and it was focused on security, particularly combatting the cartel crime that plagues our nations, as well as the other issues we all face and how we can work together to solve them.

If you've been reading my articles in recent days — and even in the weeks leading up to the event — you know I've been geeking out over it a little bit. I absolutely loved this idea and am only sorry we didn't do it sooner. I think it's a historic move that will literally change the world if successful.

But there was a much smaller story that came from it...

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Last week, the United States and Israel attacked Iran. They achieved an enormous tactical victory at the outset. Now, Republicans need to win the rhetorical war at home.

As any good attorney will tell you, he who frames the argument likely wins the argument.

To date, despite 86 percent support among Trump 2024 voters and 98 percent support among self-identified MAGA, Republicans have not succeeded in framing the argument to the rest of the country, which is currently divided 50-50.

Here are the two arguments they must make.

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