REPUBLISHED: The British conspiracy guru building a sovereign micronation in Appalachia

Some of you will remember a few months ago, I published a new investigation in Fast Company with journalist Alexander Beunder here into Sacha Stone, the conspiracy influencer establishing a ‘sovereign’ micronation in Tennessee. It is now over 180 days after Fast Company published this and the IP has returned to the authors - so I am republishing it for my readers for free.

The British conspiracy guru building a sovereign micronation in Appalachia

A new age influencer known for extreme theories and violent rhetoric is selling his followers on a refuge from state power. The locals aren’t buying it.

BY Alexander Beunder and Emma L. Briant

Matthew Williams has slept very little since he learned about Sacha Stone’s plan to build a “sovereign” micronation near his home in rural Tennessee. What began as a quick Google search in April quickly became hours of research and then days, then weeks. “It was between working on this and then stressing about working on this,” he says. Within a month, “between me and my wife, we watched over 30 hours of his videos.”

With his long hair and often bare chest, intense patter, and hundreds of thousands of online followers, the 59-year-old British “peace activist” looks like the archetype of a globetrotting, spiritual guru. One evening in late June, Stone came to Surgoinsville, a sleepy hamlet 90 minutes northeast of Knoxville, to lead dozens of supporters in a “consecration” ceremony at the 60 acres of land that now belong to what he calls the NewEarth Tanasi Micronation, dedicating it “as a template for the emergent Rainbow Warrior Tribe.”

But beyond the peace and rainbows, Williams had seen something darker in Stone’s movement: a mix of extreme far-right ideas, an alliance of influential fringe figures like Michael Flynn and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and a revenge-minded rhetorical war against a parade of bogeymen, from governments to “globalists.”

In June, Stone and dozens of supporters gathered at the NewEarth nation site in Surgoinsville, Tenn. [Photo: Matthew Williams]

The battles have also become a brisk business, with speaking tours, retreats, health products, and memberships, which Stone promotes to his hundreds of thousands of followers. For a “donation” of $10,000, Stone has said, members of the NewEarth micronation will be able to exist “tax-free” in a futuristic-looking “residential enclave,” with access to an on-site healing center specializing in “advanced microbiology” and “cures.”

A devoted Christian and libertarian, Williams, 31, believes in religious freedom and a hands-off approach by the government. (“Both political parties would hate me,” he says.) But for months, he’s been pressing Hawkins County, where he’s lived for two decades to do something, meeting with officials, hosting community meetings, posting signs and Facebook updates, and enlisting dozens of neighbors in building a local groundswell against NewEarth.

“If they were a hippie cult and they wanted to do stuff out in the middle of the woods, I couldn’t care less,” Williams says. “But a lot of Sacha Stone’s theories kind of fall in line with that QAnon theory, and people here who associate themselves with QAnon tend to be extremist, right-wing, violent individuals.”

Stone and his deputies have been pushing back against Williams and the local opposition, insisting that his movement is peaceful—that it isn’t “a cult”—and decrying “defamatory actions and false claims” in local forums. Online, Stone has used more aggressive rhetoric, alluded to NewEarth members “strapped” with guns, and alleged that Williams and other critics are part of a “Satanic” conspiracy. Stone did not respond to questions from Fast Company.

Local officials are uneasy too, but say the NewEarth group has broken no laws. “It obviously is not something that most people in the community are looking forward to having in Hawkins County,” Mayor Mark DeWitt told NBC affiliate WCYB in May. “But we have to realize that right now, there’s nothing that they’re doing that can stop them from being here at this point.”

Recently, Williams and two dozen neighbors began meeting near the site simply to pray together. “Practically everyone we’ve talked to, they’re afraid, and they’re worried about what is coming,” he says.

He’s been carrying pepper spray too, “just in case someone tries to do anything stupid.”

“This has Waco, Texas, written all over it”

“The world’s gone mad,” Sacha Stone told the audience, and he was mad too. It was August 2023 at the Las Vegas stop of the ReAwaken America Tour, a MAGA-themed religious roadshow, and hundreds of ticketholders had just watched MyPillow founder Mike Lindell deliver his “evidence” of election fraud; Donald Trump Jr. was that night’s headliner. With pendants swaying across his bare torso, Stone gripped the microphone, and, temper flaring, raised his voice to offer his central message: “Do not comply, do not do anything, anything that moves against the spirit, that moves against your soul!”

His British accent and aging rocker persona easily stood out at the ultraconservative confab, a Christian nationalist revival meeting-meets-QAnon expo cofounded by former Trump national security adviser and QAnon icon Michael Flynn in the wake of January 6. But his speech recited many familiar claims. “They” are planning to “asphyxiate your children and your parents from God-given oxygen,” and “inject mRNA, genetic therapy, into every single child in this blessed country,” he told the audience. “The government gives you two things: mind control and trafficking. That’s it baby! That’s it!”

Sacha Stone at the Arise USA tour in Milton, Florida, in May 2021 [Photo: ZimmComm/Flickr]

For more than a decade, Stone’s “sovereignty” movement has pit him against an array of existential threats: 5G, COVID-19 vaccinations, Bill Gates, the World Health Organization, the deep state, pedophiles, the United Nations, Jesuits, the Vatican, globalists and “cabals” suppressing advanced, “alien” technologies and violating “natural law.” One project, the International Tribunal of Natural Justice (ITNJ), has held “hearings” that purport to show “corporations hiding as government” engaged in human trafficking and child sex abuse.

At times, Stone has argued that “satanic” government policies warrant violent resistance. “At some point, you have to drag these people into the market square… we have to hang them by the neck until dead, if they continue to stick HIV/AIDS into our babies,” he said in 2021.

Years after the pandemic, messages like Stone’s are flourishing online. With a two-time president who’s built a political career out of spreading falsehoods and promoting conspiracy theorists, even hiring them to top cabinet posts, Trump’s second term has given new permission to wild, inflammatory ideas and the profiteers who push them. Social media companies have loosened their rules around false content, too, just as the Trump administration has slashed funding for misinformation research, and gutted the Homeland Security office responsible for helping localities counter domestic extremism. All of this is particularly concerning now, since the evidence suggests that conspiracy thinking is fueling historically high levels of polarization and political violence, from the attack on the Capitol to a wave of attacks and assassinations.

Of course, the country has been mired in dangerous conspiracy theories since long before Trump leapt onto Fox News with questions about President Barack Obama’s birthplace (or onto Jeffrey Epstein’s jet, for that matter). Since the early 2010s, Stone has cultivated a kind of spiritual conspiracism—embraced for decades by both the countercultural left and the Christian right—and leveraged a motley alliance of very online “freedom” fighters, from anti-vax advocates and cosmic starseeds to tax protesters, pedophile-fighting “patriots” and white supremacists. But his right-wing ideology of “sovereignty,” with its illiberal, authoritarian leanings, also descends from a tradition that dates back hundreds of years.

One of Stone’s recurring fixations are the “Sabbateans,” a 17th-century Messianic Jewish movement that has become a focus of contemporary antisemitic conspiracy theories. Stone has managed to evade direct controversy for years by avoiding explicitly antisemitic language, and cloaking his theories in lengthy monologues with seemingly harmless, esoteric ideas about “geoportals” or “the mechanics of ascension.” In a 2017 talk in Dartington, England, posted on YouTube, he invites his audience to question whether Hitler was misrepresented in historical accounts. “Adolf Hitler, the big bad scary guy, well that’s a very compelling spellbinding [sic],” he said, adding that “ninety percent of the facts that we spout about the Second World War were introduced in 1952.”

Stone’s fortunes changed during the pandemic, when his anti-vaccine rants led YouTube and then Facebook to temporarily remove his accounts, costing him tens of thousands of followers. But as public trust sank and social media algorithms fed a fevered search for answers, the pandemic and America’s political chaos also opened new avenues for Stone’s repertoire of spiritualism, anti-government conspiracies, and commercial hustles. He drew support from networks of conspiracy superspreaders, like the “World Doctors Alliance,” a transatlantic group of vaccine skeptic health practitioners that reached millions during the pandemic.

Neighbors posted protest signs around Stanley Valley ahead of Stone’s arrival. [Photo: Matthew Williams]

New Age, esoteric strains of conspiracy thinking, like those that animate Stone’s movement, aren’t inherently far-right, says Marc Tuters, an assistant professor in media studies at the University of Amsterdam who examines political subcultures. But, he says, “esoteric ideas have historically been popular in fascist movements,” and notions that “everything is connected” and “nothing is as it seems” can easily slide into conspiracy thinking.

“When that happens,” Tuters warns, “it becomes dangerous, because it undermines the trust that holds society together.” Amid legitimate concerns about failing political elites, the internet has provided the perfect environment for that kind of thinking to thrive, a place where anyone can “become a kind of channel and broadcaster,” says Tuters.

A cursory web search only begins to hint at Stone’s reach, which now extends to more than 450 thousand followers across Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, Rumble and Telegram. By June 2024, his videos had racked up over 25 million views, not including the videos that have been taken down, like his 2019 documentary 5G Apocalypse. The hour-long film—in which he alleges the phone networks are weapons that cause dementia, diabetes and mental illness—reached more than 1 million views before YouTube removed it, but copies of it remain online (including on YouTube).

The numbers also don’t capture Stone’s growing offline presence. As early as 2013 he was making appeals to landowners to donate land or “participate in a commercial undertaking with NewEarth Retreats.” A NewEarth eco-resort that Stone launched in Bali, Indonesia, in 2016 now organizes meditations, “sacred gatherings,” “ecstatic dance” events and festivals featuring conspiracy theorists and fringe figures. One ceremony in January featured an appearance by actor and Vladimir Putin ally Steven Seagal, whom Stone calls “a very dear friend.”

In July 2024, Stone began promoting the Tennessee micronation, which one presentation describes as a “modern day Ark,” a 1,000-home “off-grid regenerative living community … focused on absolute sovereignty,” and the first of a 50-state project aimed at battling “globalist interests” trying to “collapse the US and its $ currency” and “diminish the spirit and dignity of America.” The project, it says, heralds “a return to prosperity economics and self-determining communities, lawfully removed from the over-reach of faceless bureaucracy and lawless taxations.”

In early June, as Stone wended his way to Surgoinsville on a 10-state “Revelations” speaking tour, Matthew Williams hosted a public meeting in town to share some of what he’d learned about Stone and his movement. According to state records, in February the NewEarth Nation Coalition, a Montana Domestic Religious Corporation Sole, acquired the 60-acre parcel of land on Stanley Valley Road for $640,000. (The Golden Tickets are being sold by a California-based entity, NewEarth Nation Society, Golden Ticket, which describes itself as a “Private Membership Association,” a structure sometimes promoted as a way to operate outside tax obligations.)

In a presentation, NewEarth says it chose the location partly because Tennessee’s “visionary leaders have banned chem-trailing and geoengineering from the skies” (a reference to a law passed by the legislature last year), and because of minimal local regulations, what it calls “the lowest restrictions on planning, building and development… in the USA.”

Matthew Williams at a Hawkins Valley community meeting in early June 2025 with journalist Dave Troy [Screenshot: Matthew Williams]

Tennessee has long been a haven for utopian schemes and charismatic leaders. Not far from Hawkins County is a 130-acre retreat owned by the Rod of Iron Ministries, a church founded by the son of the late global religious leader Sun Myung Moon that exalts AR-15s and prays for Donald Trump. A more recent arrival, the Highland Rim Project, seeks to build rural communities that combine Christian values with Silicon Valley techno-libertarianism. The idea of building independent enclaves and “Network States” has also gained new momentum under Trump’s second term. Recently, lawmakers and lobbyists on Capitol Hill have urged turning some federal lands into “freedom cities,” a Trump-backed effort to build industrial zones free from state law and many federal rules.

Stone has described something similar for his micronation, but with “sovereignty” seekers and “free energy” in place of tech bros and blockchains. In a pitch video last year, he said 1,000 “Golden Tickets,” at $10,000 each, would provide “tax-free residential status,” contingent on “allodial titling and clearance of federal liens against the land.” According to the project’s website, 50 “Golden Ticket Members” had signed up as of May.

The NewEarth terms and conditions include strict confidentiality agreements that prohibit members from discussing “any information or material” about their experience, and specify that members won’t own any land. They will, however, have access to NewEarth’s Sovereignty Academy, whose curriculum promises to “impart seminal wisdom and knowledge relating to claiming the straw man, standing down illicit authoritarianism, lawfully discharging illicit bills, levies and so much more.”

Many of Stone’s “sovereign” schemes sound like the product of a modern, Western post-truth moment, with a mix of MAGA and MAHA. But as he told the crowd at ReAwaken America, his anti-government worldview first took root decades ago, in a place far from Appalachia, when he “grew up in a godless war.”

Legacies of empire

Stone—whose real name is Simon Jean Paul Sacha Adams—was born into a white family in 1966 white-ruled Rhodesia, today’s Zimbabwe. In 1965, leaders of the British colony declared independence without introducing democratic reforms, in a bid to disrupt the transition to black-majority rule. Breaking with the Commonwealth, the white-minority government birthed a pariah state, as Britain, the U.S. and the U.N. imposed sanctions.

Growing up in Rhodesia with his mother until about 16, “living behind grenade screens and traveling in convoys,” was “not particularly fun,” Stone recalled in a 2014 interview, “albeit it was a fascinating place to be born and to grow up.” More recently, he said that he received little education “beyond basic primary school in bush schools.” Stone’s views were commonplace in Rhodesia: State media—including the news spread by Stone’s mother, a TV and radio anchor—projected a “transnational far-right ideology into every white Rhodesian home,” British historian Niels Boender writes.

Although white-minority rule eventually collapsed, Rhodesia won support within a growing international far-right movement. Sympathizers migrated to defend the white state in its final years, and founded local chapters of the American Nazi party and the John Birch Society, which was known for labeling every “threat” a communist plot, from the civil rights movement to the fluoridation of water. (In recent years, nostalgia for Rhodesia has swelled online as a quieter kind of racist messaging.)

Stone has publicly identified with Rhodesia’s white rebellion. In April 2024, he described the unrecognized state as “showing real predictive verve. … We were ahead of the time … wanting to secede from the crown of England and all that bullshit. And we did. And we pulled out our guns and told the Crown to back off.” Eventually, though, “we had to cave and the globalists won, I guess.”

The 1980s reshaped Sacha Stone’s life: his family fled Zimbabwe after Robert Mugabe’s rise, settling first in South Africa, then London. As conspiracy culture evolved in post-Cold War Britain—with figures like David Icke popularizing the Illuminati and other antisemitic theories—Stone initially took a different path, fronting a rock band and running a music company while doing interior design work “for aristocrats.” But in 1997, he experienced what he later described in a now-removed video as going “all but mad for six months” and taking “two years to recover.” He then moved between Morocco and Egypt, engaging in what he called “diplomacy” before launching the nonprofit Humanitad in 2000 to promote “tolerance and goodwill between people of all nations and faith.”

Humanitad gave Stone the aura of a globe-hopping, Bono-like spiritual diplomat, with photo ops alongside dignitaries and celebrities and even an open letter from the Dalai Lama urging “international leaders” to “foster genuine peace in the world.”

One former acquaintance who asked to speak anonymously described Stone’s image as “this odd look of rock star-meets-global diplomat, driven by world peace and spirituality. It was such a mad combination, you felt it might just work.”

But, they said, Humanitad “really had no funding.” There were “lots of meetings, but no events ever materialized.” Of the many ambitious projects Humanitad announced—educational programs, a charity music festival, and a plan to deliver healthcare to underserved regions with flying “zeppelin clinics”—no traces exist. They cut ties around 2007.

Politically, Stone was “certainly anti-West, and critical of warmongering, certain Western politicians, and big business,” the person said. But his politics were “very much underpinned by spirituality and peace, nowhere near what he is advocating now.”

Hard sell

After 2012, Sacha Stone’s nonprofit Humanitad took an increasingly political and commercial turn. He launched “NewEarth,” a brand merging alternative health with conspiracy theories. For $11 to $44 per month, subscribers get media content and discounts at his “NewEarth Farmacy.” His unaccredited “NewEarth University” calls itself “the zero-point educational ecosystem of the greater NewEarth Movement.”

Soon, he was marketing tech gadgets, too: a “free energy” generator called QT-Pi, and a $350 anti-5G device said to involve “benevolent extraterrestrial intelligences” and the expertise of “the former director of the KGB.” The device was ultimately labeled a scam by British regulators: it turned out to be a common 128MB USB drive. Still, by 2021, according to U.K. records, the vendor’s financial reserves had reached 105,058 pounds (around $145,000). One of the company’s directors and shareholders, Anna Grochowalska, is also a co-owner with Stone in shares of the NewEarth Bali resort; records show their combined shares are worth roughly $1.5 million. ​Still, Stone insists that NewEarth doesn’t “take profits” and “I’ve never taken a salary.”

WATCH VIDEO OF SACHA STONE: ARISE ISRAEL 1

As his star rose within the global conspiracy movement, Stone’s orbit began to include more high-profile and deep-pocketed anti-vaccine allies, including Del Bigtree, a former adviser to Robert F Kennedy Jr. In January 2021, three years before becoming Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, Kennedy appeared on a Stone broadcasJrt to repeat his attacks on longtime U.S. medical adviser Anthony Fauci, claiming he had been serving “big pharmaceutical companies” during several recent “fake epidemics.”

That year, Stone and conspiracy theorist Robert David Steele launched Arise USA!, a 50-state speaking tour to spread false claims about election fraud and vaccines. Tax records from Steele’s nonprofit show $2.1 million in revenue from undisclosed sources and expenses of $103,052 for his “pro bono” work as the “chief counsel” for Stone’s “natural law” tribunal. Steele—who called the Holocaust a “contrived myth” and labeled the World Health Organization the largest threat to “the right to life”—died in August 2021 from complications due to COVID-19.

Stone’s profile has also grown through his MAGA ties. Michael Flynn, who once suggested that a Myanmar-style military coup “should happen” on U.S soil, called in to Stone’s broadcast in 2022 and praised him for keeping “the message of hope and faith alive” amid an ongoing “war of narratives.” Ivan Raiklin, a former Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and far-right extremist whom Flynn has praised as “a true American patriot,” has frequently appeared in Stone’s videos to call for “retribution” against Trump’s political opponents. Instead of “poking the bear,” he told Stone in November, “now we’re pulling out the icepick.”

Stone has also boasted of his ties to Trump. In an Election Day broadcast, he claimed to have had “conversations with members of the Trump family recently,” including “a beautiful message from one of them only yesterday, inner-circle Trump family.” In a video removed by YouTube, he ruminated on what the President would make of the Tennessee micronation. “Trump will be very pro this,” he said, “because Trump is all about pulling out the teeths [sic] and the fangs of a satanic government machine. So we’re gonna be helping him along the way.”

Stone’s admiration for the Russian president runs even deeper.

“I happen to love him,” he said in 2024, calling Vladimir Putin the leader of the opposition to “the Satanic cabal” and “the most powerful man on the face of the earth.”

Stone is also involved with Tracia Unita, a Romanian media company that has raised suspicions over its ties to the Russian embassy and its backing of Calin Georgescu, a far-right pro-Kremlin candidate in last year’s presidential election. (After he rode a wave of viral TikTok content to win the first round of voting, a Romanian court annuled the results, citing interference by Moscow.) In 2021 Stone acquired a 20% stake in Tracia Unita, according to a December 2024 report by the investigative outlet Snoop and the Paris-based journal Intelligence Online. In recent years, Stone has appeared at the Russian embassy, Snoop reported, and has written pro-Russian posts on Tracia Unita’s website, including one in which Stone praised Putin for “escaping from the control of the globalist Empire.”

Stone appeared at a party at the Russian embassy in Bucharest in 2023 with Bruno Mihăilescu and other members of Tracia Unita. [Photo courtesy Snoop.ro]

Another Tracia Unita shareholder, Bruno Mihăilescu, has discussed pro-Putin conspiracy theories with Stone on Romanian television, and has been described as one of NewEarth’s “science advisers.” In one livestream, Mihăilescu showed off a “free energy” machine that Stone claimed could provide electricity to the Tennessee project. In reality, it was an electrolyzer, a conventional device that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen.

“The gloves will come off“

To Williams and others in Hawkins County, the most concerning aspect of Stone’s movement is its emphasis on “sovereignty,” and its suggestion of the “sovereign citizen” movement, the loose alliance of extremists, tax protesters and conspiracists who believe they are separate from government rule. Besides the potential stress on the county’s resources and infrastructure, Williams worries about the impact of hundreds of new “sovereign” residents on local politics and elections, especially in sparsely populated Hawkins County (population: 58,600), and the town of Surgoinsville (population: 1,903).

“Our county can’t handle that many sovereign citizens,” Williams told the Hawkins County Commission during a public hearing in April. He quoted from one of Stone’s Facebook posts: “You are free to take the whip to officials or any individuals hiding behind a uniform or badge, seal or oath of office,” Stone wrote in October.

Josh Gilliam, one of the commissioners, noted that the county held no regulatory authority over NewEarth’s use of the land, but that a future planning committee meeting could address the issue. “We can talk about it,” Mayor Mark DeWitte said, “but we don’t have zoning.”

Commissioner Robbie Palmer read from a brochure for the micronation, which described “24/7 security, different universities, ceremonial grounds.” “This has Waco, Texas, written all over it,” he told the commission. “I think the state of Tennessee and the federal government need to get involved.”

WATCH VIDEO: Sacha Stone with Sean Stone - Remarks on Constitution and Sovereignty from Dave Troy

Stone has denied any links to the sovereign citizen movement. Marcia Willardson, a NewEarth official, told local media that “sovereignty” refers only to religious freedom. NewEarth “intends to pay every tax we owe,” the group said in an “FAQ” it posted on its website after the county commission meeting. When Stone called for “taking the whip” to people in uniforms and badges, he was being “metaphorical,” the FAQ said.

Still, Stone frequently rails against taxation and government authority. Governments are “stepping over the line of human sovereignty and natural law,” he said in a 2014 interview, and are “entirely rogue and they shouldn’t exist.” The aim of the micronation, Stone told QAnon influencer Scott McKay last year, is to build a territory where “the government, federal and municipal, will have to knock three times politely.”

Willardson, who teaches at NewEarth’s Sovereignty Academy, is also known for her tax protest schemes. According to a 2023 memo by the U.S. Tax Court, she “has a history of involvement with sham trusts used by tax-payers to shift income and avoid tax.” In 2019, she was also arrested for driving without a license and registration. As she recounted on McKay’s radio show, Willardson told the police officer that she was exempt from the law, a common tactic in the sovereign citizen movement.

WATCH VIDEO: NewEarth Tennessee Micronation Golden Ticket

“There’s no intent [for NewEarth] to say the truth because they do not trust the government, the media, or the neighbors living here,” Williams told a few dozen residents at the community meeting he hosted in early June. Meanwhile, he said, the aggressive language in Stone’s videos was scaring some in Hawkins County. “NewEarth members so far have not viewed resistance very nicely.”

The day after Williams held his forum, Stone’s rhetoric grew more menacing. Addressing Williams and other critics in a Facebook livestream, he threatened legal action and swore to defend NewEarth from “Sabbatean motherfuckers,” who, he said, “come crawling like snipers with goddamn balaclavas on their faces and shooting at us from the dark at the back of the head.”

Stone arrived in Hawkins County days later, and tried to strike a softer chord. “Everything we do is an act of peace,” he told a reporter for WCYB. “Do we have guns? Of course we have guns.” But he wasn’t bothered by the opposition, he insisted. While “there’s been controversy whipped up here and there, that’s just the way it goes.”

Some “well-established figures in the community” had even volunteered to help, Stone said: A local libertarian group, United Citizens for Hawkins County, had organized a second public forum where residents would be able to hear directly from Stone and other NewEarth officials. (To Williams and some community members, that raised more concerns: One of the UCHC organizers has used his X account to push antisemitic memes and repeatedly praise Adolf Hitler.)

The meeting, on June 18, drew a packed and largely skeptical crowd to the Hawkins County Cattlemen’s Association. Stone began with an impassioned introduction of his work as a “peace diplomat,” and clarified that the NewEarth sanctuary would host only “between 12 and 18” residents, with a focus on “cures” and “healing” and equine therapy “for veterans and autistic children.” He disputed alleged rumors (“I’m not running a sex cult”), said he “despise[d] the New Age movement,” and drew some applause when he said he was “born a white Christian,” and “it is pitchforks, bibles and guns that are gonna be the salvation of this world.”

The mood grew more tense as the meeting stretched into its second hour. “I moved here to get away from what your organization stands for,” one woman said, pointing to videos she’d seen online. Stone fired back at what he called “slander” by some in the audience. After Williams stood up to discuss his findings and concerns, another NewEarth official, Ethan Lucas, presented him with a “cease and desist” letter alleging defamation. Williams then told the room he’d been “indirectly threatened” by Stone.

“Respectfully, I threatened you when I was speaking to my own social media,” Stone interjected. Other reports of threats were just “hearsay.” “I said that tortious interference with what we’re doing will have consequences.”

Williams assembled a video of the meeting and posted it on Facebook. “We don’t have to get mad, we don’t have to get upset, we don’t have to threaten people,” he says. But without “Sacha Stone being able to use logic and reason and just talk, we feel more threatened than he does.”

WATCH VIDEO: Hawkins Countians, NewEarth Nation leaders gather at forum to discuss planned micronation

Days after the forum, Stone and Willardson and a dozen special guests sat on stage in a barn near the NewEarth property for a proclamation ceremony, a five-hour marathon of speeches and videos devoted to “reclaiming the living soil to the children of God” after “1500 years of theft, enslavement and genocide.” Speaking to a crowd of dozens of mostly older ticket-holders and thousands more watching online, Stone described how lawyers had established for NewEarth an “ecclesiastically protected, universally irrevocable superstructure of trusts” in order to “protect ourselves,” with “no flyover zone, no permissions granted to the war powers, or the intrusion of the corporations masquerading as governments,” he said. “No third party intervention.”

This was not “the same as a bunch of idiot sovereigns trying to throw rocks at the citadel,” Stone insisted. But “we’re talking about jurisdiction of God. We’re talking about armor of God. We’re talking being able to lay our own off-grid free-energy powered grids.” (The conventional grid was “the umbilical to the devil,” Stone said.) He reached a crescendo. “Once we’ve done it, we will franchise it to our friends and family across the land,” he said. “And I dare say it will be protected by patriots and veterans and constitutional sheriffs and good public officials.”

A prayer meeting near the NewEarth site [Photo: Matthew Williams]

On the livestream, the bangs of distant shotguns—the protests of some NewEarth neighbors—could be heard in the background. At the podium, McKay, a self-described “highly censored combat machine” who broadcasts under the name “Patriot Streetfighter”—Stone had invited him to provide “some muscle,” he said—acknowleged NewEarth’s “redneck detractors.” “There’s some local people who don’t understand, and feel that there’s some type of hippie invasion, which I totally understand by looking at the crowd,” he said. Still, “I’ve never understood the term prejudice. I don’t get it.”

Soon, though, his tone shifted, as he described a “global power structure,” one that required humanity to start “standing up and facing this criminal element.” (Online, McKay has claimed that Jews are part of a global conspiracy, and argued that “Hitler was actually fighting the same people that we’re trying to take down today.”)

“We outnumber these bastards by the billions,” he told the audience. “How do we sit back, knowing that there is government funding by three-letter agencies of child trafficking, satanic ritual abuse of our most precious asset on the planet all over the world, with your tax dollars?”

Another guest of honor—”a hero,” Stone gushed—was Richard Mack, former Arizona sheriff, founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, and former board member of the Oath Keepers, the far-right anti-government militia. Mack spoke about his experience suing the federal government, and Posse Comitatus, the legal concept that holds that the county government ought to control all the land within its borders and that the county sheriff is the nation’s ultimate law enforcement authority. The concept—and an older far-right extremist movement of the same name—is commonly seen as a precursor to the “sovereign citizen” movement.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do” to defend “this holy cause of liberty,” Mack told the crowd. “We need funding. We need your help. We gotta make this bigger, better, and faster and right away.”

In the absence of zoning ordinances, which are staunchly opposed by the UCHC, Williams sees no legal way of stopping the micronation. Last month, he brought 30 residents to a hillside overlooking NewEarth’s still-empty site for a prayer meeting. He’s also continued to share his findings about Stone on Facebook, where he’s now up to 217 followers.

Williams has now seen 100-plus hours of Stone’s videos. On Facebook, where Stone’s pages have more than 88,000 followers, one livestream sticks out. It’s early June, and Stone is sitting in a parked car, wearing aviator glasses and staring straight into the camera as he lays into his critics—including, he says with evident disgust, “Mr. Matthew—‘three followers on Facebook’—Williams.” “You godless, gormless fucking idiots. What do you think you’re doing? Everything we do is an act of peace.”

Still, he adds, “Any further obstruction from third-party interlopers, and the gloves will come off. That is an absolute statement of fact—the gloves will come off.”

This article was originally published by Fast Company and the original article can be accessed here.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Alexander Beunder is an investigative journalist from the Netherlands and a member of the Dutch Platform Authentieke Journalistiek (PAJ), an Utrecht-based organization of investigative journalists. PAJ focuses on politics, economics, and the influence of multinational corporations on Dutch politics and public opinion, publishing in both Dutch print and online media. Beunder and PAJ were the first to expose direct funding from Dutch companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, to climate denialism in the 1990s. This was part of the ongoing Shell Papers research project, in collaboration with the Dutch platform Follow the Money, which focuses on Shell’s influence in the Netherlands and abroad. In other publications, Beunder has written extensively about the history of conspiracy theories, disinformation, climate and COVID-19 denialism, and the links between Russia and far-right politics in the Netherlands.

Dr. Emma L Briant is a British researcher and Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame. She was senior researcher for the oscar-shortlisted Netflix documentary ‘The Great Hack,’ which helped ignite an important international debate about privacy, big data ethics and how propaganda is deployed in a digital age. Her Cambridge Analytica testimony and evidence were central to investigations by the UK Parliament, European Parliament, the US Congress and the Canadian Parliament and was reported worldwide. Contact her on Signal at @emmalbriant.44.