People are quiet lately. Not calm-quiet. Bracing-quiet.
You can see it in the numbers if you look. Foreclosure filings hit 227,548 in the first half of this year. That’s up 21 percent from last year. Highest level in six years. ATTOM, the company that tracks this, put the report out July 17.
Their own CEO said something worth repeating. He called it “normalization,” not a crash. Property taxes. Insurance bills. Interest rates. Nothing exotic. Just the plain cost of staying alive, grinding people down a little more every month.
At the same time, something else is happening. People are angry at AI. Not curious about it. Not cautious about it. Angry.
The Wall Street Journal reported this month that tech executives are hiring armed security. Not for show. Because of real threats. A man walked into Anthropic’s lobby saying an executive was “going to be killed.” Five days earlier, someone tried to firebomb Sam Altman’s house.
A YouGov poll found three out of four Americans want AI regulated harder than it is now. That’s not a fringe number. That’s most people.
Palantir’s CEO said it plain at a conference this year. Tell someone their job is disappearing, he said, and people go for the pitchfork.
So here’s what I see when I put it together. Rising foreclosures. Rising anger at AI. Back to school costs landing on families right now, this month. The holiday season sitting three months out, already casting a shadow. And under all of it, the midterms, still three months away.
Three months is a long time to sit in a squeeze with no release valve in sight.
That’s not a policy problem. That’s a human one. And it’s the exact ground the Baseline was built to stand on.
We absorbed a rule into CIMRP-1 on July 23rd. It says harm has to be scoped honestly, not minimized and not exaggerated. And it says something specific: a party can be materially affected by a decision without ever sitting in the room where that decision got made. The person who loses a job to an AI-driven layoff never talked to the AI. Never agreed to anything. The consequence still lands on them.
That’s the whole argument, right there. Responsibility for a decision with real consequence has to stay human, traceable, and owned by somebody at the moment they commit to it. Not diffused into “the algorithm did it.” Not absorbed into “the market decided.” A person made that call. The Baseline says name that person.
I don’t know if what we’re watching is a normal rough patch or the start of something people will look back on and mark a date to. I’m not going to pretend I know which. What I know is this: when the pressure has nowhere to go for three months, people don’t relax. They hunker down. And a country full of people hunkering down at the same time, for the same reasons, is worth naming honestly instead of waiting to see what it turns into.
That’s where I’m standing on this one. Watching, not guessing.
© 2026 The Faust Baseline LLC | All Rights Reserved
