The far right is building ‘aligned communities’ while looking for a Red Caesar

My father is Tennessee’s unofficial welcoming committee. A Virginia native who retired with my mother to her home state, he enjoys swapping stories with other newcomers at the lake near his home in Lenoir City.

Lately, he’s been meeting a lot more folks moving to the area from places like California, Michigan and New Jersey. Many are fellow retirees or young families drawn to Tennessee for lower taxes and more affordable housing. But not far from Lenoir City, in the hills that roll across Northern Tennessee and Southern Kentucky, a group of Christian nationalists are moving into the region for entirely different reasons.

Kentucky RidgeRunner LLC is a property development company based in Hartsville, Tenn., whose goal is to build “pioneer communities in the old American heartland … around shared values and the American way of life” according to its website.

The company’s Highland Rim Project offers several individual lots along with a few “premium holler farms” for buyers interested in “unmatched seclusion as well as incredible opportunity for hunting, agricultural and prepping activities.” A “holler,” in Appalachian lingo, is a narrow valley surrounded by hills or mountains.

Tennessee native Josh Abbotoy heads RidgeRunner. Abbotoy also is managing partner at New Founding, the conservative venture capital firm backing the Highland Rim Project. The HRP will be the first in a series of “aligned communities” where residents with shared conservative values can live together and “aligned start-ups” can flourish without interference from DEI mandates and “corrosive ideologies.”

Abbotoy assures buyers the community he’s creating won’t end up like Asheville, N.C., “with a bunch of rainbow flags on Main Street.” There is an application process for anyone interested in moving to the area, and those in charge will be mostly “Protestant Christians.”

“We need cities on a hill that embody the healthy, natural, Christian way of life and demonstrate the superiority of that way of life,” he explains.

Abbotoy also happens to be executive director and co-founder of American Reformer, an online journal promoting “a vigorous Christian approach” to cultural issues.

Aligned Christian communities like the HRP are actually springing up all across the country, from Doug Wilson’s misogynist compound in Moscow, Idaho, to an orthodox Catholic enclave in Hyattsville, Md. What makes New Founding’s community noteworthy is the company’s dark political connections.

It’s helpful to visualize these connections as an Appalachian holler, one that grows increasingly darker and the path more twisted as we wind our way deeper into the valley.

Abbotoy is a later addition to New Founding. The company was started by Nate Fischer, the current CEO, and Matthew Peterson, who left New Founding for Glenn Beck’s Blaze Media. They each received financial assistance from the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank where Peterson was vice president for education and founder of the influential journal American Mind, aimed at young conservatives. Both Fischer and Abbotoy were Lincoln Fellows at Claremont.

Established in Upland, Calif., in 1979, the Claremont Institute is dedicated to the belief that the founding of America is the pinnacle of Western political thought. The institute was the first serious entity to identify Donald Trump as a convenient vehicle for its ultra-conservative agenda.

In 2016, the Claremont Review of Books published an online essay in which future Trump appointee Michael Anton likened voting for Trump to the passengers of Flight 93 charging the cockpit to stop the 9-11 hijackers — a last-ditch effort to wrest control of the country away from liberals before they destroy it. Rush Limbaugh then read the essay on his radio show. With that endorsement, any Republicans still on the fence about a Trump presidency had the permission they needed to vote for him.

Since the first Trump administration, Claremont has given intellectual legitimacy to the MAGA movement. Trump filled his administration with Claremont alumni and awarded the institute the National Humanities Medal in 2019. Claremont Senior Fellow John Eastman spoke at the “Save America” rally on January 6 and provided memos for how Vice President Mike Pence might overturn the 2020 election results. While critical of Eastman’s plan, the institute has continued to endorse the lie that the election was stolen. Both the Claremont Institute and New Founding are listed on the Advisory Board of Project 2025.

The contributions of wealthy Republican donors, including the DeVos family and the Bradley Foundation, keep the Claremont afloat. Thomas Klingenstein, chairman of the board at Claremont, is the organization’s largest donor. He also contributed almost a million dollars to American Firebrand, New Founding’s now defunct SuperPAC, to create a video promoting his political world view.

“We find ourselves in a cold civil war,”  Klingenstein says in the video. “This war is between those who want to preserve the American way of life and those who want to destroy it.” In his mind, such a crisis justifies a radical response.

“Because, if you’re actually in a war, even if it’s a cold war, you behave differently,” he says. “You’re less inclined to compromise. You’re more aggressive. In war, you don’t negotiate until you’ve won.”

Klingenstein and Claremont scholars compare modern America to the final decadent days of the Roman Republic. The corrupting influence of progressivism, they assert, has propelled us into a “post-Constitutional” age. Therefore, what the country needs now is a “Red Caesar,” an authoritarian right-wing leader willing to use extreme measures to stop the rise of Democrats’ “woke utopia.”

Anton, now a Senior Fellow at Claremont, coined the title “Red Caesar” to refer to an authority figure he says would be “halfway, as it were, between monarchy and tyranny.” Others, like Christian nationalist author Stephen Wolfe, have called for a similar type of autocrat under the moniker “Christian Prince.”

Abbotoy went a step further and posted on X: “Basically, America is going to need a Protestant Franco.” He clarified that such a leader might be necessary to restore order to a nation on the verge of anarchy.

All of this means New Founding is about more than just funding businesses and housing developments; it’s about re-founding the nation from the bottom up in preparation for the arrival of this Red Caesar.

To discover how they plan to do this, we need to travel still deeper into the darkest recesses of our metaphorical holler.

Claremont leaders and other conservatives are abandoning liberal California for aligned communities like the HRP, where they can wield influence on a local level. Michael Anton and Claremont President Ryan Williams both moved their families from California to a suburb in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Fischer also lives in Dallas, and Abbotoy did as well until his recent move to Tennessee. Conservative Skyler Kressin, who moved from California to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, told The New York Times, “A lot of us share a sense that Christendom is unraveling. We need to be engaged; we need to be building.”

In 2020, Kressin, Fischer and Williams began discussing how they would establish new institutions to replace faltering liberal ones. They decided on a “fraternal community” in the mode of the Masons or the Moose Lodge, which they christened the Society for American Civic Renewal, or SACR for short.

Scott Yenor, a Boise State University professor and a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, advised Kressin on the inner workings of SACR. Yenor made news in 2021 at the National Conservatism Conference when he said women should be excluded from fields like engineering, law and medicine.

Underwriting this initiative is shampoo mogul Charles Haywood, who praised the creation of an authoritarian figure like a “Red Caesar,” saying, “When we’re talking about people like Franco or Pinochet or even Salazar … they did kill people. They killed people justly; they killed people unjustly … but they saved a lot more people than they killed.”

Haywood incorporated SACR in 2021 as a 501(c)10 and gave $50,000 to the organization and $50,000 to the Claremont Institute. Claremont itself made a $26,248 donation to SACR in 2020 to help it “establish itself.”

Haywood also is a big proponent of what he calls “armed patronage networks.” He believes the Left seeks to exterminate white people and if forced to engage in “open warfare with the federal government,” Haywood is convinced he would be a natural “warlord.” Williams, Haywood and Kressin all are on the SACR board. Kressin also heads the SACR lodge in Coeur d’Alene while Yenor presides over the Boise lodge. Fischer is president of the Dallas chapter.

According to emails between Yenor and Kressin acquired by Talking Points Memo, membership in SACR is for men only, by invitation only. Members must have the correct political alignment, the correct Christianity (Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists need not apply), and the “community influence, capability or wealth” necessary to help SACR achieve its mission.

SACR has two mission statements, a public mission statement, and an internal mission statement.

Publicly, the organization wants to help “ordinary citizens reclaim a humane vision of society.”

Privately, however, SACR seeks “unhyphenated Americans” (a term coined by Teddy Roosevelt to mean assimilated) willing to “act decisively to secure political and social dominance” for their “particular Christianity that is not blurred by modernist philosophies.” SACR members will be men “who understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise in the temporal realm.” These members will “form the backbone of a renewed American regime.”

For inspiration on how SACR would establish this renewed American regime, the group turned to the book Super-Afrikaners by investigative journalists Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom. Published in 1978, the book details the inner workings of South Africa’s Broederbond, a secretive network of white Protestant Afrikaner men responsible for the rise of the National Party and its policy of apartheid.

At the time, the Broederbond had 800 cells across South Africa. Members pulled their resources, investing only in Broederbond-led businesses to create a parallel economy. In their book, Wilkins and Strydom explain how the Broederbond members “infiltrated” local governments, the judiciary, school boards, the church, industry, policing, commerce, the civil service, all the way to the office of prime minister until “government today is the Broederbond and the Broederbond is the government.”

SACR has similar goals. Listed among its “objectives” in Yenor’s emails is the identification, philosophical formation and mobilization of “local elites.” These elites will give “preferential treatment” to SACR members and “bring political awareness” to hiring, job promotion and awarding contracts, thereby establishing a framework of loyalists ready to “advance our goals” and “defend fraternal networks.”

Like the Broederbond, SACR will use its economic strength as a foothold for eventual political dominance. Williams told TPM that, while the Broederbond was discussed, it did not serve as a model for SACR. Even still, it is hard to ignore the similarities between the Afrikaners’ strategy and SACR’s methodology.

As we return to the mouth of the holler, we can see New Founding, whose website lists SACR as a partner organization, already hard at work implementing its objectives. Subscribers to New Founding’s Venture Fund invest a minimum of $10,000 a quarter for five to 16 quarters to back conservative businesses, helping to create an alternative economy. The New Founding Network adds to SACR’s fraternal framework of loyalists by connecting “aligned job seekers and employers.” The Highland Rim Project, as Abbotoy explained to the Guardian, will be a blueprint for obtaining regional influence that the group can then replicate on a state level within the next 20 years.

Abbotoy plans to move 50 families into the Kentucky developments, with another Tennessee development opening in October. Pastor Andrew Isker announced he will be planting a church in one of the HRP communities. Isker is currently senior pastor of Fourth Street Evangelical Church in Waseca, Minn. He graduated from Doug Wilson’s ministerial training school in Idaho. Isker is critical of pastors who are taught by “Big Evangelicalism” to be “doormats,” and he approves of the aggressive takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention by fundamentalists.

Isker has written two books: Christian Nationalism, which he coauthored with Andrew Torba, owner of the online hub Gab (a haven for Neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists and white nationalists who find X too restrictive), and the The Boniface Option. Not to be confused with Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option, which prescribes retreating from society to establish Christian community, The Boniface Option believes Christians should “go on offense.”

Creating aligned communities is one way of doing just that, Isker says on the “Forge and Anvil” podcast. “If you are able to take even a few hundred people and all think the same way … and you could consolidate them in the same place, you could exercise far more political power than with a few hundred or a few thousand people than you can on your own widely dispersed across the entire county.”

Isker, who views the 2024 election as the “end game,” sees an additional benefit in this approach. “If things go Mad Max, you’ve already got a community.”

Blogger C. Jay Engel is joining Abbotoy and Isker in Tennessee to escape what he terms “a growing DEI customer base” in his California town. In his posts on X, Engel praises what he calls “Heritage Americans,” those who are descended from Anglo-Protestants and who are therefore “ethno-culturally” closer to the “ethos and spirit” of the United States. Blacks and Native Americans are welcome only if they assimilate and don’t “leverage their experience for the purposes of political guilt in our time.” Any immigrants from non-European countries, “Indians or Southeast Asians or Ecuadorians or immigrated Africans … should be sent home immediately,” he says.

The Claremont Institute’s scholars, the investment bros at New Founding, the secret SACR society members and individuals like Isker and Engel all exist in the same extreme echo chamber. They bloviate on one another’s podcasts, opine on overlapping online journals, quote from each other’s books and pander to the same wealthy donors, all the while believing their speech is being curtailed by an amorphous leftwing regime.

Their shared catastrophizing and fearmongering are so outlandish they would be laughable if they weren’t so organized, mobilized and well-funded. They are breaking ground on their vision for remaking America.

Because they believe the survival of Christendom, America, Western civilization and themselves is tied to the success of the far right, one wonders how long it might be before Klingenstein’s “cold civil war” heats up. (Fischer is part owner of an ammunitions factory in Texas.) Yet, from their rhetoric it’s difficult to determine if these conservatives are truly as concerned about the country’s “demise” as they claim, or if they’re trying to hasten it, gleeful at the opportunity to remake America in their own image.

Anton, speaking on behalf of the Claremont Institute, already is claiming the “deep state” is “subverting the 2024 election” and laying the intellectual groundwork to dispute the election results should Trump lose again. Even a loss by Trump, if it led to mass uprisings, could be a win for those who always have viewed him as a tool of disruption. According to Engel, Trump is the “vehicle through which we can normalize Right Wing priorities … like ‘deportation,’ Heritage America … and so on.”

Will Trump be the Right’s Red Caesar? Trump himself “re-truthed” a Washington Post editorial saying so, and Project 2025 would certainly go a long way toward establishing him in that role.

Others see Trump as too undisciplined, a Godzilla-like presence demolishing the country’s remaining norms and rules in preparation for a future autocratic leader.

Engel thinks Barron Trump could be the Red Caesar, while Haywood said on the “New Founding” podcast that Elon Musk is a possibility. Musk himself is backing JD Vance. Vance is certainly positioned to seize the MAGA mantle from an aging Trump, and he has ties to both the Claremont Institute and New Founding.

But whatever the outcome of the 2024 election, SACR, New Founding, and their associates are poised to act, physically moving people into position in the Highland Rim and other planned aligned communities across the country.

 

Kristen Thomason is a freelance writer with a background in media studies and production. She has worked with national and international religious organizations and for public television. Currently based in Scotland, she has organized worship arts at churches in Metro D.C. and Toronto. In addition to writing for Baptist News Global, Kristen blogs on matters of faith and social justice at viaexmachina.com.