There is an interesting controversy in Alaska where an election official just disqualified a candidate over his name. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) is in what is considered a close race with Democratic former Rep. Mary Peltola. The seat is viewed as critical to the Democrats' retaking power. The race was thrown into disarray when a retired teacher named Dan Sullivan, who had no connection to the GOP but did have connections to Democratic operatives, got on the ballot.
The alleged dirty trick by Democratic and Peltola supporters would have split Sullivan's vote through sheer confusion. Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher disqualified Dan J. Sullivan, putting an end to it this week.
The suspected dirty trick comes at a time when Democratic candidates and pundits are calling for winning back power "by any means necessary."
It could create an interesting appeal if teacher Sullivan claims that this is just a colossal coincidence or that he has a right to be a vehicle for electoral confusion.
This is an old trick employed by other Democratic candidates in history, including J.F. Kennedy. In Kennedy's first run for Congress in 1946 in Boston, he was up against Boston City Councilor Joe Russo in the primary. The district was heavily Irish and Italian. Kennedy's father, Joe, allegedly paid another Joseph Russo, a custodian, to run to divide the Italian vote through confusion.
In 2000, Republicans faced similar allegations when the House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt found himself running against Richard A. Gebhardt.
Beecher concluded that Dan J. Sullivan and the Democrats were engaged in the same dirty trick to try to seize the seat. In a letter this week, she concluded that the teacher's candidacy was "filed with a purpose to confuse or mislead and to thereby compromise the ballot's fairness or neutrality," in a letter published Monday.
Under Alaska's ranked-choice voting system, Dan J. Sullivan could have advanced to the general election among the top four vote-getters - rigging the result for Peltola.
Beecher noted several indicators that teacher Sullivan and the Democrats were engaged in a dishonest campaign of confusion. She noted that he voted under the name Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr., but requested to appear on the ballot as Dan Sullivan - making him identical to the incumbent. He even tried to register using the initial "S" once, which would have matched the senator.
She also noted that Dan J. Sullivan had not registered as a Republican before launching his Senate campaign and that he created a new website that used a "color scheme and overall theme" similar to the incumbent's campaign materials.
She also noted his connection to Amber Lee, an Alaska Democratic consultant and past supporter of Peltola.
If true, it is a disgraceful role played by this retired teacher and Democratic operatives. While claiming to be defending democracy, Democratic activists and leaders often use the most anti-democratic measures of ballot cleansing or, in this case, ballot confusion.
The question is the role of Peltola, the DNC, and the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee in encouraging this dirty trick in Alaska. That would require an inquisitive, independent national media.
Once again, from Alaska to Maine, Democrats may have to ask, "Are we the baddies?"
By any measure, California is a failed state—and a national embarrassment.
Taxes? It has the highest income and gas taxes in the nation.
Roads? A Reason Foundation survey ranks it 49th among the states.
Mass flight? Between 250,000 and 350,000 more Californians leave the state than move in each year. Housing, gas, insurance, and electricity prices? The highest in the continental U.S.
Illegal aliens, the poor, the homeless, the foreign-born, and welfare recipients? The largest numbers in the U.S.
Public K–12 schools? Test scores in the bottom quartile.
Poverty? Twenty percent live below the poverty line.
So, what happened to the nation’s most richly naturally endowed—and once best governed—state?
The Left took total control—after millions of the embattled middle class fled.
Millions more impoverished immigrants, legal and illegal, took their place.
Left-wing Silicon Valley spawned some of the wealthiest elite liberal enclaves in the world.
The result was a neo-feudal society that was hardly democratic.
Millions of subsidized poor compose the bottom.
A beleaguered middle continues to shrink.
An ultra-rich apparat of left-wing coastal professionals and investors rules from the top.
As upper-bracket taxpayers fled, taxes rose on those who remained to fund expanding entitlements for newly arrived poor would-be residents. In turn, even more of the middle class left.
The remaining pyramidal economic structure ensured a Democratic monopoly—further entrenched by changing balloting laws, gerrymandering voting districts, vote harvesting, fueling public employee unions, and ignoring or undermining popular referenda.
In 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion water bond designed to solve the state’s chronic water storage deficit.
Included was $2.7 billion specifically designated for new reservoirs, as the last major reservoir had been built in 1980, when California had roughly half its current population.
Despite the people’s vote, bureaucracies, elected officials, and green activists blocked all new reservoir construction.
Adding insult to injury, Governor Gavin Newsom instead used $250 million from the Proposition 1 fund to blow up four dams on the Klamath River. They had once provided storage, electrical generation, recreation, and flood control.
Californians have twice voted in referenda (for Proposition 209 and against Proposition 16) to bar the use of racial preferences for contracting, admissions, and promotion in public institutions.
Most public universities simply ignored the law. They continued their “diversity” quotas under new names, relying on left-wing elected officials and judges to ignore again the will of the people.
Preferential admissions, along with racially segregated dorms and graduation ceremonies, continued under euphemisms and denials. “Theme” houses, “affinity” graduations, and “safe spaces” practice “affirmative” discrimination.
California voters in 2008 passed Proposition 11 to stop political gerrymandering by creating a supposedly nonpartisan state redistricting commission of five Democrats, five Republicans, and four Independents. Two years later, the commission took over redrawing congressional districts as well.
But Democratic lobbyists and lawyers sabotaged the goal of disinterested redistricting according to population and geography. Instead, racial preferences and the interests of the Democratic majority of incumbents prevailed to warp the intent of the voters.
Although Republicans usually achieved nearly 40 percent of the California vote in national elections, two decades later there were only seven Republicans in the 52-person congressional delegation, or a mere 13 percent of the state’s representatives.
But even that tiny contingent was considered too generous by the Left. Thus, in 2026, it will likely be further redistricted down to four or five seats.
The balloting mess in the recent Los Angeles mayoral race further reminds the nation and the world just how dysfunctional and anti-democratic California has become.
Democrats warp elections without the need for the old Chicago way of outright ballot theft or destruction. Instead, they do so in a “legal” manner by passing insane laws that ensure fraud and Democratic victories.
The winners in the strange jungle primaries—usually both Democrats—were not announced until a week after the polls closed. One of the eventual winners in mayoral race, the socialist Nithya Raman, had already given her teary concession speech after coming in well back at third on election night.
The Republican Spencer Pratt was comfortably ahead of her in second place on Election Day—only to lose, as expected, when large numbers of late ballots that broke roughly 90 percent Democratic were counted.
Remember, every registered voter is sent a mail-in ballot. If it is postmarked on election day, it can arrive at vote centers up to seven days after the election.
No one really knows whether the ballots are mailed to the dead, to former or nonexistent addresses, or to legally eligible voters—by design. In 2024, when losing presidential candidate Kamala Harris won the state by 20 points, only 0.09 percent of all ballots cast were rejected.
Anyone can register and receive a provisional ballot on the same day.
Ballot harvesting and ballot curing are legal.
Campaign operatives can round up voters, gather their ballots, and deliver them en masse to a voting center.
They can register anyone to vote, provide a ballot, and then deposit it immediately afterwards.
There is no requirement to provide proof of U.S. citizenship to get a driver’s license. Yet a license is not even needed to register.
Any credit card without a picture suffices.
And it gets worse still.
If the potential voter has no license, no Social Security number, no proof of U.S. citizenship, and no credit cards, he still will be registered—once harvesters provide him with a “unique identifier” number.
He can then vote that very day without any ID at all.
If, in California, you claim you are illiterate and cannot write your name—no problem.
You simply make a mark—anything from an X to a happy face. No one asks whether an illiterate can read the names on the ballot.
Then your handler serves as a “witness” and signs his name. Such witnesses are almost always vote harvesters, and they can sign as many ballots as they wish.
If all that doesn’t work, ballot “curers” can be called in help remedy rejected partisan ballots post facto.
Democrats now rely on the system to ensure supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, no statewide Republican officeholders, a tiny vestigial Republican congressional contingent, and almost exclusively Democratic-appointed liberal judges.
The more Democrats control the state, the more socialist, anti-democratic—and autocratic—California becomes.
Their gift to the nation is a third-world failed state, now in danger of societal collapse.
Fires rage—given ideologically driven prohibitions on brush and forest management, cuts in fire departments, and sheer bureaucratic incompetence.
Billions of welfare dollars are stolen with impunity. Illegal aliens who cannot speak or read English are given passes to obtain commercial trucking licenses—as if California’s critical road signs are written in some language other than English.
A quarter of residents can’t pay their sky-high power bills on time—and correctly assume that the state and the utility companies will mostly foot their delinquent bills.
Since 2020, over 100,000 criminals have been released early from state prisons—and most have little fear that their present and future crimes will earn them another prison sentence.
Half the state’s births are paid for through state-supplied welfare coverage.
And now the homeless without addresses or IDs can determine elections.
In sum, import poverty; romanticize illegal immigration; demonize the middle class; drive out private-sector capital; and exempt elites from the consequences of their own ideology—and you’re left with a state where democracy dies, along with everything else.
UBS analyst Peter Grom, who covers U.S. consumer staples including packaged food, beverages, and household products, served up a sour outlook for the salty-snack category, warning that the recovery investors had hoped for remains further out than expected.
"Despite recent optimism around a potential recovery in salty snacks, our analysis would suggest the category remains challenged. While tracked channel growth has turned positive relative to prior periods, we have observed momentum beginning to moderate with L13W $ takeaway growth decelerating to +1.2% vs. the +3.4% peak growth seen earlier in the year," Grom began the note.
Grom pointed out that the salty-snack category remains under pressure from a confluence of headwinds, including rapid GLP-1 adoption, potential SNAP benefit reductions, and mounting macroeconomic challenges faced by cash-strapped consumers.
"The combination of GLP-1 adoption, potential SNAP benefit reductions, and broader consumer spending pressures tied to the current geopolitical conflict has weighed on snack demand," the analyst said.
Grom noted that the Nielsen data show little evidence of a robust recovery, with buy rates, purchase frequency, spending per trip, units per trip, and overall projected sales all slowing. The category is also losing share to "better-for-you" options.
A Recovery Remains Uncertain
Snack trend down
He pointed out that competitive pressure has greatly intensified, adding that Pepsi remains the junk food king, with nearly half of category sales, but most large incumbents are generating flat-to-negative growth across tracked channels.
Pepsi's Frito-Lay North America food unit has experienced negative sales growth for much of the past year and continues to lose share despite investments in pricing, promotions, merchandising, and shelf space.
Another pressure point has been declining sales at convenience stores. He said C-store salty-snack sales, historically a strong growth engine, fell 3.5% in the latest 13 weeks as higher pump prices weighed on traffic and impulse purchases. Another headwind at C-stores has been the decline in SNAP sales.
One takeaway from Grom's note is that the confluence of pressures mentioned above has collided across the salty-snack aisle, derailing the recovery investors had hoped would take shape this year.
Anthropic Rushes Staff To D.C. After A National-Security Order Yanked Fable In Three Days
Senior Anthropic technical staff have been dispatched to Washington DC, after a Friday night government demand to implement sweeping export controls resulted in the company yanking its two most capable models Friday night after only a few days of public release - Mythos and Fable (Fable being Mythos with guardrails) - over the alleged ability to 'jailbreak' the latter. As of Sunday the models are still down, no restoration date has been set, but sources on both sides told Axios they are eager to resolve it. That said, the two parties best positioned to explain what happened are telling different stories as to how this happened.
The order is narrow on paper and sweeping in effect. It prohibits access by "any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees." Anthropic has no reliable way to verify a user's citizenship at the moment they send an API request or open a chat window, and its own staff, customers, and cloud partners are spread across dozens of countries. The company concluded it could not selectively block foreign nationals, so it blocked everyone. Anthropic's other models, including Opus 4.8, Sonnet, and Haiku, are untouched and still running.
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The directive came from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's office, and a U.S. official confirmed to Bloomberg that the department sent the letter. Curiously, the letter did not spell out the specific national-security concern behind it. The legal mechanism appears to be the "deemed export" rule, the decades-old principle that releasing controlled technology or source code to a foreign person counts as an export to that person's home country. Applying it to a deployed commercial frontier model is, by NBC's account, the first time a leading AI company has pulled a publicly deployed model offline because of federal intervention.
What we do know about Lutnick's letter; it requires a license for the export, re-export, or domestic transfer of the two models and reaches any foreign person on U.S. soil. It does not, on its face, bar U.S. citizens or the U.S. government, and the cutoff for American users is a consequence of Anthropic's inability to filter rather than the order's intent. Government access is murkier still: CyberScoop reports the National Security Agency had been given Mythos 5 to conduct offensive cyber operations through Project Glasswing, and it remains unclear how the directive affects that program. Foreign vetted partners were clearly swept in, with the Korea Times reporting that Korean Glasswing members including the Korea Internet & Security Agency, SK Telecom, and Samsung lost their access. In other words, the order disconnected allied security partners abroad while a U.S. agency's separate channel to the more powerful sibling model appears, on the order's logic, to sit outside its reach.
Confirmed cut offs:
Private/commercial users. Fable's public, API, and enterprise users, plus the private-sector Glasswing partners (the vetted cyber firms) who had Mythos.
Foreign government and intergovernmental partners. The Korea Times reports Korean Glasswing members (the Korea Internet & Security Agency, SK Telecom, Samsung) lost access, and Security Affairs reports European Glasswing partners including NATO and ENISA (the EU's cybersecurity agency) were cut off with no notice. Those are foreign nationals under the order, so the order reaches them directly.
The reach inside the United States is the most unusual part, and it produced an awkward result for Anthropic; their own employees can't use Mythos or Fable now. Any non-citizen querying Fable from, say, an apartment in San Francisco is barred exactly as if they were in Shanghai - and that population includes a meaningful share of Anthropic's own workforce, since frontier labs run heavily on foreign-born engineers. The company effectively had to lock some of its own staff out of the model it had just shipped. Dean Ball, an AI policy expert who briefly served in the current administration and has been sharply critical of its moves against the company, called the action "cartoonish" on X, pointing to the incoherence of an administration that wants to export advanced AI chips to China while moving to bar allied users, from Britain on down, from the best American models.
Tinfoil, anyone?
The national security order might be a godsend for Anthropic - which priced Fable at ten dollars per million input tokens and fifty per million output, double its Opus 4.8 flagship and, by its own description, less than half the price of Mythos Preview - the most expensive model it sells and a token-hungry one on long tasks. It was free on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans only from June 9 through June 22, with metered credits taking over after, and Anthropic was candid the staged rollout was about capacity, expecting demand "very high, and difficult to predict."
So this shutdown, triggered by Amazon (read below), and landing three days into a two-week giveaway conveniently capped an expensive subsidy that after we're guessing most users switched to the thirsty model.
How Three Days Unspooled
Fable 5 launched on June 9 as the first broadly available "Mythos-class" model, the public-facing version of a system Anthropic had previously kept behind a vetted-access wall because of its cyber and biological capabilities. Mythos 5, the same underlying model with some safeguards removed, stayed reserved for cleared cybersecurity partners. Fable 5 was the middle path: Mythos-grade capability, Anthropic said, with guardrails strong enough for general release. The company put it on the API, made it generally available on Amazon Bedrock and GitHub Copilot, and folded it into Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans at no extra charge through June 22.
The imminent “Anthropic - White House” ceasefire is the new imminent “Iran-US” ceasefire https://t.co/byCO9mLo2h
The launch was rocky before Washington entered. Researchers complained the safeguards were overbroad and that ordinary technical work was being downgraded. A sharper backlash hit over what users called a "silent fallback," a mechanism that quietly rerouted certain high-risk queries to the older Opus 4.8 without telling the user. Anthropic reversed it, apologized, and said flagged requests would be made visible. Then, on June 10, a well-known jailbreaker who posts as Pliny the Liberator published what he claimed was a working bypass of Fable's safety systems, complete with lurid outputs spanning cyber exploits and chemical synthesis. It gave the controversy a public face, though it is worth noting it was not the finding the government ultimately cited. Anthropic has never confirmed which jailbreak triggered the order, the viral Pliny post or the private report described below.
π¨ JAILBREAK ALERT π¨
ANTHROPIC: PWNED π«‘
FABLE-5: LIBERATED π¦
let's start with the π...
the consensus seems to be that this has been one of the most disappointing model drops of all time, effectively preventing legitimate researchers from contributing their talents to our… pic.twitter.com/Z0vdPIt4vY
Anthropic says it received a Friday evening call giving it roughly ninety minutes to take the models down over a national-security threat, with no specifics attached. The Lutnick letter followed that afternoon. By late evening, users had lost access, and Anthropic posted its statement calling the situation a misunderstanding. The next day, David Sacks and Pete Hegseth offered the administration's version in public. As of this writing, the models are still offline.
The Trigger Was Amazon
The finding that set this off appears to have come not from an anonymous internet jailbreak but from Amazon, which is to say from Anthropic's single largest investor.
According to the Wall Street Journal, corroborated by The Information and Reuters, Amazon researchers found a way to prompt Fable 5 into surfacing information useful for cyberattacks, and Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy raised the concern directly with senior officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The company's report reportedly showed Fable surfacing security bugs in at least four software programs when fed a specific set of queries, and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross and Lutnick were both in the conversations. Sacks, in his thread, described the source only as a "highly credible trusted partner." Amazon has declined to detail the research, telling reporters it is "not uncommon for governments to seek our counsel" on security risks and that it does not discuss the substance of those talks. AWS, which hosted Fable 5 through Bedrock, later confirmed Anthropic had asked it to revoke access for all users in all regions. Amazon was not alone in raising flags, either: at least five other companies submitted warnings in the same window.
What's interesting is that Amazon is Anthropic's largest backer - with a cumulative stake of roughly $13 billion and a $100 billion AWS spending commitment running the other way, plus a board seat, the cloud that serves the models, and a Trainium chip relationship. One of the companies most thoroughly entangled with Anthropic's business helped prompt a government action that knocked Anthropic's flagship launch offline eleven days after the company filed confidentially for an IPO. There may be an entirely straightforward explanation, that Amazon spotted a real risk and escalated it through the proper channel.
Was Amazon concerned about being legally responsible for jailbroken Fable hackings?
By Anthropic's account, the government supplied only verbal evidence of a narrow, non-universal bypass that amounted to asking the model to read a codebase and flag software bugs - with the same result obtainable from other public models including OpenAI's GPT-5.5. The company argues a narrow jailbreak cannot justify "recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people," and that applying that standard industry-wide would "halt all new model deployments." It is a first-party account from a company that wants its product back online, but it is the more detailed of the two, and Anthropic notes that thousands of hours of pre-launch red-teaming by the U.S. government, the U.K. AI Security Institute, and outside groups found no universal jailbreak.
It is also corroborated by the only named expert who has read the underlying report. Katie Moussouris, the Luta Security chief executive who built Microsoft's bug-bounty program and helped design the Pentagon's first, reviewed the Amazon findings at Anthropic's request and told the Journal and Fortune it was "not a jailbreak" but "Defense Oriented Prompting (DOP), capabilities defenders need," adding that if national defense was the goal the response "just scored an own goal against us." Chris McGuire of the Council on Foreign Relations, no reflexive critic, called the across-the-board restriction "highly questionable."
The administration's case runs the other way, and it runs on Anthropic's own rhetoric. Sacks, who co-chairs the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and previously served as the White House AI and crypto czar, says a trusted partner found a working jailbreak and that the administration asked CEO Dario Amodei to fix it or pull the model. "Dario allegedly refused."
Sacks points out that Anthropic spent months calling Mythos-class models a more dangerous category needing oversight; Fable is Mythos with guardrails - so a bypass exposes "operability of a cyber weapon" to people who should not have it. His bottom line: "the ball is in Anthropic's court."
I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true:
— As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable.…
Meanwhile, a more alarming claim, that the trigger involved access from China, rests on a single Semafor source and is disputed by Anthropic, which says the issue was never raised and that it blocks access from inside China. Treasury, Commerce, and the Bureau of Industry and Security have not put a technical case on the record. Anthropic wants its model live and its safety brand intact; the White House wants to look alert rather than asleep as AI starts touching cyber operations. Nobody has shown the proof.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth posted a "Told ya so" - writing "Three months ago, @DeptofWar kicked @AnthropicAI out of our building—forever ... Every passing day proves why that was the right move."
Sacks has explicitly denied the Fable action is retaliation, and there is no public evidence that it is. But the prior friction is real, and the administration's own messaging keeps blurring the line between a technical enforcement action and a broader fight over who sets the terms for AI in national security.
Precedent-Setting
For the rest of the industry, the precedent is the point: a frontier model can be launched, praised, and pulled from global availability inside a week, by emergency directive, for reasons its provider cannot fully see. Reporting suggests the administration is treating this as Anthropic-specific for now, but even a one-company action pushes every lab toward pre-clearing high-capability releases. That direction is not hypothetical; Trump signed an executive order this month directing agencies to establish a voluntary mechanism for the government to get early access to powerful models before deployment. The Fable order is what the involuntary version looks like.
Enterprises are reading it as a resilience warning, with analysts urging multi-provider routing, local fallback, and a harder look at open-weight models - exactly the immunity Chinese open-source labs are now marketing. For U.S. allies the lesson is sharper, because the order cut off allied users too, sweeping European, Canadian, and Indian customers into the same blackout. The European Commission said emergency measures should not discriminate against partners; French officials reached for the language of technological sovereignty. The subtext, that AI infrastructure controlled in Washington can be switched off in Washington, is now being said aloud.
Then there's the paradox Anthropic helped build - long arguing that governments should be able to block unsafe deployments, distinguishing itself from rivals who oppose binding rules. This is what that looks like when the process is not the "transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts" one it envisioned but an emergency directive with no public record. Its objection is not that no model should ever be stopped, but that this is the wrong way to stop one - a harder argument for a company that spent years naming the danger and marketing the restraint.
The imminent “Anthropic - White House” ceasefire is the new imminent “Iran-US” ceasefire https://t.co/byCO9mLo2h
Ethereum could begin adding post-quantum protections to accounts for as little as $0.07, without waiting for a hard fork, according to the Ethereum Foundation's Kohaku project lead Nicolas Consigny.
In a Saturday X post, Consigny shared a paper proposing a cheaper way for Ethereum users to protect their accounts against future quantum-computing threats. The approach adapts SPHINCS+, a post-quantum signature standard developed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, to work more efficiently on Ethereum.
Dubbed “SPHINCS-,” the proposal aims to reduce onchain verification costs without requiring a protocol change or precompile. Consigny described SPHINCS- as a bridge toward a future post-quantum signature system dubbed “leanSPHINCS,” which aims to further reduce verification costs through aggregation.
The proposal seeks to address the long-term risk of a quantum threat to Ethereum's Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm with a cost-efficient solution that may be deployed before a dedicated hard fork is developed.
Future quantum computing threats stirs crypto community
In April, post-quantum startup Project Eleven awarded a prize to researcher Giancarlo Lelli for using a quantum computer to break a 15-bit elliptic-curve key.
Bitcoin’s keys are 256 bits long, significantly larger than the 15-bit key Lelli managed to crack. He derived the private key from a public key paired to it, using a variant of Shor’s algorithm, a quantum computing technique that theoretically poses a threat to the type of cryptography used by Bitcoin.
According to Glassnode, about 1.92 million Bitcoin, representing nearly 10% of the total supply, are considered “structurally unsafe” in a future quantum attack scenario. Another 4.12 million BTC, or 20.6% of the supply, are classified as “operationally unsafe” due to key or address management practices.
The analytics company estimates that the remaining 69.8% of the supply, or 13.99 million Bitcoin, remains unexposed to a quantum computing threat, broadly in line with Ark Invest’s March estimate that 65% of the supply was safe.
