The New Rule of American Politics That Washington Refuses to Admit

The New Rule of American Politics That Washington Refuses to Admit

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Look at the candidates breaking through this cycle and they don’t line up. One’s practically a democratic socialist. One’s a moderate who had kind words for some of Trump’s tariffs. One wraps progressive politics in scripture. One’s a buttoned-up senator who barely does interviews. One’s the governor of the biggest state in the country, running flat out for president. Put them in a room and they’d argue about half of what matters. And yet every one of them cracked the same code — the thing that actually decides elections now. Most of the people in Washington paid to understand politics still won’t say it out loud. Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes put a word on it recently. The word is attention. Hayes wrote a whole book arguing that attention has become the ground American politics stands on — the money, the ads, the endorsements all sit on top of it. Once you see it that way, this whole confusing election snaps into focus. So let me walk you through them, because each one is solving the same problem a completely different way. Start with the old rule, the one that ran campaigns for a generation. Find a candidate with a clean biography — a lawyer, a veteran, somebody who rose through the institutions and looks the part. Sit them down and make them dial for dollars seven hours a day, because the money buys TV, TV buys name recognition, and name recognition wins. That was ninety percent of the game. It’s dead now, because what the money was really buying was attention, and broadcast TV no longer delivers it. The candidates breaking through found other ways to earn it. Here’s how. Graham Platner, Maine. He runs an oyster farm that barely turns a profit and sells most of its catch to his mother’s restaurant. A year ago nobody outside his town knew his name. Now he’s the Democratic nominee for Senate, and the sitting governor — Janet Mills, with Schumer and the whole party behind her — suspended her own campaign and never came back. Platner was, in a real sense, cast. A group went looking for someone to run in Maine and ran it like an audition, not a recruitment. They weren’t hunting for the most accomplished person in the state; they were hunting for charisma, the raw ability to grab people and hold them. They found a former enlisted Marine with a populist streak and bet on the talent, not the résumé. It worked, because Platner carries something you can’t fake — a real belief that the system is hollow at the core, that the institutions failed because they failed him. People can feel that it’s real. The catch is real too: when you recruit a guy precisely because he has an anti-institutional life story, you also get a guy who never spent twenty years watching his every step. Out come the old Reddit posts, the tattoo questions, the baggage a cautious careerist never would’ve accumulated. High-risk bet. But remember what the safe choice got them last time — in 2020 they ran the textbook candidate against Susan Collins, clean record, up in every poll, and she lost by nine. The cautious play isn’t safe. It just fails quietly. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan. Almost Platner’s opposite. Not outside the institution — a Rhodes scholar with an M.D. and a Ph.D., a former public health official who taught at Columbia. The brass ring of American credentialing is on his hand. And he’s just as good at commanding attention, which proves the point: this isn’t about being an outsider. It’s about knowing how to own a room. Watch how he rose — he leaned into a single issue that, for an engaged primary electorate, runs like a live wire. When a controversial figure rallied with him, his opponents and outside groups attacked, and in attacking they put the exact issue he wanted at the center of the race. They handed him the spotlight while trying to take it away. That’s the new physics the old playbook never accounted for: an attack is a gift when it plants you on the side of the fight your voters care about most. James Talarico, Texas. He breaks every pattern I just described. Not the furthest left or right, no single explosive issue. A former teacher with fairly standard progressive politics — but they sit inside a Christian moral framework he clearly actually believes. You could cast him as the idealistic young pastor rooting corruption out of a complicated church. Turns out that’s a superpower right now, because what he’s tapping isn’t a hunger for radicalism. It’s a hunger for decency. He beat a viral-video star in his own primary by being authentic instead of performative. His general-election opponents are attacking him for being too nice, too soft for Texas — running cruelty against kindness — and they may be walking straight into the fight he wanted. The appetite for an actual decent human being in the middle of this era is a lot bigger than the cynics think. Jon Ossoff, Georgia. Does the opposite of everyone else. They’re all playing a volume game — yes to everything, everywhere. Ossoff is scarce. Careful. Barely touches the long podcast circuit. He builds anticipation by being hard to get. Here’s what makes him interesting: he used to make documentaries about international corruption, so the man actually knows how to build compelling video about a complicated subject. You know an Ossoff clip the second it starts — the visual grammar is his. Compare that to Raphael Warnock, same party, same state, who everyone assumed would be the rising star and who’s putting out content that looks like a Senate press conference in front of a wall of flags. Completely different command of the medium. Ossoff also figured out how to tell the corruption story — so overwhelming it leaves most of us speechless — by routing it through the system itself instead of one man, and by giving the other side its due inside his own argument. That’s a hard thing to do and a powerful one. Gavin Newsom, California. Playing this game for the presidency. If Ossoff wins by being scarce, Newsom wins by being everywhere. He made one of the most interesting attention bets on this list: omnipresence. Yes to everything. His own podcast, where he’ll sit across from hard-right figures most of his party wouldn’t share a microphone with — going places specifically because it’s strange to see him there. A few years ago I’d have been skeptical; a handsome California governor with a stack of old scandals isn’t obviously what the party’s hungry for. But the reps did their work. He’s gotten better, faster than his rivals, because he’s constantly in rooms where things can go wrong, and that volume builds a comfort you can’t rehearse. Right now the prediction markets have him as the 2028 frontrunner, and a big part of how he got there is that he stopped trying to be the poll-tested version of himself and started showing up as a guy willing to walk into hostile territory and have the argument. He’s reaching for something genuinely hard — to hold two opposite ideas at once: I’ll be your brawler, and we can disagree out in the open and keep talking anyway. He hasn’t fully fused them, and sometimes the big unifying line falls flat. But the instinct — that our fights with each other can be productive instead of disqualifying — is more honest than the alternative, and it travels. Now the counterexample, because attention alone is never the whole story. In Los Angeles, a former reality star named Spencer Pratt ran for mayor and, if you were online, looked like a phenomenon — great ads, impossible to avoid, the talk of the platform. Then he lost badly, underperforming Trump in the same city. Two reasons. First, there was no actual reason for the man to be mayor; the attention had nothing underneath it. Second, a lot of that supposed momentum lived on one platform that’s become a sealed room, where a small, intense crowd convinces itself that whatever’s loud inside is popular outside. It’s the same trap the left fell into years ago when it mistook the most-online opinion for the most popular one. Lethal then, lethal now, and the people inside can’t feel it because everyone around them agrees. Pratt is the proof that attention has to be attached to something real. When it isn’t, it evaporates the second it meets actual voters. Here’s the thread. The public can smell a phony. On the street, in an interview room, across a kitchen table, people know within thirty seconds whether you’re telling them what you actually think or what you think they want to hear. These platforms do the same thing at scale — they sniff out inauthenticity in a way the old institutions never did. The institutions wanted you to file down who you were to fit what they needed. The new ecosystem punishes exactly that and rewards the opposite. That’s what all six share. Platner’s anger is real. El-Sayed’s conviction is real. Talarico’s decency is real. Ossoff’s craft is real. Newsom’s appetite for the fight is real. Wildly different people, wildly different politics, and the one thing they have in common is that each took something true about who they actually are and learned to translate it into the language of this moment — the clip, the post, the connection that travels. The old machine recruited for institutional fit and kept getting blindsided. The consultants who built careers on the dead formula are still selling it and hoping you don’t notice. But the entry ticket now is attention, and you earn it by being some real version of yourself in public and eating the risk that comes with it. The machine is obsolete. The only question left is how long the people running it take to admit it. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

A Trainee Is Dead and 160 Are Sick. Hegseth Owns This One.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Keon McDaniel was six weeks into Air Force basic training. His whole career ahead of him. His whole life. On Friday he was rushed to Brooke Army Medical Center after a medical emergency. By Monday he was dead. The Air Force says a full medical review is underway, and we don’t yet know for certain whether his death is tied to the flu. But here’s what we do know. He was training inside a wing where nearly 160 of his fellow recruits had just come down with influenza. And we know exactly why that outbreak was able to take hold. In April, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood in front of a camera and ended a longstanding requirement that service members get the flu vaccine. He called the mandate “absurd, overreaching.” He dressed it up as a fight for religious freedom and medical autonomy and said your body and your convictions are “not negotiable.” It sounds great. It plays well to a certain audience — the people who want government out of their lives. But that mandate was never about controlling anybody. It existed for one reason. Readiness. Healthy troops. You cannot defend this country flat on your back with a 103-degree fever. Don’t take it from me. Take it from Senator Roger Wicker — the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and an Air Force veteran. When Hegseth made this move, Wicker said the requirement was there to enhance readiness, and then he said the thing that should’ve ended the whole debate: you do give up certain rights when you take the oath. It’s just part of it. That’s not a liberal talking point. That’s a Republican senator and a veteran explaining a basic truth about military service that apparently needs explaining to the man running the Pentagon. So look at what Hegseth’s “freedom” actually produced. Before the mandate ended, vaccination among recruits at this base ran close to one hundred percent. After he made it optional, it collapsed to forty. Forty percent. Now picture where these recruits live. This is basic training at Lackland — young people sleeping in open bays, bunk to bunk, eating shoulder to shoulder at communal tables. If you set out to design a perfect environment for a respiratory virus to tear through a population, you couldn’t do better than a basic training barracks. Public health officials have understood this for a century. There’s a reason the line keeps getting repeated this week: nothing in human history has killed more soldiers than disease. Military leaders under presidents of both parties knew that. It took this administration about eight weeks to forget it. And the response tells you everything. The moment the bodies started filling the medical wing, the Air Force quietly issued an exception to Hegseth’s own policy and made the vaccine mandatory again — right there at Lackland. So the same shot that was an “absurd, overreaching mandate” in April became urgently necessary in June, the second it was clear people were getting hurt. That’s the tell. If the policy were really about freedom and autonomy and principle, you’d hold the line when it got inconvenient. They didn’t. They reversed it the instant reality showed up, which means somewhere in that building people knew the original call was wrong. They made it anyway, because it sounded good in a video. And here’s the part I want to sit with, because it’s bigger than one base. This outbreak didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the predictable end product of a years-long project to convince Americans that vaccines are dangerous, that public health is tyranny, that the people telling you to get a shot are the enemy. You’ve got a Health Secretary who built a career questioning the safety of standard vaccines. You’ve got a Defense Secretary turning a routine flu shot into a culture-war trophy. And the message lands. Forty percent. These recruits didn’t decide on their own that a vaccine the military had given safely for decades was suddenly a threat. They were told that, over and over, by people in positions of trust — including their own government. So when the fever finally hit that barracks, these young men and women weren’t making a free and informed choice. They were acting on misinformation handed to them from the top. That’s what makes me angry. Not that people got sick — people get sick. It’s that they were set up to get sick by leaders who knew better and reached for the culture-war talking point anyway. And even now, with a trainee dead and 160 in the medical wing, the Pentagon’s posture is to defend the decision. A spokesman insists it was based on “thorough risk assessments” to maximize readiness and lethality. Read that back against what actually happened. A unit too sick to train is not lethal. A recruit in a hospital bed is not ready. The assessment, whatever it was, was wrong, and the proof is in San Antonio right now. Here’s the bottom line. Leadership means you own the consequences of your choices. Hegseth made a choice. He ended a protection that worked, dressed it up as freedom, and within two months a base full of young Americans paid for it. One of them may have paid with his life. The least this administration owes those recruits — and owes Keon McDaniel’s family — is the honesty to admit this was a mistake instead of hiding behind a press release. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

Kash Patel Just Blew a Live FBI Operation to Get a Headline

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] According to the Justice Department, five men planned to fly explosive-laden drones over the UFC event on the White House lawn, panic the crowd into a stampede, and have snipers pick off high-value targets as people ran. They’d built an encrypted group chat, stockpiled rifles and thousands of rounds, scouted their launch points and their sniper nests, and written up a target list with members of Congress on it. So why didn’t they pull it off? On June 10, the FBI and the Secret Service learned about the threat. They interviewed a suspect, got search warrants, and made arrests across four states over the weekend. And the case was sealed — a judge ordered it kept out of public view, because the investigation wasn’t finished. That last part is the whole story. Roughly two dozen people had been plotting this thing in those chats, and only five were in custody. Five out of two dozen. So the two agencies made a plan: unseal the case and announce it together, Tuesday afternoon, once the rest of the pieces were in place. Kash Patel had a different plan. Tuesday morning, he beat his own team to the punch, posted the announcement himself, said multiple individuals were in custody, and took the credit for the Bureau — calling it “the best of investigative work” and “exactly what we did here.” Let me explain, for anyone who’s never worked a case, why a cop reads that and winces. When a case is sealed and the operation is still live, you keep your mouth shut. It has nothing to do with being humble. It’s because the people you haven’t arrested yet are watching the news right alongside everybody else. The minute you announce, anybody in that chat who isn’t already in cuffs knows the walls are closing in. So they run. They dump their phones. They wipe the Signal threads that are your evidence. And if one of them is sitting on a spare drone and a grudge, you just started his clock for him. This isn’t some obscure trick of the trade. They teach it to you in the first week. Any patrol cop who’s sat on a surveillance, any detective who’s built a conspiracy case, any rookie agent on day one of a task force could’ve told him you don’t broadcast a live operation just to feel good for an afternoon. The man running the entire FBI either didn’t know that, or didn’t care. And here’s the thing about a case like this. The whole reason you build it slow is that the conspiracy is bigger than the people you’ve already grabbed. You arrest the five you can prove out, and you keep it sealed so the other nineteen keep talking. They keep texting. They keep showing up where you can watch them. Every hour the operation stays quiet is another hour those people incriminate themselves and walk you toward the next arrest. The seal isn’t bureaucracy. It’s the engine of the whole investigation. The morning Kash hit post, he switched that engine off. Quick word before I keep going: if you want this kind of thing broken down by somebody who actually worked in law enforcement instead of somebody reading a press release, subscribe. We’re closing in on 2,000, and the day we hit it, one subscriber gets the 2K keychain on us. You don’t have to take it from me, though. Take it from the professional whose case it actually was. The Secret Service ran this investigation from the start and made a deliberate choice not to publicize it. Their deputy director, Matt Quinn, stood at a press conference and said it about as plainly as a man in his position can: don’t choke on your own smoke. Sit with that. Quinn didn’t say Kash’s name. He didn’t have to. He stood at a federal podium, in front of cameras, and reached for a line he learned coming up in the New York field office, because that was the most diplomatic way he had to tell the Director of the FBI that he fouled his own operation. That’s the language of a man biting his tongue. Read between it and you can hear exactly how the people who did the work feel about the man who took the credit. And think about who got stuck delivering that message. The Secret Service. The people who take bullets for presidents. They’re the ones who had to walk in front of cameras and gently explain that they were the grown-ups in the room who kept their mouths shut. That should never happen. The FBI Director is supposed to be the steady hand everybody else leans on. Instead, the other agencies spent the day mopping up behind him. He’s done versions of this before. This is the same Kash Patel whose habit of commandeering FBI jets for his own travel reportedly set the Charlie Kirk assassination investigation back a day, because the analysis team couldn’t get a plane. Let that land. A team that reconstructs how an assassination happened, grounded, because the Director needed the aircraft. It’s the same Patel whose flights, according to Senator Dick Durbin, left the Bureau’s shooting-reconstruction team stuck after a shooting at Brown University. This isn’t a one-time slip. It’s a pattern — a man who keeps putting his own convenience, his own travel, his own headline in front of the actual work of the agency. The cases change. The instinct doesn’t. For five years now I’ve listened to these people lecture the rest of us about backing the blue. They put it on their trucks. They scream it at anyone who dares criticize a cop. And then they handed the most important law enforcement agency on earth to a podcaster — a man whose first instinct, handed a sealed case and a live threat by his own agents, was to grab his phone. For them, badges are props, something to wave when it’s useful. The people who actually worked this case didn’t even get named in Kash’s version of it. Now remember what’s on the line. Drones. Explosives. Snipers. A target list with congressmen on it. And the ones who got away are still out there — that much harder to catch now, because the Director couldn’t wait a few hours. You run an operation quietly for exactly that reason, so nobody has to learn the hard way what jumping the gun costs. Here’s what gnaws at me as an ex-cop. Forget Trump for a second. Forget the politics entirely. This is a plain question of competence. Can the man at the top of the FBI handle the basics? Can he keep a secret? Can he let his own agents finish the job before he starts talking? A first-year detective clears that bar every single day. Patel keeps tripping over it in public, on the cases where there’s the least room to be wrong. And every American is counting on this man to foil the next plot. After a stunt like this, imagine being one of his agents — wondering, every time you walk into his office, whether the things you tell him in confidence are going to show up on your social feed by lunch. I spent twenty years carrying a badge, and I’ve lost track of how many times Kash Patel has shown us he has no business in that chair. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

Trump Donor Got a Secret $1.7M Contract. The Reflecting Pool Turned Green Anyway.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Look at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool right now. It isn’t red, white, and blue. It’s green — a vivid, soupy, algae-bloom green. And the brand-new blue waterproofing on the bottom is already peeling up and floating to the surface. That pool just went through a $14.2 million repair. And the company brought in to keep the water clean — the one that was supposed to install the system that stops exactly this from happening — traces back to a man who lives down the street from Mar-a-Lago. His name is John J. Cafaro. Longtime Trump donor. The president once called him a “fantastic man” from a stage. And the firm hired to purify the water, Greenwater Services, is ultimately owned by Cafaro’s investment trust. Here’s how the contract worked. The National Park Service skipped competitive bidding. No open competition, no comparing offers — they handed Greenwater a $1.7 million contract directly. And by the Park Service’s own public filing, other firms had expressed interest in the work. They just never got the chance. The justification was urgency. The Park Service invoked an exemption meant for genuine emergencies, claiming there was no time to weigh other bids because the system had to be ready for the country’s 250th birthday events. But the document making that case never named a deadline. No date. Just the word “urgent” doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting. I spent twenty years watching how the “no time for process” argument gets used, and it’s almost always the tell. When somebody says the rules have to be suspended because the clock’s running, the next question is the same every time: who benefits from skipping the line? Here, the beneficiary’s address tells the story. Greenwater listed Cafaro’s Palm Beach mansion as its address in Florida corporate records. It listed his investment trust’s phone number and email in Ohio lobbying records. Same phone. Same email. A water-treatment company in Ohio and a Trump donor’s mansion in Palm Beach, sharing contact information. And before this, the company had exactly one other federal contract in its entire history. Founded in 2019. One prior federal job. Then suddenly it’s trusted with a high-profile installation at one of the most recognizable monuments in the country. Now, the Interior Department says the White House had nothing to do with picking the firm. A White House spokeswoman says the president wasn’t involved. Interior’s spokeswoman says they didn’t even know about Cafaro’s politics when they awarded it. Take that at face value if you want. But remember what the Times already reported: the general manager of Trump’s own golf club in Bedminster advised the Park Service on this project — and was in contact with Greenwater back in January. So the people who claim they had no idea who they were dealing with were being advised by a Trump employee who’d been talking to the contractor months before the deal was signed. The money isn’t subtle either. Campaign finance records show Cafaro has given more than $300,000 to political committees tied to Trump since 2016. His wife chaired the Red Cross Ball at Mar-a-Lago. This isn’t a stranger who happened to have the best bid. There was no bid. It’s worth knowing who Cafaro is. His family made its money developing shopping centers. He branched into aerospace. And in 2001 he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to bribe a sitting congressman, then testified against him. That’s the man whose company just got handed a no-bid federal contract at the Lincoln Memorial. And here’s the part that should bother you whether or not you care about the politics: it didn’t even work. The pool is green. The algae came back. Interior is now dumping hydrogen peroxide into the water and sending crews in with vacuums to suck the bloom out by hand. The permanent purification system the no-bid contract was supposed to deliver still wasn’t installed when reporters visited this week. And the Park Service won’t explain why it refilled the pool before that system was in place — the one decision that basically guaranteed it would cloud over again. So step back and look at what we’ve actually got. A monument repair running into the tens of millions. Two separate no-bid contracts, both justified by an urgency nobody will put a date on. One of them going to a company tied to a Trump donor with a bribery conviction in his past. Blue paint peeling off the bottom. Green water on top. And a federal agency that won’t answer basic questions about its own decisions. This is the pattern worth watching, because it’s bigger than one pool. When the bidding process gets waved away in the name of a deadline, the public stops getting the cheapest or the best work. It starts getting whatever’s most convenient for whoever’s connected. And we end up paying premium prices for results we can watch falling apart with our own eyes. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is supposed to reflect the monument. Right now it’s reflecting something else. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

They're Building a Christian Nationalist Town in Tennessee. Here's Who's Paying for It.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Picture a guy standing in an empty field in central Tennessee, seeing a town that isn’t there yet. A church spire. English cottages. Cattle on the ridge. A farm store. Families gathering to worship. His name is Josh Abbotoy. Thirty-eight, a master’s in medieval history, and he runs a real estate company called RidgeRunner. That empty field outside Whitleyville is going to become something he calls Brewington Farms. On paper, a neighborhood like any other. In practice, the opposite. It’s the cornerstone of the Highland Rim Project, and the stated goal is to build conservative Christian communities all across Appalachia. Understand who’s behind it, because it isn’t a guy with a pickup and a dream. It’s backed by a venture-capital firm out of Dallas called New Founding — and New Founding is wired straight into the world people call the New Right, the same intellectual circles that produced the current Vice President. The billionaire Marc Andreessen came on as an early investor. So when you hear “Christian charter community,” don’t picture a bake sale. Picture a hedge-fund-backed development. Here’s what they’ve actually done. RidgeRunner has bought or contracted to buy more than four thousand acres, cut it into two hundred lots, and sold about half. Construction starts this summer. And they’ll tell you flat out who it’s for. Abbotoy has described his customers as “good, based people.” He expects most of the project’s leadership to come from Protestant Christians. He’s a practicing Southern Baptist, and he says faith woven into neighborhood design is “inextricably linked with the whole design process.” Legally, sure, these communities are open to anyone — anti-discrimination law requires it. But the man building them has already told reporters who he expects to actually live there: right-leaning Christians. Let’s not pretend there’s a mystery about the target market. Now, some conservatives have pitched Christians retreating into their own little enclaves as a way to check out of politics entirely. There’s a famous book about it, The Benedict Option — the culture’s lost, go build a monastery, ride it out. This is not that, and Abbotoy says so himself. He calls the project part of the New Right’s effort to “beat back progressivism, globalism and secular liberalism.” The national strategy is top-down: seize the institutions, abolish the ones you can’t seize. RidgeRunner is the bottom-up version. Build the towns first, let the politics follow. His line: “If conservatives win, this is what we want for America.” In other words, a working model. A proof of concept they can point at and say, look, this is the country we want. Here’s where it gets interesting, because the locals aren’t all on board. The project centers on Gainesboro, in Jackson County — twelve thousand people, country that went for Trump three times running, north of eighty percent last time. Deep red. These are not liberals. And yet the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce rejected RidgeRunner’s bid to join, saying public statements tied to the project were “incongruent with the mission, vision, and values of the chamber.” When the Chamber of Commerce in an eighty-percent-Trump county won’t let you in the door, that tells you something. Business owners started putting signs in their windows. “Gainesboro: You belong here.” “Hate has no home in Gainesboro.” That’s the response from their own neighbors. So why the pushback in a place this conservative? A lot of it traces to a couple of the personalities orbiting this thing. There’s a pastor named Andrew Isker, a friend of Abbotoy’s who moved to the area. Isker has publicly called himself a Christian nationalist, and he’s mused out loud about wanting to “dissolve Congress and the judiciary and vest all power into a sovereign ruler named Donald J. Trump.” Read that again. Dissolve Congress. Dissolve the courts. Hand all power to one man. I took an oath to the Constitution. Not to a man. The entire point of the country I swore to defend is that nobody gets to be a king. So when somebody connected to a four-thousand-acre development is openly fantasizing about abolishing two branches of government, I’m going to take him exactly as seriously as he takes himself. There’s another guy in the mix, a commentator named C. Jay Engel, who bought land there and pushes a slogan online called “heritage America” — a term for Americans who can trace their ancestry to the founding era. Sit with what that phrase is doing. It draws a line between real Americans and everybody else, and it draws it by bloodline. Engel calls the criticism “outrage porn” and says he’s just an old-school Pat Buchanan conservative. You can decide for yourself whether “heritage America” sounds like normal politics or coded white Christian nationalism. I know what I think it is. To be fair, Isker and Engel aren’t formally part of the company. They bought land, they’re friends with Abbotoy, and they promote the project on a podcast recorded in a studio they rent from him. Abbotoy himself is more careful — flies a Gadsden flag outside the office, talks about fitting into local culture rather than changing it. But here’s the tension even the local Republicans see. The chair of the county GOP, a seventh-generation Jackson County native, summed up the town’s mood in one phrase: “Good fences make good neighbors.” That’s the live-and-let-live conservatism that’s been in those hills for generations. The Highland Rim Project rejects it. Its entire stated purpose is to use power — public and private — to push one specific way of life. Those two things don’t fit together. You can’t say “leave me alone” and “we’re going to use every lever we can to remake the country” in the same breath. One of those is libertarian. The other one wants to run your town. And that’s the real story. This isn’t just a real estate play. It’s a test. The people behind it are betting they can prove the New Right vision works on a small scale, in one county, so they can sell it to the rest of the country. So here’s the question the locals are already asking. Does this become a thriving, revitalized region that lifts everybody up? Or a playground where wealthy, reactionary transplants act out a fantasy about saving the nation, while the families who’ve been in that county for seven generations are left holding the reality? The man building it called it “the high proof of concept.” He’s right that it’s a proof of concept. The only question left is what, exactly, it’s going to prove. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!