The Fake Americans of Freedom 250
How AI-generated founders, invented citizens, and synthetic patriotism are constructing a digital Christian nationalist fantasy.
If you visit the Freedom250 website (and you should) you will hard pressed to find a more comprehensive record of the Christian nationalist rhetoric of the second Trump administration. This website has many sections, all of which deserve close attention. They include the “Story of America” video series, created with the help of Hillsdale College, to laud all aspects of the founding of the nation. The site also features an interactive “Founders Museum” which allows visitors to “turn any (online) space into a living gallery of the people and moments that shaped the nation” by downloading AI generated images of Founding Fathers along with sanitized bios. That element of the site co-opts the word “museum” in order to legitimate a virtual metastasization of this MAGAfied version of American history.
But there is also another strange, and to my knowledge, unexamined part of the Freedom250 site, and that is an area called “Voices of Liberty.”
Here, visitors encounter a series of attributed quotations sliding rather quickly across the screen. They are intended to allow readers to “hear what freedom means to your fellow Americans.”
“Bought my first truck for eight thousand dollars in 2004” says folksy Ray Kowalski from Pittsburgh, PA. “Now I’ve got a fleet of twelve. I still keep the keys from that first truck on my desk.” And there’s hardworking Heather Dunn from Bozeman, MT who says “We raise our three kids on 40 acres out here. It’s a lot of work but we get to do things our way and that’s everything to us.”
Ingrid Larsen from Minneapolis runs a third-generation bakery. Beth Nakamura teaches high school in Seattle and encourages her students to “disagree” with their assigned textbook. Very surprisingly to me, given the fact that these students would be partially-educated children, what her students write ends up even better than their assigned textbook! An immigrant like Carmen Vega from Miami is both grateful and long suffering–waiting fifteen years for citizenship then weeping in the courtroom when it “finally becomes real.” An entrepreneur like Troy Whitfield from Sacramento “Never went to college.” There was no need since he merely “taught himself to weld from watching videos online.” And now he has his own shop and six employees. “You can still do that here.” he reminds his fellow Americans.
I looked up every one of these people–from Glenn Hargrove of DesMoines to Vernon Tate of Atlanta. Not a single one has a LinkedIn profile or any kind of online presence. The poet has no publications. The contractor has no website. The Seattle teacher is not listed anywhere in the Seattle school district. I did find one “Ingrid Larsen” from Minnesota. However I found her in an AI generated “logging camp photo” from 1923 under a caption about how hard people used to work in the old days. This fake black and white photo appears on an AI slop/content farm Facebook page called “FunnyClub.”
These “fellow Americans” with carefully curated last names like “Kowalski,” “Simmons,” “Caldwell,” “Delgado,” and “Russo” don’t exist.
Once you realize this, the site begins to feel like something even more sinister than a conservative political project. Freedom 250 is not only a slanted Hillsdale College account of history. It involves fake Americans spouting fake American dream stories in an attempt to digitally construct a coherent Christian Nationalist America. At Freedom250, AI-generated founders meet name-generated fake American citizens, all of them spouting the same false narratives about the US.
The fake Americans featured on the site are archetypes: the grateful legal immigrant, the self-made businessman, the hardworking teacher brave enough not to “indoctrinate” her students with “woke” textbooks, the wealthy entrepreneur who didn’t need a college degree to make his fortune. Together they form a symbolic nation in miniature–superficially diverse but still harmonious, fiercely individualistic, and patriotic. Fake people all perfectly aligned with the totalizing moral vision of the project itself.
The technological dimension of this project is, of course, essential. The site’s downloadable AI-generated founders are especially revealing. Historically, patriotic imagery has depended on monuments, paintings, civic rituals, and public ceremonies rooted in actual places. Freedom250 is placeless, mobile, and infinitely reproducible. The founders are now nothing but digital icons designed to be instantly projected into classrooms, churches, homes, and, most importantly, social media feeds–a portable mythology detached from nearly all authentic historical context. And the fake testimonial voices are essential to that ecosystem. They function not as witnesses but as computer-generated mouthpieces for the supposedly ideal American dream.
The point is not whether “Lucia Paredes” or “Ray Kowalski” actually exist. The point is that they are designed to feel like they should exist. They are superficially plausible embodiments of the desired national story.
Meanwhile, the chilling irony is that this synthetic content is coming from a movement that claims to be restoring authenticity. What Freedom250 does is to use technology as the perfect instrument for manufacturing emotionally compelling “authentic” simulations of essential American values–so the real values can be utterly lost without anyone noticing.
Freedom250 does not just argue for a Christian Nationalist America. It attempts to simulate one into being. And it’s possible that may be the deeper story embedded in all of the disturbing “Freedom 250” rhetoric.
Thanks for restacking my piece!
Thanks for this! So much of the fake Freedom250 AI slop is finding its way into billboards, bus wraps, ads and more and it is so disheartening to see daily here in DC.