It's Unlikely Anything Good Will Come Out Of Wyoming This Century
Marjorie Traitor Greene tweeted that “everyone” she talks to agrees with her that the red states should secede. Have any of the people who talk with her— say Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Donald Trump for example— contradicted her? I’ve been waiting to hear. But so far, we’ve only heard from Liz Cheney, who tweeted: “Our country is governed by the Constitution. You swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Secession is unconstitutional. No member of Congress should advocate secession, Marjorie.”
Yesterday, Peter Wehner basically said Traitor Greene’s Presidents’ Day outburst was all but much inevitable. “It was only a matter of time before Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene— a peddler of far-right conspiracy theories, a speaker at white-nationalist rallies, a supporter of political violence, and an all-around unhinged individual— would renew her call for secession. The temptation of many people, eager to move past America’s political freak show, will be to ignore her comments and dismiss her as an outcast, a fringe figure, deranged but isolated. The less said about her, the better. That’s unwise.
Greene is not just a member of Congress, not just a member of its Committee on Homeland Security; she has become a confidante of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. He has “forged an ironclad bond” with Greene, according to the New York Times. She has “taken on an outsize role as a policy adviser to McCarthy.” He has in turn lavished praise on her.
“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” McCarthy told The Times. “When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.” He’ll even stick together with those arguing for secession, apparently.
Greene is not alone in her views. She is giving voice to a widespread and growing sentiment in the Republican Party. Among Republicans in the South, for example, support for secession was 66 percent in June 2021, according to a Bright Line Watch/YouGov poll.
Last summer,thousands of Texas Republicans approved a platform that called on the state legislature to authorize a referendum on secession from the United States. And shortly after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Rush Limbaugh, one of the most dominant figures on the American right, said, “I actually think that we’re trending toward secession. I see more and more people asking, ‘What in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York?’”
…The Republican Party, forged a century and a half ago in the fight against secession, now finds the move worth contemplating.
Civil War–like secession isn’t going to happen in the United States, at least not anytime soon. But all of the emotions that are attached to a desire for secession— seething resentment, existential fear, an unforgiving spirit, contempt and hatred for those who disagree with you— are stoked by the kind of rhetoric employed by Greene and those who see the world as she does. Such language will further destroy America’s political culture and could easily lead to extensive political violence.
…What the rest of us learned during the Trump era is that a party led by craven men and women— some of them cynical, others true believers, almost all afraid to speak out— will end up normalizing the transgressive, unethical, and moronic.
Trump did horrifying things at the end of his presidency, including attempting a coup and inciting a violent mob to attack the Capitol. The majority of Republicans tolerated what he did, to a degree that simply wouldn’t have happened at the beginning of his presidency. It took time for the corruption to fully take hold, for the party— lawmakers and the right-wing media complex— to fall completely into line. But fall in line they did. Trump may be losing his grip on the Republican Party, and that is a good thing, but his nihilistic imprint remains all over it.
MAGA Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene have added calls for secession to their corrosive lies about the 2020 presidential election. More incendiary and treacherous claims will follow. Greene and McCarthy— one crazed, the other cowardly— embody a large swath of the modern-day GOP. Any party that makes room for seditionists and secessionists is sick and dangerous.
Vanity Fair published an exhaustive piece by James Pogue yesterday, Inside The Dissident Fringe, Where The New Right Meets The Far Left, And Everyone’s Bracing For Apocalypse that describes a world where, basically political sociopaths like Marjorie Traitor Greene, Paul Gosar, Donald Trump, Matt Gaetz, Bob Good and Lauren Boebert run the show and could have been titled, “Welcome to Wyoming, The Craziest Little Whorehouse in the West.” The first character she introduces is a crackpot great-great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, whose whole family should have been exterminated decades ago for the sake of humanity. This one, who worked for Trump “believes that we’re on the cusp of a populist uprising against the brand of transnational capitalism championed by Republicans for most of the last half-century. Her politics have marked her, at least to the minds of people who share her worldview, as a bit of a class traitor in their emergent epochal struggle against the entire system.” She makes excuses for her robber baron grandfather.
“Wealthy and well-connected preppers and back-to-the-landers,” wrote Pogue, “have been moving west, many of them at least tangentially involved in the edgy online realm of thought known as the dissident right. Tech executives and crypto investors are creating secretive groups to help people ‘exit’— a term that has taken on almost mystical significance in some circles recently— from our liberal society, tech-dominated lives, and fraying system. And there are grander plans, for whole secessionist movements using crypto and decentralized autonomous organizations to build whole mini societies, many on the model of what Balaji Srinivasan, the former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, calls a ‘Network State.’ (Wyoming recently became the first state in the country to allow DAOs to incorporate as private companies.)”
These ideas used to be at the fringiest fringe of a worldview that sees our basic political battle lines shifting from left-right divisions toward a rebellion against globalization, against the notion that the massive market- and tech-driven change that we’ve been living through really represents progress. But this dissident-fringe view has rapidly become mainstream on the right, in part through the dire warnings of a disintegrating global system shared almost nightly on Tucker Carlson Tonight, and— significantly— through coded signifiers broadcast by Republican politicians trying to capitalize on the populist ferment, most obviously Ron DeSantis, who gave a speech titled “Florida vs. Davos” to the National Conservatism Conference in September. “The United States is a nation that has an economy, not the other way around,” he said. “And our economy should be geared toward helping our own people.”
According to this view, the American empire is in danger of fading, weakened by a greedy and insulated oligarchy with more loyalty to their pals in London and Tokyo than to their fellow Americans. The elite have driven regular people into a serflike existence, putting money above every other source of value or meaning: national interest, local cultures, our long-term financial stability, even the environment. (Many young conservatives have suddenly adopted an almost mystical reverence for nature, itself a form of protest against our money- and tech-driven world.) The result is that now a lot of highly online coastal elites talk in much the same way that backwoods militiamen arming themselves against the new world order have been for decades. And vice versa.
Just before I left for Wyoming, a Substack post by a writer who tweets under the name Disgraced Propagandist titled “There’s Gonna Be a War in Montana” went viral. A dozen acquaintances sent it to me, including my editor at Vanity Fair. The writer explicitly linked the anti-globalist analysis to an anger that’s been swirling in the American West over the land rush engendered by well-off coastal buyers, which has sent rents and home prices spaceward, forcing people to move away or become homeless. Longtime locals talk about being “colonized” by a flood of rich liberal newcomers. [Interesting way of looking at it, since so many of the coastal elites moving there are the polar opposite of “liberal.”]
“On one side you have global interests imputing their values, importing cheaper labor, hollowing out Montana’s attractions and selling them to an international bourgeoisie for maximum profits,” went the post. “On the other side you have the new underclass. Not the friendly Christian country folk of times past. And not Cowboy Hat Republican Rancher Dad either. No, these are a new kind of country person. Angry, exasperated, poor,” he wrote. “This group is acutely aware of just who controls Bozeman and Big Sky, and believe that the same people are coming for their territory. And they’re right.”
The Montana-based novelist Walter Kirn, who has become a hero in dissident circles, called it “immaculate bullshit” and suggested it had been written by someone hoping to inflame liberal fears of rural revolt. But it captured a moment.
It was the same moment in which Liz Cheney, Wyoming’s lone congressional representative, found herself losing her primary race in an election in which her opponents cast her as an almost perfect expression of the kind of elite oligarch with no true local roots or state loyalty.
I arrived in Wyoming just in time to attend her concession party. Cheney’s father looked on, tight-lipped, standing next to a carefully placed hay bale at stage left, as she conceded at twilight among a small crowd of well-heeled supporters dressed in haute-Western finery. She too talked openly about civil war, a possibility that more than 40 percent of Americans still think is likely, even after the midterms produced an outcome that made our politics look surprisingly normal, by the eerie standards of today. “This is not a game,” she said. “Our nation is barreling, once again, towards crisis, lawlessness and violence.” America is “young in the history of mankind,” she said, “And yet we’re the oldest democracy in the world. Our survival is not guaranteed.”
…The so-called dissident right is a world of thought where categories get scrambled. It shares space with the more buttoned-up politics of the New Right, but these days includes a whole range of unlikely allies. The “scene,” as everyone calls it, is a small, cliquey, and status-obsessed world where even at parties people often call each other by their Twitter handles. Extremely wealthy tech types chat on Signal all day with hustling writers and smugly racist bodybuilders and “rationalist” sex workers, and the simple truth is that many people tend to think America as we once knew it is already pretty much gone. “Who even needs a civil war,” one scene fixture texted me recently, “when the institutions are doing such a good job of delegitimizing themselves?”
This scene was very much on display in Austin, where in July I went to see the premiere of Alex’s War, a documentary about Alex Jones. The night before the screening, Futo, a software company started by a founding investor of WhatsApp and dedicated to fighting “tech oligopoly,” hosted a swank cocktail party on the roof of the downtown Marriott. Curtis Yarvin, the intellectual godfather of the dissident right and popularizer of the idea that America is not and should not be a functioning democracy, flew in for the screening the next day. In front of him was the former Trump staffer and documentarian Amanda Milius, who was wearing an elaborate white dress and showing off her serpentine Bulgari bangles, with emeralds for eyes.
In front of her was Ali Alexander, the Stop the Steal organizer who had, along with Jones himself, helped put on the rally that devolved into the Capitol invasion. Ariel Pink, the chillwave musician who was an indie kingpin before it got out that he’d been at the January 6 rally (he left before anyone breached the Capitol), was there too. So were Mike Cernovich and Anna Khachiyan, the cohost of the formerly left-wing podcast Red Scare. Glenn Greenwald hosted the question-and-answer session with Jones and Alex Lee Moyer, the film’s director. Greenwald looked out at the room, beaming, and described the gathering as a “merry band of misfits,” charter members of a disaffected counterculture. “We’re a bunch of weirdos and rebels here,” he said. “And I just love that.”
Jones himself had been visibly upset throughout the screening, getting up half a dozen times from his front-row seat to escape backstage. “I couldn’t watch myself through some of that,” he said during the Q&A. “I looked like Jabba the Hutt on PCP.” He kept apologizing for his conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook killings without seeming to want to actually say that he was apologizing. “A lot of that stuff I say,” he went on, “it’s like I drank a bottle of vodka, I’m smoking cigarettes, and you’re just talking. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to say.” At the after-party, at another swank Austin hotel, he grinned next to a cart of Champagne bottles and posed for photos with well-dressed young fans.
There’s a story that Jones has been telling these last 30 years, as he rose from a local curiosity on public access television to someone who claimed, by the time of the 2016 election, to be pulling in more unique viewers than every cable news network in America combined. And it has risen from the sort of thing that only kooks and rural militiamen talked about to become the grand narrative at hand. “I don’t know who is going to be in the White House on January 20, 2021,” he’d said, hours before the January 6 rally he helped organize. “But I do know that Joe Biden is a globalist.”
Resistance to “globalism” is a new organizing force of right-wing politics. “These people at the World Economic Forum,” DeSantis told the National Conservatism Conference in September, “they just view us as a bunch of peasants. I can tell you, things like the World Economic Forum are dead on arrival in the state of Florida.” It could have been Alex Jones talking.
Let me break in here for a moment. Remember reading about Huey Long, Louisiana’s "Kingfish?” He was the governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and served as a senator from 1932 until his assassination in 1935. He was a Democrat and there are a lot of good things to say about him, but he is frequently compared to Ron DeSantis. Unlike DeSantis, Huey Long was a strong populist whose agenda was redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. He implemented a number of programs in Louisiana that provided free textbooks to students, built hospitals, and improved infrastructure and was vehemently anti-corporate and a powerful critic of Big Business and a proponent of regulations to prevent corporations from exploiting workers and consumers.
So where does DeSantis come in? Like DeSantis today, Long had markedly authoritarian tendencies and as governor, he used his power to control the state government and stifle dissent, leading to credible accusations of corruption and abuse of power. He was for white workers, not workers who were not white. And he was certainly a racist. His methods of achieving what he wanted included patronage and intimidation and election fraud was always lurking in the background of his campaigns.
“If you believe [that Alex Jones] story,” wrote Pogue, “marking yourself as a ‘nationalist,’ as many Republican politicians now call themselves, or a ‘localist,’ as the American Conservative— house organ of the anti-globalist right— proudly describes itself, this framing explains why our society seems to be spinning apart: The relentless power of markets has worked its way into every part of our lives, breaking down traditional cultures and modes of life, forcing us to live drone-like lives ordered by our phones and credit scores, leading to the mass export of jobs overseas, the destruction of the natural world, an internationalist foreign policy that costs trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, and even the destruction of institutions like the American family farm. It is, like Marxism was once for the global left, a story that is a bible to all the other stories you need to understand the world.
This politics is already reshaping Europe, where Vladimir Putin has made it clear that the invasion of Ukraine was intended to be a first step in smashing what you’ll hear sneeringly called the “globo-homo”— a term spiced with homophobia, used both in Russia and on the American right to describe a world transforming into a soulless landscape of chain stores and empty hedonism. Just after Giorgia Meloni and her right-wing coalition won elections in Italy last September, a video ricocheted around the spheres of the dissident right and the social media feeds of some highly placed Republicans. In it, Meloni says, “When I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators. The perfect consumer.”
…A few years ago, Steve Bannon had a coffee date with Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage. “If you’re interested…and I’ll fund it somehow,” Bannon told his English counterpart while a documentarian filmed, “we’ll help knit together this populist-nationalist movement throughout the world.”
“Guys in Egypt are coming to me,” [anti-globalist] Bannon said. “Modi’s guys in India, Duterte, we get Orbán,” he said— referring to the then president of the Philippines and the current nationalist prime minister of Hungary, respectively. He wanted to create “somehow, some sort of convening authority, for conferences and stuff like that, so we can get ideas like that out there. Nobody’s doing it right now.”
“Nobody’s doing it,” Farage said as he nodded along, seeming to have trouble getting a word in. “It’s a global revolt,” Bannon said. “It’s a zeitgeist. We’re on the right side of history. But it’s going to need the mode of power.… The ideas have to come in more sharp focus, the economic ideas, the political ideas, right.”
I’d been hoping to meet with Bannon when I left Jackson to link up with O’Neill, the Rockefeller farmer. She had told me that both Bannon and David Bossie, the head of Citizens United, were coming to town for a “movie night” hosted by the state Republican Party, which had been taken over by a die-hard Trump faction led by a man named Frank Eathorne, who was reportedly at the Capitol on January 6 and who revved up crowds by saying he’d “run through barbed wire” for Trump. The bitter congressional primary had passed, but there were still strange machinations at work. Jennings had wondered aloud how the state party had been “taken over by people who carry clubs and knives, members of the Oath Keepers, crap like that.” He suspected national forces were at work. “He doesn’t even have a base. Nobody even fucking knows the guy.”
…“I don’t even think there is a working-class party right now,” she said. “The Democrats have abandoned them. The Republicans aren’t there yet.” She was undecided about Ron DeSantis. The one unabashed champion of her kind of politics on a national stage is Tucker Carlson. “If Tucker announced his presidency tomorrow,” she said, “I would literally move to DC, nine months pregnant, to go work for him.” I asked if she thought he would ever run. “I think he will get to a point where he feels like he has to,” she said. But her vision of the good life was so different from anything anyone talks about on a national stage that it’s hard to know whether it is even a politics at all. “It used to be you have a few acres, you work the land, you raise a family, your kids help you garden, till, or whatever,” she said, describing a world she thought had been wrecked by regulations and the oligopoly of corporations like Monsanto. “And then you create enough food for your family and maybe your community.”
I said it must be strange to desire a life like that, being a Rockefeller and all. “There’s a part of the Bible that talks about how people that were born with a lot have a lot of responsibility,” she said. (Luke 12:48.) “And I definitely feel that way.” It was a sentiment that was not at all out of place on the right these days, where everyone suddenly seems to feel like they’re taking part in a world historical drama. But for now she was going to have her baby and enjoy being in a place she thought still felt like an old-fashioned American hometown. “There’s a saying,” she said. “ ‘Wyoming is what America was.’ And I do believe that.”
Food plays an outsize role in the political imagining of the right these days. Last October, Carlson released a documentary titled The End of Men, which features, among other self-proclaimed right-wing bodybuilders, an anonymous farmer who tweets under the name William Wheelwright, one of the better-known figures in the sphere where preppers, techies, hippies, farmers, naturalists, health bros, and hard-core dissident-right types— many of whom are unapologetically racist— mingle, argue, and plan with each other. The documentary advanced a view that our technologies and agricultural system are physically poisoning us, destroying our connection to our corporeality, leading to a generation of men with declining sperm counts and low testosterone. The globalist “regime,” as Mike Cernovich described it in the documentary, has weakened America on a cellular level. The film called for men to take up weight lifting and a meat-based diet. “Well-ordered, disciplined groups of men bound by friendship are dangerous, precisely because of what they can do,” the masculinist health guru known as “Raw Egg Nationalist” said, over images of the American and Haitian revolutions. “A few hundred men can conquer an entire empire,” Raw Egg Nationalist continued. “That’s why they want you to be sick, depressed, and isolated.”
“Things are going to get worse before they get better,” he said. “How much worse isn’t exactly clear.”
I drove north toward Montana, where I visited with a man named Paul McNiel, whom I’d first met back during the fervid summer of 2020, at a Fourth of July picnic and anti-government rally headlined “Rage Against the State.” “I think that Livingston has the highest per-capita concentration of contributors to the New Yorker of any city in America,” he’d said when I introduced myself as a writer. McNiel is extraordinarily well read, and friendly with a number of literary types. He is a bit of a prepper, and while he is deeply Christian, he doesn’t consider himself right wing. “I don’t think the division is right-left anymore. It’s us against the machine,” he said, borrowing a phrase from the English writer Paul Kingsnorth— whose writings critiquing the power of tech and money in modern life have become popular among dissident types. He was dismissive of the local armed groups being flooded with new members. “At the end of the day,” he said, “if you’re not willing to shoot federal agents, then you’re not serious about it. They aren’t serious.”
McNiel had served in Afghanistan after college, and when he left the military, he’d taken out an almost unbelievable amount of debt, largely on credit cards, so that he could get himself in the position of buying his crown jewel, a trailer park in the small town of Belgrade, Montana, just outside of Bozeman. He now owned trailer parks as far away as Alaska. He had ridden the wave. “I always tell myself: No more deals. I want to stop, and I know I have to. But I can’t.”
He’d just bought a run-down country resort and tavern in the tiny town of Story, Wyoming. It was in a beautiful and secluded creekside cove of Ponderosas, a shady island amid the surrounding sagebrush desert. “Pretty good hideout, right?” he asked me, as we had a glass of wine and talked guns, European fiction, and the possibility of civil war. The place was a furious hive of activity. He was paying a couple dozen young members of Christian families to get it ready to open for the public. He was openly conflicted about his role in the churn shaping the West. “My guess,” he said, “in 10 years, there won’t be any blue-collar people left in Story.” A lanky and bearded minister from Iowa had come out with his family to help him work on the place, and there were a dozen or so kids in denim and homemade dresses rushing around, cooking, and doing some light demolition. The scene was a prime example of “crunchy conservatives,” an ecosystem described by the writer Rod Dreher— who champions localism and has long advocated that conservative Christians withdraw as a way of preserving their culture. It’s a process that eventually led Dreher himself to move to Hungary, where he has become a vocal supporter of the country’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán. “I love localism, but there is definitely a point where it can turn into blood and soil,” McNiel said. “I feel like my role is to argue for a localism that doesn’t go off the rails into exclusion.”
I asked him what he’d thought of the “There’s Gonna be a War in Montana” piece. He thought it over. In February of 2022, the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote a piece titled “Why We Are Not Facing the Prospect of a Second Civil War,” arguing that our first Civil War had been produced by a political-economic conflict between the systems of the slave-holding agricultural South and the industrial North, and that no such economic division between the right and left exists in America today. But a political-economic division is exactly what many conservatives and nationalists now see as shaping our politics: a divide between people who work in the so-called “real economy,” and the journalists and bureaucrats and bankers and everyone else who occupy the “managerial class.” “Trump better stand up and do what’s right,” Stewart Rhodes, the head of the Oath Keepers, said on January 6, calling from a Northern Virginia hotel where a cache of guns had been staged. “Otherwise, there’s going to be a slave revolt.”
Many liberal Americans do not actually understand how easy it would be to launch an insurgency in this country. “Everyone on the planet is redpilled on low-intensity warfare now,” a host of the dissident podcast Good Ol Boyz said recently, flicking at the way the Taliban was able to beleaguer and eventually defeat the American military, mostly using small arms. Pretty much every single guy in towns like Pinedale goes out to hunt elk every autumn, and the skills of overland navigation, long-range shooting, and use of high-quality optics involved in what is known as Western “spot-and-stalk” hunting are not very different from the skills involved in modern guerrilla warfare. Insurgencies are less a military war than a complicated political conflict, in which a few people demonstrate that they’re willing to kill, die, or go to prison, and dare governments to overreact, gaining support when innocent people end up shot or arrested. Blood becomes political currency, and it does not take all that much of it to create a conflict scenario.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” McNiel said, and gestured around at his hideout. “That’s why I’m here.”
He had invited me to an “open mic” he was hosting at his home in Livingston, a ramshackle place at the center of a trailer park on an island in the Yellowstone River. It was an odd combination of wholesome family fun and radical politics. Girls wore prairie dresses, and everyone prayed before a buffet of sautéed elk meat and apple pies. Children performed homespun skits, and men got up and gave slightly doom-laden speeches. “I want you to guess what the most important word you’ll all need to know in the years to come is going to be,” one guy asked the crowd. “It’s permaculture. Things are going to break down soon, and you had better be thinking about permaculture now to get ready.”
…Just after I got back from Montana, in September, I flew [to Miami] for an event called Urbit Assembly. This was their second annual gathering, a strange mix between a tech convention and a degenerate art fair, for people associated with a project Yarvin had launched long ago. Srinivasan was the project’s first investor, and Peter Thiel had been the major funder behind Tlon, a company named after a mythical world in a Jorge Luis Borges story that Yarvin had founded and that was still Urbit’s parent company.
No one has ever been able to easily explain Urbit. At the start of the conference, the head of the “Urbit Foundation” offered attendees a node on the network, worth millions of dollars, if they could explain it in one sentence. But the basic idea is that it’s a peer-to-peer, decentralized internet. And it’s also a software platform, and a network you buy into. And it’s also a subculture.
Yarvin, who is no longer officially associated with Urbit, wasn’t there, but he came up in conversation constantly. “Curtis Yarvin is everybody’s darling,” a reporter for Forever Magazine wrote trollingly in her piece about the weekend. “Curtis this, Curtis that. In Honduras with Curtis. In Dubai with Curtis. On the crypto island of Próspera with Curtis.”
Srinivasan gave the keynote. Kirn was there to do a panel. “Was that Indian Bronson?” I heard someone whisper at the opening-night cocktail party, and saw a young man nervously debating whether to approach the early employee of the crypto payment platform Swype, “the most handsome man in America,” according to the podcaster Jack Murphy. He’s also, as was fairly typical in this world, a critic of liberalism— not liberalism as represented by the Democratic Party, but of the entire Enlightenment idea that individual desires and freedoms should shape society. He had just cofounded a new dating app called Keeper, a project that arose at least in part from his view that the sexual revolution and our new culture of dating and breaking up into our 30s and 40s has actually been disastrous for women who want to get married and have children. “My personal stance is that every able-bodied adult American man should own an M4A1, an M320 grenade launcher,” I’d heard him joke to Murphy once. “He should have a full battle load-out.” But he was critiquing America’s conception of gun rights as too individualistic and atomized. “To me this should be like an imposed duty— I don’t really subscribe to a very liberal framework of the Second Amendment.”
This kind of talk was a running theme. The party the next night was at a mansion owned by John Backus, who’d just sold a crypto company for $250 million, where I met a young blond VC named Riva Tez, who flashed me the butt of a prop pistol in her purse and would later give a keynote speech critiquing the entire idea of liberal rationality. “The world of reason is overrated,” she said. “We’ve been fucked by the Enlightenment.”
There were a lot of plans afoot. She was working with Dryden Brown, the cofounder of a plan to build a city-state in the Mediterranean called Praxis, a place for “exceptional men and women seeking more vital lives.” There was an entire panel on “Forking the American Codebase,” which described how systems like Urbit could offer a “new American Revolution,” where the degraded systems of our national “meatspace” could be supplanted by new technological platforms. It was a kind of practical politics for a world where politics no longer worked. “No voice, just exit” was the mantra.
…It was a hot and muggy morning in the open-air conference space when Srinivasan gave his keynote. He wanted to make a practical case for his “crowdsourced territory,” in which self-selecting communities would use crypto platforms to band together and buy themselves a country. “Starting new countries is possible, preferable, and profitable,” he said, and drew a parallel between the American empire of today and the breakup of the French and British colonial empires. “As empires decay you get new countries,” he said. He pitched it as an opportunity for people who’d missed America’s empire-building in the West. “Ambitious people now have an alternative in these frontier societies.”
I wandered over to the edge of the crowd, having been warned in advance that Srinivasan wouldn’t be willing to talk to me. I took a beer from the open bar and a hand-rolled cigarette from the artisanal cigarette stand, and asked for a light from a guy charging his laptop at a standing worktable. He’d been talking about the Network State idea. “That’s what a lot of these new city-states are going to look like, there are people going to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, to Colorado, do you know about this shit?” He began to explain to me how decentralized autonomous organizations and Web3 platforms like Urbit helped make these ideas possible. I mentioned that I’d been curious about this sort of thing when I made a recent trip to Montana. “I just wrote a Substack about Montana,” he said.
So here was the guy who’d gotten me started on my whole summer peregrination, a 37-year-old ad copywriter named Isaac Simpson who lived barely miles away from me and was indeed very far into the “scene” of this whole dissident right. We headed down to an Irish bar to chat and watch football. We ended up talking about rainbow flags he’d seen in Bozeman. “Man, I don’t care if somebody fucks guys,” he said. “What that flag really represents is sameness. It’s this one single worldview that is going to take over everything, and what that really means is just money. You go to these places where every single bar now looks exactly the same, the same IPAs, the same hamburger, the same interiors. It’s all called ‘local’ but actually what it is is fucking private equity investment. And it’s just empty. There is no culture or life in that stuff. And people fucking hate it.”
The Miami Dolphins won a thrilling game. That night there was a small gathering at a suite in the swank Faena Hotel in Miami Beach. People were doing coke, and there were several cases of White Claw piled on a counter. I quit smoking long ago, but every time I end up around people in this scene I seem to start again. I went out to the balcony to bum one and found myself face-to-face with Kirn. I told him that the guy who’d written that Substack post about Montana was at the party. He grinned. “Let’s do this,” he said, and led me over to where Simpson was sitting. Kirn reached out to shake hands, but Simpson looked up with a set jaw. “No, we aren’t doing this,” he said. “Fuck that.” He’d been badly stung by a famous writer. Kirn sat down anyway.
They talked for a very long time. People kept going to the bathroom to do drugs. Finally, somebody announced that the party had to break up, and a group of us wandered out to the beach under the moonlight. People were doing ketamine and skinny-dipping. I had an 8 a.m. flight but went for one last swim. “Nothing is normal anymore,” I heard a guy mutter, apparently to himself, as I headed toward the water. “And it never will be again.”
This morning, a "normie," Jon Tester (D-MT), announced he is running for reelection next year. He has aleways faced long odds-- every single race. It's quite a challenge being a Democrat in Montana these days. Montana's 2 Republican congressmen, career criminal Ryan Zinke and Nazi extremist Matt Rosendale, are expected to fight it out in a vicious primary that will determine which one is Tester's 2024 opponent.