OUR PICKSKash Patel Did Promote QAnon | Trump Administration Will Strengthen Nuclear Energy | America Must Untangle Its Defense-Industrial Base from China, and more
· Kash Patel Says He Never Promoted QAnon. Here Are All the Times He Did
· An Alternative Theory to Explain America’s Murder Spike in 2020
· DeepSeek’s Safety Guardrails Failed Every Test Researchers Threw at Its AI Chatbot
· The Price America Will Pay for Trump’s Tariffs
· FBI Agents Are Stunned by the Scale of the Expected Trump Purge
· Achieving Critical Mass: Trump Administration Policies that Would Strengthen Nuclear Energy
· America Must Untangle Its Defense-Industrial Base from China
Kash Patel Says He Never Promoted QAnon. Here Are All the Times He Did (David Gilbert, Wired)
Kash Patel helped keep the QAnon movement alive on Truth Social, interacting with Q accounts, appearing on QAnon podcasts, and signing his children’s books with a QAnon catchphrase.
One of the first questions Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick for FBI director, faced during his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Thursday was whether he was a “follower or promoter of QAnon.”
Patel’s response to committee chairman Senator Chuck Grassley was unequivocal: “I have publicly rejected outright QAnon baseless conspiracy theories or any other baseless conspiracy theories.”
This isn’t true. Patel’s claim that he was not a promoter of QAnon is undermined by years of his very public and overt promotion of the QAnon community.
An Alternative Theory to Explain America’s Murder Spike in 2020 (Economist)
What if it wasn’t about policing?
DeepSeek’s Safety Guardrails Failed Every Test Researchers Threw at Its AI Chatbot (Matt Burgess and Lily Hy Newman, Wired)
Security researchers tested 50 well-known jailbreaks against DeepSeek’s popular new AI chatbot. It didn’t stop a single one.
The Price America Will Pay for Trump’s Tariffs (David Frum, The Atlantic)
Alienating allies and partners that the U.S. desperately needs means that “America First” will be “America Alone.”
FBI Agents Are Stunned by the Scale of the Expected Trump Purge (Shane Harris, The Atlantic)
Seasoned members of the nation’s top law-enforcement agency are bracing for a mass expulsion as the president roots out anyone he sees as disloyal to him.
Achieving Critical Mass: Trump Administration Policies that Would Strengthen Nuclear Energy (Sagatom Saha, Alan Ahn, and Matt Bowen, National Interest)
A second Trump administration has the opportunity to cement nuclear energy as a pillar of U.S. energy dominance and global competitiveness.
America Must Untangle Its Defense-Industrial Base from China (Gary Roughead, National Interest)
A potentially crippling entanglement with China is that of our defense and homeland security needs. If that dependence remains, our national security is at risk.
