A couple of years ago, Andrew Isker, a pastor and father of six, made a big decision. He would move his family away from Minnesota, where six generations of his ancestors had lived before him, to a rural community in Tennessee. Leaving his home state wasn’t easy, he told Tucker Carlson on Carlson’s YouTube show in March. But he had no choice; the progressive excesses of Governor Tim Waltz simply had become too much to bear. Isker was especially concerned about his autistic son, who had attended a program at a local public school. “They could be putting him in a dress and calling him a girl name, and I would have no idea,” said Isker, echoing an unfounded claim that President Trump made during a September debate with Kamala Harris. “And then when I find out and I oppose it, boom. [Child Protective Services] comes, takes him out of our custody, and he’s gone forever.”
So Isker decided to move to rural Appalachia—choosing that particular location to help launch a new community near the small town of Gainesboro, Tennessee, in the Northwestern part of the state. Isker’s new neighborhood sounds idyllic, with “bucolic pastures, waterways teeming with over 140 species of fish–including some of the country’s premier trout fishing, rolling hills, thick hardwood forests, and abundant wildlife,” according to the real estate website.
There were reasons other than just its natural beauty that this area was appealing. The community that Isker is helping to build in Tennessee is part of the Highland Rim Project, an initiative from a Christian venture capital firm called New Founding. The company seeks to build neighborhoods with Christian values in rural America: “Thick communities that are conducive to a natural, human and uniquely American way of life,” places where “your neighbors are people who seek a self-determinative lifestyle and a return to a more natural human way of living for themselves and their families.”
But the Highland Rim Project is not just another old-fashioned utopian fantasy. Rather, it is deliberately forward-looking, infused with Silicon Valley techno-libertarian values. The communities will be designed around “digital self-governance” including cryptocurrency and a culture “in which our patrimonial civic rights, chiefly those of property, free political speech and civilian armament, can be maintained and perpetuated.”
For Isker, a podcaster and prolific poster on X, the Highland Rim Project is an example of how Christian communities that have previously existed only online might soon coalesce in physical spaces. On Carlson’s show, he described the line of reasoning he has observed as something like, “‘I like this pastor. I like the sermons that he preaches, I agree with this theology, and I’m being formed and shaped.’ So you band into groups online where you sort of self-sort,” he said. “It’s like, what if we took this digital community that exists, and what if we made it in real life?”
“It’s like, what if we took this digital community that exists, and what if we made it in real life?”
There’s a name for the rough concept that Isker describes: the “Network State,” an ascendant and buzzy tech movement where internet groups are beginning to explore what it might be like to start their own new countries. At first, these new countries would appear online, and eventually in actual physical locations. Simply put, the Highland Rim Project is the Christian nationalist take on that idea. As New Founding CEO Nate Fischer put it last year on X, “Nation states are not the principal form of government today. I see no reason Christian nations or peoples couldn’t organize network states.”
As with many things tech, the Network State movement began in Silicon Valley. The concept is the brainchild of investor and entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, a close friend of PayPal titan Peter Thiel, and a former partner at Andreessen-Horowitz, the firm run by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. In a 2021 article on his website, Srinivasan laid out his vision of a plan for people seeking to build a new utopia, or, as he put it, “a fresh start.” Sure, there were the old-fashioned conventional ways to do this—such as forming a new country through revolution or war. But these options are not only, well, really hard, but also unpredictable. A cruise ship or somewhere in space were appealing possibilities for new countries, but both presented logistical challenges. Far simpler and more practical was an online nation, complete with its own culture, economy, and, of course, laws.
Eventually, Srinivasan mused, such a community could move into the analog space and acquire actual physical property where people would come together and live under the laws dreamed up by the founders. The community did not have to be on contiguous land, however, but instead a “reverse diaspora,” he said. “A community that forms first on the internet, builds a culture online, and only then comes together in person to build dwellings and structures.”
Acknowledging that the idea might sound a little goofy—like a giant live-action Minecraft—he emphasized that this was a serious proposition. “Once we remember that Facebook has 3B users, Twitter has 300M, and many individual influencers have more than 1M followers,” he wrote, “it starts to be not too crazy to imagine we can build a 1-10M person social network with a genuine sense of national consciousness, an integrated cryptocurrency, and a plan to crowdfund many pieces of territory around the world.” Imagine the network state as a kind of a Pac-Man gobbling up little pieces of land.
Consider the possibilities! Eventually, the new nation would be so big with so much economic power that other nations would be forced to recognize it as legitimate. And once that happens, conventional laws in more conventional nations could become almost irrelevant along with the nations themselves. Why on earth would, say, a pharmaceutical company choose to spend billions of dollars and decades of testing on a new drug when they could go to a deregulated network state and take it to market in record time?
In 2022, Srinivasan turned his seminal article into a bestseller, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. Srinivasan’s book is still in the top 20 lists in both the political philosophy and general technology and reference sections on Amazon—and in the three years since its publication, the ideas in it have gained a robust following. My former colleague Ali Breland wrote a 2023 investigation about Praxis, a “cryptocity” concept that drew tens of millions of dollars in investment from Thiel and other Silicon Valley luminaries—though the physical city has yet to materialize. There is also Próspera, a deregulated economic zone in Roatán, Honduras, and a somewhat different model, California Forever, an ongoing effort by a group of tech billionaires to turn part of California wine country into a “tech colony.”
In an email to Mother Jones, New Founding cofounder Josh Abbotoy, a former fellow of the right-wing thinktank the Claremont Institute, said the network state concept doesn’t perfectly capture the Highland Rim Project; he prefers the term “charter communities,” which he describes as places “chartered around particularized lifestyles or affinities. In our case, we emphasize traditional American values like faith, family, and freedom, in a rural and vintage small-town American setting.” New Founding, he says, offers “a platform on which many localists can build their more particularized projects.”
“Whether one is excited or horrified by Balaji’s predictions of the future, dismissing them out of hand isn’t good business.”
Nevertheless, he says, Srinivasan is an influence. “I have definitely learned from his theories about how digital conditions encourage more tribal social organization across the board,” Abbotoy said. “Whether one is excited or horrified by Balaji’s predictions of the future, dismissing them out of hand isn’t good business.”
Back in Tennessee, the Highland Rim project is still in its infancy. According to New Founding’s Abbotoy, so far, it has sold about 40 parcels of land in both Tennessee and adjacent Kentucky. (Technically, the properties have been sold through Abbotoy’s other business, RidgeRunner, which he says has a “strategic partnership” with New Founding.) The lots range in acreage from less than one to hundreds and in price from about $30,000 to just shy of $300,00. In the Tennessee communities where Isker bought property, he has founded a church (invite-only, so far), and there are plans in the works for a country club and events venue.
While Abbotoy didn’t provide details on plans to incorporate cryptocurrency into the communities, the people who have bought property so far, “are high agency and prioritize sovereignty in their personal lives, including digital and financial sovereignty,” he said. “So naturally many of them love crypto. We encourage crypto adoption and use, and eagerly welcome entrepreneurs operating in this space.” He estimates that about 60 households “have bought or moved to our target regions as a result of our efforts,” and the website assures interested parties, “We see rising demand and capacity for new types of communities built around a shared vision for local life in America.”
But whose shared vision? The people who already live in the communities that New Founding is targeting already have their own vision for local life, and many of them are not thrilled about the idea of wealthy Christian nationalists moving in and taking over. Last year, Nashville’s Newschannel 5 aired an investigation about the movement. A few months later, Phil Williams, the investigative journalist who broke the story, talked with locals in Gainesboro, Tennessee. “Mainly people are scared,” said the chair of the county’s Republican party. “It scares me that they are very clear about taking over.” A local restaurant owner added, “I don’t want to lose what we already have.” In response to the segment, Isker’s podcast cohost C.J. Engel, who also moved to the area to help launch the community, posted on X, “Phil and the entire journalist class at large are terrified that conservative Christians are asserting themselves in the face of dwindling media power. This is why they double down on their strategies of provoking fear through distortion.” Abbotoy reiterated that rejection of Williams’ investigation in an email to Mother Jones.
Despite the damning interviews in Williams’ investigation, Isker, who didn’t respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment, insists that the locals love him. They’re conservative Christians, so they’ve told him, “‘Oh, it just seems like you really like Donald Trump and the United States and Americans and the Constitution and our freedoms,’” he told Carlson. “’And you seem like a just normal, conservative kind of guy.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I am. I’m an open, open book. What you see is what you get.’”
But elsewhere, Isker is less wholesome. To his 43,000 followers on X, he makes statements that sometimes cross the line into antisemitism. “I don’t hate Jews,” he posted in 2023. “Their religion is literally blasphemous and anti-Christian. You cannot be a Christian without recognizing this.” On that same platform, he has referred to Indian people as “cow worshippers,” called the United States a “gynocracy” where “the only way out is men telling women ‘no,’ and thundered against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, saying it biases “our laws against Christians, men, and white people.” In July 2023, Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the “war on white America” alongside Paul Gottfried, the mentor of prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer.
And yet for all his extremist views, Isker, whom Abbotoy described as “a part of the broader project” and “a friend,” is well connected in Washington and Silicon Valley. The New Founding staffers hobnob with Vice President JD Vance. Andreessen—the venture capitalist and Srinivasan’s friend—has invested in New Founding. New Founding’s Nate Fischer has invested in the startup societies venture firm Pronomos Capital, Pronomos head Patri Friedman recently told me. Through the online magazine American Reformer, which Abbotoy and Fischer cofounded, New Founding has robust connections to the world of the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists, believe women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and idolize authoritarian leaders like Francisco Franco.
Because Isker is also Abbotoy’s customer—he bought his land from New Founding—New Founding could not weigh in on Isker’s statements on social media, Abbotoy said.
As the network state concept gains traction, Srinivasan has offered still more details about exactly what he has in mind. Last year, writing for the New Republic, journalist Gil Duran chronicled a rambling, four-hour interview that Srinivasan gave on the podcast “Moment of Zen.” In it, Srinivasan described his vision for a new San Francisco, one in which citizens would show their loyalty to tech companies by donning gray shirts. The ultimate goal is for the Grays to drive out the “Blues,” Srinivasan’s word for progressives:
So you put up some kind of, I don’t know, like a sign which says Y Combinator on it, or a Bitcoin sign, or something like that. It should look cool, but it’s also meant to lose because someone’s going to come, some crazy guy, addict will come and smash it, or a Blue will come and spray paint it, or they’ll try and the city official will come and tell you to take it down because it’s unlicensed, or something like that…Syringes on the street. Greta Thunberg on the wall. Those are blue symbols that signal that Blues control a territory. So it’s like a dog pissing and marking its territory. After you’ve got a building, you need to start figuring out how to control the streets.
The “Grays” would have access to exclusive zones of the city, and they would also enjoy protection through a special arrangement with the police, whom they would win over with lavish banquets.
Dystopian and preposterous though this may sound, fans of the Network State are trying to convince the Trump administration to scale up their vision—and there are signs that the president is listening. In 2023, during the leadup to his presidential campaign, Donald Trump proposed building “freedom cities,” which would convert federal land in rural areas into zones with laws specifically designed to attract industry and manufacturing in specific sectors. Earlier this year, a group called the Frontier Foundation—one of whose founding members is New Founding’s Josh Abbotoy—drafted an open letter to Trump urging him to act on that idea. The group’s policy memo explains that the new cities “should be exempt from certain federal regulation under special oversight by the executive branch.” Asked whether New Founding had plans to lease any of the Highland Rim Project land back to the US government, Abbotoy answered, “This is unlikely at this stage, but I won’t rule it out entirely.”
Meanwhile, Patri Friedman of Pronomos Capital, the startup societies venture firm, told me that both the Frontier Foundation and a separate group called the Freedom Cities Coalition, had met with the Trump administration, though he declined to provide details. Last month, Wired also reported that the Freedom Cities Coalition had been meeting with the Trump administration. “The energy in DC is absolutely electric,” Trey Goff, the chief of staff of Honduras’ Próspera special economic zone told Wired. “You can tell in meetings with the people involved that they have the mandate to do some of the more hyperbolic, verbose things Trump has mentioned.”
But from the perspective of the Highland Rim guys, what’s more important than the Washington lobbying is the sense the cultural and political winds are at their backs. “Now that Trump has bought us four years,” Isker posted on X the morning after election day last November, “it is the perfect time for you to begin building the restored America in rural Tennessee.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.