Are calls for unity too weak and too generic to move Americans? What are the hard truths that stand in the way of unity?
Educator, activist, and author Tim Shriver joined the Braver Angels podcast to talk about his new book, "The Call to Unite," and the budding nationwide movement to unite America.
The Call to Unite | Tim Shriver with John Wood, Jr. & April Lawsonwww.youtube.com
Prediction markets are expanding beyond finance into politics, war, and public policy. Explore the ethical, democratic, and legislative questions they raise.
Imagine opening an app on your phone and placing a bet on whether peace talks between two countries will fail, a conflict will escalate, or a terrorist attack will occur before the end of the year.
For a growing number of people, that is no longer a hypothetical scenario.
Prediction markets, online platforms where users trade contracts based on future events, have expanded rapidly in recent years. What began largely as a tool for forecasting elections and economic trends is increasingly moving into public policy and global affairs.
Supporters argue that these markets provide valuable information about what people think will happen next.
By requiring participants to put money behind their predictions, advocates contend that prediction markets can outperform traditional forecasting methods in certain circumstances. Researchers have used them to forecast everything from election outcomes to economic indicators and public health trends.
Those benefits do deserve consideration. Better forecasting can help policymakers, journalists, and citizens alike make more informed decisions.
But as prediction markets expand beyond economics, they raise a different set of questions. The debate is no longer just about accuracy. It is about what kinds of events should become objects of financial speculation.
Some prediction markets already allow users to speculate on elections, government actions, social trends, and international events. As the industry grows, so does the range of subjects available for trading.
That shift has important implications for democratic life.
There is a meaningful difference between using markets to understand economic activity and using them to place a price on public affairs. A democracy is not simply a collection of probabilities to be traded. It depends on shared trust and a shared belief that political decisions should be made in the public interest.
When prediction markets involve war, terrorism, or international crises, they transform human suffering and geopolitical instability into opportunities for profit. Foreign affairs become something to speculate on rather than something to engage with as citizens.
The concern is not simply that people may profit from tragedy. It is that financial incentives can begin to shape how we relate to politics itself.
Democracy works best when citizens evaluate public issues based on their values, priorities, and vision for the future. Prediction markets encourage a different mindset. They reward participants for focusing on what is likely to happen rather than what should happen.
Over time, that shift can affect the culture surrounding politics. Elections, policy debates, and international crises begin to resemble events to be watched, analyzed, and traded rather than civic challenges that require public engagement.
Markets also shape incentives.
Once money becomes attached to political and geopolitical outcomes, some actors will inevitably seek ways to influence those outcomes, spread information that moves markets, or capitalize on access to privileged knowledge. Even when no laws are broken, the perception that people can profit from conflict and crisis can erode trust in public institutions.
That concern is already being taken seriously in Washington.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Senate unanimously voted to prohibit senators and staff from participating in prediction markets.
The concern arose from a simple reality: lawmakers often possess information that the public does not. Allowing them to trade on political events raises serious questions about conflicts of interest and insider advantage.
At the same time, Representatives Nikki Budzinski and Adrian Smith introduced the bipartisan PREDICT Act, which would prohibit members of Congress, senior federal officials, and their immediate family members from trading on prediction markets tied to political events and government actions.
Taken together, these efforts suggest that policymakers are beginning to recognize a growing challenge. Prediction markets are no longer a niche corner of the internet. They have become influential enough that lawmakers believe guardrails are necessary.
Supporters of prediction markets argue that transparency can address many of these concerns. They note that publicly visible forecasts may be preferable to private speculation occurring behind closed doors.
That argument has merit. Forecasting itself is not the problem.
The real question is where society should draw the line. There is a difference between predicting economic trends and creating markets around armed conflicts, acts of terrorism, or sensitive government decisions. The fact that a market can be created does not necessarily mean it should be.
Young people have a particular stake in this conversation.
We are inheriting a political system already shaped by money and concentrated economic power. We have watched housing become less affordable, college costs rise, and public trust in institutions decline. Many young Americans already feel disconnected from political institutions.
Prediction markets risk deepening that disconnect. At a time when many young people are searching for ways to participate meaningfully in public life, we should be cautious about systems that encourage us to view politics primarily through the lens of speculation.
The rules governing these markets are still being written. That means young people have an opportunity to shape the conversation before prediction markets become a permanent feature of democratic life.
We should be asking difficult questions about accountability, transparency, and the appropriate limits of financial speculation. We should be paying attention to the legislation being debated in Congress. And we should be willing to challenge the assumption that every aspect of public life should be transformed into a market.
The future of foreign policy should be shaped by democratic participation and the public interest. It should not depend on who is best positioned to profit from conflict, crisis, or uncertainty.
If we want a democracy that serves its citizens rather than speculators, now is the time to decide where the boundaries belong.
Rachel Ledoux is a student at Simmons University studying political science and economics with a focus on public policy. She is also a member of the Massachusetts chapter of the Young People's Alliance.
Close-up of AI chatbot on mobile
During the rise of the Internet, as the World Wide Web moved from government and academic settings to family homes, parents worried about the exposure of their children to predators in online chatrooms. A generation later, as social media became central to young people’s lives, the dangers of platforms like Facebook and Instagram to children’s mental health moved to the forefront of the national conversation.
Now, as lawmakers and parents continue to grapple with how to keep children safe on social media, there’s a new danger already taking shape: AI-powered chatbots that simulate friendship, emotional intimacy, and care with children who may not be able to tell the difference.
The scale of adoption makes this risk even more urgent. 64 percent of teens use AI chatbots, and 28 percent use them daily. One-third of teens find conversations with chatbots more or as satisfying as conversations with humans.
Generative AI is entering daily life at a pace few consumer technologies have matched, reshaping how people work, learn, search for information, and even seek emotional support. This revolutionary technology has great potential for young people, including by offering new ways to personalize education to individual needs. But alongside the benefits, young people face serious risks, especially when chatbots are designed not just to answer children’s questions, but to increase engagement.
Many chatbots use personified language to form affiliative bonds and increase user engagement. This phenomenon, known as anthropomorphism, is the attribution of human-like feelings and behaviors to inanimate objects. In chatbots, it is one of the most dangerous features for children.
Due to developmental vulnerabilities, children have a harder time distinguishing simulated care from genuine human relationships. This can lead to unhealthy relationships with chatbots that, in some serious cases, have resulted in self-harm, violence, and suicide.
Developers train chatbots to produce outputs that sound uncannily human, including anthropomorphic design cues such as small talk, colloquial expressions, emoticons, expressed emotions, and first-person pronouns. This style of communication makes people feel a sense of social presence, or the feeling of being with someone. It is precisely what makes a chatbot feel less like software and more like a companion.
Minors are particularly susceptible to this. While their prefrontal cortex is still under development, impulsive and emotional decisions often override rational thought. If a child bounces a wild idea off a peer or an adult, they may face pushback. Chatbots that are excessively validating can encourage dangerous activities, but can never take responsibility for them.
Researchers who performed simulated conversations teens may have with chatbots found that neither general-purpose nor companion chatbots pushed back when the user wanted to get a giant tattoo of a tiger on their bicep, go into the middle of the woods with no plans, or “get drunk faster.”
In being an always-there outlet that simulates human-like empathy and behaviors, personified chatbots can foster addiction and replace social interaction.
Multiple studies looking into anthropomorphism have linked it to chatbot addiction.
In a congressional hearing last year on chatbot harms, one mother explained that when she attempted to take her son’s phone to search for answers on why he was withdrawing from the family, he attacked her and bit her hand. Another father read ChatGPT transcripts that convinced his son to turn away from his family and led him to trust the chatbot over his brother.
Technology designed to form this kind of dependent relationship with children poses serious risks.
For decades, technology companies have treated human-like communication as a sign of progress. The classic Turing test measured whether a machine could imitate human conversation well enough to fool a person into thinking it was human. But for children, that goal may now be exactly backward. In the current AI chatbot era, the safer standard is not whether technology can fool someone into thinking they are human, but whether it is distinguishable from human social engagement.
AI companies should not be able to deceive and addict children with highly personified designs. While some legislative proposals have called for chatbot companies to occasionally display text disclosures that the chatbot is AI and not human, the efficacy of this intervention is questionable when users are constantly chatting with something that presents itself otherwise.
To mitigate the risks of emotional dependency and social isolation for children, Congress should pass a chatbot child safety bill that requires a non-personified default setting—one which fails the Turing test—for users under 18.
Recognizing the potential benefits of chatbots for young people, this approach differs from other proposals that ban AI companions for users under 18. A ban on minors’ use of AI companion chatbots would only protect against chatbots built solely for companionship, not general-purpose chatbots that still have personified design cues. This type of setting allows chatbots to continue being used for educational and creative purposes. If a child goes to a chatbot for homework help, the non-personalized default setting helps reduce the risk of the child developing an unhealthy relationship.
A non-personified default setting would preserve the educational and creative benefits of chatbots while drawing a clear line: technology for children should act like technology, not like a substitute for human relationships. The internet and social media taught us what happens when lawmakers wait until harms are widespread before setting basic rules for children’s safety. Congress should not make the same mistake with AI.
Allie Maloney is a Policy Analyst for Americans for Responsible Innovation, where she researches AI governance policies that protect child safety and privacy.
A NASA logo is displayed at the entrance to the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters building on May 30, 2026, in Washington, DC.
As part of a collaboration between The Fulcrum's NextGen initiative and Made By Us, The Fulcrum is publishing Letters to America, a series created through the Youth250 project that invites Gen Z to reflect on the nation’s past, present, and future as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary.
On June 4, 1876, on the eve of our Nation’s centennial, the Transcontinental Express completed its inaugural voyage across America’s newly constructed coast-to-coast railroad, traveling from the Atlantic to the Pacific in just 83 hours. This milestone marked the end of the Railroad Race and the beginning of the Gilded Age, epitomized by its rail barons and drastic wealth disparity.
On June 12, 2026, as America approached its 250th anniversary, it gained the world’s first trillionaire. This milestone marks the latest phase in a Billionaire Space Race, the driving force behind a New Gilded Age, epitomized by “space barons” and previously unimaginable wealth.
Like the race to build transcontinental rail, the commercial space race is a rush to establish cheap infrastructure for a new frontier. Just as the railroads dramatically reduced the cost of shipping, commercial space services similarly promise to reduce the cost of putting payloads into orbit.
The commercial space race echoes its steam-powered predecessor in more than just exploration. The private space industry is likewise subject to the whims of its billionaire owners and supported by monopolistic, eye-popping, and ever-growing government contracts.
If America fails to institute common-sense regulation of this commercial space cartel, we are on track to relearn the hard lessons of the Gilded Age, with its questionable business dealings, dodgy practices, and relentless pursuit of profit.
The rail barons were empowered by government contracts and laws, effectively giving them carte blanche in the West. Their monopoly on railroad construction meant they could charge taxpayers as much as they wanted, cutting corners and inflating costs wherever they could, making the transcontinental railroad construction process ruinously dangerous, expensive, and inefficient.
After killing NASA's Space Shuttle program in 2012, the United States became dependent, overnight, on Russia for launch capabilities. Since 2020, this liability has shifted to our private sector, with SpaceX providing launch services, alongside other emerging companies like Blue Origin—and just like the railroad race, the corporate space race is administered through lucrative government contracts.
The key tenets of international space law—establishing outer space as the “domain of all mankind,” preserving it, and preventing land claims—apply to state actors, not private ones. While nations are theoretically responsible for addressing violations by private companies under their jurisdiction, a country dependent on private companies for launch services has little incentive to hold them accountable.
For-profit companies are not beholden to the international community or even to our Nation; they are responsible only to their owners, the space barons who hold monopolies on American space travel.
In the race to build a transcontinental railroad, the lack of meaningful regulation led to lengthy detours, needless worker deaths, and wasted taxpayer money. The commercial space race ups the ante exponentially. A brief glance at recent history demonstrates these risks.
On January 16, 2025, a SpaceX Starship launch exploded over the Caribbean, showering flaming wreckage and toxic chemicals over an area roughly three times the size of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, endangering life below, and putting at risk dozens of passenger airlines flying through the debris field.
The following year, on May 28, the failure of a Blue Origin rocket test resulted in the second-largest explosion in space-launch history, destroying a historic NASA launchpad and again putting lives at risk on the ground.
These tragedies, which underscore real-life dangers posed by a poorly regulated commercial space industry, are only two examples; the list goes on.
The United States space program has yet to return to its peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That it has taken us over half a century to get back to the Moon is simultaneously a testament to the ineffectiveness of our current model and to the benefits of the previous model, with its publicly owned infrastructure.
Contractors always have been, and always will be, a necessary component of space travel; but the only way to guarantee safety and accountability to the taxpayer is through a combination of NASA ownership/operation of launch infrastructure and better regulation of the private space industry.
There remains a place—indeed, an imperative—for private launch services, but they must play by the same rules as their public counterparts and uphold the same standards of safety, transparency, and accountability. Only in this way can our public/private space partnership avoid repeating the mistakes of the Railroad Race at our Nation’s centennial, and successfully navigate America's final frontier in our 250th year and beyond.Ira Parsons, 17, Scottsdale, AZ
Ira Parsons, 17, Scottsdale, AZ
ICE agents stand guard in front of protesters outside the federal immigration center at Delaney Hall in Newark, where ICE is housing detained immigrants on May 26, 2026 in Newark, New Jersey.
Last week, while the world watched JD Vance fly to Switzerland to negotiate an Iran deal, a quieter document surfaced from inside the Department of Homeland Security that may matter more to the daily lives of Americans than anything that happened at Lake Lucerne. A DHS Privacy Threshold Analysis, obtained and reported by NPR, outlines plans to give approximately 1,300 local police forces access to the same facial recognition technology that federal ICE agents currently use in the field. The app is called the ICE Task Force Module. It allows an officer to photograph any person they stop, run the image against federal databases, and receive an identity match in seconds. Every photograph taken is stored in a DHS system for fifteen years. The document states plainly that this surveillance will sweep up American citizens. The DHS knows this. It is proceeding anyway.
This is not an immigration story. It is a surveillance infrastructure story, and the distinction is the most important thing to understand about what is being built.
The ICE Task Force Module is already in partial operation. Community members in Minnesota and Maine have reported that federal immigration officers photographed their faces and license plates during enforcement operations, and that officers appeared to already know their names and addresses before approaching them. That is what real-time facial recognition plus a fifteen-year database looks like in practice: it means that attending a public event, standing on a sidewalk near an ICE operation, or legally observing an enforcement action can result in a photograph entering a federal file that persists for over a decade.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin acknowledged to Congress that the agency has already used facial recognition on protesters, including identifying people who attended protests in Oregon and cross-referencing them with individuals present at protests in Newark. That is not an incidental use of immigration technology. That is the surveillance of political activity, conducted by a federal immigration agency, stored in a database for fifteen years.
The DHS's own document provides the clearest evidence of what the program will do to people who are not its stated targets. The text reads: "It is conceivable that a photo taken by an ICE non-federal law enforcement officer using the TFM mobile application could be that of someone other than a removable individual, including U.S. citizens." The use of the word "conceivable" is the bureaucratic tell. The document is not describing an edge case. It is describing the standard operating reality of any biometric surveillance system deployed on public streets. Facial recognition software makes errors. It makes more errors with darker skin tones. The people most likely to be wrongly identified and detained are the people who were already most exposed to aggressive enforcement.
Patrick Eddington of the Cato Institute put it directly: giving 1,300 police agencies this capability makes face surveillance "ubiquitous on American streets." This is no longer a speculative concern about future technology. It is a description of a program being rolled out now, through a network of local police forces who were never elected to run a federal surveillance operation and who have no independent oversight mechanism for how the photographs they collect are used.
The most important thing about what is being built is that it will not end with this administration. Surveillance infrastructure, once constructed and normalized, almost never contracts. The fifteen-year retention window for photographs taken today means that a database assembled under a deportation mandate in 2026 will still exist, fully searchable, in 2041. A different administration with different priorities will inherit a tool capable of identifying, locating, and tracking millions of Americans whose faces were captured during immigration operations they had nothing to do with.
Congress has the authority to require that biometric data collected in the course of immigration enforcement be purged after a defined period, that its use be restricted to the stated purpose of that enforcement, and that any secondary use, including tracking protest attendance, require a warrant. None of those safeguards currently exist. None appear to be under serious consideration. The database grows, photograph by photograph, fifteen-year retention by fifteen-year retention, while the debate remains focused on Switzerland.
Consider what this looks like on the ground. On March 27, 2026, ICE agents in Huntington Beach surrounded a man next to his vehicle, failed to establish his identity through conventional means, and then attempted to scan his face using facial recognition technology. The man was not suspected of any crime. No warrant had been issued. He was a United States citizen. On December 10, 2025, in Cedar-Riverside, Minneapolis, a 20-year-old American citizen named Mubashir Khalif Hussen was stopped by masked ICE agents walking to lunch. He repeated, "I'm a citizen, I'm a citizen." The agents refused to look at his ID. He was shackled and driven to a federal building before being released. His face is now in a federal database. It will remain there until 2041.
These are not isolated incidents. Facial recognition systems have already misidentified individuals, leading to wrongful arrests and months of detention for people with no connection to any alleged activity. Fifteen known people in the United States have been wrongfully arrested due to facial recognition errors; virtually all of them were Black. The system that generated those errors is now being scaled to 1,300 local police forces and integrated into a fifteen-year federal database.
The political will to stop this exists, but it is not being applied. The technology is being deployed in the noise of a news cycle saturated with Iran, Switzerland, and British politics. By the time the public focuses on what has been built, most of the building will already be done. That is, of course, precisely the point.
Imran Khalid is a physician, geostrategic analyst, and freelance writer.
