A couple of years ago, Andrew Isker, a pastor and father of six, made a big decision. He would move his family away from Minnesota, where six generations of his ancestors had lived before him, to a rural community in Tennessee. Leaving his home state wasn’t easy, he told Tucker Carlson on Carlson’s YouTube show in March. But he had no choice; the progressive excesses of Governor Tim Walz simply had become too much to bear. Isker was especially concerned about his autistic son, who had attended a program at a local public school. “They could be putting him in a dress and calling him a girl name, and I would have no idea,” said Isker, echoing an unfounded claim that President Trump made during a September debate with Kamala Harris. “And then when I find out and I oppose it, boom. [Child Protective Services] comes, takes him out of our custody, and he’s gone forever.”
So Isker decided to move to rural Appalachia—choosing that particular location to help launch a new community near the small town of Gainesboro, Tennessee, in the central northern part of the state. Isker’s new neighborhood sounds idyllic, with “bucolic pastures, waterways teeming with over 140 species of fish–including some of the country’s premier trout fishing, rolling hills, thick hardwood forests, and abundant wildlife,” according to the real estate website.
There’s a name for the rough concept that Isker describes: the “Network State,” an ascendant and buzzy tech movement where internet groups are beginning to explore what it might be like to start their own new countries. At first, these new countries would appear online, and eventually in actual physical locations. Simply put, the Highland Rim Project is the Christian nationalist take on that idea. As New Founding CEO Nate Fischer put it last year on X, “Nation states are not the principal form of government today. I see no reason Christian nations or peoples couldn’t organize network states.”