Delsia Bare and her mother, Ida Huddleston, were offered $26 million for their Kentucky farmland by the developer of an AI data center campus. They signed, then got out of the contracts.
Most fights over data centers are argued on noise, water and property values. Bare argued hers on the Book of Revelation and on four generations of deeds, and the refusal has made her a folk hero to strangers in seven states and a defendant's opponent to the neighbors she has had to sue.
"There must be something wrong with me and mom because it didn't seem like it was much of a problem to us."
Bare is 54, nearly blind from diabetes, and has spent her whole life on the same Mason County land; Huddleston is 83 and lives down the street in a house her late husband built by hand. Wall Street Journal reporter Erich Schwartzel guest-hosted the episode to tell the story he reported over two days with them in June.
I listened to the full episode so you can skip it. 29 minutes of audio, 16 minutes of reading.
Here are the 9 moments that matter.
👤 Guests: Delsia Bare, a 54-year-old cattle farmer outside Maysville, Kentucky, who is nearly blind from diabetes and has lived on her family's land her entire life, and her mother Ida Huddleston, 83, who lives down the street in the house her late husband built
🎙️ Host: Erich Schwartzel, a Wall Street Journal reporter guest-hosting the show to tell his own story
👥 Also on: Danielle Rees, who owns the biker bar across the road from the proposed site, and Cody Bess, a Maysville contractor whose family has a long history in the town
📰 Published: 9 September 2026 on The Journal's podcast feed
🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Episode page | ⏱️ 29 min | ✅ Time saved: 13 min
Key Takeaways
Two women turned down $26 million rather than let an AI data center onto land their family has held for four generations
They had already signed; the daughter revoked once she learned what was being built
Her objection is theological before it is environmental
She reads AI as the beast system of Revelation, and calls it "anti-human"
The money would have bought nothing she wanted, because the thing buying it would ruin the rest
Asked what she'd do with $26 million won on a lottery, she said she'd buy every property along the creek so nothing could harm it
To sue the project, opponents had to sue the neighbors who agreed to sell
Those neighbors are the only landowners named in the paperwork
The developer has committed to $110 million in land deals if the data center gets built
Plus tens of millions for local projects, including water treatment facilities the town cannot fix on its own
Residents found paperwork pointing to Meta, which says it has made no final decision
The bar owner directly across the road wants the project and would have taken the check
City planning documents estimate more than 1,500 construction jobs, and the company says 400 permanent ones
Neither woman moves either way: the farmer stays if it is built 50 feet from her door, and the bar owner stays if they try to push her out
1. Riding Blind on 297 Acres
The episode opens with Schwartzel behind the wheel of a beat-up Jeep on the back roads of Maysville, Kentucky, with Bare navigating from the passenger seat. She is nearly blind from diabetes and directs him from memory and from the feel of the road.
She calls the turns before he can see them. "Just don't cross the bridge that's in front of us," and later, "Like I said, hold over to the right, hold on to something if you're in the back, and you need to pull speed to it"
Told they were exactly where she said they were, she answered: "Well, that means I've measured off of my head all these years"
The destination is a clearing off the road where she spent her childhood. "This is where I stayed on most of my childhood. I stay down here on horseback all the time. It's rough and wild. Nobody can get to you from the outside"
The horses were an escape from school. She listed the names she was called — "In school they called me devil Delcy, redheaded Delcy, fat Delcy, cowgirl Delcy, yee-haw Delcy" — and said she walked through what she called a bullying from hell at the Mason County School System, then got off the bus and straight back onto the horse
Her favorite horse, Rebel, was broken in this clearing. She described running him up and down every hill on the property — "There's 297 acres of hills here" — until he was a foam bath of sweat, riding back to the gate with her fingers wrapped in his mane and no idea where the reins were
"I kept that horse for 33 years. He outlasted all the men in my life"
At 54 she expected none of this to change. "I just figured I'd be riding horses up to the time I dropped dead and chasing these cows around here, but I don't know. That's pretty much a cowboy attitude, I guess"
2. The $26M They Turned Down
A company started buying land in Maysville last year and nobody knew why. Then residents learned it was for a campus of data centers, one Schwartzel described as so large it would be bigger than two Central Parks. The developer wanted Bare's acreage and a portion of her mother's property too.
Together the two women were offered $26 million, and they signed. Then Bare learned the plan was an AI data center, and, in Schwartzel's telling, told the company to "Kick rocks and don't come back"
Huddleston's objection is that she intends to die in the house. "I've lived here in this home for 50 or 60 or 70 years and I tend to try to die in it. And that's why I don't want a data center aggravating me while I'm trying to die"
Bare's is that the land cannot be replaced once it is gone. "This is dad's land and it's grandpa's land, his dad's land, and then grandpa's dad's land. If I let go of it, it can't ever be bought back," and: "If you don't have the land, you don't have nothing"
Asked what she would do with $26 million if she had won it on a lottery instead, her answer was to buy more land. "I would've turned around and bought every piece of property along Lees Creek so that nothing could ever harm it. So the 26 million isn't going to mean anything to me because the data center would ruin anything that I would want"
The company released them from the contracts rather than force the sale. Schwartzel spoke to the local official who had been securing acreage for the project, who told him everyone involved knew that forcing someone to sell was not a way to win over the community
Schwartzel put it to Bare that the hardest thing for people hearing the story is imagining turning the money down. Her reply: "There must be something wrong with me and mom because it didn't seem like it was much of a problem to us"
3. Bats, Flags and Floorboards
The interview proper happens in Huddleston's living room, with Schwartzel and producer Max Green as guests. Three flags fly at the house: an American flag, a don't tread on me flag, and one bearing the Christian cross.
The house is a physical record of the family's work. Huddleston's late husband built it; Bare described her father drilling and screwing down every floorboard, and herself sitting with a dowel, a cloth and a small saw cutting the dowels off flush in the holes. The fireplace rocks came out of the creek on the farm
Both women are widows, and they run a farming operation that has included cattle, hay and tobacco. They sit in matching recliners; there is a bed in the corner of the living room where Huddleston sleeps now that the stairs are difficult, and she uses a cane
There are bats nesting in the chimney, with babies, audible during the interview. "We can't shut the bats and the chimney up. Sorry. They're talking right now. She's got babies in there," Bare said. Huddleston's view: "They live here too and they don't seem to bother"
Bare suspects they may be a protected species — "We probably got endangered species in our chimney" — and added, "Just don't let any of the bureaucrats come and look around," because in her mother's words, "No, they'll kill them"
From the bats she went straight into a list of species she says were introduced here and made things worse. A crane released as an endangered animal that ate the bullfrogs, which she says let invasive tiger frogs take over; English sparrows and starlings brought in; and then, in her account, "now they've brought in peregrine falcons to eat those two up," which she says are hard on chipmunks, squirrels and songbirds
Asked whether a new invasive species was coming to Maysville, she named the data center, and then named it again. "It's the antichrist"
4. AI as the Beast System
Bare says her opposition is not a reaction to this project. She had a view of AI before anyone knocked on her door, and it comes out of her reading of Bible prophecy.
She places AI inside the Book of Revelation. "I had an opinion on AI before this happened. I'm into Bible prophecy. AI is the beast system that the Revelation is talking about that makes it possible for the beast or Lucifer to track you in everything you're doing. And if you won't worship him, then he'll come and cut your head off and that's the way this is going to go down"
She has her own coinage for it. "I come up with the word anti-human like anti-Christ. AI is anti-human"
Her conviction is inherited and was actively discouraged. Her father, she was told, believed the scriptures to his deathbed, and he did not want her reading Revelation — he thought there was a curse attached to it, and that it might be why she cannot see
"He was afraid of Revelation and I just wanted to study it that much more. So I guess I have prepared my whole life for this moment"
5. What the Company Promised
Schwartzel set Bare's religious objection alongside the conventional ones, and gave the other side of the ledger — what the developer and the town have put on the table.
Her secular concerns are the same ones raised in every other town fighting a data center: environmental impacts, noise, and the worry that the economic benefits are not worth the disruption. Maysville officials say they are aware of those concerns and have passed regulations they say will address them
The developer's total commitment on land is now on the record. In Schwartzel's own reporting: "All told, the company has committed to paying $110 million in land deals if the data center is built"
It has also pledged tens of millions of dollars for local projects, including repairs to water treatment facilities that are falling apart
The company's identity was withheld through all of this — for a long time nobody in town knew who was behind the project at all
6. Folk Heroes and Lawsuits
The story of the refusal spread nationally, and the response split in two directions: admiration from strangers, and a legal fight with the people next door.
One admirer, Kenneth Cartier, wrote several songs about the story and admitted he used AI to write them. A snatch of one plays in the episode: "We are Mason County. We love this land. We're not against the future. We just want to stay in the plain"
Letters and phone calls arrived from across the country. Bare listed them: "We've gotten several from California, some from Boston, Massachusetts, some from New York, some from Maine, some from Wisconsin, some from North Dakota, some from Wyoming"
Broadcast coverage turned the pair into characters. The episode carries a montage of news clips repeating the "Kick rocks and don't come back" line, one of which says the women "wanted to keep their cows and not replace them with computers," and another simply: "I cannot get enough of these ladies"
The lawsuit to stop the project had to be filed against their neighbors. "When we filed the lawsuit, we had to file it against the only landowners on record that they put in the paperwork is our neighbors," Bare said
Most of the fighting happens in Facebook groups, and it is personal. "A lot of the individuals on the other side keep referring to our land as just an old bunch of scrubby hillside. There's nothing going on there. It's a vacant land. The worst one said we were disgusting pursuing our neighbors"
There are plenty of residents who want the project — Schwartzel described them as seeing it as progress, a new tax base and an employer for a town that needs one
7. Meta Behind the Paperwork
The buyer stayed anonymous for months. Residents recently found official paperwork that points toward Meta, and a Meta spokesman told the Journal the company has not made a final decision about working in the area.
Bare had already guessed, and turned it into a joke about her mother. "I'd like to see her get ahold of Zuckerberg if it's Meta. She turned him over her knee"
Whoever it turns out to be, she says the test is the same one. "What would Jesus do? And that really is what I'm asking." In her own answer, she cannot picture the Lord Jesus Christ asking her to hand over the $26 million for what she calls dad's creation
She concedes the town needs something — just not this. "Well, Maysville needs something. We may need something, but we don't need this"
8. The Bar Across the Road
After leaving the two women, Schwartzel and his producer walked into The Thirsty Beaver, a biker bar directly across the street from the proposed site. A cartoon beaver with prominent buck teeth drinks a draft beer on the outside wall under a sign reading "Stop in for a damn good time" — spelled D-A-M. Another sign sets the speed limit at 69.
The owner, Danielle Rees, bought the bar about a year and a half ago after moving to the area. Her greeting sets the register: "It's the thirsty beaver. And if the name offends you, I'm going to offend you"
She wants the data center, mainly for the jobs. Schwartzel gave the numbers: "City planning documents estimate more than 1,500 construction jobs over several years, and the company says there will be 400 full-time jobs once it's built"
"My kids can't get a job. My kids are leaving. There's not a whole lot going on in this town"
"I don't even care if it's a hundred people. That's a hundred more people that need fuel, that need breakfast, lunch, and dinner." She counts the families too — schools, teachers, an extra bus
She is not certain it is good for her own business. Asked whether it is a huge opportunity, she said: "It's intimidating. I mean, it could go both ways." Construction dust, dirt and noise might drive off her regulars before any of the new trade arrives
She polices the argument inside the bar. She had to throw someone out who would not stop railing against the project: "It's kind of like you don't talk about certain things in the bar." What she sees outside it is uglier — "I still see people picking on those who have decided to sell. So it's a big divide with those that are defending their neighbors versus attacking"
She would have taken the $26 million without hesitating. "26 million. I buy me a damn island. I put the cows on it and move the house that I wanted so bad." Schwartzel's counter, on the two women's behalf, was that it could have been 26 billion and their answer would have been the same
She also expects the project to come for her own property, and says she is staying. "I mean, they didn't take that. They didn't take this. I think what they're going to try to do, I think they're going to try to push us out. I ain't going anywhere"
Schwartzel pointed out that this makes her sound like the farmers who won't sell. Her answer: "Well, they didn't have to"
Rees does see one loss coming. She points across the road at cows grazing on the site and says she will miss them
The regulars weigh in
Cody Bess, a contractor whose great uncle's grocery store is the building the bar now occupies, tested the reporter before answering anything — "What are you, pro data center?" — then broke Rees's rule about what does not get discussed inside
His objection is that nobody has shown him the benefit. "No, nobody's been able to prove to me yet how it's going to do anybody any good." He thinks the sellers are blinded by the money: "you've given up your family farm to go live somewhere else and you might have a little money left, but was it worth it?"
Another drinker, John, leaned over with a video on his phone of the noise a data center makes. "You're going to tell me you got noise like this coming out of your house 24 hours, seven days a week?" — and when Schwartzel reacted, John's line was that it was a small one
Bess was unimpressed by the volume: his own music, three days a week, is louder
9. 50 Feet From the House
Back on the farm, Schwartzel drew out what leaving would actually cost, and it is not the acreage.
Her late husband, Mike, died in 2013 and his ashes are scattered on the property. "I don't know how I would suck him back up and take him with me"
After his death she was accused of abuse and neglect of their only son. She said it was a disagreement over corporal punishment, and she agreed to let him live with a relative rather than go to trial, which left her living alone
She still runs the cattle blind. She calls them to breakfast, eight enormous bags of feed come out of the back of the Jeep, and seven or eight black cows come running while she leans on a walking stick
On what she thinks separates animals from people: "Humans are destructive and brutal. The cow might kick your head clean off, but she didn't know she kicked her head off. The humans know they do it and do it anyway"
The farm is layered with the family's own history. All that is left of her great-grandfather's house is a few bricks on the ground; behind Bare's house is a small group of gravestones going back hundreds of years. "Cholera and typhoid were common here. There was a family of cholera up there. They were in a straight line and they all died near around the same date"
The graves come with a ghost story she believes. Her husband, she says, could see the other side — "When he was in Vietnam, if he shot a man, he knew if the fellow went to heaven or hell" — and years ago her young son, out looking for rabbits and squirrels, told her twice that there were little girls up there who wanted their mother. Her father then told her there was a cemetery on that ground, holding two girls whose mother had died of influenza before they did
It may all be moot. Enough neighbors have agreed to sell that the data center can come to Maysville without her land, and Bare may end up living next to it
"I don't give a flip. I'm not leaving grandma and grandpa's land"
Bonus Insights
The episode is a hand-off: the show's regular host, Jess, opens by explaining that colleague Erich Schwartzel is guest-hosting, and Schwartzel reported the trip with producer Max Green
The bar's wall carries a line the episode treats as the story's epigraph, attributed there to Carl Jung: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate"
Schwartzel disclosed his own stake in the story, telling Rees he grew up in a town about the size of Maysville and kept thinking about how sad it must be to have neighbors you see every day divided this way
Inside the bar there is a second beaver, a taxidermied one that Schwartzel says has seen better days, along with beer signs, chalk drawings and what he calls the first of many double entendres on the walls
Bare's position is not that $26 million is too little for the farm, but that no amount can buy something back once it is gone — and with enough neighbors already signed, she expects to lose the argument and stay anyway.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Meta (The company residents' recently discovered paperwork points to as being behind the Maysville project; a spokesman said no final decision has been made about working in the area)
Facebook (Where the town's argument actually plays out — residents debating the data center in local groups and insulting each other over it)
The Thirsty Beaver (Danielle Rees's biker bar, the closest restaurant to the proposed site and the one business in the story that stands to gain from construction traffic and lose its regulars to the dust)
Books & Resources Mentioned
The Book of Revelation (The text Bare reads AI through, and the one her father warned her off; she says studying it is what prepared her for this fight)
The Vanishing of an Anti-AI Activist (Further listening the show points to from this episode)
A Data Center Revolt in Missouri (The show's earlier episode on a town fighting the same kind of project, also pointed to from this one)
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