In Donald Trump’s America, everything is up for renegotiation — no matter how controversial. This month, Ben Shapiro launched a campaign to convince Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd. As of today, the conservative media figure’s petition has gathered over 50,000 signatures while his five-part docuseries “The Case for Derek Chauvin” has added more fuel to the campaign.

In recent weeks, both Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk have also expressed their support. But there’s just one small problem: a presidential pardon would only affect Chauvin’s federal conviction for violating Floyd’s civil rights, not his longer state sentence for second-degree and third-degree murder. Unless erstwhile VP candidate and current Minnesota governor Tim Walz deigns to pardon him, he’d remain in prison regardless of Trump’s actions.

However, this campaign isn’t about Chauvin specifically — it’s about declaring a definitive end to an era in which racial justice concerns dominated public discourse. It’s a symbolic statement that the moral panic of 2020 is over, and that the pendulum has swung decisively back. As Shapiro writes in his letter to Trump, “the Derek Chauvin conviction represents the defining achievement of the Woke movement in American politics”.

Trump, for his part, has wisely feigned ignorance of the effort. That’s because the President must surely know that embracing Chauvin would risk alienating the black and minority voters he’s worked to cultivate, even as he likely recognises the political advantage in allowing his base to believe such a pardon remains possible.

The pardon push has created an uncomfortable tension within Trump’s coalition. While figures like Shapiro and Kirk enthusiastically promote the idea, and Elon Musk calls it “something to think about,” other prominent Trump supporters are horrified. Rob Smith, a black gay veteran and Turning Point USA figure, called the campaign “absolutely destructive,” stating pointedly: “It does nothing for Trump’s agenda, it would cause racial strife in America, [and] it is an idea so toxic and destructive I don’t know what Ben Shapiro is thinking.”

Although Smith’s points are well taken, it’s easy to understand what Shapiro is thinking: he and his supporters are eager to roll back every perceived victory of their ideological opponents, regardless of practicality or timing. Indeed, the conservative has already indicated his campaign might extend beyond Chauvin. He told Axios he’s “more than happy to look at” other cases of police officers who have been “railroaded,” specifically mentioning the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Breonna Taylor in Louisville. The potential for a wholesale revisiting of these controversial cases suggests a broader project: not just to free individual officers, but to rewrite the entire narrative of American policing.

Shapiro’s campaign arrives at a propitious moment because the Right has already secured its signature victory on the law enforcement front. The acquittal of Daniel Penny was celebrated across conservative media as the definitive end of the “defund the police” era. And evidently, most of the public agreed.

What matters here isn’t primarily criminal justice reform or police accountability, but whose version of 2020 will prevail in the national consciousness. Despite all evidence, many Americans have convinced themselves that whole cities burned to the ground during the “summer of rage.” Others have insisted the protests were “mostly peaceful” despite a wealth of documented violence. In this environment, Chauvin once again becomes less a fumbling police officer convicted of a regrettable murder and more a contested symbol in America’s increasingly incompatible versions of reality. Though Trump will likely maintain strategic ambiguity on this hot-button topic, the real victory for Shapiro and his allies is making Chauvin’s once-unthinkable crimes contestable again.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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