The Free Press

Before the 2024 election, a group of Democratic political operatives came together in Washington, D.C., to form a nonprofit to support groups aligned with the left. Bright Future Fund wound up spending $182 million, including a chunk of money to the largest super PAC that made ads supporting candidate Kamala Harris.

Like many other nonprofits, Bright Future Fund submitted its annual tax return for 2024 to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) last November. Just two days later, it quietly went out of business. Bright Future Fund seemed likely to be remembered as nothing more than a small cog in the vast dark money machine that tried to elect Harris and failed.

But Bright Future Fund is now attracting attention among some tax experts and conservatives because of where almost all its money came from during 2024.

The nonprofit received $37.5 million from Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, one of the country’s largest donor-advised funds. Donor-advised funds are tailored to people who wish to donate anonymously and receive tax breaks for their philanthropic giving. In its own tax return, Fidelity said that it gives money only to nonprofits “where the funds distributed will be used exclusively for charitable purposes.”

Is changing your mind a sign of intellectual honesty—or betrayal? These days, it can feel like most people think it’s the latter. We live in an age where rethinking a position becomes a gotcha moment—a chance for someone to pull up your old social media posts to prove you’re a hypocrite or a fraud. The pressure to not admit to changing your mind—to stick to your guns—has never been greater.

But the ability to change your mind is a sign that you think for yourself. It takes curiosity, honesty, courage, and humility. And so it is worth understanding how it happens.

That’s why we’re launching a new video interview series called Confessions.

In each episode, I sit down with someone who has abandoned a belief that was once central to who they were: a former climate activist who now thinks the movement has lost the plot; an anti-Israel protester turned Zionist; a body-positivity activist turned Ozempic evangelist. Whatever the subject, the goal every time will be the same: to understand why someone changed their mind—and what it took to walk away from a set of beliefs they once lived by.

We’re kicking off the series with Richard Hanania. Once upon a time, Hanania was an alt-right extremist posting hateful diatribes online. Those pseudonymous posts came back to haunt Hanania years later, after he had found mainstream success as a political commentator, thanks to an exposé by HuffPost. Hanania reckoned with his past in an essay titled “Why I Used to Suck, and (Hopefully) No Longer Do.”

In my interview with Hanania, he describes his journey from the fringe to the mainstream. Watch it here:

To mark the launch of the series, we’re also publishing an essay by Hanania about why you shouldn’t be afraid to change your mind. Hanania writes about a more recent change of heart, this time about Donald Trump. Hanania voted for the president but now thinks that was a mistake. He regrets his vote, but not admitting he was wrong. Read Richard on why the path of intellectual honesty is the only one worth taking:

To make sure you don’t miss the next installment of Confessions, subscribe to our YouTube channel. And if you are a socialist turned capitalist, a capitalist turned socialist, a former Scientologist, a former Groyper, a former vegan, or—you get the picture—write to us at [email protected].

This essay is published alongside the launch episode of our new video series, Confessions, in which people explain why and how they changed their mind. Watch episode one here.

The night of the 2024 election, I was a guest on the stream of liberal influencer Steve Bonnell, better known as Destiny. We were both critical of the populist turn in the GOP but, being more conservative than him, I had nonetheless voted for Trump. Speaking after it was clear that Trump had likely won, I said that if RFK were appointed to an important position, I would know that I had made a mistake.

A few weeks later, Trump nominated the most prominent vaccine skeptic in the country to the top position in the public health bureaucracy. I criticized that decision, but held out hope that maybe he wouldn’t be confirmed. This hope was soon dashed too.

I had also said Trump’s tariffs wouldn’t be so bad. After all, I thought, the U.S. effective tariff rate reached a high of just 3.5 percent in the first term. I argued about this with the writer Matthew Yglesias and others, and even made a prediction market to bet money that the number would not reach 6 percent in 2025. It became clear I would lose that bet during Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” speech, in which he announced tariffs that immediately tanked the stock market.

On Monday, Jimmy Lai, the heroic freedom fighter and my dear friend, was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a Hong Kong court. He’s 78. This amounts to a life sentence.

For more than three decades, Jimmy has been a leading voice in the struggle for a free, democratic Hong Kong. Chinese control over Hong Kong has steadily increased since Britain ceded the territory in 1997. In the final weeks before Jimmy’s arrest about six years ago, I had several moving conversations with him over Zoom. Everybody knew—but he better than anyone—that he would soon be arrested for his public criticism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). “Why don’t you, a wealthy British citizen, try to leave Hong Kong?” I asked him. “I cannot do it,” he replied. “I will not betray my people. They listened to me and they trusted me—I will not leave them.”

Jimmy fulfilled his duty toward his people, and to the entire free world, to the end. It’s cost him everything. Now, the question is: Will the free world fulfill its duty toward him?

It’s Monday, February 9. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Kat Rosenfield and Coleman Hughes on Lionel Shriver’s new immigration satire; what can the West do to free Jimmy Lai?; Haviv Rettig Gur tells us why he let anti-Israel protesters interrupt his talk; Suzy Weiss on America’s divided halftime show(s); and much more.

But first: One giant leap away from mankind.

You might have missed it, but last week the world changed.

Here’s what happened: AI firms Anthropic and OpenAI both released new versions of their coding agents. That might seem like a technical note, but these were not your average software updates. They showed huge leaps in what the AI agents can do. And—crucially—a large part of the programming work that went into them was itself done by AI.

This is an inflection point. A self-correcting AI is one that will advance far faster than one that relies on us mere mortals.

The narrow meaning is this: “Learn to code” was terrible advice. For weeks now, leading software engineers have been acknowledging that, as Ryan Dahl put it recently, “The era of humans writing code is over.” Earlier last week, hundreds of billions of dollars were wiped off the value of software stocks, as investors braced for the AI disruption.

The bigger meaning is this: It looks like a lot is about to change—and very quickly. We’re at the point on a graph when the line bends sharply upward, and we’re not sure where it’s going to take us.

Today, three stories on that steep trajectory into the unknown.

First, Tyler Cowen unpacks the developments of the past week, and explains why we have reached such a major turning point in AI—and what a self-improving AI will mean for all of us:

Next, Mark Gimein looks at the two companies at the heart of this transformation, and the fight between them playing out in the press, on social media, and even in last night’s Super Bowl ads. What does OpenAI want? And why does Anthropic want to stop them? Read Mark’s piece to find out:

Amid all this change, I find myself asking more and more often: How do we stay ourselves? That’s the question on Freya India’s mind too. Freya describes the feeling of hopelessness she has while “staring down the barrel of a life spent inputting and prompting.” But don’t despair, she says. “You just have to be human.” To find out how, read her full essay:

—Oliver Wiseman

Lionel Shriver has a talent for brutal honesty on morally charged topics, and her new novel is no different. In A Better Life, Shriver’s subject is immigration, and the book is bound to annoy—well, everyone. Read Kat Rosenfield on Shriver, immigration, and a book that Kat says refuses to reduce the characters to their politics:

Lionel is Coleman Hughes’ guest on his podcast this week. They talk about the book and debate immigration, free expression, and more. Listen to the latest episode of Conversations with Coleman:

For more on Jimmy Lai, read his daughter Claire: “I Don’t Want My Father to Be a Martyr Behind Bars.” And read Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky’s letter to Jimmy Lai.

• The Seattle Seahawks defeated the New England Patriots 29–13 to win Super Bowl LX after sacking Patriots’ quarterback Drake Maye six times and forcing three turnovers, returning one interception for a fourth-quarter touchdown. The victory marks the franchise’s second Super Bowl win—and first since 2014.

• American skier Lindsey Vonn crashed seconds into her downhill Olympic race on Sunday in Milan after she decided to compete despite rupturing her left ACL in a World Cup crash a week ago. The former gold medalist was airlifted from the course to a local hospital for surgery. She remains in stable condition.

• Donald Trump said he didn’t see the racist video of Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces superimposed onto apes that his Truth Social account posted late Thursday night. The clip came at the end of a video about the 2020 election. “I guess during the end of it, there was some kind of picture that people don’t like. I wouldn’t like it either, but I didn’t see it,” Trump said on Saturday. Asked if he would apologize, Trump declined. Asked if he condemned the clip, he said, “Of course I do.”

• Japan’s conservative prime minister Sanae Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has won a landslide victory after she called a high-stakes snap election, securing a supermajority for her party in Japan’s lower house legislature. Takaichi, elected in October, has taken a hard line against China and North Korea and aligned herself closely with the Trump administration. (Read “How Japan’s Iron Lady Wooed Trump” by Philip Patrick.)

• British prime minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff resigned Sunday over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States, despite knowing his close ties to Jeffrey Epstein. “The decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was wrong,” Morgan McSweeney said in a statement. “He has damaged our party, our country, and trust in politics itself.”

• President Trump criticized U.S. Olympian Hunter Hess after the freestyle skier cited “mixed emotions” representing Team USA in the Milan Olympic Games due to political concerns back home that he is “not the biggest fan of.” Trump called Hess a “real loser” and said it was “very hard to root for someone like this” in a Sunday morning Truth Social post.

• Democratic Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi announced she will endorse Jack Schlossberg in a crowded congressional primary in New York’s 12th district, previously represented by longtime congressman Jerry Nadler. Schlossberg, the 33-year-old grandson of President John F. Kennedy, lauded Pelosi as “a hero” of his after her endorsement. (Read Will Rahn’s dispatch from the wacky 12th district.)

• The Pentagon announced on Saturday that it was severing all institutional ties with Harvard University, ending military training, fellowships, and certificate programs. “Harvard is woke; the War Department is not,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote on X.

• Allies of President Trump are offering access and perks in exchange for donations to Freedom 250, a group planning events in celebration of America’s 250th anniversary in July, according to The New York Times. Donations totaling more than $1 million come with a “thank you reception” with President Trump.

I’ve noticed that the more morally charged a topic becomes, the harder it is to talk about it honestly. Immigration is a good example. The public conversation has flattened into slogans, while engagement with real disagreements is treated as suspect, if not outright taboo.

The emotional effect of cultural change is a human response—and yet it is not acknowledged consistently. While it would be widely accepted for a black resident of Harlem to say he wants to preserve the culture of his neighborhood, the same sentiment, expressed by a white resident of Arizona, would almost certainly be condemned.

This dynamic is what drew me to A Better Life, the new novel by Lionel Shriver. Rather than making an argument about immigration policy, the book stages a simple experiment. A family that strongly supports open immigration agrees to take a migrant into their home. The book then follows what happens when ideals that feel virtuous at a distance collide with the practical realities of daily life.

What’s interesting about the novel is its refusal to resolve that tension cleanly. The migrant is neither presented as good or bad. The family members are not presented as heroes or villains. Shriver captures something that is often missing from political debate: that human beings are inconsistent, that generosity has limits, and that, in practice, ideology can get muddled by real life.

I sat down with Shriver to talk about her book, and to have some healthy debate about immigration, cultural change in the West, and why policing speech has become an obstacle to understanding what’s actually at stake.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

They call it the biggest stage in music. The Super Bowl halftime show is one of the precious few American events that we have left—save the actual sports—that people watch live, and with each other, which is why whatever happens during it takes on outsize significance. When Janet Jackson had a wardrobe malfunction in 2004 during the show with Justin Timberlake, it broke the fledgling internet. I couldn’t tell you who took the field in 2013, except for Destiny’s Child, reunited during Beyoncé’s epic performance. Bad Bunny took the stage this year, and while there was no decade-defining wardrobe malfunction, or even a musical performance for the ages, there was something great: a colorful, joyful, multigenerational show at human scale.

Bad Bunny’s performance recreated a small town Puerto Rican vibe: At the outset there were old men playing dominoes, a woman getting her nails done, and a man hawking jewelry. Bad Bunny, real name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, weaved and danced through boxers sparring and a man barbecuing before taking the roof of a casita while a battalion of dancers in Adidas sneakers shook and twisted below. Compare this to Rihanna’s halftime show, where the dancers were basically in hazmat suits and the set was made of industrial-lit cubes.

Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai’s 20-year sentence on Monday ended one of the longest political trials in history, a multiyear spectacle that showed how Hong Kong’s vague and sweeping national security law can be weaponized to find anyone guilty of something.

The trial, in the end, proved the wealthy media entrepreneur guilty of nothing more dangerous than practicing journalism. Instead of rebelling, he used his publications, like Apple Daily and Next Magazine, to fight for the democracy that China pledged to Hong Kong but never fully delivered. The heavy sentence confirms China’s betrayal of Hong Kong, a former British colony that had been promised freedom to run its own affairs under Deng Xiaoping’s “one country, two systems” formula after the 1997 handover.

The AI wars were raging at the Super Bowl this weekend, and Anthropic fired the opening salvo. The AI developer known for its models’ coding prowess created a series of commercials tweaking its better-known competitor, OpenAI. The ads are worth watching because they’re funny—but also because of what they suggest about the differing ambitions of the two AI pacesetters.

Neither OpenAI nor ChatGPT is directly mentioned in Anthropic’s ads, but they are obviously the target. In one, a short basketball player asks an enormously oversized personal trainer for advice on improving his game. The trainer obligingly says he’s happy to do that, then starts recommending a brand of height-enhancing insoles as the questioner’s hopeful expression deflates.

Last week brought a day that will go down in history. February 5 saw the release of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.3-Codex. That may not seem especially exciting to the non-expert eye, but behind these arcane names is a new reality.

What makes these new models so important is the fact that much of the programming work behind them was done by artificial intelligence rather than humans. Anthropic insiders are claiming, for instance, that effectively 100 percent of the code behind their products is written by Claude itself. You can debate exactly how much human guidance and oversight goes into that, but other major AI labs all seem to be on the same trajectory. (Disclosure: I am on the Anthropic Economic Advisory Council.)