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WASHINGTON, DC, USA –– White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt answers questions from journalists on Jan. 28, 2025.
WASHINGTON — As the Trump administration increasingly welcomes vloggers and social media influencers into press briefings and the Oval Office, established outlets like the Associated Press find themselves excluded from the century-old press pool, sparking controversy about what "transparency" truly means.
Joshua Sukoff is a photojournalist from Long Island, New York. He is currently studying journalism at Northwestern University.
From “Patriot Games” to The Hunger Games, how spectacle, social media, and political culture risk normalizing violence and eroding empathy.
When the Trump administration announced the Patriot Games, many people laughed. Selecting two children per state for a nationally televised sports competition looked too much like Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games to take seriously. But that instinct, to laugh rather than look closer, is one the Capitol is counting on. It has always been easier to normalize violence when it arrives dressed as entertainment or patriotism.
Here’s what I mean: The Hunger Games starts with the reaping, the moment when a Capitol official selects two children, one boy and one girl, to fight to the death against tributes from every other district. The games were created as an annual reminder of a failed rebellion, to remind the districts that dissent has consequences. At first, many Capitol residents saw the games as a just punishment. But sentiments shifted as the spectacle grew—when citizens could bet on winners, when a death march transformed into a beauty pageant, when murder became a pathway to celebrity.
Tiny shifts made over time resulted in a complacent citizenry, subtly trained to see cruelty as patriotism.
And while I don’t believe Trump is preparing the nation to watch children kill each other, I can’t help but notice those same mechanisms of shock, awe, spectacle, and eventual numbness being used on us every single day.
Every day we are barraged by absurdity. We’ve waited for social media posts to tell us if we’re at war. We’ve laughed when our Secretary of Health did push-ups in a sauna while drinking raw milk with a former rock star. We’ve chuckled at the incompetence of a made-up task force, DOGE. We’ve guffawed every time the president fell asleep on camera.
But between the jokes, we saw glimpses of violence. We saw two U.S. citizens murdered on the street, and we marched for them, at least until the cameras disappeared. Because police brutality is our new normal. We saw video evidence of U.S. bombings of Iran played to a popular culture mixtape, and we wondered more about copyright infringement and music artists' responses than the lives lost in an unnecessary war, because the culture of virality has normalized violence, as long as it arrives in the right format, set to the right beat.
Soon, we begin to laugh at it all, the violent and the absurd, out of discomfort, out of incredulity, as a trauma response. We click, share, and repeat until we learn to scroll past brutality without flinching. We hold our anger inside because outrage over absurdity feels…well…absurd. And in this holding, we participate in a slow conditioning where we can no longer tell where entertainment ends and violence begins.
Ours is a society that has practiced looking away from the suffering of children for a long time. So, the psychological and emotional destruction of children has already become background noise. We crossed that line of complacency a while ago.
We crossed it when school shootings were met with thoughts and prayers instead of policy. We crossed it when the pleas of Latinx children kidnapped by ICE went unheard, save for the few viral moments the news cycle deemed worthy. We crossed it in the fleeting outcry against legislation lifting the ban on conversion therapy for minors, protecting the speech of those causing harm while erasing the needs of the children in the room.
Many of our children are already participants in the Hunger Games. Their suffering is already treated as content instead of a crisis. The one thing we’re missing is a way to bet, to gamify their pain.
As a literacy researcher who studies dystopian fiction, I’ve spent my career asking: what if this story is warning us about something real? I take that question seriously because these stories exist to help us see the world as it is and as it could become.
What if a country that imprisons adults for existing on its soil turns its attention to the mass jailing of children? What if a country that classifies certain people as nonexistent due to their gender identity or relationship preferences decides children must conform or be erased? What if a country that’s made it possible to bet on everything from basketball games to military strikes turns to gambling on the lives of young people?
To be sure, the Patriot Games and the Hunger Games are distinct, and we have not slid completely into dystopia. But the mechanisms—spectacle, desensitization, the disposal of children dressed as patriotism—are the same, and mechanisms do not wait for permission to accelerate.
In The Hunger Games, Katniss accepted her role as a symbol of rebellion even when naming it cost her. Cinna fought the Capitol from within, using art as defiance for the people he loved. Gale chose to fight in whatever ways he could, and he never normalized what others had learned to accept.
We can do all three. We can name what we see without waiting until we’re certain. We can use our art, curricula, policies, and stories as acts of resistance. And we can refuse to scroll past without flinching.
Because that’s how we resist the pull toward dystopia. We learn from the mistakes of other worlds in hopes that our own will survive.
Stephanie Toliver is a Public Voices Fellow and a member of the OpEd Alumni Project sponsored by the University of Illinois.
Anthropic’s Mythos AI raises alarms about surveillance, deepfakes, and democracy. Why urgent AI regulation is needed as U.S. policy struggles to keep pace.
On April 24, America got a wake-up call from Anthropic, one of the nation’s leading artificial intelligence companies. It announced a new AI tool, called Mythos, that can identify flaws in computer networks and software systems that, as Politico puts it, “Even the brightest human minds have been unable to identify.”
A machine smarter than the “brightest human minds” sounds like a line from a dystopian science fiction movie. And if that weren’t scary enough, we now have a government populated by people who seem oblivious to the risks AI poses to democracy and humanity itself.
Until now, the Trump Administration has been determined to let its tech bro supporters do whatever they want and to blackball AI companies like Anthropic that aren’t willing to let the administration use their AI tools however it wants. The release of Mythos makes the need for smart AI regulation more urgent than ever.
The administration seems to lack the will or capacity to provide what is needed. If the administration won’t provide it, Congress must.
America cannot afford to bury its head in the sand as the developments in AI proceed at warp speed, and neither can the rest of the world. As the American Civil Liberties Union explained last February, those developments have “begun to demolish the foundations for ensuring that artificial intelligence (AI) in the U.S. is safe and responsible. The president is not only set to completely roll back the fledgling protections Joe Biden’s administration instituted, but also to further accelerate the spread of unchecked AI across American life.”
Maybe Mythos has gotten through to the Trump Administration, which has previously sought to make Anthropic pay for its refusal to knuckle under to its outrageous desire to use AI irresponsibly. Recall that the Department of Defense retaliated by declaring Anthropic “a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security” and that “no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.”
For the first time, that designation, which had been applied only to foreign companies, was directed at one based in the United States. The government did so when the company refused to go along when the Department of Defense demanded that Anthropic “not prevent its technology from being used both for domestic mass surveillance of Americans and for fully autonomous lethal weapons.”
At the time, Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, pointed out that “AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do.” He went on to say that “AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties.”
He explained that “to the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI…. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble… scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale.”
Not surprisingly, the Trump Administration was not moved by Amodei’s appeal to democratic values or fundamental liberties. In fact, the president upped the ante when he posted to Truth Social the following: “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War….”
“Therefore,” Trump continued, “I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again! …WE will decide the fate of our Country — NOT some out-of-control, Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about.”
As CNBC notes, “Before the conflict erupted in late February, Anthropic was one of the first AI companies to partner with many federal agencies as the government sought to rapidly upgrade its systems and capabilities with cutting-edge AI tech.”
In March, Rita Lin, a federal judge in San Francisco, granted Anthropic’s request for a temporary restraining order against the government. But she did more.
Lin called out the administration for punishing Anthropic because it “criticiz(ed) the government’s contracting position in the press. … Punishing Anthropic for bringing public scrutiny to the government’s contracting position is classic illegal First Amendment retaliation.” She wanted no part of “the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government.”
Now it seems the Trump Administration is willing to deal with Anthropic’s “nut jobs.” Amodei was even invited to the White House to meet with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on April 17.
That is one indication that, as a former White House AI advisor told the Washington Post, "'Mythos has activated a lot of people in D.C.‘…For the Trump administration.” The Post adds, “The arrival of Mythos has led to a reckoning with some of the technology’s potential downsides.”
Those downsides include the threat AI poses to democracy and rights and the capacity of democratic governance to keep up with its rapid development. AI can threaten democracy and rights in a variety of ways.
One, its use as a surveillance tool, was highlighted in the dispute between the Defense Department and Anthropic. But there are others.
AI’s capacity to produce convincing “deepfake” content may turn the world of campaigning and electioneering on its head. It can be used to convince voters that one or another political leader or party has said or done something reprehensible.
Combined with social media’s capacity to rapidly amplify such content, we will increasingly live in a world where seeing is not believing. And the Westminster Foundation for Democracy warns, “Deep fakes also enable a ‘liar’s dividend’ whereby political actors claim real content is fake to avoid sanction.”
AI may also be used by government officials to make consequential decisions. We have yet to think about what democratic accountability means in that situation.
The list could go on, but these examples illustrate a few ways that AI may jeopardize democratic processes. And it is not clear that democracies will be adequate to the challenge of adapting to those challenges.
Constitutional democracy in the United States is, even at its best, notoriously slow. And when government is paralyzed by partisan rancor as ours is, what scholars call the “pacing problem” just gets worse.
Simply put, the pacing problem “refers to technological advances outpacing laws and regulations.”
Arizona State University Law Professor Gary Merchant is right to say that “it is in the common interest of all concerned, including government, industry, civil society, and the general public, to try to prevent proactively significant harms from emerging technologies which will…be contrary to public well-being… ‘Rapid change demands foresight, vision, adaptability, and creativity, all combined with a healthy degree of prudence.’”
Those are not words that one would generally associate with the Trump Administration. Even as it may now realize it can’t ignore Anthropic or the growing potency of AI, it seems clear that the president would rather post than think more about AI.
That is a luxury that neither he nor we can afford. The fate of democracy hangs in the balance.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
This nonpartisan policy brief, written by an ACE fellow, is republished by The Fulcrum as part of our partnership with the Alliance for Civic Engagement and our NextGen initiative — elevating student voices, strengthening civic education, and helping readers better understand democracy and public policy.
Without a national AI law, states have been filling in the gaps on their own. The result is an uneven landscape where a person’s legal protections depend entirely on which state they live in.
Colorado was among the first states to pass a broad AI accountability law. Its 2024 Colorado AI Act, set to take effect in 2026, targets “high risk” AI systems which are defined as tools that are used to make important decisions about people. Under the law, companies must test their AI tools for bias, notify people when AI played a role in a decision about them, and allow people to appeal those decisions.
New York passed the RAISE Act, which establishes standards for companies that use AI in high-stakes settings, including requirements to disclose AI use and assess the risk of harm before using an AI system in high-stakes areas like employment, housing, healthcare, or financial services. New York City separately passed a law in 2023 requiring employers to audit their AI hiring tools for bias and notify job applicants when such tools are used.
Other states including Utah, Washington, California, and Illinois have each passed or proposed their own transparency and accountability measures, often targeting specific uses of AI in healthcare, hiring, or in public benefits decisions.
The result is a confusing compliance system for companies operating across multiple states and for average citizens trying to understand their rights. A person fired by an algorithm in Colorado has different legal options than someone in the same situation in a state with no AI law at all. This patchwork is the central issue that federal lawmakers are now trying to solve.
Artificial intelligence is now being used to make decisions that directly affect people’s lives. When these systems make mistakes, the consequences can be serious and lasting.
However, under current law, it is often unclear who is legally responsible when AI causes harm. Three groups could potentially be held liable:
Traditional liability law was designed for a world where a human being made the decision. When an AI system produces a biased hiring recommendation, a wrong medical diagnosis, or a faulty credit decision, it is not always clear which party in the chain is responsible. This legal gray zone means that people harmed by AI may have no clear path to getting help, and companies may have little incentive to make their systems safer before releasing them.
With states passing laws that often contradict each other, pressure has been placed on the federal government to set a single national standard. In March 2026, two major proposals emerged within days of each other.
The White House National Policy Framework for AI was released on March 20, 2026, and it outlines the Trump administration’s vision for federal AI law. The framework takes a “light-touch” approach focused on protecting innovation. Key positions include:
The TRUMP AMERICA AI Act, a draft bill released on March 18, 2026, takes a more detailed approach. Key proposals include:
Those who favor limiting AI liability, including many in the Trump administration and many in the technology industry, argue that holding developers legally responsible for every possible way their tools are used would make building AI in the United States far too costly and legally risky. Supporters of this view also warn that pushing liability too far could drive AI development to other countries with fewer regulations, meaning Americans would end up using AI built with even less oversight than they would have had otherwise. On the question of state laws, those who want to limit AI liability also argue that a single, clear federal standard is better for everyday people than the current situation.
However, proponents of stronger AI liability argue that without real legal consequences, companies have little financial incentive to invest in making their systems safer before releasing them to the public. The profit motive, they argue, pushes developers to move fast. As a result, the American people are most likely to be harmed and have the least power to push back. Those who want strong AI liability also argue that most existing laws, including civil rights statutes and consumer protection rules, were written long before AI existed and were not designed to handle situations where a machine made the important decision. Courts struggle to apply these older frameworks to AI harms, leaving many people with no practical legal resource. Finally, this side expresses concern that a federal law designed to primarily limit liability could end up setting a weak national floor that overrides stronger protections that states like Colorado and Illinois have already put in place.
What does “liability” mean?
What is a “high-risk” AI system
What is federal preemption?
Why can’t existing laws handle AI harms?
Has any federal AI liability law passed yet?
Margaret Wakefield is an ACE fellow.
Who’s Responsible When AI Causes Harm?: Unpacking the Federal AI Liability Framework Debate was first published by ACE and republished with permission.
A bold critique of modern democracy and rising authoritarian ideas, exploring how AI-powered swarm digital democracy could redefine participation and governance.
We are increasingly told that democracy has failed and that its time has passed. The evidence proffered is everywhere, we are told: Gridlock, captured institutions, performative elections, a public that senses, correctly, that its voice rarely translates into real power. Into this vacuum step dystopic movements like the Dark Enlightenment and harder strains of Right-wing populism, offering a stark diagnosis and an even starker cure: Abandon the illusion of popular rule and return to forms of authority that are decisive, hierarchical, and unapologetically exclusionary. They present themselves as bold, clear-eyed, rambunctious, alive, and willing to act where others hesitate. And all to save the world from itself.
But this framing depends on a sleight of hand: It assumes that what we have been living under is, in fact, democracy, and that its failures are the failures of democracy itself. That is the first mistake.
What we call democracy today has largely been a thin and intermittent layer of participation laid over deeply entrenched concentrations of power, economic, bureaucratic, and informational. Voting every few years, choosing among preselected options, while the core decisions that shape life remain insulated from meaningful public control. This is not democracy in any real sense, let alone a robust sense. It is a highly managed system that borrows the language of democracy while constraining its substance to serve a well-entrenched elite class and the professionals who manage and sustain that class (the infamous 9.9%).
The anger directed at this sham democracy is not misplaced. But the conclusion drawn by reactionary movements is.
They see the brittleness of this fake democracy system and conclude that the problem is too much participation, too much inclusion, too much diffusion of authority. Their solution is to tighten control, to concentrate power in the hands of a very few bold and enlightened leaders daring to take us where we tremble to go. This, they present, as a radical, epochal innovation.
And yet what is this move if not the recycling of the oldest political model we have had throughout the millennia: Rule from the top?
In sharp contrast, what remains largely untried is a form of mass democracy that does not depend on periodic delegation upward, but on continuous, distributed participation across a network of people who are directly involved in shaping outcomes as they emerge.
This is where the idea of Swarm Digital Democracy becomes central.
A swarm is not a mass without structure. It is a coordinated field of agents acting locally, responding to signals, adjusting behavior in real time, and producing collective outcomes that no single center commands. In nature, swarms can navigate complexity, adapt quickly, and solve problems without central control. And the key to their astonishing success, effectiveness, efficiency, and durability is not uniformity, but alignment through feedback.
Transposed into political and civic life, swarm democracy means something precise. It is a system in which decisions are not simply handed down or voted on at long intervals, but continuously formed through layered participation of ordinary citizens, distributed deliberation, and real-time synthesis of collective input.
It is important to see that swarm digital democracy does not seek to replace judgment with automation. The opposite: It seeks to amplify judgment by making it possible for a sea of perspectives to interact without collapsing into noise. It allows large groups to think together without requiring them to think the same and without requiring a group of “people in the know” to mediate their interaction.
At this point, defenders of the status quo often retreat into what critics dismiss as a “precautionary” posture, slow, hesitant, unwilling to risk structural change. Their opponents, eager to contrast their rumbunctious selves, claim the mantle of the “pro-actionary,” decisive, daring, adventure-loving, unencumbered, and willing to break old things in order to build new ones.
But even if one were to accept their language for the sake of argument, something crucial becomes clear. What is being offered as “pro-actionary” today is, in substance, deeply conservative. It reaches backward, to monarchy, to exclusion, to centralized command, models that have been tested repeatedly and found wanting.
If boldness is the measure, then a genuinely “pro-actionary” politics would not resurrect these forms. It would move in the opposite direction, toward systems that expand participation while increasing capacity for coordinated action.
This is where technology becomes decisive.
For the first time, tools shaped by Artificial Intelligence make it possible to scale what previously broke under its own weight. The historical limits of democracy were not only political. They were informational. How do you process millions of inputs without distortion? How do you summarize complex debate without flattening it? How do you allow participation without drowning in incoherence?
These are no longer purely structural constraints. What Rousseau dreamt of and declared practically impossible is now eminently possible.
Artificial intelligence can help translate complex policy into accessible language without dumbing it down. It can synthesize large volumes of input into coherent patterns while preserving disagreement rather than erasing it. It can support deliberation by summarizing, clustering, and clarifying without deciding in place of people. In a swarm democratic system, it functions not as a ruler, but as a layer of cognitive infrastructure that helps collective intelligence operate at scale.
The objection arrives quickly. These systems are controlled by large corporations, embedded in surveillance economies, and shaped by centralized interests. To rely on them, it is said, is to deepen the very structures that already distort democracy.
But this objection, while understandable, is incomplete and betrays a bit of innocent ignorance.
We are now at a point where the tools of machine learning are no longer the exclusive property of large institutions. Small groups of individuals can build, train, and deploy their own models. A handful of people can construct systems tailored to their values, with their own constraints, their own safeguards, and their own governance logic. The infrastructure has diffused. The capacity to build is no longer monopolized. And most crucially, such groups can make the AI totally open-source, transparent to everyone to inspect, most crucially to the layperson.
It is important to grasp this and to take it seriously because to assume that AI is synonymous with its largest corporate implementations is to miss the opening it now presents. It is to treat a field of possibility as if it were already closed. The real risk is the opposite: A fear of contamination leads to abandonment of tools that could expand collective agency, ceding such powerful tools to those who wish to use them to concentrate power in a way that could never have been concentrated before.
Reactionary movements promise decisiveness by narrowing participation, by deciding in advance who counts and who does not. It is easier to be decisive when fewer people are allowed to speak. Swarm democracy takes the much harder path. The far more rumbunctious and adventure-loving path. It assumes complexity rather than denying it. It does not simplify the world by excluding voices, but by organizing them. It does not resolve disagreement by suppressing it, but by creating structures in which disagreement can produce direction.
This requires a different imagination of governance, one that does not seek a fixed architecture but an evolving system. It requires an imagination that does not seek to build a hierarchy that distributes authority downward or upward, but as a living network that continuously adjusts itself through feedback.
The opportunity, now emerging, is to build something denser, more distributed, and more alive than ever before, more daring, more radical than anything else seen in the history of humankind, and most certainly more than anything that the cynical, dystopic, oligarchy-worshipping, dark enlightenment forces. A swarm digital democracy capable of thinking and acting at scale without surrendering itself to the old logic of the center is the only radical move forward that will budge history to take its real next step forward.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.
