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
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport on March 23, 2026 in West Palm Beach, Florida.
WASHINGTON – Independent journalist Georgia Fort filmed federal agents outside of her home on Jan. 30. They were coming to arrest her in connection with reporting and filming at an anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis, Minn., almost two weeks prior.
“I don’t feel like I have my First Amendment right as a member of the press,” said Fort in video footage shared with CNN.
She added that “it’s hard to understand how we have a Constitution, constitutional rights, when you can just be arrested for being a member of the press.”
Don Lemon, a former CNN host, was arrested in late January in connection with the same protest. Junn Bollman, an independent photographer, was also arrested in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, according to reporting by the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Arresting journalists escalated the Trump administration’s consistent attacks against the media. Experts warn that these attacks could have a chilling effect on the press, which the public relies on for information and to hold government officials accountable.
“You need the press to find out about your neighbors being abducted if it doesn't happen in front of your eyes, and it usually won't happen in front of your eyes,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “Whatever it is that you are most concerned about and that you want to resist during this administration, you know you're going to need a free press to give you the information you need in order to advocate effectively for your priorities.”
THE PRESIDENT AND THE PRESS
The executive branch needs some amount of secrecy, which means the president and the press have “always been at odds with each other,” said Matt Carlson, professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
“Journalists' job is to bring all these things into the public eye,” said Carlson. “Even presidents who seem supportive of the press are always unhappy when what they're doing is reported into everyone's living rooms or everyone's computers or everyone's newspapers.”
Historian Harold Hozner said Trump is not the first president to criticize the media.
“The first president who talked about fake news was the first president, George Washington,” Hozner said.
Other presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, attempted to limit the freedom of the press. However, Hozner noted that previous administrations implemented restrictions during genuine national emergencies.
“The difference is that Donald Trump has done this without a national emergency,” Hozner said. “There has been no declaration of war. There has been no insurrection, except when Donald Trump was leaving the presidency in 2021.”
Since Trump became the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, he has regularly attacked journalists, Carlson said.
According to Reporters without Borders, in the two months before the 2024 presidential election, Trump verbally attacked the media over 100 times, not including social media posts. Trump has also insulted female reporters using sexist language and demeaning comments, while others in his administration have publicly argued with journalists.
Carlson said Trump has challenged the legitimacy of journalism as a whole.
“It tears down confidence in the press as an honest broker in seeking the truth. And I think that's the goal,” said Hozner. “I think it's a very purposeful, long-range way to tear down the reputation of the press.”
ESCALATION AFTER ESCALATION
In addition to verbal attacks on the media, the Trump administration has tried to restrict reporting.
In the first few months of the second administration, the White House took over deciding who would make up the press pool, a job previously handled by the White House Correspondents Association.
The Trump administration tried to ban the Associated Press from White House coverage after the publication refused to change its style guide on the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The Pentagon also restricted access to only allow journalists who agreed to various reporting restrictions. On Wednesday, they also banned press photographers from briefings on the Iran War.
The administration’s actions against the press have escalated in recent months, with the arrests of three journalists in connection with their reporting at a protest in Minnesota and the raid of a Washington Post journalist’s home.
Previous presidents, including former President Barack Obama, have used tools like the Espionage Act to go after sources that leaked confidential information, said Gabe Rottman, the vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Arresting journalists for their work at protests is an attempt to “criminalize very routine newsgathering practices,” Stern said.
Fort, Pullman, and Lemon were each charged with two crimes. The first was conspiring to deprive people of their civil rights, and the second was violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which prohibits interfering with access to reproductive health clinics and places of worship.
The journalists’ arrests were "unprecedented" and a “really dramatic overcharge,” Rottman said.
Charges are usually brought at the local or state level, and it is very rare for journalists to be charged, let alone convicted, for covering a protest, Rottman said.
In January, FBI agents executed a search warrant on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natson’s home. Her phone, a watch, a personal laptop, and a work computer were seized. Natson was not the target of the investigation. Authorities were investigating a government contractor accused of possessing classified documents.
Prior to the raid, journalists had some assurance they could publish leaks without retribution, Stern said.
“Now, any journalist who wants to publish a government leak has to consider the possibility that their home might be raided,” Stern said.
Stern added that government leaks have been crucial to some of the most important news in American history.
“If you see these instances in isolation, you can point to precedent for them under administrations of both parties,” said Rottman. “When you put them all together, it's escalation after escalation.”
A CHILLING EFFECT
By going after independent journalists, the Trump administration is trying to “intimidate” reporters everywhere, Stern said. He added that it makes journalists “second-guess whether they can safely do their jobs without getting arrested” and creates a landscape where people are unsure how laws are enforced.
“Nobody knows what routine conduct the administration is going to figure out a way to go after next,” Stern said. “The only discernible rule that you can figure out if you're a journalist trying not to be targeted by this administration is to self-censor, to not report things that the administration doesn't want you to report.”
Stern added that people do not always know when publications are self-censoring.
“We will never know how many stories we didn't read about because a journalist decided to self-censor, or a news outlet decided to self-censor,” Stern said. “We know what news we do read. We don't know what we don't know. So it's entirely possible that some really significant news has not come across our radars because of fear of retribution.”
Despite the Trump administration’s wide variety of attacks, great journalism and reporting critical of the administration has still continued, Stern said.
“From the most powerful to, you could argue, the most vulnerable, the administration is coming up with tactics to suppress news gathering and chill reporting,” Stern said. “The media hasn't rolled over and died.”
According to reporting by PBS, after Lemon’s arrest, he said he would continue reporting.
"I have spent my entire career covering the news. I will not stop now,” Lemon said. “In fact, there is no more important time than right now, this very moment, for a free and independent media that shines a light on the truth and holds those in power accountable."
Marissa Fernandez covers politics for Medill on the Hill.
There has been no shortage of articles hailing the opportunity of AI and ones forecasting disaster from AI. I understand the good uses to which AI could be put, but I am also well aware of the ways in which AI is dangerous or will denigrate our lives as thinking human beings.
First, the good uses. There is no question that AI can outthink human beings, regardless of how famous or knowledgeable, because of the amount of information it can process in a short amount of time. The most powerful accounts I've read have been in the field of medical research: doctors have fed facts into AI, asking for a diagnosis or a possible remedy, and AI has come up with remarkable answers beyond the human mind's capability.
Clearly, AI, in the hands of knowledgeable professionals, can assist them in doing their work and improving our lives.
That, however, is where the good news ends. And it all depends on the phrase "in the hands of knowledgeable professionals." AI in the hands of everyday people, as it is already today, is a danger to themselves and our society. Let me give you some examples.
Perhaps the worst are the many reported cases where individuals are using AI as a companion or advisor. People, mostly teenagers, it appears, are looking to chatbots for emotional support, including advice on suicide, because they don't have someone to confide in. AI may sound like a person and be able to respond to what someone says or asks, but it isn't trained to respond to the complexities that make up a person's emotional state. Further, they are currently designed mostly to reassure people with doubts; if someone is in emotional trouble, reassuring that person that he's doing the right thing is probably exactly the wrong thing to do.
Another class of cases are people—I assume again very lonely people—who look to chatbots as a love or sex object. There was a report of one teenage boy who committed suicide in order to "join" his chatbot love. People are confusing illusion and reality.
It has also been reported that many people who are having problems with the medical profession or who just don't have access to a doctor are using chatbots to self-diagnose. The reader may well ask, if professionals can use AI for this purpose, why can't the average layman? The answer is that AI depends on the quality of the information it is given about the problem it is being asked to solve. The old expression, "Crap in, crap out," clearly applies here. Medical problems are so complex that it is unlikely the patient can identify all the factors AI needs to properly answer the question.
A second class of harm comes from the use of AI by individuals intent on creating misinformation, whether on the right or the left, to influence people's responses to political events.
We have seen the impact that misinformation on social media has had. Now we have the added impact of AI. As was just reported by The New York Times, a "torrent of fake videos and images" has been generated by people using AI to create reactions to the Iran war online. The impact of these images is strong because people tend to believe what they see; AI has been perfected to a level where, even in the hands of amateurs, one cannot tell that an AI-generated video or image is fake.
An entirely different kind of harm comes from people—whether students or adults—who use AI to generate a variety of work products—papers, applications, articles. To say that this practice is a no-no is obvious. When someone submits work-product, it should be their own, meaning it results from their own mind. Using AI to generate such things is just another way of cheating.
But the problem is not just that these people are being dishonest about what they have submitted. It's that they haven't used their mind. Remember the famous words of Descartes: "I think, therefore I am." The development and use of one's mind is what makes people grow, increase their ability to process information, and perform tasks. Using AI yields no growth.
The list goes on and on. But the general point is the one I started with: In the hands of professionals, AI is already very useful for analyzing difficult or rare situations, and it will likely become even more so. However, in the hands of the average person, it is either a way to meet an emotional need that isn't being satisfied in the real world, an invitation to be lazy or cheat, or a way to spread misinformation to achieve a goal.
While I sympathize deeply with people who are lonely and look to their chatbot to mitigate that loneliness, it is a bad and dangerous answer. For those using AI because their human providers are inadequate, their problem is very real, but using AI is again a bad and dangerous answer.
People in both these situations are suffering from a failure of society—of humans—to provide an environment where people are nourished and heard. Whether it's within the family, in the workplace, or in one's relationship with a healing or other provider, this is a serious societal problem. But chatbots are not the answer.
The answer, as I see it, is twofold. First, the law needs to regulate the use of AI. Its use should be restricted to assisting professionals in analyzing problems. AI products (e.g., chatbots) should not be available to the average person. AI should be treated similarly to a controlled substance; only people licensed to use it can obtain it.
Let the tech giants howl at this limitation on their ability to make money from their AI investments. Even with restricted use, I have no doubt that they can figure out how to make a good profit.
Second, society and families are failing people in numerous ways. Parents need to change the way they raise their children (see my book, Raising a Happy Child). Doctors need to communicate better with their patients. And society needs to stop sending people messages of inadequacy. The latter will, in all likelihood, never come about. And so children will continue to be harmed by what they learn from the media and by their interactions with others.
If we cannot change society, then we have to provide children (or adults) with the means to see themselves differently so they are not damaged by these interactions. (See my book, Discover Your Power.) Turning to chatbots to resolve the problem is not the answer.
Finally, AI should not enable people to influence an already chaotic political landscape by distributing misinformation. This dangerous tool must be kept out of the hands of all but professionals working in areas where the benefits of AI are clear.
Ronald L. Hirsch is a teacher, legal aid lawyer, survey researcher, nonprofit executive, consultant, composer, author, and volunteer. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago Law School and the author of We Still Hold These Truths. Read more of his writing at www.PreservingAmericanValues.com
The nation that wins the global AI race will hold decisive military and economic advantages. That’s why President Trump’s January 2025 AI Action Plan declared: “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.”
However, AI global dominance does not just mean producing the best AI systems. It also means that the American “AI Stack” – the layered collection of tools, technologies, and frameworks that organizations use to build, train, deploy, and manage artificial intelligence applications – will become the international standard for this world-changing technology. As such, advancing a commonsense export policy for American AI chips will play a decisive role in determining whether the United States remains embedded at the core of global AI development or is gradually displaced by rival systems.
During the Biden Administration, U.S. policy unfortunately drifted away from an approach that encouraged American technological leadership. In 2024, President Biden signed Executive Order 14110, which wrapped AI development in a bureaucratic maze of political correctness, equity, and government control of virtually every aspect of training and deployment of AI models. And, Biden’s Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) issued last-minute regulations to ban the export of virtually all microchips to China that could be used to develop AI systems.
Biden’s hard ban on AI-capable chips to China was superficially appealing. After all, without chips, China can’t compete with America, right? Wrong. Rather than preserving America’s advantage, blanket export controls on AI capable chips encouraged the emergence of a parallel Chinese technological ecosystem largely beyond U.S. influence and would severely injure US AI companies.
As a result of the ban, China launched an aggressive campaign to replace foreign suppliers. State-backed capital flowed into semiconductor fabrication, chip design, advanced packaging, and AI data-center infrastructure. Chinese firms were encouraged to adopt domestic chips. even though performance lagged Western counterparts, ensuring scale and revenue for Chinese manufacturers. Export controls did not, therefore, freeze China’s AI ecosystem; they reorganized it around domestic Chinese supply chains and used the opportunity to accelerate their competition on the global stage.
Fortunately, Trump has started to right the ship. Since taking office he has revoked Biden’s executive order and lifted the absolute bans on sales of mid-range chips like Nvidia’s H200 chip, allowing them to be sold to highly vetted Chinese buyers. This nuanced approach to chip exports will improve America’s strategic and economic dominance in several ways.
To start, America’s new approach is well designed to thwart the fast development of a competitive Chinese AI ecosystem without surrendering military and strategic dominance in this key technology. It bans export of very high-end AI chips, where the US and its allies enjoy a monopoly. But it allows discretionary export of a lower-class of AI capable chips (for example, the H200 and AMD MI325X chips) to be exported under strict export controls which prevent diversion, mandate Know-Your-Customer protocols, and prohibit any military or intelligence uses.
This lower-class of chips is also about one-tenth as powerful than the top-end chips produced by companies in America and our allies. Yet while the H200 is not Nvidia’s best chip, it still has six times the power of the best AI chip available in China today and is better than any chip that Huawei – the Chinese telecom giant that has served as a domestic alternative to Nvidia – plans to make for at least two years. Now Chinese firms seeking chips have to decide between inferior, costly Chinese chips and much more powerful American exports, taking the wind out of state-based manufacturing efforts in China.
Furthermore, Trump’s policy bolsters the chip manufacturing of the US and its allies. Nvidia, the largest AI/GPU chip manufacturer in the world is no longer hamstrung by exclusion from one of the world’s largest markets and is better to positioned to compete internationally more broadly. This is non-trivial. At around $40,000 per chip, Bloomberg estimates Nvidia has and will lose $10-15 billion a year in lost sales of the H200 chip alone as a result of the chip ban. And it’s not just Nvidia. Biden also cut off Intel, AMD and others from billions in revenue. All this reduces US revenue for R&D, shrinks production runs, increases per unit costs, and gives Chinese firms monopolistic domestic markets, allowing their international expansion.
President Trump’s AI chip export policy supports the larger strategic and economic interests of the US. We may still be the dominant AI figure world-wide, but this is no time to be encouraging the emergence of a competitive AI-stack ecosystem nor to hamstring American companies that are the key to that dominance. That is why we must prioritize speed, scale, and global adoption and resist well-meaning yet misguided efforts like the AI Overwatch Act (H.R. 6875) currently under consideration in Congress. This bill would effectively codify the kind of overbroad export approach President Trump has begun to unwind, undermining the strategic reset now underway.
The surest way to preserve America’s technological edge is not to shrink the commercial base on which it depends, but to expand it. In a long-term strategic competition, staying ahead matters more than trying to hold others back.
Frank D. Francone is a California attorney admitted to the United States Supreme Court bar. He is also a widely published author in Artificial Intelligence, having co-authored a graduate level textbook in machine learning and about fifty peer-reviewed scientific articles in AI and information theory.
What can the success of SEMATECH teach us about winning the AI race? Explore how a bold U.S. public-private partnership revived the semiconductor industry—and why a similar model could be key to advancing AI innovation today.
Imagine waking up to this paragraph in your favorite newspaper:
The willingness of the U.S. government to eschew partisanship and undertake a bold experiment -- an experiment based on cooperation as opposed to traditional procurement, and with accountability standards rooted in trust instead of elaborate regulations -- has led the U.S. to a position of preeminence in an industry which is vital to our nation's security and economic well-being.
You'd likely be incredulous, right? Private-public collaboration, as if! Bipartisan investment in a long-term project, sure! Redesigning out-of-date systems and ditching unnecessary regulations, in our dreams!
That is not a quote from a utopian novel.
I lifted that language from the Final Report to the Department of Defense on an initiative known as Sematech. In the late 1980s, the US recognized that it was in danger of missing a pivotal technological moment. Japan had seized a substantial advantage in semiconductor research and development. As of 1989, the US share of semiconductor equipment sales plunged from 69 percent in 1983 to just 51 percent in 1988. Over that same five-year span, Japan surged ahead--increasing its share from 25 percent to 40 percent. Rather than pursue a patchwork of state-driven approaches and in place of relying solely on private US firms to magically catch their Japanese rivals, a diverse set of stakeholders coordinated a national response.
Congress acknowledged that the status quo marked an "unacceptable situation" and formed SEMATECH--a private-public consortium of 14 private companies committed to putting the US back on the vanguard of this critical industry. In practice, this involved “developing, demonstrating and advancing the technology base for efficient, high yield manufacturing of advanced semiconductor devices.” The consortium embarked on research covering everything from lithography to plasma etch and deposition equipment. The idea was that this kind of basic research would lead to the US reclaiming its status as the market leader.
Such an intensive, ambitious, and cooperative research agenda would not have happened without a willingness for public and private participants to invest—literally and figuratively—in a more competitive, productive America rather than attempt to regulate our way back to the top. The deal required all stakeholders to put significant skin in the game. More specifically, each company pledged to pay one percent of their semiconductor sales revenue per year, albeit with a floor of $1 million and a ceiling at $15 million. The federal government threw in a cool $100 million of matching funds to help things along.
But the buy-in from the private side was far more than financial--as Chris Hughes explains in his book, “Marketcrafters.” Companies sent some of their top talent to Austin, home to Sematech’s state-of-the-art fab facility (which was built in just 32 weeks). Many of those brilliant engineers stayed for two years--demonstrating the importance of the cause as well as the esprit de corps that SEMATECH’s leaders managed to cultivate.
SEMATECH firms also agreed that the resulting research would be shared and commercialized, which meant that even non-members could experience downstream benefits from the project’s advances. Intel later reported that its cumulative $17 million in SEMATECH saved the firm $300 million via production efficiencies. On the whole, economists suspect that the return on investment was somewhere between $1.40 and $2.80.
We’re in dire need of a SEMATECH for AI. More than three years into the current generative AI revolution, there’s a shortage of basic AI research -- studying new AI paradigms beyond large language models, developing evaluations to test model capabilities, and generally advancing the AI frontier so that we can keep pace with geopolitical rivals and realize the technology’s potential to increase human flourishing.
It’s no secret that some of America’s greatest scientific and technological advances have come about through getting a bunch of really smart folks together in one place and charging them with an ambitious mission that’s personally meaningful, politically important, and, yes, lucrative. A SEMATECH for AI would reduce duplicative work that’s going on at the labs, across universities, and within nonprofits.
Two key lessons should be gleaned from the SEMATECH example: first, government should not pick winners or micromanage innovation; and, second, the state can sometimes do the most good by clearing space for voluntary coordination, aligning incentives, and then getting out of the way. A modern AI consortium should be narrow in scope, time-limited, and disciplined by real private capital—not a new regulatory superstructure, not a permanent bureaucracy, and not a vehicle for industrial policy. Its charge would be simple: fund pre-competitive research that the market undersupplies, share results widely, and sunset once its mission is complete. That approach respects what folks such as Nobel Laureate Joel Mokyr have long argued—that durable technological leadership comes from trust, experimentation, and decentralized problem-solving, not compliance checklists or precautionary bans.
Kevin Frazier is a Senior Fellow at the Abundance Institute, directs the AI Innovation and Law Program at the University of Texas School of Law.
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