‘this Is What We Want For America’

WHITLEYVILLE, Tennessee — On a Tuesday morning earlier this spring, Josh Abbotoy steered his pickup truck through a grassy meadow in central Tennessee. The field was empty, save for a few patches of yellow wildflowers. But from behind the wheel, Abbotoy — a soft-spoken 38-year-old with a boyish face and a stubbly beard — described a town that was visible only to him: A cluster of English cottages and Craftsman-style farmhouses, their front porches opening onto a communal town green; a farm-to-table restaurant tucked alongside a repurposed barn housing an organic farm store; on the ridge overlooking the field, a pasture dotted with grazing cattle and other livestock. And at the center of it all, Abbotoy said, gesturing toward the middle distance, a church spire rising into the pale-blue Tennessee sky.

For now, the town exists only in his imagination. But if everything goes according to plan, the field will soon become Brewington Farms, one of the neighborhoods that Abbotoy’s real estate company, RidgeRunner, is developing in rural Tennessee.

On paper, Brewington Farms will be a neighborhood like any other; in practice, it’s anything but. The development stands as the cornerstone of the Highland Rim Project, an audacious effort to build conservative Christian “charter communities” throughout Appalachia. Backed by the venture-capital firm New Founding, a Dallas-based fund with extensive ties to the ecosystem of conservative intellectuals and activists known as the New Right, the plan embodies that movement’s core conviction: that conservatives need to use the levers of public and private power to remake American life in their own image. As Abbotoy readily acknowledges, the project is as much an ideological experiment as an entrepreneurial one. What would it look like to build a microcosm of the New Right’s ideal society in the middle of central Tennessee?

Abbotoy parked his truck at the other end of the meadow, and we started to hike up the tree-covered ridge where he eventually plans to build his own house. Brewington Farms, Abbotoy explained, is just one of four charter communities that RidgeRunner has begun developing since it started work on the project in 2024. Planning for another community in Tennessee’s Jackson County is underway, in addition to two more communities across the border in Kentucky’s Cumberland County. All told, Abbotoy said as we reached a clearing near the top of the ridgeline, the company has purchased or contracted to purchase over 4,000 acres of land, which it has subdivided into 200 lots of varying sizes. About half of those lots have already been purchased or are currently under contract, and the first wave of construction is expected to begin later this summer.

Abbotoy has specific visions for Brewington Farms. The bulk of the land, he explained, will be parceled out and sold for single-family development, the aesthetic continuity of which will be ensured by a homeowner’s association and an architectural control committee. (“English farming village-in-Appalachia feel,” Abbotoy said of his desired look.) In each neighborhood, the company will hold some land to operate as communal farmland or shared amenities like parks or playgrounds. Other parcels will be rented out or sold to “aligned” businesses.

Crucially, the communities will be infused with what Abbotoy describes as a distinctively Christian cultural ethos. Some developments will be centered around “an architecturally significant church,” and the company is placing a premium on developing communal spaces — like schools, community centers and churches — where large families can gather to work, worship or socialize. In accordance with anti-discrimination laws, the communities are theoretically open to anyone, but in practice, Abbotoy, who is a practicing Southern Baptist, expects them to be populated primarily by right-leaning Christians. He has described his customers as “good, ‘based’ people who want to build something inspiring and authentic to the region’s history,” and has said that he expects “most of the leadership” for the project to come from Protestant Christians.

“Having faith integrated with neighborhood design — that’s just inextricably linked with the whole design process,” Abbotoy told me. “It’s thinking structurally about the things that Christians want in a neighborhood.”

Abbotoy, who holds a master’s degree in medieval history, knows all too well that the idea of bringing like-minded Christians together in intentional communities is not a new one — nor is it always a recipe for radical politics. In recent years, various conservative intellectuals have even embraced the idea of building insular conservative Christian communities as a kind of anti-political statement — a declaration that America’s thoroughly secularized and liberalized culture can’t be saved through conventional political means. That retreatist mindset was most memorably captured by the conservative writer Rod Dreher in his 2017 bestseller The Benedict Option, which counseled conservative Christians to take refuge in quasi-monastic communities dedicated to cultivating transcendent virtues. (Dreher apparently held out more hope for the people of Hungary, where he moved in 2022 to join a think tank allied with the country’s now-ousted conservative prime minister Viktor Orbán.)

Abbotoy, though, insists that the Highland Rim Project is not designed to offer an escape from the political fight engulfing the country. Back at RidgeRunner’s offices in downtown Gainesboro, a small mountain town just south of Whitleyville that serves as the seat of Jackson County, he was explicit about the company’s aims. The project, he suggested, is part of the New Right’s broader effort to revitalize America by beating back the forces of progressivism, globalism and secular liberalism that they believe have led the country to the brink of destruction. The only difference is tactical. If the New Right’s approach at the national level is top-down — to remake the country by seizing (and, when necessary, abolishing) the primary institutions of political and cultural power — then RidgeRunner’s is the inverse: building local communities that seed a conservative transformation of the country from the bottom up. “If we want national renewal, one of the things we’re going to need is a renewal of the kind of hyper-local, self-governing virtues that were here at our founding,” Abbotoy said.

RidgeRunner’s move into the political fray comes at a uniquely precarious moment for the New Right. In Washington, the movement’s goal of reorienting the Republican Party around the cultural values and material interests of white working-class Christians is running up against the chaos and tumult of the second Trump administration. The electoral coalition that the New Right hoped would buttress its power in the coming decades has splintered over the war in Iran and the persistently high cost of living, and the movement’s allies in the Trump administration — including its leading intellectual avatar, Vice President JD Vance — are struggling to preserve the patina of intellectual coherence that they have erected around Trump’s haphazard style of governance.

Yet even as the New Right project flounders in Washington, RidgeRunner is placing a bold bet: that the war can still be waged and won at the hyper-local level. “Even from a holler in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee, you can be shaping the national discourse,” Abbotoy said. A place like Brewington Farms is designed to send a very specific message: “If conservatives win, this is what we want for America.”

Nestled along the Cumberland River about an hour and a half outside Nashville, Gainesboro is the quintessential small town: a square of shops and storefronts built around the old yellow-brick courthouse that serves as the seat of Jackson County. The town has followed a regrettably common path of economic decline. A booming river depot during the first half of the 19th century, its economy stalled with the advent of the railroad and the interstate highway system, and the light industries that came in to fill the void in the 20th century evaporated after NAFTA. Today, manufacturing accounts for less than a fifth of total employment among Jackson County’s 12,000 residents.

A familiar political transformation followed suit. Long a stronghold of New Deal Democrats — Warren Harding was the only Republican to win the county in the 20th century — the area swung from blue to red for the first time in 2012. Since then, Trump has carried the county three times in a row, most recently with over 80 percent of the vote.

Abbotoy grew up 30 miles west of Gainesboro, in the equally small town of Hartsville. He spent his summers working as a land surveyor for a local real estate developer, mapping many of the areas where RidgeRunner now operates. The work inspired a deep sense of attachment to the land and the feeling of rootedness it provided, but his intellectual horizons eventually proved to be broader than central Tennessee. During a short stint living in Israel, where his dad worked for a cell phone company, he developed an interest in medieval history — especially the history of the Crusades — and after finishing up his undergraduate studies at a Baptist college outside Memphis, he enrolled in a master’s program in medieval and Byzantine history at the Catholic University of America in Washington.

At grad school, he developed an appreciation for the complexity of pre-modern ways of thinking. “People just act like [pre-modern people] were dumb, but they were very intelligent, and they had a lot of insights that modern people are just, like, completely ignorant of,” Abbotoy said. For one thing, he said, they knew how to build beautiful towns. “Just look at where people go when they get to go on vacation.” Not suburban New Jersey.

Abbotoy had grown up in a conservative Christian family, but he waded deeper into conservative politics as he entered the world of elite liberal institutions — first as a student at Harvard Law School and later as a private-equity attorney at Kirkland & Ellis and at a JPMorgan portfolio company. His shift to the right was hastened by a nagging sense that gaining membership in the elite circles of Washington or New York required giving up any kind of immediate relationship with the land and the sense of freedom and self-possession that comes with it. “When you work in corporate America, you’re making a lot of money, but really, you don’t have a ton of autonomy,” Abbotoy told me. “You rent your apartment and you spend a lot of your life working for somebody else and spending money somewhere. It’s a very consumptive, lower-agency lifestyle.”

When the pandemic hit, Abbotoy was living in Houston. The lockdowns and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests deepened his sense of civilizational unease. In late 2020, Abbotoy and his father began purchasing a handful of properties in the Highland Rim area, a mountainous crescent of land that surrounds greater Nashville. He also started mulling a career change: In 2021, Abbotoy reached out to a fellow Harvard Law School alum named Nate Fischer about a job at his new venture-capital firm, New Founding.

Fischer, who got his start buying distressed real estate in Florida and Texas after the 2008 financial crisis, had founded the company to fill what he saw as a void for an unapologetically right-leaning venture fund working on “critical civilizational problems,” not only in tech and business but also in politics and culture. “Our motto from the beginning has been ‘Build the America you want to live in’,” Fischer told me. “There wasn’t really anyone doing that in a way that was aligned with the right or even with the theme of American revitalization.” That pitch had caught the attention of some big names in Silicon Valley’s growing conservative sphere, including the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who signed on as an early investor. Around the same time, Fischer struck up a casual friendship with another up-and-coming conservative venture capitalist, JD Vance, who was mulling a run for a U.S. Senate seat from his home state of Ohio.

Abbotoy and Fischer hit it off, and Abbotoy joined New Founding as a partner in late 2021. Fischer had been weighing the possibility of expanding into real estate, and Abbotoy’s holdings in Tennessee provided them with an anchor. As the pandemic dragged on, and Abbotoy started digging into the data about “the Big Sort” and the out-migration from cities to rural areas, he and Fischer started to think there might be a serious business opportunity in his side hustle.

He also saw it as a chance to put some of the political ideas he had been chewing on into practice. In 2023, Abbotoy participated in the Lincoln Fellowship program at the Claremont Institute, a week-long crash course in the institute’s thesis that modern progressivism has untethered America from virtues like self-rule and small-R republican government. He also joined the Society for American Civic Renewal — or SACR (pronounced “sacker”), for short — a by-invitation-only Christian fraternal organization founded with the help of several Claremont scholars to connect New Right elites outside Washington.

In his spare time, Abbotoy was immersing himself in the growing body of literature about the collapse of social trust and the fraying of America’s social fabric — classics like Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and more niche titles like Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. He was particularly interested in the work of Balaji Srinivasan, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose 2022 book The Network State: How to Start a New Country was enthusiastically passed around New Right circles. In the book, Srinivasan argued that the proliferation of internet communities and digital cryptocurrencies was rapidly rendering the modern nation-state irrelevant. In its place, he predicted the rise of what he called “network states” — communities of like-minded people that formed online before migrating into the real world as decentralized but sovereign states.

Abbotoy told me he was “skeptical about some of [Srinivasan’s] broader prognostications about the demise of the nation state,” but that he thought Srinivasan was essentially correct about how the internet generates new possibilities for communities organized around common values rather than economic nodes. “You don’t need to buy some of his longer-term predictions to get a lot of benefit from his description of the basic political dynamics,” Abbotoy said.

By late 2023, these intellectual currents had given shape to a loose mission for a new company: building communities that combined that political orientation of Claremont with the Christian localism of SACR and the digital dynamism envisioned by Srinivasan. In early 2024, RidgeRunner launched as a partner of New Founding, and Abbotoy packed up his wife and kids to move from Texas to Tennessee.

So far, about 40 RidgeRunner households have moved into the greater Gainesboro area, many of them renting or buying on a short-term basis until they can break ground on their new properties. (The primary holdup to construction, Abbotoy said, is burying electric lines, which turns out to be trickier than expected.) None of the customers who have bought in the developments agreed to speak with me, but Abbotoy described the customer base as divided more or less evenly between “high-performing remote workers” — primarily employees at tech companies — and “people who are economically portable” for one reason or another. Many are wealthy transplants from blue cities or red-state suburbs: One buyer recently sold several locations of a national franchise for enough money to retire early; another is a firefighter in California who moved his family to Tennessee and now flies across the country for the four days out of every 12 that he’s on call.

For now, RidgeRunner’s customers have formed a sort of shadow community in and around Gainesboro. Several have formed a homeschooling co-op that follows a loosely classical Christian curriculum, with hopes of eventually opening a private school in one of the RidgeRunner communities. Many have joined a congregation run by the conservative Presbyterian pastor Andrew Isker, a close friend of Abbotoy’s who moved to the area in 2024; others have fanned out into other local churches. They have, to varying degrees, woven themselves into the town’s existing social fabric: Abbotoy estimated that about six of the 15 or so kids on his son’s local pee-wee football team are from RidgeRunner families.

Without dedicated gathering places, the customers are making do with what they’ve got. As we looked around the Brewington Farms property, Abbotoy showed me into a damp limestone cave where a few residents had set up a bedsheet and some straw bales for an impromptu screening of The Lord of the Rings. He eventually hopes to turn the cave into a distillery making gin flavored with local juniper berries.

The “charter” in RidgeRunner’s “charter communities” is a nod to the emergent “charter cities” movement, a Silicon Valley-adjacent push to build semi-autonomous city-states that are exempt from local laws and regulations and fueled by cryptocurrencies. (A handful of such cities have been built in places like Honduras and Nigeria, with varying results.) Abbotoy says that RidgeRunner is hoping to replicate the “community cohesion” of the charter communities, but it isn’t seeking specific exemptions from local laws or regulations. In any case, Tennessee’s low tax rates coupled with Jackson County’s extremely lax zoning restrictions make such exceptions largely unnecessary — one of the reasons the company chose the area in the first place. As for cryptocurrency, Abbotoy said that the communities’ adoption is being driven by his customers, many of whom are already crypto curious. The company recently agreed to its first land sale using Bitcoin, and it will facilitate its adoption going forward by encouraging retailers in the communities to accept crypto as payment.

The sudden influx of RidgeRunner customers has not gone unnoticed by the local community. In November 2024, a local TV news network ran an investigative segment drilling down on the company’s connection to various Christian nationalist networks. The report focused in particular on the views of Isker, the pastor, and another of Abbotoy’s customers, a conservative commentator named C.Jay Engel. Isker and Engel are not formally affiliated with RidgeRunner beyond buying land from it, but both are friends with Abbotoy and have promoted the project on their shared podcast, which they record in a studio rented from Abbotoy.

On their podcast and social media feeds, both have promoted a potpourri of proudly reactionary views. Isker, a self-described Christian nationalist who is ordained in the conservative Presbyterian denomination founded by the controversial pastor Doug Wilson, has mused about his desire to “dissolve Congress and the judiciary and vest all power into a sovereign ruler named Donald J. Trump.” (Isker declined to speak with me.) Engel, meanwhile, has led the online charge to promote the nativist slogan “heritage America,” used to describe Americans who trace their ancestry back to the founding era.

The news reports have sparked a backlash among some locals who objected to the podcasters’ hardline views. Several of the most vocal critics are outspoken liberals, but not all: Last summer, the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce — not exactly a bastion of woke progressivism — rejected RidgeRunner’s bid to join the organization, citing “public statements [that] are incongruent with the mission, vision, and values of the chamber.” In Gainesboro, various business owners have put up signs in their windows reading, “Gainesboro: You belong here,” to signal their opposition to what they see as RidgeRunner’s exclusionary vision.

“I wouldn’t consider it my business if people want to come in, make money and live here,” said Mark Dudney, a Jackson County native who has helped organize the local opposition. “But this talk about ‘control’ and ‘governance’ made it a public matter for everyone who lives here.”

One morning in Gainesboro, I met Engel in the solitary coffee shop downtown. When I asked about the pushback from residents, he dismissed it as a “loud minority,” and said that the majority of locals have been welcoming. He characterized his own politics as “standard Pat Buchanan, old school-conservative views” and argued that the media reports painting him as some sort of right-wing extremist were “outrage porn.”

Still, Engel offered a stark vision of what is happening in Gainesboro. He ventured that the dynamics surrounding RidgeRunner reflect “what’s happening in the West and around the world,” which he described as a broad-based rejection of “global managerial capitalism,” “unfettered third-world immigration” and “left-wing cultural subversion.” He described his own decision to leave California, where multiple generations of his family had lived, as “a meta-political statement”; the “frontier spirit” that had pushed his ancestors West couldn’t survive in the land of Gavin Newsom. Instead, that ethos is rebounding back across the continent, reconstituting itself in more rugged climes like Gainesboro. “When you come out here, we can actually start from something that is more frontier-like,” Engel told me. “We can create a vision of the future that is built on heritage and history but that doesn’t have to capture any institutions, because the institutions don’t exist here.”

Like Abbotoy, Engel views RidgeRunner’s conservative localism as an extension of the broader New Right project. “Part of the dialogue on the New Right is the question of should we pursue an institutional strategy, or should we pursue more of a decentralized, localist strategy?” he said. In the long run, those two approaches will be complementary, he said, but the localist strategy serves as a kind of near-term bulwark against the uncertainties of politics at the national level: “I want to set up a life for my family here and I want to attract like-minded families here so that no matter what happens in Washington, we have a layer of protection.”

As part of that effort, Engel — whose day job is running a company that manufactures off-road camping trailers — is teaming up with a friend and recent Jackson County transplant named Ryan Green to turn an old community center outside Gainesboro into an old-timey gas station and diner. They plan to call it “Rockwell’s” — an homage, they claim, to Norman Rockwell, their favorite American painter. Engel told me the goal is to recreate the nostalgic feel of mid-20th century filling stations, before modern rest stops became grimy microcosms of America’s hedonistic hyper-consumerism. The duo has taken to calling their store “the anti-Buc-ee’s”: “No vapes, no lotto, none of that stuff,” Engel said.

The attached diner, which will sell primarily locally sourced food, embodies the back-to-the-land agrarianism that has become a quietly influential force in New Right politics. Indeed, a kind of MAHA-adjacent preoccupation with sustainable food systems and niche health trends suffuses the entire Highland Rim Project. As part of their membership in the Brewington Farms homeowner’s association, residents will receive credits to redeem at the community farm store, which will sell beef raised on the neighborhood’s pastures. In downtown Gainesboro, an Italian restaurant that’s popular with the RidgeRunner crowd proudly advertises its use of beef tallow rather than seed oils for frying. “Food was honestly the most radicalizing thing for me in any of my political thinking,” Green, Engel’s business partner, said.

Culinary preferences aside, Engel and Green’s plan for the gas station points to a deeper source of tension between the RidgeRunner project and the local community — and one that can’t be chalked up to a bunch of pesky liberals. A few days after I left Gainesboro, I spoke with Beau Smith, the chair of the local Republican Party and a seventh-generation Jackson County native. Smith described the prevailing political mood among the town’s conservative residents as more libertarian than communitarian. “Good fences make good neighbors,” he said. “We take that very seriously.” Abbotoy had described the local temperament in a similar way, invoking the old Charlie Daniels song “Long Haired Country Boy,” whose weed-smoking and booze-drinking narrator sums up his political philosophy like this: “If you don’t like the way I’m livin’ / You just leave this long-haired country boy alone.”

That vision is at odds with the ethos of the Highland Rim Project, which, like the New Right more generally, rejects that live-and-let-live mentality; its stated aim is to use public and private power — whether channeled through a government agency or a gas station — to promote a conservative and Christian way of life. Abbotoy is sensitive to the tension this dynamic could generate with the community, and he’s taken some steps to ameliorate it. The name “RidgeRunner” — an allusion to the Appalachian moonshiners who evaded the feds during Prohibition by racing along the tops of the nearby mountains — is meant to signal a degree of sympathy with the area’s homespun libertarianism. Outside its office in Gainesboro, the company was flying a Gadsden flag, the informal emblem of the libertarian right.

Abbotoy maintains his customers are more interested in assimilating to the local culture than changing it. “They are drawn to what this area is like today, so they’ve very keen to understand why it is the way it is today and how to keep it that way,” he told me. But whether RidgeRunner’s conservative communitarianism proves compatible in the long run with the local population’s default libertarianism remains an open question. As members of the New Right bid for power on the national stage, it’s a dilemma that will have ramifications far beyond Gainesboro.

Before RidgeRunner can pursue its grandiose ambitions to revitalize the country, the company faces a more immediate test: driving economic growth in Jackson County. There’s little question that the area desperately needs it. Until 2019, the county was a regular fixture on the Appalachian Regional Commission’s annual list of “distressed” counties, a designation reserved for the 10 percent of poorest areas nationwide; in 2020, the county was upgraded to merely “at-risk.” Signs of that economic strain are inescapable in downtown Gainesboro, where nearly every block features an empty building or a boarded-up storefront.

The community’s preferred path toward economic revitalization runs through a mix of small business development and tourism. If you squint, the makings of a charming weekend community are visible downtown: a craft moonshine distillery in a restored Texaco station, a Creole-style bistro, a brand-new Brazilian jiujitsu studio. Last year, a small contemporary art museum opened in a one-story brick building on the town square, and plans are underway to restore a now-defunct hotel. On the opposite corner of the square from the hotel, an “adventure center” advertises local outdoor excursions, including some popular spots for smallmouth bass fishing.

This whole approach to revitalization — and the contemporary art museum in particular — is anathema to the RidgeRunner crew, who see tourism as a Trojan horse for progressive governance and its attendant cultural malaises. Abbotoy often speaks scornfully of places like Asheville, North Carolina, a once-struggling mountain community that has transformed itself into the kind of vacation destination featured in Condé Nast Traveler. “Imagine the people who built Asheville coming back and seeing it today,” Abbotoy said with an air of disgust. “It would be completely culturally alien to them.” (Dudney disputed the idea that locals want to turn Gainesboro into a miniature Asheville: “That’s apples and oranges,” he said.)

According to Abbotoy, RidgeRunner is premised on a different model of economic revitalization: recruiting a significant number of high-earning remote workers to move to the area and set down roots. This kind of arrangement was more or less impossible a decade ago, but with the fallout of the pandemic and the rise of remote work, Abbotoy thinks it’s not only a possibility but an inevitability. “What’s happening in America right now is not like some temporary flash in the pan where people wanted country life for a couple of years and then everything’s going to go back to normal,” he said. “There’s, like, 20 million Americans today who are in cities or suburbs who would prefer to live in the country if it were possible and if they were presented with the right options.”

Abbotoy’s bet is RidgeRunner’s communities can function simultaneously as havens for like-minded conservatives and as engines of durable economic growth. He predicts that the two communities that RidgeRunner is building in Jackson County will generate about $100 million in local construction business and that, in the longer term, the neighborhoods will bolster the local economy through local property taxes and spending at local businesses. In addition to that, Abbotoy is counting on the project generating additional economic benefits through the much-vaunted “network effect,” the idea that if you take a bunch of “high-agency people” — a Silicon Valley buzzword for people who like to take control of their immediate circumstances — and put them in close contact with one another, the benefits will snowball over time. He pointed to Engel’s gas station revitalization project as an early sign that the network effect is already working its magic.

But not everyone in the area is convinced that RidgeRunner can generate the kind of economic uplift that Abbotoy promises. In Gainesboro, I met with Kevin Cummins, a longtime realtor and Jackson County commissioner, who arrived outside the coffee shop wearing a MAGA-style “USA” hat and a graying goatee. Cummins is friendly with Abbotoy and generally sympathetic to the RidgeRunner project, but he said that he’s doubtful the project can turn around the town’s financial fortunes. The region’s hilly terrain makes large-scale development too difficult, he said, and it’s nearly impossible to drive serious economic growth without attracting new employers, given the area’s low tax rates. “It’s a good concept, but I just don’t see it,” Cummins said.

Dudney, meanwhile, told me he was skeptical that RidgeRunner is at all interested in generating economic benefits for the area, dismissing the company’s promises as “a marketing strategy.” He was also dubious of Abbotoy’s claims that importing a bunch of high-earning tech workers and farm-to-table restaurants represents a genuine attempt at cultural preservation, as opposed to something more like right-coded gentrification.

Abbotoy remains undeterred, and he’s putting serious money — both his and his investors’ — behind the model. The company currently has roughly 700 additional acres under contract in a nearby county in Tennessee, and he’s in the market for more. He described the scope of the project’s ambitions as “national,” and wouldn’t rule out eventually expanding into other states.

“There is a reordering that’s going on back to rural areas, and I think that we’re early movers in that,” he said. “Our hope is that this [project] draws a lot of attention, engages the vision of a lot of people around the country and has an impact culturally and politically.” He remains vague, though, about how exactly RidgeRunner hopes to move the needle politically, beyond channeling the symbolic effect of building a model conservative community. He floated the possibility of eventually getting involved in congressional races or tapping into the communities to fundraise for friendly candidates, but he said nothing concrete is in the works. Once again, he’s placing his faith in the network effect. “If you’re getting well-resourced, high-agency people together in the same place, there’s always compounding effects from that that will be felt politically,” he said.

Yet it is precisely here, at the level of cold, hard political and economic reality, that RidgeRunner will offer the most telling trial of the New Right’s ambitions. At least in its own account, the New Right promises that its grand plan to save Western civilization will redound to the benefit of working people — that, from the wreckage of liberalism, it can build a new political order that will deliver real material benefits to left-behind communities like the one in Gainesboro. That project is faltering in Washington, where any lingering hopes within MAGA for progress on a meaningfully populist agenda have been eclipsed by the Trump administration’s chumminess with corporate interests and its stubborn adherence to Republican economic orthodoxy.

RidgeRunner offers another test of that vision on a local scale. “What we’re doing here is like the high proof of concept,” Abbotoy said. He’s right that whatever materializes in the grassy fields of Brewington Farms will offer a glimpse into the soul of the New Right, but perhaps not in the way he intends. Will it become a nexus of a prosperous and revitalized region? Or a bucolic fantasyland where the rich and reactionary live out their dreams as national saviors, while their neighbors down the road are left to face a stubborn reality?

On my last night in Gainesboro, I went to the only restaurant that was open that night, a saloon-style steakhouse on the corner of the town square. The tin-ceilinged room was full of families eating meals together and patrons chatting amiably over $2 domestic beers at the wooden bar. A country duo from Nashville played a mix of originals and covers from a stage at the front of the room. Visions of a brighter community flickered around me, no venture-capital backing or network state necessary.