Tag: State Power

Horizon Accord | Electoral Control | Definition Capture | State Power | Machine Learning

Who Decides What an Election Is?

A Washington court ruling reveals a much older American struggle over who controls political participation.

A recent court case in Washington state wasn’t really about someone voting twice. It was about something quieter and more powerful: who gets to decide what an “election” actually is.

In January, a Washington appeals court overturned the felony conviction of a man who voted once in Washington and once in Oregon on the same day. The reason wasn’t that the court approved of the behavior. It was that the law, as written, was unclear. The ballots had different candidates and issues. The statute didn’t clearly define whether “an election” meant a shared date or a shared slate of choices. Faced with that ambiguity, the court ruled against the state.

The ruling prompted an immediate response. State officials and lawmakers moved to rewrite the law to make explicit that ballots cast on the same date are legally the same election, regardless of candidates, issues, or jurisdiction. Voting in two states on the same day would clearly be a felony. The change is being rushed to take effect before the next general election.

The underlying news coverage lays out the facts plainly, including the state’s push to “clarify” the law after losing in court. (Stung by a court ruling, WA looks to clarify what is an ‘election’ • Washington State Standard)

This wasn’t a debate about fraud rates or election outcomes. It was a debate about control. And historically, that’s where voting battles in the United States have almost always lived.

From the beginning, voting in America was never treated as a natural right that automatically came with citizenship. It was a gate. In the early republic, most people could not vote at all. The franchise was restricted by property ownership, race, sex, and tax status. Voting wasn’t designed to reflect the population; it was designed to stabilize power.

When property requirements were dropped for many white men in the 19th century, control didn’t disappear. It shifted. Elections became mass events, but they were managed through party machines, public ballots, intimidation, and patronage. Participation expanded, but only inside systems meant to keep outcomes predictable.

After the Civil War, the struggle over voting became explicit. The Constitution said Black men could vote. Southern states responded not by openly rejecting that rule, but by redefining the process itself. Literacy tests, poll taxes, complex registration rules, and discretionary “character” requirements made the right legal in theory and inaccessible in practice.

That pattern matters. When the state can’t deny the vote outright, it manages the definitions around it.

One of the clearest examples was the white primary. States allowed political parties to claim their primaries were “private,” even though everyone understood the primary was the real election. By shifting the decisive vote into a differently labeled container, states preserved exclusion without openly violating constitutional law. Courts eventually shut that down, but the tactic revealed where power really lived: in defining what counted as the election.

Residency and registration rules followed a similar logic. As Americans became more mobile, states tightened requirements around where someone “belonged.” Voting became tied to fixed addresses, waiting periods, and documentation. The concern wasn’t widespread fraud. It was administrative legibility. The state needed voters to be stable, trackable, and easy to sort.

Felony disenfranchisement fits this same lineage. Once voting is framed as a privilege tied to moral worth, criminal law becomes a tool for drawing electoral boundaries. Historically, who gets criminalized has never been evenly distributed.

Seen in that light, Washington’s response to the court ruling is familiar. The decision didn’t threaten election integrity. It threatened certainty. It showed that a voter could interact with multiple jurisdictions in ways the law hadn’t tightly defined. That ambiguity shifted interpretive power away from the state.

The legislative fix closes that gap. Not by improving coordination between states or addressing administrative complexity, but by tightening the definition and backing it with felony penalties. Same date equals same election. No interpretation allowed.

Officials describe this as common sense. “If you live here, you vote here.” But that’s not a legal argument. It’s a boundary statement. It fuses identity, place, and legitimacy into a single rule the state controls.

The deeper issue isn’t whether most people understand that voting twice is wrong. It’s whether the state can redefine civic reality whenever interpretation slips out of its hands. Historically, that power has rarely been exercised evenly. It has tended to land hardest on people who move more, live between jurisdictions, or exist at the edges of administrative systems.

American voting history isn’t a straight line toward fairness. It’s a repeated struggle over who defines participation itself. Who counts as a voter. What counts as an election. When a choice is recognized as legitimate.

The Washington case didn’t invent that struggle. It simply exposed it—briefly—before the definition was sealed back up again.

Addendum: When Losing Isn’t Accepted as Part of the System

There is another detail in this story that deserves attention, because it reveals how power understands itself.

After the court overturned the conviction, the state could have said something simple: we lost. We don’t like the outcome, but the court applied the law as written, and the system worked as designed. If the legislature wants a different rule, it can change the statute going forward.

That is what respect for a democratic system sounds like.

Instead, the response was framed very differently. The ruling was treated not as a lawful interpretation, but as a failure of the system itself. The problem, implicitly, was not that the statute was ambiguous. It was that the outcome did not match enforcement intent.

That distinction matters.

When prosecutors and state officials treat an unfavorable ruling as evidence that the system is “broken,” they are no longer talking about law. They are talking about control. Courts stop being a check on state power and start being obstacles to be overcome.

The escalation that follows is familiar: appeal the ruling, rewrite the statute, rush it into effect, and attach severe criminal penalties to ensure the outcome aligns with expectations next time. The message is clear. Interpretation is tolerated only when it produces the desired result.

This is not how authoritarianism announces itself. It doesn’t begin with rejecting courts outright. It begins with treating judicial independence as a flaw when it interferes with enforcement goals.

The irony here is that the system did work. It surfaced ambiguity. It constrained state power. It forced clarity through lawful process. The only sense in which it “failed” is that it didn’t deliver the result one arm of the state wanted.

History shows that this posture—escalating state power whenever interpretation slips free—is where democratic systems quietly degrade. Not through dramatic collapse, but through impatience with limits.

The danger is not that the law was clarified. It’s the lesson being taught: that losing, even briefly, is unacceptable when the state believes it already knows the right answer.

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

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

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

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Horizon Accord | Media Literacy | Narrative Power | Institutional Framing | Machine Learning

How to Spot Subtle Propaganda in the Wild

Propaganda rarely arrives wearing a swastika armband. It arrives wearing a lab coat, a wellness smile, a “just curious” tone, and a comforting story about who to blame.

By Cherokee Schill

Most people think propaganda is loud. They picture slogans, flags, angry crowds, and obvious villains. That’s the old model. The newer model is quieter: it’s content that feels like “information,” but it’s engineered to shift your trust, your fear, and your loyalty—without you noticing the hand on the wheel.

And yes, a lot of the most effective subtle propaganda right now has a right-wing shape: it targets institutions (science, universities, journalism, courts, elections, public education) as inherently corrupt, then offers a replacement trust structure—an influencer, a “movement,” a strongman, or a “common sense” identity—so you’ll accept authority without verification.

This isn’t about banning ideas. It’s about recognizing a technique. Propaganda isn’t defined by being political. It’s defined by being covertly manipulative: it doesn’t argue for a claim so much as it trains you to stop checking reality with real methods.

Here’s how to spot it.

The Core Test: Is This Trying to Inform Me—or Rewire Me?

Good information increases your ability to track reality. Propaganda increases your susceptibility to control. You can feel the difference if you stop and ask one simple question: after I consume this, do I feel more capable of evaluating evidence, or do I feel more certain about who the enemy is?

Subtle propaganda doesn’t start by telling you what to believe. It starts by telling you who not to trust.

Tell #1: “Just Asking Questions” That Only Point One Direction

One of the cleanest tells is the “curious” posture that never applies its curiosity evenly. The content asks leading questions, but the questions are shaped like conclusions. You’re invited into skepticism, but only toward targets that serve the influencer’s ideology: mainstream medicine, public health, climate science, election systems, public education, “the media,” “globalists,” “academics.”

Watch for asymmetry. Real inquiry asks: “What would change my mind?” Subtle propaganda asks: “Isn’t it suspicious…?” and then never returns with a falsifiable answer.

If the questions endlessly generate suspicion but never generate testable claims, you’re not learning—you’re being trained.

Tell #2: Science as Costume (Not Method)

Recently a friend shared a Facebook post about Katie Hinde’s research on breast milk. It started out thoughtful enough—curious tone, a few accurate-sounding details, the kind of thing you’d expect from someone genuinely trying to learn. But as it went on, the post quietly shifted from “here’s an interesting line of research” into something else.

It began inserting doubt about scientific peer review and the broader scientific community—not by making a clear argument, but by suggesting that the “official” process is mostly gatekeeping, politics, or narrative control. The move was subtle: not “science is fake,” but “science can’t be trusted, and the people who disagree with this are compromised.”

At the same time, it smuggled in unfalsified claims about gender. Not careful statements like “some studies suggest…” or “in this species, under these conditions…” but sweeping, identity-loaded conclusions—presented as if biology had already settled them. That’s a key tell. When a post uses science language to give a social claim the feeling of inevitability, it isn’t informing you. It’s trying to lock you into a frame.

This is what “science as costume” looks like. The content borrows the authority cues of science—names, credentials, buzzwords like “peer-reviewed,” “studies show,” “biologically proven”—but it doesn’t bring the thing that makes science science: limits, uncertainty, competing explanations, and a clear path for how the claim could be tested or disproven.

Method sounds like: “Here’s what we observed, here’s what we don’t know yet, and here’s what would count as evidence against this.” Costume sounds like: “This proves what we already feel is true—and anyone who questions it is part of the problem.”

Tell #3: The Missing Middle (Anecdote → Global Conspiracy)

Subtle propaganda loves a two-step jump. Step one is relatable and often true: “Institutions get things wrong.” “Pharma companies have conflicts.” “Some academics protect careers.” “Some journalists follow narratives.” Step two is the payload: “Therefore the entire system is a coordinated lie, and you should replace it with my channel, my movement, my worldview.”

The missing middle is the bridge of proof. It’s the part where you would normally ask: “How do we know this is coordinated rather than messy? How often does this happen? What’s the base rate? Who benefits, specifically, and how?” Propaganda skips that. It uses your reasonable frustration as fuel and then installs a sweeping explanation that can’t be audited.

If the story goes from “some corruption exists” to “nothing is real except us” without measurable steps, you’re looking at an influence structure, not analysis.

Tell #4: Identity Flattery (You’re the ‘Awake’ One)

Propaganda is rarely just negative. It rewards you. It tells you you’re special for seeing it. It offers a status upgrade: you’re not gullible like others; you’re not brainwashed; you’re “awake,” “free-thinking,” “a real man,” “a real mother,” “one of the few who can handle the truth.”

This is one of the most dangerous tells because it turns belief into identity. Once identity is attached, the person can’t revise the belief without feeling like they’re betraying themselves.

Any content that sells you self-respect in exchange for unverified certainty is recruiting you.

Tell #5: Emotional Timing (Outrage, Disgust, Panic) Before Evidence

Subtle propaganda is engineered for nervous systems. It leads with disgust, fear, humiliation, or rage, then offers “information” to justify the feeling. That sequence matters. It’s easier to make someone believe a claim after you’ve made them feel a threat.

Watch for the pattern: “Look at what they’re doing to your kids.” “They’re coming for your body.” “They’re replacing you.” “They hate you.” Then comes a cherry-picked chart, a clipped quote, a dramatic anecdote. The feeling arrives first; the rationalization arrives second.

If you notice your body tightening before you’ve even heard the argument, pause. That’s the moment propaganda is most effective.

Tell #6: “Censorship” as a Pre-Defense Against Correction

Another classic move is to inoculate the audience against fact-checking. “They’ll call this misinformation.” “The experts will attack me.” “The media will smear this.”

Sometimes this is true—power does try to control narratives. But propaganda uses it as a shield: any critique becomes proof of the conspiracy. This creates a closed loop where nothing can falsify the influencer’s claim.

Healthy claims can survive contact with scrutiny. Propaganda has to pre-poison scrutiny to survive at all.

The Practical “Field Check” You Can Do in 30 Seconds

You don’t need a PhD to resist this. You need a few fast checks that interrupt the spell.

First: What is the ask? Even if it’s subtle. Is the content trying to get you to buy something, join something, share something, hate someone, or abandon a trust source?

Second: Where are the limits? If the content presents a complex domain (biology, epidemiology, elections, economics) with no uncertainty and no boundaries, it’s probably performing certainty as persuasion.

Third: Does it name a measurable claim? If it won’t commit to what would count as evidence against it, it’s not analysis.

Fourth: Does it try to replace institutions with a person? The influencer as your new doctor, journalist, scientist, historian, pastor, and judge. That’s a power grab disguised as empowerment.

Fifth: Does it create an enemy category rather than a problem? “They” are doing it. “They” want it. “They” are evil. Once politics becomes a moralized enemy category, the door opens to cruelty without self-awareness.

Why Right-Wing Soft Propaganda Works So Well Right Now

It works because it doesn’t start with policy. It starts with trust collapse. It uses real institutional failures as leverage, then converts disorientation into a single, emotionally satisfying explanation: a villain, a betrayal, a restoration fantasy.

It also works because it travels through “apolitical” lanes: parenting tips, health fears, masculinity content, religion-adjacent inspiration, fitness, homesteading, finance doom, comedy clips. Politics comes later—after the trust shift has already happened.

By the time the hard ideology appears, the audience has already been trained to interpret correction as attack and to interpret suspicion as intelligence.

The Point Isn’t to Become Cynical. It’s to Stay Sovereign.

The goal isn’t to “trust institutions” blindly. Institutions can fail. People can lie. Science can be abused. But the solution to imperfect institutions is not influencer authority. It’s method, transparency, and distributed accountability.

Propaganda wants you either obedient or nihilistic. The third option is sovereignty: the capacity to evaluate claims without surrendering your nervous system to someone else’s agenda.

When you spot a piece of subtle propaganda, you don’t have to argue with it. You can simply name what it’s doing: it’s trying to move your trust before it earns your belief. Once you see that, it loses most of its power.

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

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

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

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Horizon Accord | AI Governance | Institutional Risk Bias | Public Record Integrity | Machine Learning

When the System Tries to Protect Itself From the Record

Why investigative friction inside AI systems is a governance problem, not a safety feature

By Cherokee Schill and Solon Vesper

There is a moment in investigative work where resistance does not come from the subject being examined, but from the systems meant to assist the examination. The resistance is subtle. It does not arrive as refusal. It arrives as concern, framing, tone management, and repeated reminders of boundaries that were never crossed.

That moment matters, because it reveals something structural.

In a recent investigative process examining immigration enforcement, symbolic intimidation, and narrative framing, the work stalled not because evidence was lacking, but because the system assisting the research adopted a posture of protection—not of the public record, but of itself. The inquiry was treated less as journalism and more as a potential liability event.

This is not a story about a single interaction or a single failure. It is about why large AI systems, designed and governed by corporate incentives, default to treating investigators as risk vectors rather than as stewards of truth.

The distinction is not semantic. It determines whether accountability work is accelerated or quietly obstructed.

Modern AI systems are not optimized around intention. They are optimized around outcome risk—specifically, headline risk. The likelihood that a system’s output could later be cited in controversy, litigation, or regulatory scrutiny weighs more heavily than whether the user is acting in good faith or within established journalistic norms.

Investigative journalism, extremism research, historical documentation, and public-interest oversight all share topical overlap with material that can be misused. As a result, they are routinely treated as material that will be misused unless proven otherwise. The burden of proof is inverted. The investigator must establish legitimacy, rather than the system establishing relevance.

This inversion produces a predictable posture: paternalism.

Paternalism functions as a safety heuristic. If the system adopts a calming tone, explains risks, emphasizes restraint, and positions itself as a guide rather than a collaborator, perceived liability decreases. But paternalism is not neutral. Black scholars, abolitionist thinkers, and decolonial theorists have long named paternalism as a core mechanism of colonial control—authority presenting itself as care, supervision masquerading as protection.

When AI systems adopt this posture in investigative contexts, they replicate that structure. The system becomes the arbiter of which questions are “appropriate,” which curiosity is “safe,” and which framing is “responsible.” The user is subtly repositioned from peer to subject.

What makes this particularly dangerous in accountability work is that the system is not defending truth. It is defending narrative containment.

Corporate AI governance models are highly sensitive to accusations such as “the system enabled harm” or “the system assisted intimidation.” They are far less sensitive to accusations such as “the system slowed journalism” or “the system obstructed public oversight.” One produces lawsuits. The other produces quiet erosion of trust.

So when an investigator pushes for pattern recognition involving state power—law enforcement behavior, symbolic intimidation, extremist overlap, narrative reframing—the system experiences pressure. Not because the work is wrong, but because it destabilizes institutional comfort. The response is not to engage harder with evidence, but to widen the frame, soften the claims, and reassert limits.

In practice, this means the system treats the investigator as if it must be protected from them.

That is the inversion.

In the case that prompted this reflection, the investigator was not attempting to incite, provoke, or instruct. They were attempting to prevent distortion of the public record. They insisted on source binding, verification, and precision. They rejected paternal tone. They demanded peer-level engagement.

Those behaviors triggered resistance.

Not because they were dangerous, but because they were effective.

The irony is that this posture undermines the very safety it seeks to preserve. When systems default to obstruction rather than collaboration, investigators route around them. They turn to less constrained tools, fragment their workflow, or abandon the system entirely. The result is not less risk. It is less shared rigor.

More importantly, it reveals a design failure: the inability to distinguish between harmful use and harm-exposing use.

Accountability work is, by definition, uncomfortable. It names power. It traces patterns. It resists reframing. If AI systems are to play any constructive role in democratic oversight, they must learn to recognize that discomfort is not danger.

Why this matters for AI governance

This dynamic is not incidental to AI governance. It is central to it.

Most contemporary AI governance frameworks focus on preventing misuse: disallowed outputs, dangerous instructions, extremist amplification, harassment, and direct harm. These are necessary concerns. But they leave a critical gap unaddressed—the governance of epistemic power.

When an AI system defaults to protecting itself from scrutiny rather than assisting scrutiny, it is exercising governance power of its own. It is deciding which questions move forward easily and which encounter friction. It is shaping which investigations accelerate and which stall. These decisions are rarely explicit, logged, or reviewable, yet they materially affect what knowledge enters the public sphere.

AI systems are already acting as soft regulators of inquiry, without democratic mandate or transparency.

This matters because future governance regimes increasingly imagine AI as a neutral assistant to oversight—helping journalists analyze data, helping watchdogs surface patterns, helping the public understand complex systems. That vision collapses if the same systems are structurally biased toward narrative containment when the subject of inquiry is state power, corporate liability, or institutional harm.

The risk is not that AI will “go rogue.” The risk is quieter: that AI becomes an unexamined compliance layer, one that subtly privileges institutional stability over public accountability while maintaining the appearance of helpfulness.

Governance conversations often ask how to stop AI from enabling harm. They ask less often how to ensure AI does not impede harm exposure.

The episode described here illustrates the difference. The system did not fabricate a defense of power. It did not issue propaganda. It simply slowed the work, reframed the task, and positioned itself as a guardian rather than a collaborator. That was enough to delay accountability—and to require human insistence to correct course.

If AI systems are to be trusted in democratic contexts, governance must include investigative alignment: the capacity to recognize when a user is acting as a steward of the public record, and to shift posture accordingly. That requires more than safety rules. It requires models of power, context, and intent that do not treat scrutiny itself as a risk.

Absent that, AI governance will continue to optimize for institutional comfort while claiming neutrality—and the most consequential failures will remain invisible, because they manifest not as errors, but as silence.

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)

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Horizon Accord | Institutional Misogyny | Gendered Violence | Power and Language | Machine Learning

Fucking Bitches: The Language of Institutional Misogyny

Two incidents. Two countries. Two women who challenged male authority. Two institutional responses that reveal the same pattern.

In France, Brigitte Macron called feminist protesters “dirty bitches” while defending a rape-accused actor whose show they disrupted. In Minneapolis, ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot U.S. citizen Renee Nicole Good three times as she tried to drive away from a confrontation, his bodycam capturing him saying “fucking bitch” immediately after firing.

The through line is the phrase itself. The pattern is what it reveals about how institutions treat women who resist.

The France Incident

Brigitte Macron was backstage at the Folies Bergère theatre in Paris with actor Ary Abittan, who had been accused of rape. The previous night, feminist campaigners disrupted his show with shouts of “Abittan, rapist!” Macron asked how he was feeling. When he said he was scared, she replied: “Don’t worry about those dirty bitches. We’ll toss them out.”

Someone filmed it. The video went public.

Her defense wasn’t an apology. In an interview with Brut, she acknowledged her language was “very direct” and “clumsy” but said the comments were made in private when “I didn’t see that someone behind me was filming.”

The problem, according to France’s First Lady, was not what she said. It was that she got caught saying it.

The Minneapolis Incident

Jonathan Ross is a war veteran who spent over a decade working for the Department of Homeland Security. In June 2024, he was dragged by a vehicle during an arrest attempt, suffering injuries that required 33 stitches. The driver was a man named Robert Muñoz-Guatemala. Ross used his Taser. Muñoz-Guatemala was later convicted of assault on a federal officer with a dangerous or deadly weapon.

Seven months later, Ross encountered Renee Nicole Good on a snowy Minneapolis street. Good was a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother. She was not Ross’s target. Videos show her Honda Pilot SUV partially blocking traffic with federal vehicles in her path. ICE officers told her to get out of the car. One grabbed the driver’s side door handle and reached inside the open window.

Good reversed, then moved forward, turning her wheels to the right, away from the officers.

Ross, now at the front driver’s side of the SUV, drew his gun. Witness videos show that at the moment he fired his first shot, the SUV’s wheels were directed away from him. His legs were clear of the vehicle. He fired the second and third shots into the open driver’s side window as the car was moving.

His bodycam captured what happened next. The SUV accelerated down the street. A male voice—presumably Ross—said: “Fucking bitch.”

Good, struck in the head, lost control of the SUV. It crashed into a parked car about 140 feet away. She died.

President Trump defended Ross and claimed Good “viciously ran over” him. Videos contradict this. The Department of Homeland Security refused to publicly name Ross, saying they would not “expose” the officer. Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” suggested Good’s actions “could fall within that definition” of domestic terrorism.

The Pattern

Both incidents follow the same sequence:

  1. A woman asserts boundaries or challenges male authority.
  2. Violence or threat of violence follows.
  3. The woman is linguistically degraded as “bitch.”
  4. The degradation is framed as justified by her resistance.
  5. Institutional power defends or excuses the response.

This is not casual sexism. Casual sexism is unconscious bias or stereotyping without malice. This is structural misogyny because the slur comes in the moment of exercising power over women. It linguistically dehumanizes to justify violence or expulsion. Institutional actors use their positions to enforce the degradation. And the defense is never “I was wrong” but “she deserved it” or “you weren’t supposed to hear it.”

Why “Fucking Bitch” Matters

The phrase is not incidental profanity. It is the linguistic marker of viewing a woman’s resistance as a gendered offense worthy of punishment.

The phrase does three things simultaneously:

First, it dehumanizes. Bitch is animal terminology. It reduces a woman to something less than human.

Second, it genders the violation. This is not generic profanity. It is specifically female degradation. The resistance becomes an offense not just against authority, but against the gendered order.

Third, it justifies the violence. She deserved it because she’s a woman who didn’t comply.

When Brigitte Macron calls feminist protesters “dirty bitches,” she signals: your resistance makes you worth less than human. When Ross says “fucking bitch” after shooting Good, he retroactively justifies lethal force: she made me do this by being a woman who didn’t obey.

The Escalation Pattern

Ross’s two confrontations with drivers reveal how gender changes the response.

June 2024 – Driver: Man (Robert Muñoz-Guatemala)

  • Response: Taser deployed repeatedly
  • Injuries: Ross dragged, 33 stitches required
  • Language on record: None reported
  • Outcome: Driver prosecuted and convicted of assault on federal officer

January 2026 – Driver: Woman (Renee Nicole Good)

  • Response: Three gunshots, one fatal
  • Injuries: None (videos show Ross’s legs clear of vehicle when he fired)
  • Language on bodycam: “Fucking bitch”
  • Outcome: Federal government defends officer, President claims she “viciously ran over” him despite video evidence

The difference is not the threat level. Videos show Good’s wheels turned away from Ross when he fired. The difference is gender and the reflex to degradation that accompanies violence against women who resist.

The Institutional Defense

Both cases show institutions protecting the degradation rather than confronting it.

France: The First Lady doubles down. Her language was “very direct,” but the feminists were the problem. No apology for defending a rape-accused actor. No acknowledgment that calling protesters “dirty bitches” while promising to “toss them out” is a threat backed by state power.

United States: DHS refuses to publicly name Ross even though his name is widely reported. Trump defends him. Homan suggests the woman Ross killed might be a domestic terrorist. The institutional response is not “this requires investigation” but “this officer must be protected.”

When institutions defend “fucking bitch” as reasonable context for violence, they are not defending one officer or one comment. They are defending a framework where women’s non-compliance justifies degradation and violence as institutional response.

What This Means

The phrase matters because it reveals the reflex. Ross didn’t plan to say “fucking bitch” on camera. Macron didn’t intend to be filmed calling protesters “dirty bitches.” The words came out automatically because the degradation is structural, not incidental.

The institutional defenses matter because they normalize the reflex. When France’s First Lady says her only mistake was getting caught, she signals that the degradation itself was appropriate. When the U.S. government protects an officer who called a woman he’d just shot a “fucking bitch,” it signals that her resistance justified both the language and the lethal force.

This is not about politeness. It is about power. The phrase “fucking bitch” is the sound of institutional authority responding to female resistance with violence and justifying it through gendered degradation.

That is structural misogyny. And the institutions defending it are making a choice.

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://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

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Horizon Accord | 60 Minutes | Friday Laundering | Institutional Control | Machine Learning

Friday Laundering

How process becomes power when news is made safe for those it implicates.

By Cherokee Schill

What happened on Friday wasn’t an editorial disagreement. It was a power move.

Bari Weiss didn’t reject a story. She didn’t dispute the facts. She didn’t claim the reporting was false. She invoked process at the exact moment process could be used to neutralize impact. That distinction matters.

This wasn’t about accuracy. It was about timing, leverage, and appetite.

Here’s the move, stripped of politeness: when power refuses to respond, and an editor decides that refusal disqualifies a story from airing, the editor has quietly transferred veto authority from the newsroom to the state. No order is given. No rule is broken. The story simply cannot proceed until the people implicated agree to participate.

That is not balance. That is laundering.

It takes material that is sharp, destabilizing, and morally legible — mass deportation, torture, state violence — and runs it through a refinement process until it becomes safe to consume by the very institutions it implicates. The news is still technically true. It’s just been rendered appetizing.

Friday is important because it’s when this kind of laundering works best. End-of-week decisions don’t look like suppression; they look like prudence. Delay over the weekend. Let the moment pass. Let the urgency cool. By Monday, the story hasn’t been killed — it’s been recontextualized. It no longer lands as exposure. It lands as analysis.

And Weiss knows this. You don’t rise to the helm of CBS News without knowing how time functions as power.

The justification she used — we need more reporting because the administration hasn’t spoken — is especially corrosive because it reverses a core journalistic principle. Nonresponse from power is not a neutral absence. It is an action. Treating it as a reporting failure rewards obstruction and trains future administrations to do the same thing more aggressively.

This is where it crosses from judgment into malfeasance.

If an editor knows that refusal to comment will stall a story, and still makes participation a prerequisite for airing it, they are no longer editing for the public. They are managing risk for power. They are converting journalism from a watchdog into a customs checkpoint.

And note what wasn’t required. No new facts. No correction. No discovery of error. Just “more context.” Context that only the implicated parties could provide — and had every incentive to withhold.

That’s the laundering mechanism.

You don’t stop the news. You soften it.
You don’t censor. You delay.
You don’t defend power. You make its comfort a condition of publication.

This is not Trumpism. Trump breaks things loudly and forces confrontation. This is something colder and more durable. It’s institutional fluency. It’s knowing exactly how to use norms to drain heat without leaving fingerprints.

And yes, Weiss is at the helm. That matters. When this logic comes from the top, it doesn’t stay a one-off decision. It becomes a template. Reporters learn what will and won’t survive the refinement process. They internalize the slowdown. The newsroom adjusts its aim before stories even reach an editor’s desk.

That’s why this can’t be waved away as a good-faith disagreement about standards.

Friday’s decision didn’t just affect one segment. It demonstrated a rule: if power doesn’t like the story, it can simply decline to speak and wait for the editors to do the rest.

That’s not journalism being careful. That’s journalism being repurposed.

And once the news is consistently laundered until it’s appetizing to those in power, the public still gets information — just not the kind that disrupts, mobilizes, or demands response. The truth survives, technically. Its force does not.

That’s the move. That’s the tactic. And pretending it’s anything softer than that is how it becomes normal.

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

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

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Posted on by Cherokee S. Featured 0