A Michigan credit union has removed its chief executive after she posted an artificially generated photograph of her family wearing sweatshirts that read "Lake America," the name President Trump has directed federal agencies to use for Lake Ontario.
Saginaw-based Family First Credit Union said in a September 23 statement that Jane Smith is no longer an employee, "effective immediately." Chief operations officer Jason Acosta is serving as interim chief executive. In a Facebook post the following day the credit union told its members, "We sincerely apologize for the concern, disappointment and pain this situation has caused our members and community."
What She Actually Did
Smith told ABC 12 that on September 11, as she and her family were leaving for a planned trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia, they were talking about the President's executive order changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. They took a photograph of themselves at the Detroit airport and ran it through ChatGPT to see what it would look like if they were wearing Lake America sweatshirts.
Then she posted it to her private Facebook page.
"We weren't trying to make a political statement," Smith told the station. "However, we were, you know, kind of poking fun at the fact that, you know, one of the Great Lakes' names were getting changed."
The renaming itself is real and recent. Trump directed federal agencies to adopt Lake America for Lake Ontario in late August, as part of his ongoing trade dispute with Canada.
What It Cost Her
The image travelled well beyond the private page it was posted to. According to reporting on the episode, the backlash included death threats, and the family cut the Halifax trip short and came home early.
Within days the credit union announced her departure. The statement does not give a reason. It apologises to members and moves on.
Our Take
Strip away the lake and the sweatshirts and look at what actually happened here.
A woman went on holiday with her family. At the airport, on the way out, they made a joke about a news story. She typed it into an image tool, put the result on her own private Facebook page, and got on a plane. Four days later she had no job, and strangers were threatening to kill her.
Nobody has alleged she mismanaged a dollar. Nobody has suggested a single member of that credit union was harmed by anything she did at work. Her competence was never the question. The question was a picture.
And notice how carefully the institution avoided saying so. "Effective immediately." An apology for "concern, disappointment and pain." Not one sentence explaining what the offence was, because writing it down would have made it sound as ridiculous as it is: our chief executive made a joke about a lake.
This is the part people keep missing about the mood in this country. It is not that someone with a strong political opinion got into trouble. She did not have a strong political opinion. She was poking fun, in her own words, at a name change, on a private page, on her own time. The lesson being taught, and it is being taught deliberately, is that the safest thing an ordinary American can do is have no visible opinion about anything at all.
Plenty of people will read this and think she was foolish to post it. Maybe. But foolish and fireable are not the same word, and a country where they become the same word is not a free one. The death threats are their own answer. Whatever you think of the sweatshirts, nobody sent those over a lake.
