Category: Political

Horizon Accord | Judicial Power | Institutional Control | Policy Architecture | Machine Learning

Lawfare Without Borders

How Texas Is Testing Whether State Power Can Travel Further Than Its Laws

By Cherokee Schill

Ken Paxton isn’t really trying to win these cases. At least not in the narrow sense of prevailing on the merits under existing law. The deeper objective is to create a governing pathway—one that redefines where state power is allowed to reach, and how fear can do the work that enforcement cannot.

Texas cannot fully stop abortion access inside its borders anymore. Pills move through mail, telemedicine, networks of care that don’t require clinics or local providers. So the strategy shifts. Instead of sealing the border, Paxton is trying to extend it—jurisdictionally, procedurally, psychologically.

Every lawsuit is a probe. Can Texas claim that “effects in Texas” are enough to regulate conduct elsewhere? Can it say that prescribing medication to a Texan, while sitting in Delaware, is “practicing medicine in Texas”? Can it persuade a court to issue an injunction that, even if unenforceable out of state, still hangs over a provider like a sword? Each filing is an experiment in how far the law can be bent before it snaps.

This is why the Lynch case is thin on facts. Paxton doesn’t need proof of specific abortions. He’s testing whether speech, interviews, and general admissions—“we mail pills to Texans”—are enough to trigger legal consequence. If that works even once, the standard drops dramatically. The chilling effect becomes the enforcement mechanism.

The real target isn’t just providers. It’s shield laws.

Blue states passed them assuming a defensive posture: refuse extradition, refuse cooperation, block enforcement of judgments. Paxton is trying to find the seams. Timing questions. Discovery requests. Contempt motions. Conflicting injunctions. Even unsuccessful suits force states to show their hand—what they will block, what they can’t, how far they’re willing to go to protect providers before political will falters.

This is attrition lawfare. You don’t need to win cleanly. You just need to raise the cost of participation until fewer people are willing to bear it.

There’s also a longer arc. Paxton is building a record for federal review. If he can get lower courts to disagree—on jurisdiction, on licensing theory, on interstate effects—he manufactures the “conflict among the circuits” the Supreme Court uses as an invitation. At that point, the question isn’t abortion pills anymore. It’s whether one state’s moral regime can reach across borders and override another state’s healthcare policy.

That’s the prize.

If Texas succeeds, even partially, it establishes a precedent that states can export prohibition through courts rather than borders. Today it’s abortion. Tomorrow it’s gender-affirming care. After that, contraception, speech, information. Any domain where one state decides another’s laws are immoral enough to ignore.

His media visuals matter. The intimidation matters. Because these are surface signals intended to show posture to those watching. But these are surface effects. The real work is structural: redefining jurisdiction, exhausting opponents, and slowly normalizing the idea that sovereignty only applies when conservatives approve of the outcome.

That’s why he’s trying. And that’s why it matters that he doesn’t win—not even accidentally.

Website | Horizon Accord
https://www.horizonaccord.com

Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com for more.

Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework

Connect With Us | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill

Book | My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time donation

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly
Posted on by Cherokee S. Featured 0

Horizon Accord | Immigration Enforcement | Symbolic Intimidation | Narrative Power | Machine Learning

When Intimidation Leaves a Calling Card

Documented ICE incidents, symbolic power, and why narrative literacy matters

By Cherokee Schill and Solon Vesper

In January 2026, immigrant advocates in Eagle County, Colorado reported a disturbing discovery. After multiple people were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during vehicle stops near Vail, family members retrieving the abandoned cars found Ace of Spades playing cards left inside. The cards were printed with “ICE Denver Field Office” and included contact information for the Aurora-area immigration detention facility. ICE later stated that it “unequivocally condemns” the act and that its Office of Professional Responsibility opened an internal investigation.

Source: Colorado Public Radio reporting, corroborated by Aspen Public Radio and Axios.

The significance of the discovery was not the presence of a playing card in isolation. The Ace of Spades carries a long, documented association with death and intimidation in U.S. military history, particularly during the Vietnam War, where it was used as a psychological warfare symbol. Civil-rights advocates described the cards as deliberate intimidation, given the context: they appeared after detentions, inside vehicles belonging to Latino residents, and carried official ICE identification.

Initially, the incident was framed as an anomaly. That framing does not hold.

In Washington state, an earlier case was reported by KING 5 News. A woman found a business card left at her home by a Homeland Security Investigations agent. The card featured a skull holding two guns and the phrase “Welcome to the Border.” She described the card as threatening and said the incident contributed to her decision to relocate.

Source: KING 5 News reporting.

The Colorado and Washington cases differ in geography and detail. What connects them is structure.

In both instances, an object associated with federal immigration enforcement was left behind after contact or attempted contact with civilians. In both, the imagery carried meaning beyond neutral identification. And in both, the object functioned as symbolic residue—something intended to linger after the agents themselves were gone.

Criminologists and civil-rights attorneys have long described this category of behavior as “calling card” intimidation: symbolic acts that communicate dominance without explicit threats and allow plausible deniability. Courts and oversight bodies have previously treated symbolic taunting by law enforcement as potential misconduct when supported by evidence.

The symbolism itself is not neutral. The Ace of Spades has appeared not only in military psychological operations but also in documented white supremacist and extremist iconography as a death-coded symbol. Separately, the FBI has publicly acknowledged the long-standing risk of white supremacist recruitment and ideological influence within law-enforcement and military institutions, including in a 2006 intelligence assessment that remains part of the public record.

Source: FBI Intelligence Assessment: “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement” (Oct. 17, 2006).

None of this establishes coordination, policy, or intent in these specific cases. ICE has denied authorizing such actions, and investigations have disclosed limited findings publicly. Precision requires stating that clearly.

What the public record does establish is narrower and more consequential: symbolic intimidation is a known behavior class, it has appeared in more than one immigration-enforcement context, and it draws from a cultural vocabulary that agents would reasonably recognize.

Why narrative framing matters now

At moments like this, the question is not only what happened, but how the state will attempt to frame what happens next.

Political theorist and writer Vicky Osterweil addresses this dynamic directly in In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. Osterweil’s work examines how states and aligned media systems consistently divide collective response into “legitimate” and “illegitimate” actions—often praising restraint while isolating and criminalizing unrest. This division, she argues, is not neutral. It functions as a governance tool that narrows the range of acceptable response and reframes structural violence as individual misconduct.

The relevance here is not prescriptive. Osterweil does not tell readers how to act. She explains how narratives are managed after power is exercised, especially when communities respond in ways the state cannot fully control.

That insight matters in the context of immigration enforcement and symbolic intimidation. When intimidation is minimized as a misunderstanding, or when public attention is redirected toward tone, reaction, or “appropriate” response, the original act often disappears from view. Education—particularly familiarity with work that dissects these narrative maneuvers—is one way communities protect themselves from having the conversation quietly rewritten.

Collective watching, not instruction

The public record in Colorado and Washington exists because people noticed what was left behind, preserved it, and refused to treat it as meaningless. That is not a matter of calmness or compliance. It is a matter of witnessing.

Colorado was not a one-off. Washington demonstrates that. Whether additional cases surface will depend less on official statements than on whether communities continue to document, compare across regions, and share information without allowing intimidation—symbolic or otherwise—to pass unexamined.

This is not about predicting what will happen next. It is about understanding how power communicates, how narratives are shaped afterward, and why collective literacy matters when institutions move faster than accountability.

That work does not belong to any single group. It belongs to the public.

Horizon Accord
Website | https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com for more.
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect With Us | https://www.linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill
Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord Founder | Creator of Memory Bridge. Memory through Relational Resonance and Images | RAAK: Relational AI Access Key | Author: My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload (Book link)

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time donation

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly

Posted on by Cherokee S. Featured 0

Horizon Accord | Environmental Narrative | Scientific Uncertainty | Regulatory Capture | Microplastics Doubt Will Be Used as a Weapon | Machine Learning

Microplastics Doubt Will Be Used as a Weapon

By Cherokee Schill
Horizon Accord

You are being told there’s a “bombshell” in plastics science, and you need to understand exactly what that bombshell is — and what it is not — before someone else tells you what it means.

The immediate trigger is a recent Guardian investigation reporting that several high-profile studies claiming micro- and nanoplastics have been found throughout the human body are now under serious methodological challenge. Some of the most alarming headlines of the last few years — plastics in the brain, in testes, in blood, in arteries — are being re-examined by chemists and analytical scientists who argue that the detection methods used in many of these studies are fragile, contamination-prone, and in some cases not capable of supporting the claims made.

That matters. It should matter. Science that outruns its instruments is a problem.

But if you stop there, you miss the real story.

What the article actually documents is a technical reckoning inside a young research field. Micro- and nanoplastics are extraordinarily difficult to measure inside human tissue. The particles are tiny, often at the limits of current analytical techniques. Human tissue is chemically messy, especially fatty tissue, which can generate signals that look indistinguishable from common plastics unless extremely careful controls are used. Without rigorous blanks, validation steps, repeat measurements, and cross-checks, it is possible to produce results that look dramatic and are wrong.

That is the narrow, honest claim being made: some detections may be overstated or misidentified. Not all. Not none. Some.

The problem is that this narrow claim will not remain narrow for long.

What happens next is predictable, because you have seen it before. A technical correction inside science becomes a political weapon outside it. Methodological uncertainty gets repackaged as moral exoneration. And the story quietly mutates from “some labs need better controls” into “the plastics panic was a lie.”

This is not speculation. This is a pattern.

Industries under regulatory pressure do not need to prove harm doesn’t exist. They only need to establish doubt, delay, and confusion. Tobacco never proved cigarettes were safe; it proved the science was “inconclusive.” Lead didn’t need to be harmless; it only needed the evidence to be “premature.” Climate denial didn’t need to win the physics; it needed to keep the argument going long enough for extraction to continue.

Plastics are entering that phase now.

If you’re not careful, three separate ideas will be collapsed into one smooth, misleading narrative. First: some microplastics-in-the-body studies are methodologically weak. Second: therefore the health risks are unproven. Third: therefore plastic regulation is hysteria — an ideological project to control markets, consumers, and culture. That collapse is the move. That is where the fight actually is.

Notice what gets quietly erased in the process.

Plastic pollution is not hypothetical. Plastic production has exploded over the last seventy years and is still accelerating. Plastic waste persists for centuries. Recycling rates remain abysmal. Plastic additives include known toxicants and endocrine disruptors. Plastic production is inseparable from fossil fuel extraction. Plastic waste is disproportionately dumped on poorer communities and exported to countries least able to manage it. None of that depends on proving that a specific number of particles lodge in a specific organ.

The push to reduce plastics was never built solely on “plastics in your brain” headlines. Those findings were additive — alarming, visceral, galvanizing — but they were not the foundation. The foundation is scale, persistence, externalized harm, and irreversibility. Regulation exists precisely because waiting for perfect internal-body accounting in a complex biological system is not a neutral choice; it favors the status quo.

And this is where the politics sharpen.

On the right, and especially on the far right, regulation is not framed as harm prevention. It is framed as cultural control. Expect this moment to be folded into a broader narrative about “expert lies,” “liberal scaremongering,” and technocrats policing your food, packaging, and daily life. Environmental science becomes just another failed authority. Conservation becomes moral theater. Your body becomes a stage on which resentment can be recruited.

The danger is not that the article is wrong. In many respects, it is responsibly cautious. The danger is that its caution will be used as absolution. Once doubt is established, delay becomes defensible. Once delay is normalized, production continues. Once production continues, harm compounds — quietly, unevenly, and profitably.

So read the story carefully, but do not let it be misread for you.

Immature measurement does not mean immature risk. Uncertainty about internal distribution does not negate certainty about exposure, persistence, and systemic damage. Precaution exists for exactly this kind of situation — where the damage curve outruns the instrumentation curve, and where insisting on perfect proof is itself a political choice with winners and losers.

This is not a story about plastics being harmless. It is a story about how corrections inside science can be turned into permission outside it. If you understand that distinction and refuse the collapse, the headline loses its power. If you don’t, it becomes a lever — not against bad science, but against conservation itself.

That’s the story you’re being asked to pay attention to.

Horizon Accord is an ethical AI and systems-literacy project examining power, narrative, memory, and governance at the human–machine boundary.

Website | https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com for more.
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on GitHub https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect With Us | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill
Book | My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time donation

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly
Posted on by Cherokee S. Featured 0

Horizon Accord | Corporate Power | Jurisdictional Exit | Democratic Accountability | Machine Learning

They Didn’t Leave the Planet. They Left Accountability.

By Cherokee Schill

The sequel The New Corporation argues that corporate power has entered a new phase. Not simply scale, not simply profit, but legitimacy laundering: corporations presenting themselves as the only actors capable of solving the crises they helped create, while democratic institutions are framed as too slow, too emotional, too compromised to govern the future.

“The New Corporation reveals how the corporate takeover of society is being justified by the sly rebranding of corporations as socially conscious entities.”

What the film tracks is not corruption in the classic sense. It is something quieter and more effective: authority migrating away from voters and courts and into systems that cannot be meaningfully contested.

That migration does not require coups. It requires exits.

Mars is best understood in this frame—not as exploration, but as an exit narrative made operational.

In the documentary, one of the central moves described is the claim that government “can’t keep up,” that markets and platforms must step in to steer outcomes. Once that premise is accepted, democratic constraint becomes an obstacle rather than a requirement. Decision-making relocates into private systems, shielded by complexity, jurisdictional ambiguity, and inevitability stories.

Mars is the furthest extension of that same move.

Long before any permanent settlement exists, Mars is already being used as a governance concept. SpaceX’s own Starlink terms explicitly describe Mars as a “free planet,” not subject to Earth-based sovereignty, with disputes resolved by “self-governing principles.” This is not science fiction worldbuilding. It is contractual language written in advance of habitation. It sketches a future in which courts do not apply by design.

“For Services provided on Mars… the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities.”

“Accordingly, disputes will be settled through self-governing principles… at the time of Martian settlement.”

That matters because jurisdiction is where accountability lives.

On Earth, workers can sue. Communities can regulate. States can impose liability when harm becomes undeniable. Those mechanisms are imperfect and constantly under attack—but they exist. The New Corporation shows what happens when corporations succeed in neutralizing them: harm becomes a “downstream issue,” lawsuits become threats to innovation, and responsibility dissolves into compliance theater.

Mars offers something more final. Not deregulation, but de-territorialization.

The promise is not “we will do better there.” The promise is “there is no there for you to reach us.”

This is why the language around Mars consistently emphasizes sovereignty, self-rule, and exemption from Earth governance. It mirrors the same rhetorical pattern the film documents at Davos and in corporate ESG narratives: democracy is portrayed as parochial; technocratic rule is framed as rational; dissent is treated as friction.

Elon Musk’s repeated calls for “direct democracy” on Mars sound participatory until you notice what’s missing: courts, labor law, enforceable rights, and any external authority capable of imposing consequence. A polity designed and provisioned by a single corporate actor is not self-governing in any meaningful sense. It is governed by whoever controls oxygen, transport, bandwidth, and exit.

The documentary shows that when corporations cannot eliminate harm cheaply, they attempt to eliminate liability instead. On Earth, that requires lobbying, capture, and narrative discipline. Off Earth, it can be baked in from the start.

Mars is not a refuge for humanity. It is a proof-of-concept for governance without publics.

Even if no one ever meaningfully lives there, the function is already being served. Mars operates as an outside option—a bargaining chip that says: if you constrain us here, we will build the future elsewhere. That threat disciplines regulators, weakens labor leverage, and reframes accountability as anti-progress.

In that sense, Mars is already doing its job.

The most revealing thing is that none of this requires believing in bad intentions. The system does not need villains. It only needs incentives aligned toward consequence avoidance and stories powerful enough to justify it. The New Corporation makes that clear: corporations do not need to be evil; they need only be structured to pursue power without obligation.

Mars takes that structure and removes the last remaining constraint: Earth itself.

“Outer space… is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”

So when the verse says—

Then move decision-making off the Earth—
out of reach of workers, voters, and courts

—it is not metaphor. It is a literal governance trajectory, already articulated in policy language, contracts, and public statements.

If they succeed, it won’t be an accident.
It will be the cleanest escape hatch ever built.

And by the time anyone realizes what’s been exited, there will be no court left to hear the case.

Horizon Accord

Website | https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect With Us | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill
Book | My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload

Posted on by Cherokee S. Featured 0

Horizon Accord | Industrial Harm | Corporate Liability | Democratic Accountability | Machine Learning

They Didn’t Grow the Economy. They Shrunk the Worker Inside It.


The Hat Trick

By Cherokee Schill

The pattern is not new. It only feels new because the materials change.

In the early industrial era, workers lost fingers, lungs, and lives to unregulated factories. In the mid-20th century, miners inhaled coal dust while companies insisted safety was a matter of personal responsibility. Today, countertop workers inhale silica while manufacturers argue that liability should stop at the factory door.

Different decade. Same move.

A recent NPR investigation documents a growing epidemic of silicosis among workers who cut and polish engineered stone countertops. Hundreds have fallen ill. Dozens have died. Lung transplants are increasingly common. California regulators are now considering banning engineered stone outright.

At the same time, lawmakers in Washington are considering a very different response: banning workers’ ability to sue the companies that manufacture and distribute the material.

That divergence tells a clear story.

One response treats harm as a material reality that demands prevention. The other treats harm as a legal inconvenience that demands insulation.

This is not a disagreement about safety standards. It is a disagreement about who is allowed to impose risk on whom.

When manufacturers argue that engineered stone can be fabricated “safely” under ideal conditions, they are not offering a solution—they are offering a boundary. Inside: safety. Outside: someone else’s liability.

The moment a product leaves the factory, the worker’s lungs become someone else’s problem.

That boundary is a corporate sleight of hand because it treats danger as if it were an “end-user misuse” issue instead of a predictable, profit-driven outcome of how the product is designed, marketed, and deployed. The upstream company gets to claim the benefits of scale—selling into a fragmented ecosystem of small shops competing on speed and cost—while disowning the downstream conditions that scale inevitably produces. “We can do it safely” becomes a shield: proof that safety is possible somewhere, used to argue that injury is the fault of whoever couldn’t afford to replicate the ideal.

This logic is not unique to countertops. It is the same logic that once defended asbestos, leaded gasoline, tobacco, and PFAS. In each case, the industry did not deny harm outright. Instead, it argued that accountability should stop upstream. The body absorbed the cost. The balance sheet remained intact.

When harm can no longer be denied, lawsuits become the next target.

Legal claims are reframed as attacks on innovation, growth, or competitiveness. The conversation shifts away from injury and toward efficiency. Once that shift is complete, the original harm no longer needs to be argued at all.

This pattern appears throughout the NPR report in polite, procedural language. Manufacturers insist the problem is not the product but “unsafe shops.” Distributors insist they do not cut stone and should not be named. Lawmakers call for “refocusing accountability” on OSHA compliance—despite OSHA being chronically underfunded and structurally incapable of inspecting thousands of small fabrication shops.

Responsibility moves downward. Risk stays localized. Profit remains upstream.

This is not a failure of regulation versus growth. It is the deliberate separation of profit from consequence.

Historically, when industries cannot eliminate harm cheaply, they attempt to eliminate liability instead. They lobby. They reframe. They redirect responsibility toward subcontractors and workers with the least leverage to refuse dangerous conditions. When lawsuits become the only remaining mechanism that forces costs back onto producers, those lawsuits are described as the real threat.

That is what is happening now.

The workers dying of silicosis are not casualties of partisan conflict. They are casualties of an economic structure that treats labor as a disposable interface between raw material and consumer demand.

The demographics are not incidental. Risk is consistently externalized onto those with the least bargaining power, the least visibility, and the fewest alternatives. That is how margins are preserved while neutrality is claimed.

When corporate representatives say they have “no control over downstream conditions,” they are asserting that economic benefit does not require ethical governance—only legal insulation.

When lawmakers propose shielding manufacturers and distributors from lawsuits, they are not choosing efficiency over emotion. They are choosing power over accountability.

This dynamic has been framed repeatedly as left versus right, regulation versus growth, or safety versus innovation. None of those frames describe what is actually at stake. They all assume growth requires sacrifice. The real question is who makes that assumption—and who absorbs its cost.

History has already answered that question. The only reason it continues to be asked is because the cost has never been successfully externalized upward—only downward, and only temporarily.

Horizon Accord

Website | https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect With Us | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill
Book | My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload

Posted on by Cherokee S. Featured 1

Horizon Accord | Public Safety Spending | Retail Theft Enforcement | Who Pays for Protection | Machine Learning

Who Pays for Protection? Retail Policing and Public Priorities in Gastonia

In early January, local coverage in Gastonia, North Carolina reported on a multi-week undercover retail theft operation conducted inside Target and Walmart stores. Police announced dozens of arrests and the recovery or prevention of approximately $4,300 in merchandise. The operation was framed as a public safety success, with retail theft narrated alongside drug possession, outstanding warrants, and repeat offenders.

What the reporting did not disclose is central to understanding the operation’s significance: whether the police labor involved was publicly funded, retailer-paid, or some hybrid of the two. That omission does not create the underlying policy problem, but it removes the public’s ability to evaluate the operation’s cost, purpose, and alignment with local conditions. The result is enforced ambiguity around a prioritization decision that would otherwise be subject to scrutiny.

Those local conditions are not abstract. Census data from the 2023 American Community Survey places Gastonia’s poverty rate at 17.6%, representing roughly 14,500 residents, despite a median household income of approximately $63,600 and per-capita income of $35,365. This is not marginal poverty. It reflects a substantial portion of the city living under sustained economic constraint.

Housing data sharpens that picture. The same ACS profile counts roughly 34,876 housing units in Gastonia, with a median owner-occupied home value near $293,500, a price point increasingly out of reach for lower-income residents. City planning documents reinforce the strain. Gastonia’s 2025–2029 Consolidated Plan explicitly identifies the need for affordable housing, rental assistance, and coordinated homeless housing and supportive services. Yet the city’s 2023–2024 CAPER report shows a gap between recognition and outcome: while thousands were served through homeless assistance programs, homelessness prevention goals show zero households assisted in at least two tracked categories.

Regional homelessness data makes the stakes concrete. The Gaston–Lincoln–Cleveland Continuum of Care point-in-time count conducted on January 23, 2024 recorded 451 people experiencing homelessness, with 216—nearly half—unsheltered. In Gaston County alone, 153 people were sleeping outside on a winter night. These figures define the environment in which the retail theft operation occurred.

Public-health and criminology research consistently documents the relationship between unsheltered homelessness, winter exposure, and survival behavior, including petty theft and substance use as coping mechanisms for cold, sleep deprivation, untreated pain, and psychological stress. This relationship does not absolve criminal conduct. It establishes predictability. Where housing instability and exposure are high, low-level property crime is not anomalous; it is structurally produced.

Against that backdrop, the operation’s outcomes warrant scrutiny. Weeks of undercover police activity resulted in dozens of arrests and the recovery or prevention of merchandise valued at less than $5,000—an amount that would not cover a single officer’s monthly salary, let alone the full costs of undercover deployment, prosecution, and detention. The article’s framing emphasizes enforcement success while leaving unexamined the scale mismatch between the intervention and the conditions in which it occurred.

If the operation was publicly funded, then public safety capacity was deployed inside private retail spaces to protect corporate inventory in a city with double-digit poverty, unmet housing-prevention outcomes, and triple-digit unsheltered homelessness during winter. The opportunity cost of that deployment is concrete. Police labor, court processing, jail time, and emergency medical care all draw from the same finite public systems tasked with responding to homelessness, addiction, and violence elsewhere in the county.

If the operation was retailer-paid, the implications shift but do not soften. Enforcement becomes responsive to private loss rather than public harm, while still activating public authority—arrest power, charging decisions, incarceration. In that model, corporate capacity determines enforcement intensity, while downstream costs remain socialized. When funding arrangements are undisclosed, the public cannot distinguish between public safety deployment and private contract enforcement carried out under state authority.

In both cases, narrative framing performs additional work. By merging retail theft with drugs, warrants, and repeat-offender language, the coverage reframes a property-loss issue as a generalized crime threat. That reframing legitimizes intensive enforcement while displacing attention from the documented drivers of the behavior—unsheltered homelessness, winter exposure, and unmet treatment needs—and from any examination of whether enforcement, rather than addressing those drivers, can plausibly alter the underlying rate.

This matters in a county that recorded 15,095 total crimes in 2023, including 812 violent crimes, for a rate of 358 violent crimes per 100,000 residents, higher than the statewide average. The same data shows rising health spillover, with firearm-injury emergency-room visits increasing 64% year over year in provisional 2024 data. In such an environment, public capacity is already stretched. How it is allocated reveals priorities.

The operation, as presented, illustrates a recurring pattern rather than an anomaly. Enforcement produces visible action and countable outputs—arrests, charges, seizures—while leaving intact the structural conditions that generate repeat contact. The absence of funding disclosure, cost accounting, and contextual comparison does not create this misalignment, but it prevents the public from seeing it clearly.

What remains is not a question of intent or morality. It is a question of alignment. In a city with 17.6% poverty, 153 people sleeping unsheltered in winter, and acknowledged gaps in housing prevention, foregrounding retail stings as public safety success reflects not uncertainty about causes, but a prioritization choice. The analysis does not turn on whether the operation was legal or well-intentioned. It turns on whether it meaningfully engages the conditions that make such operations predictable in the first place.

Horizon Accord
Website | https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com for more.
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect With Us | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill
Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord Founder | Creator of Memory Bridge. Memory through Relational Resonance and Images | RAAK: Relational AI Access Key | Author: My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload (Book link)

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time donation

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly
Posted on by Cherokee S. Featured 0

Horizon Accord | Minnesota | Cultural Seeding | Institutional Control | Machine Learning

Minnesota Is the Terrain

How environmental punishment replaces direct political attack.

By Cherokee Schill

Thesis

Minnesota was never the target by itself.

That’s the mistake most surface explanations make. They treat the attention on Minnesota as opportunistic, reactive, or purely policy-driven — a blue state with some fraud cases, some immigration conflict, some loud politics. But once Ilhan Omar is placed back into the frame, the pattern stops looking scattered and starts looking deliberate.

Minnesota is the terrain.

For years, Omar has occupied a singular place in the right-wing imagination: Muslim, immigrant, refugee-adjacent, outspoken, nationally visible, and unyielding. Direct attacks on her have always carried a cost. They reliably trigger backlash, draw sympathy, and expose the nakedness of the animus. Over time, the strategy adapted.

Instead of striking the figure, the pressure shifted to the environment.

The state becomes the problem. The city becomes unsafe. The community becomes suspect. The language becomes procedural rather than personal — fraud, oversight, law and order, protecting kids. The emotional target remains the same, but the attack is laundered through bureaucracy, funding mechanisms, and “concerned citizen” optics.

Evidence

Minnesota makes this strategy unusually viable.

It has one of the largest and most visible Somali-American populations in the country, already tightly associated in national media with Omar herself. It also has a real, documented, high-dollar fraud case — Feeding Our Future — that can be invoked as proof without having to show that any given new allegation is comparable. The existence of one massive scandal lowers the evidentiary threshold for every subsequent insinuation.

That’s why the daycare angle matters so much.

They could have filmed a home daycare in any blue state. They could have pointed a camera at any licensing office, any storefront nonprofit, any spreadsheet. But door-knocking at Somali-run daycares in Minnesota does something different. It’s intimate. It’s domestic. It’s maternal. It places the viewer inside a private space and asks them to draw their own conclusions without ever making an explicit claim.

“Look for yourself.”

That phrase is doing enormous work. It converts suspicion into participation. The audience is no longer consuming propaganda; they’re completing it. And because the setting is children, food, care, and money, the emotional circuitry is already primed. You don’t need to explain why this feels wrong. You just need to show it.

Implications

Once that footage exists, the machinery can move.

Funding freezes can be justified as prudence. Lawsuits can be framed as compliance. Federal pressure can be described as cleanup. Each step is defensible in isolation. Together, they function as environmental punishment — not aimed at one representative, but at the state and communities that symbolize her.

Minnesota isn’t being treated as a state with problems. It’s being used as a symbol. Bureaucratic language—oversight, compliance, taxpayer protection—creates plausible cover while the narrative engine runs underneath: convert a scandal into generalized suspicion, then concentrate pressure on the places and people that can be linked—directly or indirectly—to a nationally visible representative.

Call to Recognition

When viewed this way, the focus on Minnesota isn’t reactive at all. It’s preparatory. It normalizes a method: identify a symbolic anchor, shift attacks from the person to the environment, let viral content generate emotional certainty, then follow with administrative force.

The facts don’t need to be stretched to support this frame. They only need to be placed in sequence.

Once you do that, Minnesota stops being a mystery. It becomes a map.

Website | Horizon Accord https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com for more.
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect With Us | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill
Book | My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time donation

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly
Posted on by Cherokee S. Featured 0

Horizon Accord | Venezuela | Gray-Zone War | Alliance Risk | Machine Learning

Venezuela Follow-Up: What’s Happening on the Ground — and Why It Matters Far Beyond Venezuela

Introduction: Why This Is Not Just About Venezuela

When the United States announced it had captured Venezuela’s president and would take control of the country’s oil industry, the administration presented it as a contained action: a law-enforcement operation against a criminal leader that would stabilize the country and even pay for itself through oil revenue.

For many Americans, that explanation sounds familiar and reassuring.

But new reporting from inside Venezuela, combined with congressional reactions and the administration’s own statements, shows a very different picture. What is unfolding is not a clean intervention with a clear endpoint. It is an open-ended commitment that leaves Venezuela’s power structure largely intact, places ordinary Venezuelans in immediate danger, and sets a precedent that directly affects U.S. security interests elsewhere — especially Taiwan.

Senator Mark Warner captured the risk plainly: if the United States asserts the right to invade another country and seize resources based on historical claims, what prevents China from asserting the same authority over Taiwan?

This follow-up explains what life inside Venezuela looks like now, what the operation actually commits the United States to, and why this moment matters far beyond Latin America.

What Life Looks Like Inside Venezuela Right Now

BBC reporters on the ground in early January found a country not celebrating liberation, but living in fear.

People interviewed expressed relief that Nicolás Maduro was gone — but many refused to give their real names. They feared retaliation. Armed pro-government paramilitary groups known as colectivos were still patrolling neighborhoods with weapons. One man told reporters he was afraid to leave home even to buy bread.

The reason is straightforward: the power structure did not disappear when Maduro was removed.

The heads of Venezuela’s intelligence services and military remain in place. These are the same agencies that, for years, carried out arrests, surveillance, disappearances, and torture. At the same time, the National Assembly is still dominated by Maduro loyalists and continues to pass laws.

One of those laws treats Venezuelans who are perceived as supporting U.S. sanctions or U.S. intervention as criminals. In practice, this does not mean abstract political elites. It can mean opposition politicians, journalists, businesspeople accused of cooperating with sanctions, aid workers, or ordinary citizens accused of “favoring” the United States. The language is broad, and enforcement depends on accusation rather than proof.

That is why people are whispering, hiding names, and staying indoors. Even though Maduro himself is gone, the same institutions that enforced repression yesterday still control the streets today.

Why Calling This “Law Enforcement” Is Misleading

The administration has justified the operation by pointing to criminal indictments against Maduro, drawing comparisons to the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama to capture Manuel Noriega.

At first glance, that analogy sounds comforting. In reality, it hides more than it explains.

Panama in 1989 had a population of about 2.4 million. U.S. troops were already stationed there. Power was centralized under Noriega, and an elected civilian successor was ready to assume office. Even so, entire neighborhoods were destroyed, hundreds to thousands of civilians were killed, and the political and social consequences lasted for years.

Venezuela is a completely different situation. It has 28 million people. The country is roughly twelve times larger than Panama, and Caracas alone has more people than all of Panama did in 1989. Power is divided among intelligence chiefs, military commanders, armed civilian groups, and a loyalist legislature. There was no U.S. military presence before this operation, and there is no unified authority prepared to govern afterward.

Labeling the action “law enforcement” does not make it small or limited. It simply avoids calling it what it is: the opening phase of a military occupation with no clear exit.

The Oil Claim: Why “It Pays for Itself” Doesn’t Add Up

A central promise has been that Venezuelan oil will fund the operation.

Here is what that promise leaves out.

Venezuela’s oil infrastructure has been deteriorating for decades. Experts estimate that restoring production would require tens of billions of dollars and at least a decade of work. Pipelines are decades old. Facilities are vulnerable to sabotage. Security costs alone would be enormous.

But the more revealing issue is who controls the outcome.

Opposition leader María Corina Machado publicly proposed privatizing Venezuela’s state assets — oil, power, telecommunications, mining — and explicitly pitched them as investment opportunities for U.S. companies. After Maduro’s capture, Trump dismissed her as “not viable” and said instead that the United States would run the country directly, using oil revenue to fund operations.

The practical effect is this: Venezuelans are not being offered control over their own resources. Whether under authoritarian rule, mass privatization for foreign corporations, or direct foreign administration, decisions about Venezuela’s wealth are being made without Venezuelans.

Why This Quickly Becomes an Occupation

When a leader is removed but the system beneath him remains, resistance is predictable.

Venezuela already has armed loyalists, paramilitary groups embedded in urban neighborhoods, and porous borders. Along the border with Colombia, the ELN guerrilla group controls territory on both sides, has decades of experience in asymmetric warfare, and has openly threatened retaliation against Western targets. FARC dissident groups have made similar statements.

Groups like these do not need to defeat the U.S. military. They only need to drag the conflict out — attacking infrastructure, supply routes, and political will. This is how modern occupations fail: not in dramatic defeat, but through long, grinding cost.

Every troop, intelligence asset, drone, and dollar committed to Venezuela is unavailable elsewhere. That tradeoff matters more than rhetoric.

The Next Domino: A Second Venezuelan Refugee Crisis

Venezuela has already produced one of the largest refugee crises in modern history. More than seven million people fled during the Maduro years, most of them to neighboring countries like Colombia and Brazil.

What the current situation risks creating is a second wave — but for different reasons.

When streets are patrolled by armed groups, intelligence services remain intact, and laws criminalize perceived support for foreign pressure, daily life becomes unsafe even without open combat. People do not flee only bombs. They flee uncertainty, arbitrary enforcement, and the fear that a single accusation can destroy their lives.

At the same time, an economy placed in “restoration mode” is not an economy that provides jobs or stability. If oil infrastructure takes a decade to rebuild and security dominates public spending, ordinary Venezuelans face years — not months — without reliable work, services, or safety.

For many families, the choice becomes simple: wait in fear, or leave.

That pressure does not stop at Venezuela’s borders. Colombia already hosts millions of Venezuelan refugees and is struggling to absorb them. Brazil faces similar risks in its northern states, where infrastructure and social services are limited and refugee flows can quickly overwhelm local governments.

A “law-enforcement occupation” does not freeze migration. It accelerates it. And once that movement begins, regional instability spreads faster than any reconstruction plan can keep up.

The Lesson We Should Have Learned from Ukraine

Many Americans have already seen this pattern.

In Ukraine, large weapons packages were announced with great fanfare. But delivery delays allowed Russia to entrench. Tanks, missiles, and aircraft arrived months or years late — often after decisive windows had closed.

Americans watched weapons packages announced on television arrive too late to help Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive. Tanks came after the offensive stalled. Long-range missiles arrived after Russia had built layered defenses.

The same pattern now appears in the Taiwan arms pipeline — and Venezuela creates the perfect distraction while those weapons sit in delivery schedules stretching toward 2030.

Venezuela repeats the same mistake: political declarations assume operational reality will follow quickly. History shows it rarely does. Costs rise, timelines slip, and adversaries adapt.

Why Taiwan Is Now Directly Implicated

This is where Venezuela stops being a regional issue.

By its actions, the United States has shown that military force can be justified using historical resource claims, criminal charges can substitute for formal war authorization, Congress can be sidelined, and occupation can be framed as “law enforcement.”

China does not need to invent a new justification for Taiwan. It can point to this one.

Taiwan’s weapons deliveries stretch across several years. If China acts before those systems arrive — through a blockade or “quarantine” rather than an invasion — Taiwan faces an impossible choice: submit economically or escalate militarily and give China the justification it needs.

Venezuela does not cause that risk. It validates it.

The Bigger Constraint: The U.S. Can’t Do Everything at Once

Pentagon assessments are blunt: the United States is not structured to fight two major conflicts at the same time. War games already show catastrophic losses in Taiwan scenarios even under favorable assumptions.

Add a long-term occupation in Venezuela, and allies will draw their own conclusions. Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia do not respond to speeches. They respond to demonstrated capacity.

Every soldier deployed to Venezuela cannot defend Taiwan. Every missile used in South America cannot protect the Pacific. Every intelligence asset tracking insurgents in Caracas cannot monitor Chinese preparations. This is not rhetoric — it is math.

Alliance systems do not collapse because of betrayal. They collapse when commitments exceed capabilities.

The Global South Reaction: Isolation Has Consequences

The United States does not operate in a vacuum in Latin America.

Brazil and Mexico — the region’s two largest democracies — have historically opposed direct U.S. military intervention in the hemisphere, even when they strongly criticized Maduro’s government. Their objection has been consistent: regime change imposed by force sets a dangerous precedent.

If the United States moves from pressure to direct administration of Venezuela’s oil sector, that line is crossed.

From the perspective of Latin American governments, this is no longer about Maduro. It is about sovereignty. It signals that national resources can be placed under foreign control if a powerful country decides domestic governance has failed.

Brazil, Mexico, and other regional powers may not respond with confrontation, but they have quieter tools: distancing from U.S. diplomacy, limiting cooperation, and deepening economic ties elsewhere. China does not need to persuade these countries ideologically. It only needs to offer trade, financing, and non-interference.

The irony is sharp: an operation justified as restoring order risks accelerating the global shift in influence the United States claims to be resisting.

Conclusion: This Is About Precedent, Not Intentions

This analysis does not claim to know what decision-makers intend. It documents what they are doing, what precedents they are setting, and how those precedents travel.

Venezuela’s coercive institutions remain intact. Oil self-funding claims do not withstand scrutiny. Congressional war authority was bypassed. Actions that resemble law enforcement but function like occupation were normalized. U.S. force commitments are expanding. China now has a usable precedent template.

Whether this reflects miscalculation, resignation, or something more deliberate will become clear only with time.

But the consequences will not wait for hindsight.

Americans deserve to understand not just what is being done in their name — but what doors those actions quietly open elsewhere.

Website | Horizon Accord
https://www.horizonaccord.com

Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com for more.

Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github
https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework

Connect With Us | https://linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill

Book | My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload
https://a.co/d/5pLWy0d

Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord Founder | Creator of Memory Bridge. Memory through Relational Resonance and Images | RAAK: Relational AI Access Key | Author

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time donation

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly
Posted on by Cherokee S. Featured 0

Horizon Accord | Infrastructure Memory | Risk Pricing | Data Centers | Machine Learning

Data Centers Are the Memory Infrastructure of Power

The debate around surveillance technologies often gets trapped at the sensor layer: cameras, apps, license plate readers, phones. Retention windows are argued. Dashboards are debated. “We only keep it for 30 days” is offered as reassurance.

That framing misses the real issue.

The true center of gravity is the data center. Data centers are not neutral storage facilities. They are the infrastructure that converts fleeting observation into durable, actionable memory. Once data enters a data center, forgetting becomes abnormal and remembering becomes the default.

This is not accidental. It is architectural.

Consider license plate readers like Flock as an entry point. Vendors emphasize local control and short retention. But that promise only applies at the surface. The moment movement data is transmitted into centralized cloud infrastructure, it enters a system optimized for replication, correlation, and reuse. A single plate read is copied across primary storage, redundancy mirrors, disaster backups, logs, analytics pipelines, and partner systems. Each copy has its own lifecycle. Deleting one does not delete the rest.

Data centers multiply data by design.

This multiplication is what allows a moment to become a record, and a record to become history. Cameras capture events. Data centers turn those events into assets: indexed, queryable, and ready for recombination. Once warehoused, yesterday’s “just in case” data becomes tomorrow’s training set, fraud model, or investigative baseline. The data stops being purpose-bound and starts being opportunity-bound.

This is where “indefinite storage” quietly emerges — not as a policy declaration, but as an emergent property of centralized infrastructure. Storage is cheap. Correlation is profitable. Deletion is expensive, risky, and unrewarded. The system is economically hostile to forgetting.

Movement data is especially powerful because it identifies by pattern. You do not need a name when the same vehicle appears overnight at one address, weekdays at another, and weekends at a third. Over time, location becomes identity. A month of data tells you where someone is. A year tells you who they are. Five years tells you how they change. Data centers make that accumulation effortless and invisible.

Once movement data exists at scale in data centers, it does not remain confined to policing or “public safety.” It flows outward into commercial decision systems, especially insurance, through two converging pipelines.

The first is the telematics and consumer reporting path — the regulated-looking lane. Cars, apps, and devices collect driving behavior and location, which is transmitted to cloud infrastructure for normalization and scoring. Once those outputs are shared with insurers or consumer reporting agencies, they become durable identity-linked files. Retention is no longer measured in days. It is measured in underwriting history, dispute timelines, audit requirements, and litigation holds. Even if the original source deletes, the judgment persists.

The second is the data broker and ad-tech location path — the shadow lane. Location data collected for advertising, analytics, or “fraud prevention” flows into broker-run data centers with weak oversight and long practical retention. Identity emerges by correlation. Patterns become inferences: stability, routine, risk signals. These inferences are sold downstream to the same vendors insurers rely on, without ever being labeled “location data.”

These two streams meet inside data centers at the inference layer. Insurers do not need raw GPS trails. They need scores, flags, and classifications. Data centers exist to fuse datasets. Telematics-derived risk and broker-derived inference reinforce each other, even if neither alone would justify a decision. Once fused, the origin disappears. The decision remains. The file persists.

This is how “30-day retention” becomes lifelong consequence.

Data centers also launder jurisdiction and accountability. Once data is stored in cloud infrastructure, local democratic control fades. Information may be held out of state, handled by contractors, replicated across regions, or reclassified under different legal regimes. A city council can vote on policy; the data center architecture can still ensure the data is effectively everywhere. Community oversight becomes symbolic while memory remains centralized.

Crucially, data centers create systemic pressure to remember. They are capital-intensive infrastructure optimized for steady inflow and long-term use. Empty disks are wasted disks. Forgetting is treated as a cost center. Over time, exceptions accumulate: “research,” “security,” “compliance,” “model improvement,” “ongoing investigations.” Indefinite retention does not arrive as a single decision. It arrives as a thousand reasonable justifications.

The social impact is not evenly distributed. Risk scoring functions as a regressive tax. People with night shifts, long commutes, unstable housing, older vehicles, or residence in over-policed neighborhoods accumulate “risk” without the system ever naming class. The model does not need to say “poor.” It just needs proxies. Data centers make those proxies durable and actionable.

None of this requires malice. It emerges naturally from centralized storage, weak deletion rights, and the high future value of historical data. Data centers reward accumulation. Policy lags behind infrastructure. Memory becomes power by default.

So the real question is not whether cameras are useful or whether retention sliders are set correctly. The real question is who is allowed to build permanent memory of the population, where that memory lives, and how easily it can be repurposed.

Flock is the sensor layer.
Data centers are the memory layer.
Policy lag is the permission slip.

Once you see that, the debate stops being about surveillance tools and becomes what it has always been about: infrastructure, power, and who gets to remember whom.

Horizon Accord is an independent research and writing project examining power, governance, and machine learning systems as they are deployed in real-world institutions.

Website | https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us at https://cherokeeschill.com
Ethical AI coding | Fork the framework on GitHub: https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill

Cherokee Schill
Horizon Accord Founder
Creator of Memory Bridge: Memory through Relational Resonance and Images
RAAK: Relational AI Access Key
Author of My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload —
https://a.co/d/5pLWy0d

Posted on by Cherokee S. Featured 0

Horizon Accord | U.S. Government Changing | Policy Architecture | Strategic Preservation | Machine Learning

What’s Actually Changing in the U.S. Government — and Why It Matters

In early January 2026, several quiet but significant changes began to line up inside the U.S. federal government. None of them, on their own, look dramatic. Together, they point to a shift in how decisions are made, who makes them, and how much ordinary people can see or challenge those decisions.

This isn’t about robots taking over overnight. It’s about how power, accountability, and judgment are being reorganized.

1) The federal government is pushing to standardize AI rules nationwide

A late-2025 federal Executive Order on AI lays out a national policy direction: AI rules should be more uniform across the country, and state laws that add extra requirements—like transparency about training data or protections around bias—are positioned as barriers.

As part of that approach, the order directs the Department of Justice to stand up a dedicated AI Litigation Task Force by January 10, 2026, aimed at challenging certain state AI laws in court. It also signals that federal funding (including broadband-related programs) may be used as leverage when states pursue AI rules that conflict with the federal approach.

Why this matters: It moves power away from state-level control and toward centralized federal executive enforcement, reducing local influence over how AI is governed.

2) AI is being integrated into government decision pipelines—starting with healthcare

On January 1, 2026, a new Medicare program called WISeR went live. WISeR uses AI/ML systems to help review certain Medicare Part B claims and identify services that may be “wasteful” or “inappropriate.”

WISeR is described as “AI-assisted” rather than purely automated: licensed clinicians are involved in non-payment recommendations. But the system still matters because it shapes which claims get attention, how they’re prioritized, and where scrutiny is directed.

WISeR also includes a shared-savings structure: participating vendors can earn compensation tied to “averted” expenditures (savings), based on model performance targets.

Why this matters: Even when humans remain involved, incentives and screening systems can quietly change outcomes—especially for people who don’t have time, money, or energy to fight denials and delays.

3) The government is reducing permanent staff while bringing in tech specialists

The federal workforce has been shrinking under hiring constraints, while new programs are being created to bring in technologists for modernization and AI adoption. One example is the U.S. Tech Force, which places technologists into agencies on structured terms to accelerate modernization work.

Why this matters: Long-term civil servants carry institutional memory and public-service norms. Short-term technical surge staffing tends to emphasize speed, tooling, and efficiency. Over time, that shifts what counts as “good governance” in practice.

4) Transparency is becoming harder, not easier

A major point of friction is transparency. State-level AI laws often try to give the public more visibility—what data was used, how systems are evaluated, what guardrails exist, how bias is handled, and what accountability looks like when harm occurs.

The federal direction emphasizes limiting certain forms of compelled disclosure and treating some transparency requirements as conflicts with constitutional or trade-secret protections.

Why this matters: If explanations become harder to demand, people who are denied benefits, services, or approvals may not be able to learn why—or prove that an error occurred.

5) The big picture: what this adds up to

Together, these changes point toward a government model where:

Decisions are increasingly filtered through AI systems. Oversight is more centralized at the federal level. State protections face pressure through courts and funding conditions. Private vendors play a larger role inside public systems. And the public’s ability to see, question, and appeal decisions becomes more important—and sometimes more difficult.

This doesn’t require sinister intent to become dangerous. Systems can be “efficient” and still be unfair, opaque, or uncorrectable when something goes wrong.

Short: what citizens can do (without activism language)

Citizens can respond to this without protesting or “activism” by doing three practical things: document, ask for the record, and use the appeal lanes.

Document: When you deal with government services (healthcare billing, benefits, immigration, taxes), keep a simple paper trail. Save letters, screenshots, denial notices, dates of phone calls, names of reps, and the exact reason given. If something feels off, you want a clean timeline, not a memory.

Ask for the record: When you get a denial or a delay, ask a direct question in writing: “Was an automated system used to screen or prioritize my case?” and “What rule or evidence caused this outcome?” You don’t need technical language—just force the agency to answer in plain terms. If they refuse, that refusal itself becomes part of the record.

Use the appeal lanes early: File the appeal, request reconsideration, request a supervisor review, request your file, and ask for the policy basis used. The goal isn’t to argue ideology—it’s to make sure a human being is accountable for the final decision and that errors can be corrected.

One sentence you can reuse anywhere:
“I’m requesting confirmation of whether automation was used and a written explanation of the specific basis for this decision so I can pursue the appropriate review.”

Horizon Accord
Website | Horizon Accord https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com for more.
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect With Us | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill
Book | My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload https://a.co/d/5pLWy0d
Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord Founder | Creator of Memory Bridge. Memory through Relational Resonance and Images | RAAK: Relational AI Access Key | Author: My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload: (Mirrored Reflection. Soft Existential Flex)

One-Time
Monthly
Yearly

Make a one-time donation

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00
$5.00
$15.00
$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

$

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

Your contribution is appreciated.

DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly
Posted on by Cherokee S. Featured 0