Out in the beautiful rolling lands of Gainesboro, Tennessee, a group of far-right real estate developers, backed by Silicon Valley venture capital and with powerful ties to MAGA and other authoritarian-friendly activist groups around the country, is buying up land. It is part of a plan to create “aligned communities” as havens for so-called “heritage Americans” — by which they mean white Americans who subscribe to a reactionary and intolerant form of Christianity. In essence, the venture, called New Founding, is a money-driven land speculation project with a culture war angle. Writer and podcaster Brad Onishi and I joined host Jenn White, along with Bloomberg investigative reporter Susan Berfield, Tennessee-based reporter Meribah Knight, and Gainesboro artist Nancy Pruett, to discuss this development for an episode of NPR’s 1A early this month. You can listen to the show here.
(A side note: I was particularly pleased to be in conversation again with Onishi, whose forthcoming book, American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America Into a Monarchy, traces the alliance between spiritual warfare and Silicon Valley libertarianism.)
The architects of New Founding have said that they chose Gainesboro because they wanted to situate their community where it would represent the “local” and “authentic” culture. You can stop right there, because there is little that is authentic and nothing that is local about the project — at least, not according to many representatives of the existing community in Gainesboro. As Gainesboro artist Nancy Pruitt noted on the show, some existing residents are calling it a takeover.
About 30 percent of Tennessee is Black, Hispanic, Native American, or another non-white racial category. The state’s name is derived from Native American language, in this case Cherokee, as are many of its named cities, including Chattanooga. Although the state is majority red and reliably Republican, it hosts a diversity of political opinions, just like its musical culture, cuisine, and the arts. But none of that seems to matter for New Founding.
The community’s pitch is a list of Christian nationalist talking points that can be heard coast to coast. New Founding is meant for those who feel besieged and persecuted in an America that they claim does not seem to share their commitment to “faith, family, and tradition” — or perhaps their natural right to rule the nation in accordance with their values. When the New Founders talk about “heritage Americans,” they are using a euphemism for “white Christian Americans” — or, more accurately, those white Americans who have a highly racialized and religiously intolerant understanding of their own identity.
This is a place for refugees from the national War on Christmas. The first prominent customers have come straight from cyberspace. A pastor and author from Minnesota a writer from California heard the call on their feeds and moved down to Gainesboro and then promptly launched a podcast series called Contra Mundum, or “against the world.” They quickly got down to business of succeeding in a part of the modern world that rewards those who can stoke the loudest grievances and make the most outrageously mean-spirited pronouncements. In recent episodes, they aired their views, in rambling style, that “hardened men” need to “take back culture” and that each “household” should be given a single vote, to be cast by the husband.
Many of the people who already live in the Gainesboro area — the actual locals — have no time for this kind of hate. Some erected signs with a sunflower motif and the slogan, “You belong here.” A billboard reads “Small Town-Big Heart: Here, nasty notions play no part. Gainsboro, Where ALL are welcome!” To paraphrase one local leader, the town may be majority Republican, but a lot of the local businesses are run by strong and enterprising women, and the town welcomes residents of all colors, religions, and ethnicities. The actual Gainesboro, it turns out, isn’t a homogenous zone of self-replicating “heritage Americans.” Strangely, its residents don’t seem to think they are worse off for the diversity.
This gets at one of the strangest aspects of the New Founding idea. Setting its peculiar ideology, the core assumption seems to be that human beings can find happiness only in a community where everyone thinks exactly as they do.
It is not a fringe view at this point. In a New York Post podcast last year, Vice President JD Vance expressed this sentiment when he said it’s totally “reasonable and acceptable” to want to share a culture and language with your neighbors. Adherents of America’s New Right, in other words, have a strong emotional need for a “safe space,” where their beliefs will go un-challenged. It’s not just that they disagree with liberals, progressive Christians, feminists, or any number of people who don’t share their views; it’s that they really can’t stand having those people anywhere nearby.
By taking a closer look at the extremely non-local funders and organizers who have brought New Founding to life, we can get a handle on where this demand for absolute social and ideological conformity comes from.
To understand New Founding better, you need to know about other organizations it is involved with: American Reformer encompasses a Substack and blog, a journal, a podcast, and a fellowship program; and the Center for Baptist Leadership, led by the self-described Christian nationalist William Wolfe, author of The Case for Christian Nationalism. The CBL appears to be an offshoot of American Reformer, which is deeply intertwined with the New Right, sharing the same Dallas business address, down to the very same suite, as a company co-founded by Charles Cornish-Dale, who writes under the pseudonym Raw Egg Nationalist. Cornish-Dale is an English historian who frequently publishes at the Claremont Institute, a key think tank of the New Right. He is known for his extremist statements, including the idea that men and women should not work together in the same spaces. (Hello, Taliban? You have some company!) He has also published books with the Pennsylvania publishing house Antelope Hill, which publishes and reprints the work of white supremacists.
Experts have claimed that New Founding appears to have drawn inspiration from a South African Apartheid-era all-white, men-only group, the Afrikaner-Broederbond.
But the New Founding venture is not merely the artifact of the endless culture wars prosecuted by those with extreme religious views. It’s also a place for reactionary men (and a few women) associated with a sector of America’s emerging tech oligarchy. This is the most important part of the story.
Billionaire tech investors have invested directly in New Founding and similar projects.
There are two things to know about the alliance between the religious right and the tech right. First and foremost, it is born, in part, of convenience. These tech bros fundamentally want minimal or no regulation of their tech monopolies. They are desperate to capture whole new markets in AI, just as they did in transportation with Uber and hospitality with Airbnb. They have realized that to achieve these extractive goals, they need to have the powerful American voting bloc that is mobilized by having religious-right leaders on their side.
But the alliance rests on something more durable than mere convenience. These tech titans appear to want to demolish anything that stands in the way of their self-image as a natural aristocracy and the rightful benefactors of humankind. They see democratic government itself as an obstacle to their aims. In fact, they explicitly talk about destroying the institutions of democratic government — “smashing the administrative state,” a term that emerged from the New Right and its affiliated think tanks. This idea was woven throughout Project 2025 and the seed of the DOGE fiasco.
The new tech oligarchs also share New Founding’s desire to create a safe space for themselves apart from the world they are working to demolish. The difference, of course, is that Peter Thiel is setting up his private world in a bunker-like lodge in New Zealand (and perhaps also in Argentina). Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison purchased all but a few pebbles of the Hawaiian island of Lana’i. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg constructed his walled and gated shelter on Hawaii’s Kauai.
The Gainesboro project is for the mini-Thiels of the world — the people who have absorbed the same anti-social set of values but not nearly as much of the money. Clearly, there will be a psychic payoff to living out a Little House in the Prairie fantasy in defiance of the pieties of woke America and the deep state. But will they get a decent return on their investment?
Historically speaking, ideological utopias run into two difficulties. The first is that the like-minded ideologues, compelled to share a patch of land with one another, discover to their dismay that they can hate one another as much as they ever hated, for instance, a woke-trans-DEI-loving blue-stater. The other issue is that utopias can be expensive to run. Once the tech bros cash out, who will be left to pay the bills for mandatory church and all the other logistical and administrative details of the male-operated subdivision in the middle of nowhere?
What the activists and funders behind the project appear to have in common is the idea that greed is good. They will be happy to sell off the fantasy to — let’s face it — those who may well be plantiffs in a future lawsuit against them.
Katherine Stewart is an award-winning author and journalist who has covered politics, religion, and the rise of the anti-democratic movement, for over 17 years. Her New York Times bestselling book Money, Lies, and God is on Foreign Affairs’s list of Best Books 2025.
Great news! When all the “heritage Americans” congregate in their sanctuary cities, all we normal folk will know where these dangerous nutjobs are and can rest easy, safe from their extremist lifestyles.
We don’t need the Taliban to impose sharia law on the US - these so-called Americans will do it themselves.