The British conspiracy guru building a sovereign micronation in Appalachia 

Matthew Williams has slept very little since he learned about Sacha Stone’s plan to build a “sovereign” micronation on 60 acres of land 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. In late June, Stone arrived in Surgoinsville, a sleepy hamlet 90 minutes northeast of Knoxville, to lead dozens of supporters in a “consecration” ceremony at the site, dedicating what he calls the NewEarth Tanasi Micronation “as a template for the emergent Rainbow Warrior Tribe.” 

But beyond the peace and rainbows, Williams had seen something much darker in Stone’s “sovereign” 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.”

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!”

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 &t=2089s">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.

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