2025-04-26 05:20:00
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
Right now, OpenAI is something unique in the landscape of not just AI companies but huge companies in general.
OpenAI’s board of directors is bound not to the mission of providing value for shareholders, like most companies, but to the mission of ensuring that “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” as the company’s website says. (Still private, OpenAI is currently valued at more than $300 billion after completing a record $40 billion funding round earlier this year.)
That situation is a bit unusual, to put it mildly, and one that is increasingly buckling under the weight of its own contradictions.
For a long time, investors were happy enough to pour money into OpenAI despite a structure that didn’t put their interests first, but in 2023, the board of the nonprofit that controls the company — yep, that’s how confusing it is — fired Sam Altman for lying to them. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that has signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent. One of Anthropic’s early investors is James McClave, whose BEMC Foundation helps fund Future Perfect.)
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It was a move that definitely didn’t maximize shareholder value, was at best very clumsily handled, and made it clear that the nonprofit’s control of the for-profit could potentially have huge implications — especially for its partner Microsoft, which has poured billions into OpenAI.
Altman’s firing didn’t stick — he returned a week later after an outcry, with much of the board resigning. But ever since the firing, OpenAI has been considering a restructuring into, well, more of a normal company.
Under this plan, the nonprofit entity that controls OpenAI would sell its control of the company and the assets that it owns. OpenAI would then become a for-profit company — specifically a public benefit corporation, like its rivals Anthropic and X.ai — and the nonprofit would walk away with a hotly disputed but definitely large sum of money in the tens of billions, presumably to spend on improving the world with AI.
There’s just one problem, argues a new open letter by legal scholars, several Nobel Prize winners, and a number of former OpenAI employees: The whole thing is illegal (and a terrible idea).
Their argument is simple: The thing the nonprofit board currently controls — governance of the world’s leading AI lab — makes no sense for the nonprofit to sell at any price. The nonprofit is supposed to act in pursuit of a highly specific mission: making AI go well for all of humanity. But having the power to make rules for OpenAI is worth more than even a mind-bogglingly large sum of money for that mission.
“Nonprofit control over how AGI is developed and governed is so important to OpenAI’s mission that removing control would violate the special fiduciary duty owed to the nonprofit’s beneficiaries,” the letter argues. Those beneficiaries are all of us, and the argument is that a big foundation has nothing on “a role guiding OpenAI.”
And it’s not just saying that the move is a bad thing. It’s saying that the board would be illegally breaching their duties if they went forward with it and the attorneys general of California and Delaware — to whom the letter is addressed because OpenAI is incorporated in Delaware and operates in California — should step in to stop it.
I’ve previously covered the wrangling over OpenAI’s potential change of structure. I wrote about the challenge of pricing the assets owned by the nonprofit, and we reported on Elon Musk’s claim that his own donations early in OpenAI’s history were misappropriated to make the for-profit.
This is a different argument. It’s not a claim that the nonprofit’s control of the for-profit ought to produce a higher sale price. It’s an argument that OpenAI, and what it may create, is literally priceless.
OpenAI’s mission “is to ensure that artificial general intelligence is safe and benefits all of humanity,” Tyler Whitmer, a nonprofit lawyer and one of the letter’s authors, told me. “Talking about the value of that in dollars and cents doesn’t make sense.”
Are they right on the merits? Will it matter? That’s substantially up to two people: California Attorney General Robert Bonta and Delaware Attorney General Kathleen Jennings. But it’s a serious argument that deserves a serious hearing. Here’s my attempt to digest it.
When OpenAI was founded in 2015, its mission sounded absurd: to work toward the safe development of artificial general intelligence — which, it clarifies now, means artificial intelligence that can do nearly all economically valuable work — and ensure that it benefited all of humanity.
Many people thought such a future was a hundred years away or more. But many of the few people who wanted to start planning for it were at OpenAI.
They founded it as a nonprofit, saying that was the only way to ensure that all of humanity maintained a claim to humanity’s future. “We don’t ever want to be making decisions to benefit shareholders,” Altman promised in 2017. “The only people we want to be accountable to is humanity as a whole.”
Worries about existential risk, too, loomed large. If it was going to be possible to build extremely intelligent AIs, it was going to be possible — even if it were accidental — to build ones that had no interest in cooperating with human goals and laws. “Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity,” Altman said in 2015.
Thus the nonprofit. The idea was that OpenAI would be shielded from the relentless incentive to make more money for shareholders — the kind of incentive that could drive it to underplay AI safety — and that it would have a governance structure that left it positioned to do the right thing. That would be true even if that meant shutting down the company, merging with a competitor, or taking a major (dangerous) product off the market.
“A for-profit company’s obligation is to make money for shareholders,” Michael Dorff, a professor of business law at the University of California Los Angeles, told me. “For a nonprofit, those same fiduciary duties run to a different purpose, whatever their charitable purpose is. And in this case, the charitable purpose of the nonprofit is twofold: One is to develop artificial intelligence safely, and two is to make sure that artificial intelligence is developed for the benefit of all humanity.”
“OpenAI’s founders believed the public would be harmed if AGI was developed by a commercial entity with proprietary profit motives,” the letter argues. In fact, the letter documents that OpenAI was founded precisely because many people were worried that AI would otherwise be developed within Google, which was and is a massive commercial entity with a profit motive.
Even in 2019, when OpenAI created a “capped for-profit” structure that would let them raise money from investors and pay the investors back up to a 100x return, they emphasized that the nonprofit was still in control. The mission was still not to build AGI and get rich but to ensure its development benefited all of humanity.
“We’ve designed OpenAI LP to put our overall mission — ensuring the creation and adoption of safe and beneficial AGI — ahead of generating returns for investors. … Regardless of how the world evolves, we are committed — legally and personally — to our mission,” the company declared in an announcement adopting the new structure.
OpenAI made further commitments: To avoid an AI “arms race” where two companies cut corners on safety to beat each other to the finish line, they built into their governing documents a “merge and assist” clause where they’d instead join the other lab and work together to make the AI safe. And thanks to the cap, if OpenAI did become unfathomably wealthy, all of the wealth above the 100x cap for investors would be distributed to humanity. The nonprofit board — meant to be composed of a majority of members who had no financial stake in the company — would have ultimate control.
In many ways the company was deliberately restraining its future self, trying to ensure that as the siren call of enormous profits grew louder and louder, OpenAI was tied to the mast of its original mission. And when the original board made the decision to fire Altman, they were acting to carry out that mission as they saw it.
Now, argues the new open letter, OpenAI wants to be unleashed. But the company’s own arguments over the last 10 years are pretty convincing: The mission that they set forth is not one that a fully commercial company is likely to pursue. Therefore, the attorneys general should tell them no and instead work to ensure the board is resourced to do what 2019-era OpenAI intended the board to be resourced to do.
OpenAI, of course, doesn’t intend to become a fully commercial company. The proposal I’ve seen floated is to become a public benefit corporation.
“Public benefit corporations are what we call hybrid entities,” Dorff told me. “In a traditional for-profit, the board’s primary duty is to make money for shareholders. In a public benefit corporation, their job is to balance making money with public duties: They have to take into account the impact of the company’s activities on everyone who is affected by them.”
The problem is that the obligations of public benefit corporations are, for all practical purposes, unenforceable. In theory, if a public benefit corporation isn’t benefiting the public, you — a member of the public — are being wronged. But you have no right to challenge it in court.
“Only shareholders can launch those suits,” Dorff told me. Take a public benefit corporation with a mission to help end homelessness. “If a homeless advocacy organization says they’re not benefiting the homeless, they have no grounds to sue.”
Only OpenAI’s shareholders could try to hold it accountable if it weren’t benefiting humanity. And “it’s very hard for shareholders to win a duty-of-care suit unless the directors acted in bad faith or were engaging in some kind of conflict of interest,” Dorff said. “Courts understandably are very deferential to the board in terms of how they choose to run the business.”
That means, in theory, a public benefit corporation is still a way to balance profit and the good of humanity. In practice, it’s one with the thumb hard on the scales of profit, which is probably a significant part of why OpenAI didn’t choose to restructure to a public benefit corporation back in 2019.
“Now they’re saying we didn’t foresee that,” Sunny Gandhi of Encode Justice, one of the letter’s signatories, told me. “And that is a deliberate lie to avoid the truth of — they originally were founded in this way because they were worried about this happening.”
But, I challenged Gandhi, OpenAI’s major competitors Anthropic and X.ai are both public benefit corporations. Shouldn’t that make a difference?
“That’s kind of asking why a conservation nonprofit can’t convert to being a logging company just because there are other logging companies out there,” he told me. In this view, yes, Anthropic and X both have inadequate governance that can’t and won’t hold them accountable for ensuring humanity benefits from their AI work. That might be a reason to shun them, protest them or demand reforms from them, but why is it a reason to let OpenAI abandon its mission?
Reading through the letter — and speaking to its authors and other nonprofit law and corporate law experts — I couldn’t help but feel badly for OpenAI’s board. (I have reached out to OpenAI board members for comment several times over the last few months as I’ve reported on the nonprofit transition. They have not returned any of those requests for comment.)
The very impressive suite of people responsible for OpenAI’s governance have all the usual challenges of being on the board of a fast-growing tech company with enormous potential and very serious risks, and then they have a whole bunch of puzzles unique to OpenAI’s situation. Their fiduciary duty, as Altman has testified before Congress, is to the mission of ensuring AGI is developed safely and to the benefit of all humanity.
But most of them were selected after Altman’s brief firing with, I would argue, another implicit assignment: Don’t screw it up. Don’t fire Sam Altman. Don’t terrify investors. Don’t get in the way of some of the most exciting research happening anywhere on Earth.
(After publication, OpenAI reached out to me with the following comment, which reads in part: “Our Board has been very clear: our nonprofit will be strengthened and any changes to our existing structure would be in the service of ensuring the broader public can benefit from AI. This structure will continue to ensure that as the for-profit succeeds and grows, so too does the nonprofit, enabling us to achieve the mission.”)
What, I asked Dorff, are the people on the board supposed to do, if they have a fiduciary duty to humanity that is very hard to live up to? Do they have the nerve to vote against Altman? He was less impressed than me with the difficulty of this plight. “That’s still their duty,” he said. “And sometimes duty is hard.”
That’s where the letter lands, too. OpenAI’s nonprofit has no right to cede its control over OpenAI. Its obligation is to humanity. Humanity deserves a say in how AGI goes. Therefore, it shouldn’t sell that control at any price.
It shouldn’t sell that control even if it makes fundraising much more convenient. It shouldn’t sell that control even though its current structure is kludgy, awkward, and not meant for handling a challenge of this scale. Because it’s much, much better suited to the challenge than becoming yet another public benefit corporation would be. OpenAI has come further than anyone imagined toward the epic destiny it envisioned for itself in 2015.
But if we want the development of AGI to benefit humanity, the nonprofit will have to stick to its guns, even in the face of overwhelming incentive not to. Or the state attorneys general will have to step in.
Update, April 24, 3:25 pm ET: This story has been updated to include disclosures about Vox Media’s relationship to OpenAI and Anthropic.
Update, April 25, 5:20 pm ET: This story has been updated to include a comment from OpenAI sent after publication.
2025-04-26 05:15:15
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: FBI agents arrested a Milwaukee County judge this morning on felony charges of interfering with immigration agents, as the Trump administration cracks down on local officials who threaten progress on its deportation agenda.
What exactly happened? Last week, federal agents came to Judge Hannah Dugan’s Wisconsin courtroom to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican citizen facing domestic violence charges. Dugan is accused of sending the agents away and allowing Flores-Ruiz to leave out a non-public side door, though he was quickly arrested anyway. Today, federal agents were again at the courthouse, this time to arrest Dugan.
Is this unprecedented? Not quite. The Trump administration arrested a Massachusetts judge in 2019 on charges of obstructing immigration officials, but they dropped the charges in 2022 after the judge agreed to refer herself to a state review board.
What’s the big picture? There’s longstanding tension between federal immigration enforcement and local courts, as local officials argue immigrants won’t attend court unless they can do so without fear of deportation. Some municipalities — sometimes called “sanctuary cities” — officially limit local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
Trump has issued an executive order calling on agencies to halt federal funding for those cities, an order that a federal judge largely blocked on Thursday. Now, in the Milwaukee case, the administration is threatening officials with personal consequences if they work to stymie federal deportation efforts.
What’s the big question? If the charging document is accurate, Dugan went beyond non-cooperation to actively complicate an arrest. But that line can get blurry, and it remains to be seen whether the administration will make good on Trump’s threat to arrest local officials who refuse to fall in line.
After work today I’ll be listening to a Today, Explained episode about Hollywood stunts. (You can listen here on Apple podcasts or here on Spotify.) After nearly a century, the Academy Awards are finally recognizing this incredible work with their own category. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you back here next week.
2025-04-26 03:54:35
Creatine — yes, the favorite of gym rats everywhere, a supplement many of us have taken ourselves — is a naturally occurring compound that is already found inside each person. Scientists have been studying creatine since the 1830s and, for more than a century, we have known that it was pivotal for producing energy in our muscles.
That, as anybody who was alive in the ’90s may remember, is how creatine first exploded as a consumer product. Swedish researchers published influential research in 1992 demonstrating creatine supplementation’s effectiveness in improving stamina and recovery during the short bursts of physical exercise. It didn’t take long after that for creatine supplements to hit the shelves of drugstores and workout gyms nationwide. And it was popular. Not only was it cheap — a 10-ounce jar of creatine costs $17 on Amazon — but it was also an easy way for bodybuilders and exercise enthusiasts to improve their performance. Today, as many as one in four adults say they have used creatine; $400 million worth of it is sold in the US every year.
And this was a supplement that really worked: A 2018 meta-analysis of the available research concluded that creatine is “the most effective nutritional supplement available to athletes to increase high intensity exercise capacity and muscle mass during training.” Across years of studies, no dangerous side effects have been detected.
But the most surprising use of creatine supplements is in a setting that could not be further from the image of jacked-up bodybuilders pumping iron: treating depression.
In the early 2000s, scientists established creatine’s importance not only for muscle use but also for brain function. The compound helps your brain to convert nutrients into energy and scientists concluded that poor metabolism could help to explain various psychiatric disorders, including depression. In layman’s terms, if your brain wasn’t processing energy efficiently, it could have these negative side effects.
If that were true, it would follow that more creatine could improve a person’s brain metabolism and thereby ease their depression.
A decade ago, the first clinical trials began testing whether creatine supplements improved depression among people who were also receiving antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy. The results have been impressive: A 2024 meta-review concluded that creatine had proven its effectiveness in supplementing those other treatments, leading people to feel better more quickly and be less likely to experience depression again.
Now comes a new study, out of India, suggesting creatine could be helpful in treating depression without antidepressants being involved — a preliminary but potentially important finding as we search for cheaper and easier ways to provide help to more people who need it.
The study, published earlier this year, was tiny and flew under the radar: 100 participants, in Dehradun, a city of 800,000 in India’s far north. Lead researcher Nima Norbu Sherpa of Glasgow Caledonian University received a grant from an India-based charity, the Universal Human Rights and Social Development Association, to run the experiment.
The setting is telling: Part of creatine’s appeal in mental health treatment is not only its potential efficacy but also that it’s cheap and doesn’t require a professional clinician; patients can take it on their own. That made Dehradun, a developing city with a lot of low-income patients and relatively few mental health clinicians, a logical place to test whether creatine could improve people’s well-being without antidepressants, said Riccardo De Giorgi, a clinical lecturer in psychiatry at Oxford and co-author of the paper.
The 100 participants, recruited from the city and small surrounding villages, were split into two groups. Both groups took part in talk therapy sessions. One group also received 5 grams of creatine every day, while the other got a placebo.
After eight weeks, both groups were improving — cognitive behavioral therapy itself is, of course, a well-attested treatment for depression. But the patients who took creatine on top of their therapy were doing better still.
The participants answered a nine-question survey at the beginning of the study, which provided a one-number score of the severity of their depression symptoms. People in both groups started a little below 18 on average, indicating moderately severe depression. At the end of the study, the patients taking creatine reported a score of 5 on average, while the control group registered at 11. Eleven people who were taking creatine throughout the study reported going into remission, meaning they could effectively return to normal life; only five people taking placebos said the same.
Both groups had about 20 people discontinue their treatment — not uncommon for people with depression, the authors noted. The reported side effects for people taking creatine were mild.
It is an eye-catching result, even as De Giorgi emphasized repeatedly that the findings were “incremental and preliminary.” The inevitably sensational nature of the finding — a bodybuilder supplement can help with depression? — warrants being clear and cautious in how we interpret the findings.
“Previous sensationalist messages in this research area, e.g., creatine, physical exercise, keto diet, have caused more harm to the science than benefit,’” De Giorgi told me over email.
For one, the high dropout rate is reason for skepticism about the precise size of creatine’s effect. More research that replicates the same results is needed before we can be confident that creatine plus therapy is a winning combination.
But it’s an area of research worth watching. Peter Attia, a physician who writes about longevity and health enhancement and was not involved with the study, wrote in covering the study’s findings that “since many people already use creatine as part of their supplement routine, it could be an easy addition for those looking to improve mental health without major lifestyle changes.” Its affordability and ubiquity could also make it appealing for people with fewer resources, like those who participated in the India study.
He did, however, also caution that more evidence would be necessary before we can figure out whether and how creatine fits into “the therapeutic toolbox.”
As we grapple with a global mental health crisis, we need all of the tools we can find. More than two-thirds of the world’s population can’t get access to conventional mental health treatments. If we really have an alternative as cheap and available as creatine, it could make a real difference.
2025-04-26 03:50:00
President Donald Trump has been sending undocumented immigrants to a mega prison in El Salvador without due process. Most of these deportees have no criminal record, yet our government has condemned them to indefinite incarceration in an infamously inhumane penitentiary.
In the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration admits that its deportation order was unlawful. In 2019, a court had ruled that Abrego Garcia could not be sent to El Salvador, as he had a credible fear of being persecuted in that country. The White House attributed his deportation to an “administrative error.”
The Supreme Court has ordered Trump to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States, but the White House refuses to comply and has publicly vowed that Abrego Garcia is “never coming back.”
Some Democrats believe that their party must call attention to this lawless cruelty. Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen and four progressive House members have traveled to El Salvador in recent days to check on Abrego Garcia’s condition and advocate for his due process rights.
But other Democrats fear their party is walking into a political trap. After all, voters are souring on Trump’s handling of trade and the economy, but still approve of his handling of immigration. Some Democratic strategists therefore think that Van Hollen and other progressive advocates for Abrego Garcia are doing the president a favor: By focusing on the plight of an undocumented immigrant — instead of the struggles of countless Americans suffering from Trump’s tariffs — they have increased the salience of his best issue and reinforced the narrative that Democrats care more about foreigners than about the American middle class.
Sign up here for more stories on the lessons liberals should take away from their election defeat — and a closer look at where they should go next. From senior correspondent Eric Levitz.
As one strategist told CNN, “The impulse among lots of Democrats is to always crank the volume up to 11 and take advantage of whatever the easiest, most obvious photo opportunity is. In this case, you get a situation where you’re giving the White House and the Republicans a lot of images and visuals that they think are compelling for them.”
Some progressives have declared this argument morally bankrupt. But I don’t think that’s right. Democrats have a moral responsibility to defend both America’s constitutional order and its most vulnerable residents. It does not follow, however, that they have a moral duty to hold press events about Abrego Garcia’s case — even if such photo ops do nothing to abet his liberation, while doing much to boost Trump’s political standing.
In my view, the argument that Democrats are doing more harm than good by taking a high-profile stand in favor of due process is not immoral, but simply mistaken. Van Hollen’s trip has plausibly benefited US residents unlawfully detained in El Salvador. And the political costs of such dissent are likely negligible, so long as Democrats keep their messaging about immigration disciplined and eventually shift their rhetorical focus to Trump’s economic mismanagement.
So far as I can tell, no Democrat is arguing that the party should acquiesce to Trump’s lawless deportations. The concerned strategist who spoke with CNN stipulated that “Democrats should stand up for due process when asked about it.”
Rather, the argument is that 1) the party should not go out of its way to elevate immigration as an issue, or invite the impression that the rights of undocumented immigrants are its chief concern, and 2) congressional delegations to El Salvador risk doing precisely that.
The case for this position is fairly simple. Voters are much more supportive of Trump’s handling of immigration than of his economic management. In data journalist G. Elliott Morris’s aggregation of recent issue surveys, voters approve of Trump’s handling of immigration by 2.7 points, while disapproving of his approach to inflation and the cost of living by 21.8 points.
Therefore, anything Democrats do to increase the salience of immigration plausibly aids Trump. What’s more, elevating Abrego Garcia’s cause above other issues could give voters the impression that Democrats are not prioritizing their own economic concerns.
Or at least, this is what Republican strategists seem to believe. Following House progressives’ trip to El Salvador, National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) spokesperson Mike Marinella said in a statement, “House Democrats have proven they care more about illegal immigrant gang bangers than American families.” The NRCC proceeded to air digital ads against 25 swing-district Democrats, in which it offered to buy the representatives’ airfare to El Salvador if they promised to “livestream the whole thing and snap plenty of selfies with their MS-13 buddies.”
For those urging Democrats to embrace message discipline, focusing on the due process rights of the undocumented is a lose-lose proposition, accomplishing nothing of substance while damaging the party politically. In this view, Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador did not actually help Abrego Garcia, whose fate still lies with America’s court system and the White House. To the contrary, Democrats are effectively giving Trump an incentive to ship more undocumented immigrants to a foreign prison without due process. After all, the president wants his opponents to take high-profile stances in defense of the undocumented. If Democrats teach him that they will do precisely that — so long as he violates immigrants’ due process rights — then they will have made such violations more likely in the future, not less.
Meanwhile, this faction of wary strategists insist that their party has a genuine image problem. Yes, Trump’s tariffs are deeply unpopular. And as their economic impacts surface, the president’s trade policies are liable to become more salient, no matter what Democrats say or do. But thus far, the public’s declining confidence in Trump is not translating into rising confidence in the Democratic Party.
Historically, Democrats always outperformed Republicans on the question of which party “cares more for the needs of people like you,” outpolling the GOP by 13 points on that score as recently as 2017. Yet in a Quinnipiac poll taken after Trump single-handedly engineered an economic crisis with his “Liberation Day” tariffs, the two parties are tied on that question.
What’s more, even as the public sours on Trump, the GOP remains more popular than the Democratic Party. In a new Pew Research survey, voters disapproved of Trump’s job performance by a 59 to 40 percent margin. Yet the Republican Party’s approval rating in that same survey was 5 points higher than the Democrats’, with only 38 percent of voters expressing support for the latter.
Democrats have time to improve their image; the midterms are well over a year away. So some might wonder why the party should fret about increasing the salience of an unfavorable issue so far from Election Day. But there’s an argument that the party should be doing everything in its power to increase its popularity — and reduce Trump’s — right now. Businesses, universities, and various other civic institutions will need to decide in the coming weeks and months whether to comply with the president’s illiberal attempts to discipline their behavior. The weaker Trump appears to be, the less likely it will be that American civil society acquiesces to authoritarianism.
Thus, from this vantage, message discipline is a moral imperative. Centering Democratic messaging on Abrego Garcia’s case might help ambitious Democrats earn small-dollar donations and adoration among the party’s base. But it undermines effective opposition to Trump’s authoritarian regime.
This argument is reasonable. But in my view, it understates the potential benefits of vigorous advocacy against Trump’s lawless deportations and overstates the political harms.
On the substance, Democratic officials flying to El Salvador to check on Abrego Garcia’s condition could plausibly deter abuses against him and other immigrant detainees in that country. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele may be a reactionary aligned with Trump, but he is surely aware that the United States has a two-party system. His government therefore must give some thought to its relationship with a hypothetical future Democratic administration. Thus, by advocating so forcefully for US residents unlawfully imprisoned in El Salvador, the Democratic Party has given Bukele some incentive to, at a minimum, keep Abrego Garcia and others like him alive (something that his government routinely fails to do with its prisoners).
Meanwhile, bringing a measure of comfort to a long-time US resident unlawfully disappeared to a foreign prison is a clear moral good. In an interview with Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, Van Hollen said that Salvadoran authorities have not allowed Abrego Garcia to communicate with his family or his lawyers. Rather, they had kept him isolated from the entire outside world, until a US senator demanded a meeting with him. Only through Van Hollen’s intervention was Abrego Garcia’s wife able to send her greetings to him, or even confirm that her husband was still alive. If an elected official has the power to serve a constituent in this way, it seems worthwhile that they do so.
The prospect that Van Hollen might have effectively encouraged more unlawful deportations by taking this course of action — since Trump wants his opponents to do photo ops on behalf of undocumented immigrants — merits consideration. But it strikes me as far-fetched. One could just as easily posit that Democrats ducking this issue entirely would have emboldened Trump to ramp up unlawful deportations. Ultimately, I think the president’s ambitions on this front will be determined by the scope and persistence of the judiciary’s opposition, not by Democratic messaging.
It seems possible — perhaps, even likely — that Democrats loudly advocating for Abrego Garcia is politically suboptimal, relative to a monomaniacal focus on the economy. But so long as Democrats act strategically on other fronts, I think the political costs of taking a stand on due process are likely to be negligibly small, for at least five reasons:
First, as far as progressive immigration positions go, “The Trump administration should honor court orders and the due process rights of longtime US residents” is pretty safe territory. In March, a Reuters-Ipsos poll asked Americans whether Trump “should keep deporting people despite a court order to stop?” — they said no by a margin of 56 to 40 percent. And an Economist-YouGov poll released Wednesday found voters specifically agreeing that Trump should bring Abrego Garcia back by a 50 to 28 point margin.
If Democrats frame Abrego Garcia’s case as a question of Americans’ civil liberties — while reiterating their party’s commitment to enforcing immigration law and securing the border — they should be able to mitigate any political cost inherent to elevating this issue. And that has largely been Van Hollen’s message. As the senator argued at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday, “I keep saying I’m not vouching for Abrego Garcia. I’m vouching for his constitutional rights because all our rights are at stake.”
Second, there does seem to be some scope for eroding Trump’s advantage on immigration. On March 1, polls showed voters approving of the president’s immigration policies by more than 10 points. Surveys taken in the last 10 days, by contrast, show that margin has fallen to 2.5 points. It is unclear whether Democrats’ messaging on the Abrego Garcia case had any impact on this decline. But given the timing, that possibility cannot be summarily dismissed
Third, some influential right-wingers endorse the Democratic position on Abrego Garcia. Last Thursday, pro-Trump podcaster Joe Rogan detailed his misgivings about the president’s violations of due process:
What if you are an enemy of, let’s not say any current president. Let’s pretend we got a new president, totally new guy in 2028, and this is a common practice now of just rounding up gang members with no due process and shipping them to El Salvador, “You’re a gang member.” “No, I’m not.” “Prove it.” “What? I got to go to court.” “No. No due process.”
Defending a principle mutually endorsed by Joe Rogan and the Roberts Court does not seem like the riskiest stand that Democrats could take.
Fourth, I’m not sure that the media’s coverage of this controversy looks all that different in the alternate dimension where Democrats voiced opposition to Trump’s actions when asked, but otherwise spoke exclusively about his failed economic policies. The president exiling US residents to a foreign prison — and refusing to attempt to repatriate one of them, in defiance of the Supreme Court — is a huge news story. This is a much more shocking and unprecedented event than the House GOP’s quest to cut Medicaid, even if the latter will ultimately inspire more voter backlash.
In a world where Van Hollen and his House colleagues never go to El Salvador, the general subject of immigration might have received marginally less media attention over the past week. But I think the effect here is quite small.
Fifth, Democratic officials are not speaking out on this entirely at their own direction. Their party’s base is understandably alarmed by the president’s lawlessness. Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost said he traveled to El Salvador because he had received “hundreds and hundreds” of emails and calls from his constituents demanding action on this issue. Thus, there might be some cost to Democratic fundraising and morale, were the party’s officials to uniformly avoid calling attention to the controversy.
All this said, I think it’s true that the optimal political strategy for Democrats is to focus overwhelmingly on economic issues. Voters are more concerned with prices and economic growth than with due process. And Trump is most vulnerable on tariffs, Medicaid cuts, and his economic management more broadly.
I just don’t think that dedicating some time and energy to championing bedrock constitutional principles — 19 months before the midterm elections — is by itself a perilous indulgence. In any event, to this point, it has proven entirely compatible with driving down Trump’s approval rating, which has fallen by 7 points since February in Pew’s polling.
Going forward, Democrats do need to convey that their top concern is Americans’ living standards. If Trump moves ahead with anything resembling his current trade policy, his approval is likely to fall, irrespective of Democratic messaging. But the party needs to make sure that voters see it as an effective alternative on economic issues — one that cares more about the needs of people like them.
Throughout the US today, a large and growing number of small business owners, workers, and retirees are suffering as a direct result of Trump’s mindless economic policies. If congressional Republicans get their way, millions more will lose their health insurance as a result of Trump’s fiscal agenda. Democrats must find ways to elevate these stories. Van Hollen’s decision to go to El Salvador evinced some verve and creativity. His party must apply similar energy to the task of dramatizing Trump’s economic misgovernance and communicating their party’s vision for redressing it.
Clarification, April 25, 3:45 pm ET: This story originally described Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s status unclearly. He is a longtime US resident.
2025-04-26 01:44:52
In recent days, Donald Trump has signaled eagerness to reach a trade agreement with China. The president said Tuesday that his 145 percent tariffs on Chinese imports will “come down substantially” in the near future.
On Thursday, Trump said that his administration is already negotiating with China over trade, saying, “They had a meeting this morning.” Asked who precisely had a meeting, Trump told reporters, “it doesn’t matter who ‘they’ is.”
Yet that same day, China denied the existence of such negotiations, saying that “any reports on development in talks are groundless.”
By most accounts, China feels little need to come to the table. Chinese leaders reportedly believe that they can wait Trump out. They’re not enticed by his floated offers of partial tariff relief, but instead favor a total pause on the tariffs, as a condition for commencing negotiations over the two nations’ trade disputes.
China’s intransigence may take some US observers (particularly those in the White House) by surprise. The Chinese economy has been suffering from deflation, due to a collapse in its property sector. Manufacturing has been one of the nation’s few economic bright spots. Now, as many as 20 million Chinese workers are at risk of losing their jobs because of a collapse in exports to the US, according to an estimate from Goldman Sachs.
Nevertheless, the Chinese government believes that it has the upper hand in this trade fight. And they’re probably right. That could have dire implications for America’s economy, if Trump cannot reconcile himself to a near total capitulation.
China has the advantage in its trade war with the US for at least three reasons:
Donald Trump’s trade policies are all rooted in one fundamental — and fundamentally wrong — premise: If America runs a trade deficit with another country, then we are effectively “subsidizing” that nation. After all, in that scenario, our trade partner is receiving more money from us than we are collecting from it.
Given this reality, the president long assumed that America could easily win a trade war with China, which runs a large trade surplus with the US. Trump spelled out the logic of his position in 2018, tweeting, “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win.”
But this is poor reasoning. Trade is not a zero-sum game in which sellers “win” and buyers “lose.”
This is easy to see at the individual level. Unless you own a farm or snack-food company, you probably run a trade deficit with your grocery store: Each year, you sell roughly $0 worth of goods to your local Costco or Aldi, while purchasing hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars worth of foodstuffs from them. Yet it does not follow that you are “losing” hundreds of dollars on trade with your grocer annually — the money you give them secures you life-sustaining products.
By Trump’s logic, American consumers could comfortably cease all trade with US grocery stores — and therefore win a “trade war” with those grocers — since shoppers “lose” money on transactions with such retailers. Yet money is only useful to the extent it can be exchanged for goods and services. Bread has more utility to a starving man than a wallet full of $20s.
Of course, trade between consumers and their local retailers is not perfectly analogous to trade between America and China. But Trump’s idea that buyers always have the upper hand is actually even more misguided when applied to the US-China relationship. Your local Kroger needs to sell things to Americans in order to exist. The same is not true of China, which sells only about 15 percent of its exports to the United States.
Without question, Trump’s tariffs will heap pain upon an already faltering Chinese economy. But ultimately, China needs our dollars less than we need its goods, minerals, and industrial inputs.
Compensating for a decline in consumer demand is a fairly simple task. Money is not technically difficult to generate: China can partially offset the impact of lost sales to Americans by helping its own people spend more through policies that discourage saving, boost wages, and increase income redistribution. At the same time, China can work on increasing its exports to the rest of the world (a task it is currently pursuing).
By contrast, it is not technically possible for the United States to swiftly replace what we gain from trade with China.
Beijing has sought to hammer home this point in recent days by abruptly choking off exports of rare earth minerals and magnets to the United States. Such elements are indispensable for manufacturing electronics, batteries, military drones, and countless other essential goods. And America cannot get many of these minerals from anywhere else, at least not at the necessary scale.
According to one expert who spoke with the Washington Post, developing a China-free supply chain for all rare earths would take “10 to 15 years.” Many US manufacturers will exhaust their stockpiles of these minerals within the next couple months.
And America’s dependence on Chinese industry extends well beyond elements. We also rely on China for electronics, pharmaceutical ingredients, and myriad other goods.
A government can increase consumer demand almost instantly by electronically depositing money into its citizens’ bank accounts. By contrast, there is no button that the US can push to instantly replace the physical products that China provides us.
To the extent that Trump has a strategy for winning his trade war with China, it involves conscripting America’s allies into the fight. The administration says it aims to strike trade deals with the European Union, Japan, and other friendly countries and then “approach China as a group.” It also plans to ask its allies to reduce economic ties with China, as a condition of securing relief from Trump’s tariffs.
It is true that America and its allies have some mutual economic grievances against China, which has threatened Western export industries by “dumping” products below cost onto global markets.
Nevertheless, America’s allies display little appetite for an economic showdown with China. On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that Japan intends to “push back against any US effort to bring it into an economic bloc aligned against China,” due to the importance of its trade relationship with Beijing. Likewise, the European Commission said this week that it has no intention of “decoupling” from China.
The reasons for this reluctance to break with China are not difficult to discern. Japan and the EU are no less dependent on Chinese exports of key minerals and goods than the United States is. And at this point, they have little reason to believe that the US is a more reliable trade partner than China. Beijing is not waging war against Europe’s exporters to protest largely fictional trade barriers; Washington is. So why pursue closer economic alignment with the US at the expense of trade relations with China?
Trump’s diplomatic task is made all the more difficult by his failure to articulate a clear set of demands. It is not evident precisely what America’s allies are supposed to be uniting against China to achieve. Trump’s ostensible complaint is that the US runs a trade deficit in goods with China. But it is difficult to conceive how such a deficit could be fully eliminated, given the structural characteristics of each nation’s economy — and even harder to understand what interest Europe or Japan would have in eliminating that deficit.
The final reason why the Chinese government has the upper hand in Trump’s trade war is that it will face less domestic political pressure to relent.
This is partly because China’s authoritarian government doesn’t need to worry about the next election. But it also reflects the fact that America is unambiguously the aggressor in this fight. Trump’s tariffs weren’t triggered by any particular Chinese action, even if they are partly inspired by Beijing’s genuine trade violations over the past two decades.
Xi Jinping therefore should have little difficulty persuading much of the Chinese public to blame Trump for any contraction in their nation’s export industries. In fact, Trump’s tariffs may actually help Xi politically by enabling him to deflect public discontent about economic conditions away from the Chinese Communist Party and toward the United States.
For Trump’s party, on the other hand, his trade war already looks politically devastating. Public approval of Trump’s economic management has fallen to 37 percent in Reuters-Ipsos’s polling, his lowest mark ever in that survey. An Economist-YouGov poll, meanwhile, shows Americans saying Trump’s economic actions have hurt them personally more than they’ve helped by a 30-point margin. And these results are consistent with those of other surveys.
Critically, the real economic effects of Trump’s trade war with China have barely been felt yet. Manufacturers and retailers have been able to draw on their stockpiles of Chinese wares, delaying the shortages and price spikes that a sustained trade war will produce. If Trump stays the course, it is likely that his approval will fall much lower, jeopardizing the GOP’s fragile grip on the House if not the Senate.
For all these reasons, China does not feel compelled to rush to the negotiating table. Xi seems to believe that time is on his side — the longer this trade war drags on, the more desperate Trump will become for a deal. Judging by the White House’s increasingly conciliatory rhetoric — and strained attempts to demonstrate progress toward a settlement — the Chinese president seems to be right.
2025-04-25 21:19:04
About nine years ago, a new organization called Canary Mission released a YouTube video describing their mission: maintaining a blacklist of anti-Israel college students.
American campuses, the video warns, had become hotbeds of anti-Israel extremism: safe spaces for students to attend “Jew-hating conferences and anti-American rallies.” To fight this, Canary Mission would build an extensive database of students and professors who engaged in anti-Israel activity. The primary intent, per the video, is to ensure that anti-Israel students cannot find gainful employment after graduation.
“These individuals are applying for jobs within your company,” the Canary Mission video warns. “It is your duty to ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.”
Over the course of the next decade, Canary Mission — which takes its name from the expression “canary in the coal mine” — delivered on its promise.
Its database now contains mini-profiles of thousands of students and professors, and has expanded to include professionals like doctors and nurses. People listed in the database have been harassed, disciplined, and even fired. Israeli intelligence has used Canary Mission profiles as justification for detaining listed visitors at the border.
And since the second Trump administration began, Canary Mission’s targets have started to be deported from the United States.
After plainclothes officers arrested Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk on the streets of Boston in late March, Öztürk’s attorneys claimed the sole reason for her arrest was her Canary Mission profile. While the Trump administration claims she had engaged in activity “in support of Hamas,” the private Homeland Security memo justifying her detention only cited an op-ed she had written in support of boycotting Israel, using language very similar to her Canary Mission page.
The organization, for its part, is happy to take the credit (though it did not respond to my request for comment). After Öztürk’s arrest, Canary Mission’s X account posted a celebratory tweet claiming “sources point to her Canary Mission profile as the primary cause.” It currently maintains a list of seven other students and professors who it believes should be targeted for deportation. Two of these, Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, are currently in ICE custody. Mahdawi was arrested after his name appeared on this list (Khalil was arrested before it was published).
Canary Mission’s rise is not really a story about one organization, or even the toxic climate of America’s Israel-Palestine debate. Rather, it is a case study in how civil society organizations — normally seen as pillars of liberal democratic life — can become agents of illiberalism. And when such groups can align themselves with a friendly government, the danger rises exponentially.
There are many pro-Israel activist in groups in the United States, and many that focus on college campuses specifically. But Canary Mission is unusual in two respects: its opaque structure and extremely aggressive tactics.
Canary Mission’s website does not list a president, board, or a staff directory. On paper, its headquarters are in Israel — specifically Beit Shemesh, a medium-sized city near Jerusalem. Yet the address listed on its paperwork is in a padlocked, seemingly abandoned building.
Over the years, reporters have identified some of the Canary Mission’s revenue streams — including significant donations from some prominent American Jewish philanthropies. But much of the Canary Mission’s funding remains anonymous due to its use of a pass-through group, called Central Fund of Israel (CFI).
Canary Mission represents a different, and more aggressive, strain of campus pro-Israel activism, one that aims not to debate pro-Palestinian students and scholars but to silence them.
American donors can give to CFI without having to disclose whether the money is earmarked for Canary Mission, and CFI can disburse funds to Canary without noting their original source. It’s an unusual setup that effectively allows Canary Mission to keep its funding sources fully anonymous.
“It really stands out when you look at other similar organizations in the same ecosystem,” says Yousef Munayyer, the head of the Israel-Palestine program at the Arab Center think tank in DC. “I can’t think of another one that hides their funding like this.”
The obvious irony — that an organization dedicated to naming and shaming is itself so opaque — is palpable. But it is necessary, in part, because Canary Mission has been a lightning rod for controversy even within the pro-Israel community.
No matter what you think about pro-Israel groups’ views of American college campuses, they clearly have the right to express their views and organize around them. And many of these groups engage in political activity — like documenting Jewish students’ concerns about campus antisemitism or creating new right-leaning Middle East studies journals — that are within the confines of legitimate debate and activism in a democratic society.
But Canary Mission represents a different, and more aggressive, strain of campus pro-Israel activism, one that aims not to debate pro-Palestinian students and scholars but to silence them.
Lila Corwin Berman, a historian of Jewish philanthropy at New York University, dates this approach to roughly the early 2000s. During that time, pro-Israel organizations like Campus Watch and the David Project began publicly targeting professors and students that they believed had engaged in unacceptable speech.
These efforts were haphazard at the outset, publishing specific attacks on allegedly problematic scholars rather than maintaining a full-on blacklist. Canary Mission’s database, first unveiled in 2014, represented a qualitative escalation — one explicitly aimed at creating professional problems for anti-Israel activists.
This was highly controversial. In 2018, pro-Israel campus groups at five major universities published a joint op-ed calling on the movement to repudiate Canary Mission.
“We are compelled to speak out against this website because it uses intimidation tactics, is antithetical to our democratic and Jewish values, is counterproductive to our efforts and is morally reprehensible,” they wrote.
This internal criticism did not do much to stop the Canary Mission’s growth, fueled as it was by unaccountable backers. Today, Canary Mission’s searchable database is vast — containing entries for over 2,000 individuals across 38 states, DC, and five Canadian provinces.
To understand why Canary Mission is so controversial, start by looking at how its blacklist works.
Each individual listing contains both a dossier documenting the target’s alleged offenses and their contact information, including direct links to their social media accounts that can facilitate targeted harassment campaigns. The only official way to get an entry deleted is to release a public apology with evidence of new pro-Israel beliefs; these testimonials are then posted on the “ex-Canary” segment of the Mission’s website.
Some Canary Mission targets have said or done something that many would find offensive, such as endorsing the October 7, 2023, massacre. But the vast majority of profiles I could find were individuals who either attended a pro-Palestinian rally or wrote something critical about Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians.
Canary Mission will describe this banal activity in threatening terms, like “attending a pro-Hamas rally.” But the speech in question is more than just legally protected: It is exactly the sort of political activity that people in a democracy are supposed to use as a vehicle for expressing their opinion. The Mission’s database isn’t primarily about identifying examples of extreme anti-Israel speech or political violence — it is about trying to silence any criticism of Israel by labeling it antisemitic or pro-terrorist.
Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts graduate student facing deportation, is a case in point.
The Canary Mission profile that reportedly led to her ICE arrest listed a single offense — an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper calling on the university to (among other things) “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and “divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” Agree or disagree with these positions, advocating for them is clearly legitimate political speech. There is no plausible case that people like Öztürk constitute any kind of threat to Jews on campus. That she is listed by Canary Mission — and that the organization publicly cheered her arrest — reveals its primary interest in policing speech critical of Israel by any means necessary.
This can also be seen by the sheer number of Jewish students and professors on the Canary Mission’s database.
The American Jewish community is fairly left-wing; roughly two-thirds disapprove of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government. While a strong majority supports Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state, large numbers of American Jews believe its occupation of Palestinian territory is both strategically unwise and morally indefensible. There is also a minority of anti-Zionist American Jews, more prominent in younger generations, who support the dissolution of Israel and its replacement with a binational state.
If you scan the Canary Mission database, Jewish students and scholars make up many of the entries. Reading their dossiers, like the profile of eminent Holocaust historian Omer Bartov, their alleged offenses include everything from criticizing the Netanyahu government’s approach to judicial reform to attending a pro-Palestinian demonstration.
If Canary Mission were truly about protecting Jews’ rights to participate freely in campus life, then it wouldn’t include them on a database explicitly designed to hurt their career prospects.
We don’t know for a fact that the Trump administration is using Canary Mission’s database to identify deportation targets. There is suggestive evidence: The wording in the State Department memo justifying Öztürk’s deportation, for example, is very similar to what appeared on her Canary profile). But so far, there is no direct proof of a link.
The depressing thing is that it makes all the sense in the world.
Yet regardless of whether Canary Mission entries are currently directing policy, it’s clear they wish to be seen as doing so. They do this not only by maintaining their list of seven people they wish were deported, but also posting messages in support for actual deportations with slogans like “pro-Hamas extremism has consequences” and “no more safe havens for terror supporters.”
These messages demonstrate an undeniable hostility to basic liberal values. Canary Mission has graduated from “merely” advocating professional consequences for pro-Palestinian voices to endorsing outright state repression against them. They are sliding down a slippery slope at a rapid clip.
The depressing thing is that it makes all the sense in the world.
The idea of trying to silence political opponents rather than debate them is dangerous. There are certainly cases where speech merits consequences: If a professor says discriminatory things about Jewish students, for example, or an activist advocates violence against her peers. But these are generally seen as exceptions rather than rules in free societies: the “boundary cases” where toleration for political expression runs up against other important values.
Canary Mission was founded on the opposite principle: that an entire category of speech, pro-Palestinian advocacy, should be treated as presumptively illegitimate. They believe the cause of defending Israel is best served not by engaging in rigorous debate and advocacy, but by making a giant list of people who believe the “wrong” things and ensuring they suffer consequences for those beliefs.
This is illiberalism as practiced by civil society — and is, necessarily, less dangerous than illiberalism enforced by the state. But when illiberalism takes root in an influential sector of society, such as pro-Israel activism, it becomes a potential ally for an illiberal regime.
No elected leader can turn a democracy into an authoritarian regime on their own. They need partners, influential people and organizations that can operate to weaken resistance to democratic backsliding and help create a climate of fear in which anti-government activity is perceived as costly.
The go-to examples are usually people with physical power and money — generals, police chiefs, and the wealthy elite. But there’s a growing recognition that other social groups, even ones that seemingly lack soldiers or billions, can assist in undermining democracy’s foundations.
In 2001, the political theorists Simone Chambers and Jeffrey Kopstein warned of a phenomenon they termed “bad civil society.” This is a phenomenon that they describe as “civic participation that weakens liberal democracy” — weaponizing the tools of organizing and activism to oppose the very democratic principles that allow them in the first place.
At the time, it appeared that “illiberal forces are small, marginalized, and contained” in the United States. However, Chambers and Kopstein warned, this doesn’t mean they’ll always be irrelevant.
Even if “illiberal forces cannot destabilize the state,” the authors write, “they can still “contribute to an insidious erosion of values that leaves liberalism vulnerable to all sorts of threat.”
Canary Mission’s behavior in the past 10 years shows that this warning was prescient. The organization isn’t just cheering Trump on from the sidelines; they have put together a public list of potential deportation targets. They are gleefully reveling in the fact that their longtime mission of suppressing speech is now backed by force of law.