This Is Not Freedom

The Most Patriotic Thing I’ll Be Doing in America’s 250th Year

Jun 26, 2026

First, they came for my words. Then they came for my job. Now, they’re coming for my town.

This is what was going through my head as my family of three drove to the Vevay Township Hall board of trustees meeting on the night of June 10, 2026. We arrived a half hour early, knowing there might be a crowd. Perhaps a dozen cars and trucks were already in the parking lot. I backed into a spot to make our later exit easier, but I still hoped it would be difficult to get out. Surely others felt as strongly as we did. Surely the place would be packed. Surely we were not alone.

We got out of the car, walked through the hot and humid evening air, and tried the door. It was open. We wrote our names and addresses in a spiralbound notebook that sat on a table in the hallway, marking each line with an “S” for “speaking.” We had a lot to say. Then we entered the modest meeting room and had our pick of the sixty padded folding chairs that had been set up in six rows with an aisle down the middle. At the front of the room were three men and two women at a long, curved desk. I tried to read their expressionless faces. Would they listen to our concerns? Had they already made up their minds? Was this all a huge waste of time?

We sat down in the third row and waited for reinforcements.

My Words

In the summer of 2023, in the midst of the chaos of selling our house in Michigan’s capital city of Lansing, I discovered that five of my six novels had been pirated by Meta to train its AI. (I’m unsure as to why one of my novels escaped being violated, but it is striking to me that it’s the only one of the six to have a male protagonist rather than a female one.) It was sometime in late 2025 that I knew Anthropic had also used my novels, without permission or renumeration, to train its large language model (LLM). I wasn’t just angry about these thefts. I was seething. How dare they? How could they just get away with this, stealing from writers, artists, and musicians, most of whom could not make a living from their art but who created it anyway, because that’s what humans do? As soon as possible, I joined the class action lawsuit against Anthropic led by my new heroes: authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson.

I was not in rare company. I was among millions of authors who had poured our hearts and souls and humanity—not to mention decades of effort—into our work, only to have it plucked up and pressed unwillingly into service. Though not all datasets used by the various AI companies have been made public, it is almost certain that the others engaged in the same kind of unethical—dare we say criminal—behavior.

Internal emails that have been made public prove the folks at Anthropic knew what they were doing was wrong, and they did it anyway. The $1.5 billion settlement offers affected authors some renumeration, but it cannot begin to heal the emotional wound. After all, if you were raped and the rapist contemptuously tossed some money at you afterward, you certainly wouldn’t feel good about the transaction. Plus, no amount of money can cover the real cost of these actions to humanity, which is yet to be seen.

Not long after I signed up to be part of the class action lawsuit against Anthropic, I became aware of a not quite audible but everpresent rumbling undercurrent at the publishing company I worked for. It was not unlike the nonstop tonal noise emitted by data centers—a noise you feel in your body that raises cortisol levels and can create a state of constant anxiety in anyone unfortunate to live within a mile of the site. Then one day in August 2025, I heard it plainly, coming out of the mouth of the executive vice president of marketing. Change was coming—whether anyone liked it or not.

My Job

Shall I set the scene? I was standing in my home cigar lounge, an outbuilding my husband and I had spent three months and thousands of dollars renovating when we moved in 2023. The outbuilding—nothing more than a smelly garage with a forlorn brown-felted pool table and a few metal beer signs the previous owner hadn’t cared to take with him—was the main reason we decided to buy the house. At our old house, we had a cigar room. Now we could create an entire lounge.

With my laptop on the mahogany bar we had salvaged from a barn and my back to the 13-foot-long u-shaped booth we salvaged from a restaurant that was being demolished the next day, I started the Zoom meeting with the man who had been hired to replace my old boss. I really missed my old boss, who had been fired out of the blue for seemingly no good reason by the new CEO soon after he took over the publishing company. I still hadn’t figured out this new guy, but I was excited to explain the vision for the future I had been discussing with two longtime colleagues. But before I could articulate our ideas about how to grow the department and better serve our authors, I was rendered speechless by these words: “We want you to train AI to do copywriting, because copywriting’s not creative. Then you’ll be freed up to write other content.”

Or, it was something like that. I didn’t quite black out, but it felt much the same as the second or two before being in a bad car accident, when you can see it coming but you know there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Time slows down, but not enough so that you can avoid what’s coming.

After being talked at for a few more minutes about how wonderful AI was, I finally managed to voice my serious concerns—nay, vehement objections.

But copywriting is creative, and it disturbs me that an executive vice president of marketing does not understand the nature of this work.
How could you ask me to train the technology that stole my intellectual property?
How can our company actually be paying for a supposedly secure, proprietary AI system from the very crooks—Anthropic—that stole thousands of this very company’s books?
Why would you trust a demonstrably untrustworthy company that this system is indeed closed and the data you enter into it is not being used or leaked?
Why would you think I would ever have anything to do with training AI to replace people? I have already summarily rejected multiple lucrative requests from other companies to do just that as a freelancer, which you would have known if you had actually started this conversation with a question about how I felt about AI rather than a command that I participate in a technology I find loathsome and offensive in every way.

I kept going. I raised concerns about environmental impact, about our humanity, and about ethics. I talked about the author-publisher relationship, about how the reason authors will sign away the majority of the profits from their book sales to a publisher is because they are expecting us, the experts who have been doing our jobs for years and often decades, to give our best to their books—not to shunt the work off to computers. Why wouldn’t they just do that themselves and keep all the profits? At what point would no one want to work with us? And who would blame them?

Then I went for the real heart of the matter. The publishing company I worked for was a Christian company. Or at least, I thought it was. It definitely was when I started working there 24 years ago when I was fresh out of college. It definitely was before the last CEO retired and they found the new guy who had fired my boss and hired this clown. How, I wondered aloud, did using AI—a technology built on theft and exploitation and used as a tool of oppression and dehumanization—honor God? How did it serve people made in God’s image? How could I say that I did my work unto the glory of God if I used a technology I felt was, not to put too fine a point on it, more in line with the work of the devil?

Well, he didn’t like that. He didn’t like that at all. After sputtering some non sequitur, he abruptly said he had another meeting and the call ended. I was left staring at my own face on my laptop screen, wondering what had just happened. Wondering if, like my old boss, I was about to get fired because I wouldn’t fall neatly in line with the new regime. Wondering why this man hadn’t bothered to draw on my 24 years of experience and instead assumed I’d be excited to join the AI Fan Boy Club with him.

I had never felt so devalued, dismissed, and depressed. And furious. I spent the next few weeks complaining to anyone who would listen—my husband, my son, my friends, my sister, my mother. I cried over the fact that, having just lost my father to brain cancer the year before, I could not get his advice, though he too had given his entire career to a company only to see new leadership ruin it. I was the recipient of much sympathy from my wonderful and decent immediate supervisor, as well as my beleaguered and bewildered coworkers. But no one had any solution. There was no ethical path forward for me in my current job, and I would never feel at home there again.

In late September, I was in Scotland on a long-planned and oft-delayed trip with my mother and my sister. The day after I got home, I started looking for a new job. I am now Editor in Chief of publications at a historical organization where no one is enamored with AI. No one here uses it or trusts it. No one can tell me I have to use it. And I have instituted a zero-tolerance policy on using AI for contributors to our magazines.

Finally, I felt I had some measure of control over how I would let AI into my life (apart from all of the crevices of the internet companies are needlessly shoving it into so as not to be “left behind”). But then, a couple months later, the rumblings started again. Not at work, but at home.

My Home

I probably saw it on Facebook first, in one of the several community groups I belong to. Amid the posts about lost dogs and garage sales and vegetable stands were posts about city council meetings and the mayor and the city manager. And that dreaded term kept appearing: data center.

What is going on? I thought to myself. This isn’t what we were promised when we moved to Mason, Michigan, an idyllic town full of antique shops, ice cream parlors, a bookstore, and a five-and-dime that’s been there for 90 years. We thought we were moving into Hill Valley, 1955. You know—Marty McFly, Doc Brown, the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. (Can she use two different movies as metaphors in the same essay? Why, yes. Yes I can.) But would we end up in the Hill Valley of alternate 1985? The one run by corrupt Biff Tannen (who is so clearly modeled after Donald Trump)? That’s what we thought we were leaving when we moved.

When we listed our cute little brick house in Lansing after living there eighteen years, there were a number of reasons, among them:

A growing crime wave that intensified during the pandemic, including a murder at the drugstore down the street, a firebomb thrown at a house we shared a property line with, and a beating at a house across the street.
An increase in aggressive panhandling, often by people who were clearly on drugs.
The fact that we lived right near three of the top five most dangerous intersections in the city and our son was about to start driving.

We’d had cars broken into and items stolen. Then we had an entire car stolen. I was once looking out the window over the kitchen sink and watched a drunk man walk up my driveway and through my currently unfenced yard (we were replacing the old rotting fence) like he’d used that route a dozen times before. He stopped briefly to vomit, then kept walking.

So when we got to Mason—with its free concerts on the courthouse lawn all summer, its quaint shops and kind people, its kids riding bikes and scooters in the middle of the street without fear of being run over by a driver under the influence of weed or booze or a phone—we let go of the breaths we’d been holding and unclenched our jaws. This was where we wanted to grow old and retire. Having grown up in a small town, this felt like coming home. We immediately got to work making the place our own.

Besides helping my husband with the outbuilding-to-cigar-lounge makeover, I got to work in the blank slate of a back yard. Over the past three years, I have spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars building raised beds for vegetables, planting and training fruit trees and berry bushes, moving literal tons of soil and mulch and bricks and stone, and planting more than 300 shrubs and perennials for privacy, pollinators, and pleasure. I planted evergreens that will one day give us better screening from the highway that zips past beyond the back fence. I planted a redbud tree my guys gave me for Mother’s Day to replace the one I had left behind in Lansing. I planted a dark pink crabapple in memory of my father.

Now, with parts of the gardens in their third year, I’m finally getting a taste of what our little slice of paradise will look like in five, ten, twenty years.

If we’re still there.

Because those posts about a possible data center? They kept coming. More frequent. More intense. The comments sections were blowing up. Video after video of people voicing their opposition at city council and city planning meetings, only to be met with stony silence, condescension, sometimes even derision. It became very clear very fast—the people don’t want this, but the mayor and the city manager and a majority of the city council are going to push it through anyway.

Anti-data center lawn signs started popping up all around town. Then signs calling for a recall of the mayor and a councilwoman. In January and February, Mason residents packed city hall to oppose the council’s proposed data center ordinance, which they had tried to sell as, “Hey folks, it’s coming whether we like it or not, so we need to regulate. Oh, and also we’ll be getting $7.6 million in tax revenue! Isn’t that great?”

The people of Mason gathered enough signatures for a referendum to force the ordinance to the ballot so that the actual people affected by such a project could vote on it. To avoid what they must have known would have been a sound defeat, the council rescinded the ordinance and the same day had a 425 Agreement ready to go. A 425 Agreement is a way for one municipality to partner with another in the transfer of land without the consent of the governed.

Basically, Mason wants Vevay Township, where the land actually lies, to hand over the parcels in question to the City of Mason so the city council can do what it wants with it. It’s “voluntary,” and if you give it to us we’ll share that sweet $7.6 million with you, but . . . if you don’t hand it over “voluntarily,” Mason will just go ahead and annex it and you get nothing.

AI was coming after my town, whether we wanted it or not. It was coming after my house, which is just over half a mile as the crow flies from the proposed site, well within the range where we could be subjected to constant, 24/7 noise and the light pollution I’d been so thankful to leave behind in Lansing. It was coming after me—even after I’d been part of that class action lawsuit against it, even after I’d quit my job of 24 years to avoid being forced to use it.

But Mason didn’t have the land yet. And annexation could take 2-3 years. And there’s an election coming up. And we are going to do whatever it takes to oust these bullies from office. And we are going to petition the State Boundary Commission. And we’re going to document the nesting bald eagles at the site. And we’re going to pass a stronger noise ordinance that is impossible for data centers to comply with. And whatever else we can think of to preserve our community.

What we needed on the night of June 10, 2026, was for the board of trustees of Vevay Township to refuse to enter into the 425 Agreement and instead say to Mason’s city council, “If you want this land, we’re going to make you fight for it.”

As we sat in that township hall, waiting for the meeting to start, we were certainly ready for a fight. We had watched clips of the contentious Mason city council meetings, so we knew what to expect. We had spent hours reading up on everything that had already happened and everything that might happen. We had consulted friends in state and local government. We had prepared and timed our remarks down to the second of the 3 minutes we would be allowed.

As we waited, every available inch of space behind and around us was flooded with people who shared our concerns, our fears, our outrage. The sixty chairs filled up. The back of the room filled up. The line to get in the room spilled out the hall and out both doors. Hundreds of people. Every parking spot taken. Cars lining both sides of the road in either direction for at least a mile.

The people of Vevay Township and the City of Mason had showed up.

As the meeting came to order, the board took time to calmly talk through the situation as they saw it. They explained what a 425 Agreement or an annexation could mean. They explained that they had spoken to no one involved in the proposed project—not the developer, not the mysterious end user that still had not identified itself, not the Mason city council or the mayor or the city manager (despite the city manager’s assertion, on record, that she had spoken to at least one of them).

As they spoke, it became apparent that some of what we had planned to say didn’t need to be said, and some of it should probably be said in a different way. These folks seemed reasonable, truthful, honorable—dare we hope, even sympathetic. In the township, unlike in the city, it was clear that the people knew and trusted their leadership and the leadership knew and respected their people.

For the next hour and a half, comments were delivered politely and received in the same way. From my seat right near the podium, I could see how many people were shaking as they spoke, whether through controlled anger, fear of public speaking, or raw emotion. More than one person was fighting back tears.

To avoid lengthening the process, we were asked to raise a hand any time we agreed with what was being said rather than clapping. It looked like a revival meeting, hands shooting up for every speaker, sometimes at every sentence. No one was cut off at three minutes. No one abused that leniency to filibuster. No one yelled or swore or interrupted. Everyone was heard.

When the board took a short recess, we gave up our primo seats so someone who had been standing could have them. We walked out into a gathering storm, drove home while watching the clouds for signs of rotation, and let the dog out before the downpour. Then we hopped on the livestream in time to watch the vote.

Our Future

A favorite scare tactic of those involved in the AI industry is to warn people that if they don’t start using AI, they’ll be left behind. You may as well get on board, they say. It’s the way the world is going, and there’s nothing we can do about it so we may as well give in and start depending on it for everything we never needed it for last year, last month, or even one minute ago. They want you to believe that the future is already written (and apparently it’s written rather poorly, with the same uncanny affect and the same frequency of em-dashes, in the same bizarre style cobbled together from all of the styles stolen from real writers). That it’s all so . . . inevitable.

But is it? Does it have to be? Doesn’t that imply that we have no agency as human beings and that the world is always just happening to us? Where would America be if our founders had thought that way? It wouldn’t exist.

The truth is that AI, like any other manmade and human-directed endeavor, is evitable.

Wait, that’s not a word, is it? Inevitable is a word, but not evitable all on its own. Right?

I’m here to tell you it is a word. A perfectly good word that has been around since the 16th century. I didn’t need AI to tell me that. Merriam-Webster did. And if you see AI telling you definitions of words, it stole those definitions from dictionaries, which have been around since about the same time evitable came into common use in English. The word means, predictably, the opposite of inevitable. If something is evitable it is avoidable. It can be stopped.

The tech world wants you to believe that AI is not evitable, that it is inevitable, so you’ll stop fighting back—so they can make more money off of you. Kind of like the British Empire treated the American colonies in the mid-18th century.

I admit, it does feel that way. Like the AI data center boom is a historic tornado outbreak unleashed upon an unsuspecting populace that either didn’t hear or didn’t heed the warning sirens. Do we have time to get into the basement? Is this a storm we just have to ride out? What will we find left of the world we loved when we finally come to the surface and survey the damage?

Fundamentally, Dr. Jo Harding was wrong. Tornadoes weren’t specifically targeting her, even if it felt that way. But she was also right. She was right to fear their destructive power. And she was right to fight them for the good of her community, for the good of humanity.

AI isn’t targeting me, even if it feels that way. But I do fear it, and I will fight it. It is actively threatening my town. And, fundamentally, it’s not “AI” that’s doing it. It’s people. It’s board rooms full of greedy, short-sighted people who would never consent to having a data center in their community, but will nonetheless force it upon others. It is oppression. It is colonization. It is fundamentally unAmerican.

The power of mankind to abuse and destroy is so well-documented it is amazing to me that anyone can go through life believing that humans are basically good. As a reluctant Calvinist, I am necessarily a pessimist when it comes to people’s capacity to be prideful, self-serving, exploitative, and unrepentant. Just look at the mayor and city council of Mason, Michigan.

But then . . . there’s those folks in Vevay Township.

After everyone who wanted to speak had had their (more than) three minutes, the Vevay Township board of trustees took a vote. To a person, they supported their constituents—their neighbors, family, and friends. No 425 Agreement would even be discussed should Mason’s city council ever actually bother to loop them in. If you want our land, they said, you’re going to have to annex it—if you can.

For the first night in a week, I slept soundly.

There is still a long road ahead of us to secure the future we want for ourselves and our descendants, but there is also a sliver of hope. Hope that as America celebrates the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we might actually be able to prove once more, as so many have before us, that the American Experiment is not a failure. Yes, it is flawed, but it’s still the best system mankind has devised to ensure the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

People. Not corporations. Not industries. Not special interests. Not politicians.

One more time for those who couldn’t get into the room because it was already overflowing.

People.

Louder for all those people lined up outside the building.

PEOPLE.

We are the people. Not AI companies.

We are the ones endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. AI threatens those rights, both in an existential sense and in the practical, physical world of multiplying data centers and dwindling natural resources.

To protect these rights, it is our right, our duty, to throw off any form of government that becomes destructive of these ends. That means mayors and city managers and council members who refuse to represent the people they were elected to serve and instead get in bed with whatever companies and industries that promise them enough money. That means state legislators and senators who lack the courage to stand up to special interests.

That means governors who smile at the camera, shovel in hand, during the ground-breaking for a data center that had been denied conditional rezoning by the people of Saline Township and then went forward when OpenAI and Oracle threatened to bankrupt the small community in court.

During the ground-breaking in Saline Township, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer was caught on a hot mic laughing and saying to the CEO of Oracle, “We’re used to people saying ‘f*ck no,’ and doing it anyway.” This is not the spirit upon which our country was founded. It’s the spirit of British Empire we defeated.

We have the right to hold our elected and appointed leaders accountable to the oaths they have made to protect and preserve the health and happiness of the people who put them in office. We have the duty to remove them when they prove faithless to the public trust.

The mayor and the city manager and the majority of the city council of Mason have broken that trust. They have ignored the people’s will. They refuse to listen. They can’t hear us over the cartoon cash register sounds going off in their heads as they contemplate what they might do with the tax revenue they have been promised by an industry for which deception, harassment, abuse, theft, and broken promises is standard practice. They have perpetuated a long train of abuses and usurpations designed to reduce us under absolute despotism. It’s time to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for our future security.

Our Fight

All I want is to be left behind in the AI revolution. The choices I’ve made about how I create and how I conduct my work were made specifically so that I would be left behind, part of a faithful remnant of people who see, value, and promote the singular experience of humanness.

But AI has not left me behind as promised.

The belief that I could decide not to use it and then I wouldn’t have to deal with it was naïve. It’s not a product on a shelf I can bypass because I’m not interested in it. It’s showing up everywhere in everything. (And it almost always makes those things worse.)

It’s not some solicitor ringing my doorbell that I could just send packing with a thanks but no thanks. It’s a thief.

It broke through the door and stole my books, which are made up of my very thoughts, drawn from my unique and personal lived experience.

Then it came into my workplace in the sweaty hands of an unimaginative middle manager who had been given a job he didn’t understand and didn’t deserve. It drove me to leave the career I had built over a quarter century.

But even then, I wasn’t safe. I had decided not to use it, not to have anything to do with it as far as it was within my power. And now it may be moving into my neighborhood, disturbing the peace, devaluing the property around it, stealing sleep, raising cortisol levels, drying up aquifers, displacing endangered species, raising utility rates, exacerbating catastrophic climate change, and forever altering the nature of the town I thought I was going to live in the rest of my life.

AI violated me. AI replaced me. And now AI may displace me.

And the whole time, I chose not to use it.

I know as much as anyone that AI is personal. It’s also public. And political. Because there is an unregulated, out-of-control industry out there bullying small communities, buying up as much land as possible, trying to get ahead of their competition before the bubble bursts. It’s not something we can decide not to do and then we’re free from it. Just ask the people of Saline Township.

What is needed—what was needed five years ago—is robust legislation to protect the people of this country from the ramifications of unrestrained, unethical, merciless conquest of our communities by tech companies, which is currently being enabled by elected leaders who act more like oligarchs than public servants. The founding fathers of this country did not throw off the tyranny of a king merely to usher in the tyranny of a bunch of money-grubbing CEOs and feckless bureaucrats.

Did George Washington or James Madison or Alexander Hamilton envision a future where billionaires ruin the lives and livelihoods of millions of regular people to feed their egos, fill their offshore bank accounts, and fund their lavish lifestyles? No. They were trying to create a place in the world where regular people could do honest work and build a good life for themselves without government interference and oppression.

Regulation of an industry is not government interference in the lives of its citizens. But failure to regulate an industry to the detriment of the everyday American citizen is interference, by way of negligence.

The way to fight AI encroachment into our lives is not only to make personal decisions about not using it (but please, at the very least do that). It is also to elect city council members and mayors and governors and legislators who will make public decisions that benefit the people they serve. And to hold them accountable when they don’t.

I don’t know what’s going to happen in my town. I don’t know if we’re going to have to put our house up for sale and look for some other, more hospitable place to live, or if we could even afford to move if we wanted to. I do know that the people who run AI companies want us to tire of talking about it, to tire of fighting back, to just lay down and take it—it won’t hurt as much if you don’t fight back.

But if we don’t fight back and keep fighting—in our own personal use of technology, in maintaining our integrity, in speaking up, in getting signatures and writing ordinances and ousting corrupt politicians—that’s when we lose. These companies are taking every advantage they can get, so we better use every avenue we have to delay, frustrate, and defeat them.

The most American thing I will be doing during our nation’s 250th birthday is casting my vote to recall Mayor Russell Whipple and Councilwoman Elaine Ferris, and vote in a new slate of council members who will listen to the people they represent in Mason, Michigan.

AI may be here to stay. But I’ll be damned if I let it take me without a fight.

If you in any way support me and my writing, please share this column widely on social media, restack and share it on Substack, email it to your friends, and hit it with some likes and comments to help it reach a wider audience. Thank you.

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