The buffalo were grazing by the highway on the outskirts of the richest county in the richest country in the history of the world.

It was a clear morning in the Tetons, and with binoculars it was possible to see all the way across the valley known, since prehistory, as one of the most secure and comfortable little basins in all of the Mountain West—named, for one of the first white trappers to winter there, Jackson’s Hole. The landscape may have looked like wilderness to the caravanning tourists in $200,000 Sprinter vans and thousands more in athleisure who now flood Teton County year-round. But it is also a kind of hyperreality of money—tens of thousands of acres and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of conservation easements—in what may be the world’s most unequal political jurisdiction. Above the ospreys and eagles, there was a constant traffic of small jets and private aircraft, humming into and out of a town that has become a modern refuge for people with remote jobs and portfolios fattened by one of history’s great asset bubbles, many of them driven to the Northern Rockies by a worry or wariness that the rest of America is on its way toward environmental, political, or economic breakdown. Or some combination of the above.

A couple hours outside Jackson, I met Catharine O’Neill, whose family once owned these mountains. Her great-great-grandfather was John D. Rockefeller, and she worked in Trump’s State Department. Now, she was living in a modest little house outside of Casper, Wyoming, and was about to have her first child with a home appraiser she’d met after moving there. She isn’t hiding out exactly, but, like many Americans these days, she has a sense that things are cracking up.

“Election night we were talking, kind of joking,” she said. At the time she was living in DC. “I was afraid of being thrown into a concentration camp. I know that sounds crazy.”

“I was with my friends and I was like, ‘Well, we’re kind of fucked,’ ” she said. “And they’re like, ‘Well, let’s choose a red state to go take over.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I have a place in Wyoming we can go.’ ”

She is a proud conservative who views the corporate elite as enemies of America, and believes that we’re on the cusp of a populist uprising against the brand of transnational capitalism championed by Republicans for most of the last half-century. Her politics have marked her, at least to the minds of people who share her worldview, as a bit of a class traitor in their emergent epochal struggle against the entire system.

“Maybe I’m biased—obviously,” she said. “But if these organizations were run by people like my grandfather—he was a devout Christian and actually cared about this country and wanted to build this country up—that would be one thing.”

“He literally led the way for this country to be a superpower,” she said. “And we have seen a one-eighty now. That’s what’s interesting with a lot of these executives. They’re now trying to, it seems to me, break the country down.”

O’Neill was “the key to understanding all this,” according to the former Trump staffer who put us in touch, not because she necessarily possessed any secret knowledge, but because she captured so many of the quiet currents swirling around younger conservative circles these days. Wealthy and well-connected preppers and back-to-the-landers have been moving west, many of them at least tangentially involved in the edgy online realm of thought known as the dissident right. Tech executives and crypto investors are creating secretive groups to help people “exit”—a term that has taken on almost mystical significance in some circles recently—from our liberal society, tech-dominated lives, and fraying system. And there are grander plans, for whole secessionist movements using crypto and decentralized autonomous organizations to build whole mini societies, many on the model of what Balaji Srinivasan, the former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, calls a “Network State.” (Wyoming recently became the first state in the country to allow DAOs to incorporate as private companies.)

These ideas used to be at the fringiest fringe of a worldview that sees our basic political battle lines shifting from left-right divisions toward a rebellion against globalization, against the notion that the massive market- and tech-driven change that we’ve been living through really represents progress. But this dissident-fringe view has rapidly become mainstream on the right, in part through the dire warnings of a disintegrating global system shared almost nightly on Tucker Carlson Tonight, and—significantly—through coded signifiers broadcast by Republican politicians trying to capitalize on the populist ferment, most obviously Ron DeSantis, who gave a speech titled “Florida vs. Davos” to the National Conservatism Conference in September. “The United States is a nation that has an economy, not the other way around,” he said. “And our economy should be geared toward helping our own people.”

According to this view, the American empire is in danger of fading, weakened by a greedy and insulated oligarchy with more loyalty to their pals in London and Tokyo than to their fellow Americans. The elite have driven regular people into a serflike existence, putting money above every other source of value or meaning: national interest, local cultures, our long-term financial stability, even the environment. (Many young conservatives have suddenly adopted an almost mystical reverence for nature, itself a form of protest against our money- and tech-driven world.) The result is that now a lot of highly online coastal elites talk in much the same way that backwoods militiamen arming themselves against the new world order have been for decades. And vice versa.

Just before I left for Wyoming, a Substack post by a writer who tweets under the name Disgraced Propagandist titled “There’s Gonna Be a War in Montana” went viral. A dozen acquaintances sent it to me, including my editor at Vanity Fair. The writer explicitly linked the anti-globalist analysis to an anger that’s been swirling in the American West over the land rush engendered by well-off coastal buyers, which has sent rents and home prices spaceward, forcing people to move away or become homeless. Longtime locals talk about being “colonized” by a flood of rich liberal newcomers.

“On one side you have global interests imputing their values, importing cheaper labor, hollowing out Montana’s attractions and selling them to an international bourgeoisie for maximum profits,” went the post. “On the other side you have the new underclass. Not the friendly Christian country folk of times past. And not Cowboy Hat Republican Rancher Dad either. No, these are a new kind of country person. Angry, exasperated, poor,” he wrote. “This group is acutely aware of just who controls Bozeman and Big Sky, and believe that the same people are coming for their territory. And they’re right.”

The Montana-based novelist Walter Kirn, who has become a hero in dissident circles, called it “immaculate bullshit” and suggested it had been written by someone hoping to inflame liberal fears of rural revolt. But it captured a moment.

It was the same moment in which Liz Cheney, Wyoming’s lone congressional representative, found herself losing her primary race in an election in which her opponents cast her as an almost perfect expression of the kind of elite oligarch with no true local roots or state loyalty.

I arrived in Wyoming just in time to attend her concession party. Cheney’s father looked on, tight-lipped, standing next to a carefully placed hay bale at stage left, as she conceded at twilight among a small crowd of well-heeled supporters dressed in haute-Western finery. She too talked openly about civil war, a possibility that more than 40 percent of Americans still think is likely, even after the midterms produced an outcome that made our politics look surprisingly normal, by the eerie standards of today. “This is not a game,” she said. “Our nation is barreling, once again, towards crisis, lawlessness and violence.” America is “young in the history of mankind,” she said, “And yet we’re the oldest democracy in the world. Our survival is not guaranteed.”

A big mustachioed oilman named Tex McBride, who ran a pro-Cheney super PAC, was watching from the back of the crowd. I asked him what he thought was coming next for America. “My answer’s not fit for the record,” he said. But he went on anyway. “I think we’re fucked.”

The so-called dissident right is a world of thought where categories get scrambled. It shares space with the more buttoned-up politics of the New Right, but these days includes a whole range of unlikely allies. The “scene,” as everyone calls it, is a small, cliquey, and status-obsessed world where even at parties people often call each other by their Twitter handles. Extremely wealthy tech types chat on Signal all day with hustling writers and smugly racist bodybuilders and “rationalist” sex workers, and the simple truth is that many people tend to think America as we once knew it is already pretty much gone. “Who even needs a civil war,” one scene fixture texted me recently, “when the institutions are doing such a good job of delegitimizing themselves?”

This scene was very much on display in Austin, where in July I went to see the premiere of Alex’s War, a documentary about Alex Jones. The night before the screening, Futo, a software company started by a founding investor of WhatsApp and dedicated to fighting “tech oligopoly,” hosted a swank cocktail party on the roof of the downtown Marriott. Curtis Yarvin, the intellectual godfather of the dissident right and popularizer of the idea that America is not and should not be a functioning democracy, flew in for the screening the next day. In front of him was the former Trump staffer and documentarian Amanda Milius, who was wearing an elaborate white dress and showing off her serpentine Bulgari bangles, with emeralds for eyes.

In front of her was Ali Alexander, the Stop the Steal organizer who had, along with Jones himself, helped put on the rally that devolved into the Capitol invasion. Ariel Pink, the chillwave musician who was an indie kingpin before it got out that he’d been at the January 6 rally (he left before anyone breached the Capitol), was there too. So were Mike Cernovich and Anna Khachiyan, the cohost of the formerly left-wing podcast Red Scare. Glenn Greenwald hosted the question-and-answer session with Jones and Alex Lee Moyer, the film’s director. Greenwald looked out at the room, beaming, and described the gathering as a “merry band of misfits,” charter members of a disaffected counterculture. “We’re a bunch of weirdos and rebels here,” he said. “And I just love that.”

Jones himself had been visibly upset throughout the screening, getting up half a dozen times from his front-row seat to escape backstage. “I couldn’t watch myself through some of that,” he said during the Q&A. “I looked like Jabba the Hutt on PCP.” He kept apologizing for his conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook killings without seeming to want to actually say that he was apologizing. “A lot of that stuff I say,” he went on, “it’s like I drank a bottle of vodka, I’m smoking cigarettes, and you’re just talking. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to say.” At the after-party, at another swank Austin hotel, he grinned next to a cart of Champagne bottles and posed for photos with well-dressed young fans.

There’s a story that Jones has been telling these last 30 years, as he rose from a local curiosity on public access television to someone who claimed, by the time of the 2016 election, to be pulling in more unique viewers than every cable news network in America combined. And it has risen from the sort of thing that only kooks and rural militiamen talked about to become the grand narrative at hand. “I don’t know who is going to be in the White House on January 20, 2021,” he’d said, hours before the January 6 rally he helped organize. “But I do know that Joe Biden is a globalist.”

Resistance to “globalism” is a new organizing force of right-wing politics. “These people at the World Economic Forum,” DeSantis told the National Conservatism Conference in September, “they just view us as a bunch of peasants. I can tell you, things like the World Economic Forum are dead on arrival in the state of Florida.” It could have been Alex Jones talking.

If you believe this story, marking yourself as a “nationalist,” as many Republican politicians now call themselves, or a “localist,” as *The American Conservative—*house organ of the anti-globalist right—proudly describes itself, this framing explains why our society seems to be spinning apart: The relentless power of markets has worked its way into every part of our lives, breaking down traditional cultures and modes of life, forcing us to live drone-like lives ordered by our phones and credit scores, leading to the mass export of jobs overseas, the destruction of the natural world, an internationalist foreign policy that costs trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, and even the destruction of institutions like the American family farm. It is, like Marxism was once for the global left, a story that is a bible to all the other stories you need to understand the world.

This politics is already reshaping Europe, where Vladimir Putin has made it clear that the invasion of Ukraine was intended to be a first step in smashing what you’ll hear sneeringly called the “globo-homo”—a term spiced with homophobia, used both in Russia and on the American right to describe a world transforming into a soulless landscape of chain stores and empty hedonism. Just after Giorgia Meloni and her right-wing coalition won elections in Italy last September, a video ricocheted around the spheres of the dissident right and the social media feeds of some highly placed Republicans. In it, Meloni says, “When I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators. The perfect consumer.”

But it’s not just the right. Even figures in the Democratic Party seem to be coming to the conclusion that globalization presents a deeper problem than anyone wants to talk about during our overheated elections. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan has been on a subtle journey of discovery, talking about how our headlong rush into globalization may have been misguided. In November, Connecticut senator Chris Murphy published a piece in The Atlantic titled “The Wreckage of Neoliberalism,” using a phrase that, on the left, critiques much the same system. “By accentuating a pro-family platform of economic nationalism salted with a bit of healthy tech skepticism,” he wrote, “Democrats can build a new coalition that sells in the parts of our society that have suffered under, and grown tired of, the neoliberal consensus.”

Last November, The Wall Street Journal ran a slideshow describing “The Messy Unwinding of the New World Order,” depicting a pullback in international investment since the high times before the 2008 financial crash. “New world order” was once famously uttered by President George H.W. Bush, and it described a system built on the expectation of more or less constant economic growth, American military power as stabilizing force, and ceaseless technological development, to allow the world to pay for the cost of building it and the massive increase in global population. It’s a kind of gigantic pyramid scheme we all participate in—a “constant revolution,” as the Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal described it in Revolt, his best-selling account of the anti-globalization backlash.

Our constant revolution and the response to it was on full display at the Corral Bar on West Pine in Pinedale, Wyoming—town motto, “All the Civilization You Need.” You can still smoke inside and the night I was there, most of the clientele was sunburned and foul-mouthed fly-fishing guides with endless ribald anecdotes about the private-jet types they cater to. A sticker above the bar reads “My Wyoming Has An East Infection.”

“I want to put the blinders on, but you know what? It’s going to happen,” a richly tattooed grandmother named Cathryne told me. “It’s happening everywhere,” she said, just before she burst into tears as she talked about how she no longer had any hope of being able to buy a house to live in with her daughter. Too many other people were looking for a small-town feel, space to roam and be in nature, a life that felt calm and sane. “They don’t want to be in the cities anymore. And I don’t blame them.”

She said she’d gotten into an argument with some investors from Atlanta just a few days before. “I said to them, you’re gonna have to make housing for people who are going to wipe your asses,” she said. “Everybody deserves to choose where they want to live, but people that are in the elite, in their heads, they don’t think that. When did that happen?”

I had versions of this conversation dozens of times over the next few weeks. “The only fix to what is happening right now,” a man from tiny Augusta, Montana, told me, “is gonna be if we drag that real estate agent who is selling away the soul of this community down Main Street with a chain.” I stopped to fish off the Green River, between Pinedale and Jackson Hole, and ended up chatting with a mother and her adult son who were living out of a camper, having been priced out of rural California. “What’s going to happen when there’s nowhere left affordable to go?” the mom asked. “There’s gonna be a war,” the son said casually.

I’d been invited to the annual Jackson Hole Land Trust Picnic, billed to me as “the most glamorous picnic on earth.” It was held 80 miles and a world away from Pinedale, on a ranch just south of Jackson, where guests had to nose their vehicles through a small herd of cattle blocking the dirt access road to get to the field tents serving local meats, whiskeys, and wines. The land trust is at the center of the local philanthropic scene. It has secured conservation easements preventing development on 55,000 acres of private land in a county where the federal government already owns 97 percent of it. This has been very good for the surrounding ecosystems and very good for the private-jet class, who save millions in federal income tax. “Wealthy people out here tend to do conservation easements as a financial tactic,” as one land trust expert put it to Justin Farrell, the author of the book Billionaire Wilderness. At least one member of this class of “new Rockefellers” has made a sport of it, flying a helicopter each summer to scout a new parcel to buy.

Meanwhile, the town has an underclass of service workers, largely Latino, with little but cramped and irregular housing, a pattern now common in wealthy towns in the West and across the country. In Ketchum, Idaho, the town council recently considered legalizing camping in the city park—which would have created a government-sanctioned shantytown for service workers who can’t afford to live where they work.

The crowd at the picnic had the same turquoise jewelry, big hats, and effortfully folksy manner that colors Western high society in every town from Santa Fe to Sun Valley. Everyone I spoke to was uncomfortably conscious of what the town had come to symbolize—a place for an elite to playact at rugged Americana. The average home price in the county is now $4 million, and the median income is $420,000. Shawn Smith, the absurdly handsome chairman of the land trust’s board and the founder of an environmentally minded hedge fund, said, “I didn’t come to Jackson to change Jackson. I fish, I hunt, I recreate, my wife works for a nonprofit,” he said. “So I see that and wonder how it’s changing.” He was a Republican and a Brown graduate. “The wealthiest people in town used to drive around in pickups and Suburbans,” he said, which has changed, judging by the cars parked in the field. “But if you look at anywhere in the US, the socioeconomic structure is changing, and I think it’s easy to look at the West as a microcosm of that.”

“The whole system is rapidly unraveling,” town council member Jonathan Schechter had told me after he’d given a panoramic environmental, political, and economic analysis of what had made Jackson into an extreme example of what was off in all of America. It was strange to hear, coming from a small-town city councilman, but these are strange times. Eighty percent of the personal income in the county comes from investment proceeds, which is another way of saying that it is money derived from having money. He described how a “location-neutral” economy dominated by a small elite had transformed a place that, until recently, had still been remote enough to retain a cross-class community character. “These people are getting paid a ton of money, they can get whatever services they want online, and they can have all these bodacious ski hills,” he told me. “And so you get all these people who are like, okay, great, we’ll buy up a pool of homes and jack up the rent, and it’s just become another money pot to them.”

The process is unfolding across the expanse of the Greater Yellowstone region, the closest thing to a large, intact ecosystem left in the lower 48 states, which encompasses towns like Bozeman and Livingston, Montana, both undergoing their own upheavals. No one talked about any of this during Cheney’s primary, the highest-profile election Wyoming has ever seen. “What makes it sad is that candidates who want to run in Wyoming are preening and dancing for outside billionaires instead of addressing what people are actually worried about,” a longtime Wyoming politico named Rob Jennings told me. “Everyone in Wyoming becomes almost like a subject or a service worker,” he said. “You’re turning it into a service-worker economy, and the only people who get heard are the political interests, the oil interests, the billionaire interests.”

A few years ago, Steve Bannon had a coffee date with Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage. “If you’re interested…and I’ll fund it somehow,” Bannon told his English counterpart while a documentarian filmed, “we’ll help knit together this populist-nationalist movement throughout the world.”

“Guys in Egypt are coming to me,” Bannon said. “Modi’s guys in India, Duterte, we get Orbán,” he said—referring to the then president of the Philippines and the current nationalist prime minister of Hungary, respectively. He wanted to create “somehow, some sort of convening authority, for conferences and stuff like that, so we can get ideas like that out there. Nobody’s doing it right now.”

“Nobody’s doing it,” Farage said as he nodded along, seeming to have trouble getting a word in. “It’s a global revolt,” Bannon said. “It’s a zeitgeist. We’re on the right side of history. But it’s going to need the mode of power.… The ideas have to come in more sharp focus, the economic ideas, the political ideas, right.”

I’d been hoping to meet with Bannon when I left Jackson to link up with O’Neill, the Rockefeller farmer. She had told me that both Bannon and David Bossie, the head of Citizens United, were coming to town for a “movie night” hosted by the state Republican Party, which had been taken over by a die-hard Trump faction led by a man named Frank Eathorne, who was reportedly at the Capitol on January 6 and who revved up crowds by saying he’d “run through barbed wire” for Trump. The bitter congressional primary had passed, but there were still strange machinations at work. Jennings had wondered aloud how the state party had been “taken over by people who carry clubs and knives, members of the Oath Keepers, crap like that.” He suspected national forces were at work. “He doesn’t even have a base. Nobody even fucking knows the guy.”

O’Neill was friendly with Bannon, who had tried to persuade her to run against Cheney. “I was sitting in Steve Bannon’s house January 12,” she said. He told her, “ ‘You have to run, you have to beat her, you’re going to be Trump’s girl,’ ” she said. “I was sitting there like, I don’t really want to take on this duty. That’s not really where I actually am.” She laughed and said she was thinking, “I’m about to be picked up in a helicopter and shipped to Guantánamo Bay.”

“I am so torn,” she said after a while. Her baby was due in a couple of weeks, and we’d been talking about her family, about Wyoming, about the 580-acre “vertically integrated cattle operation” she’d started—tiny by Wyoming standards, but one she had high hopes for as a test of new farming methods. She said she’d been watching documentaries about her family online, thinking about the irony of a Rockefeller who’d adopted a politics that was supposed to be about reducing the power of money and corporations over our lives. “I try to be very self-aware,” she said. “I can’t pretend I’m not who I am. So it’s been a very interesting struggle for me.”

She seemed caught between the desire to live a simple life away from it all, and the desire to be a part of the world-shaping changes that people like her and Bannon believe are coming. Food politics is her way of trying to split the difference. “We don’t have that stability anymore,” she said, talking about disruptions to supply chains and a general sense that systems we once never had to think about were breaking down. “And that’s terrifying.”

“Look at Italy’s election,” she said to me later. “That was a direct rejection of internationalism, globalism, whatever you want to call it.” She told me that her “dream” president was Thomas Massie, the Republican Kentucky congressman who lives on a 1,200-acre off-grid homestead, and who combines a quixotic critique of America’s involvement overseas with a hyperlocalist platform. “Giving Americans the right to control their own food and sustenance, I mean, it’s at the core of that fight.”

We ended up at the bar with her fiancé and some of her friends, among them a carpenter, a schoolteacher, regular people. It was slightly surreal to drink beer and jump between talking about running irrigation pipe to hearing her anecdotes about how funny Nigel Farage is in person. The next morning I drove up to her small house, on a plot a few miles up Casper Mountain.

“I don’t even think there is a working-class party right now,” she said. “The Democrats have abandoned them. The Republicans aren’t there yet.” She was undecided about Ron DeSantis. The one unabashed champion of her kind of politics on a national stage is Tucker Carlson. “If Tucker announced his presidency tomorrow,” she said, “I would literally move to DC, nine months pregnant, to go work for him.” I asked if she thought he would ever run. “I think he will get to a point where he feels like he has to,” she said. But her vision of the good life was so different from anything anyone talks about on a national stage that it’s hard to know whether it is even a politics at all. “It used to be you have a few acres, you work the land, you raise a family, your kids help you garden, till, or whatever,” she said, describing a world she thought had been wrecked by regulations and the oligopoly of corporations like Monsanto. “And then you create enough food for your family and maybe your community.”

I said it must be strange to desire a life like that, being a Rockefeller and all. “There’s a part of the Bible that talks about how people that were born with a lot have a lot of responsibility,” she said. (Luke 12:48.) “And I definitely feel that way.” It was a sentiment that was not at all out of place on the right these days, where everyone suddenly seems to feel like they’re taking part in a world historical drama. But for now she was going to have her baby and enjoy being in a place she thought still felt like an old-fashioned American hometown. “There’s a saying,” she said. “ ‘Wyoming is what America was.’ And I do believe that.”

Food plays an outsize role in the political imagining of the right these days. Last October, Carlson released a documentary titled The End of Men, which features, among other self-proclaimed right-wing bodybuilders, an anonymous farmer who tweets under the name William Wheelwright, one of the better-known figures in the sphere where preppers, techies, hippies, farmers, naturalists, health bros, and hard-core dissident-right types—many of whom are unapologetically racist—mingle, argue, and plan with each other. The documentary advanced a view that our technologies and agricultural system are physically poisoning us, destroying our connection to our corporeality, leading to a generation of men with declining sperm counts and low testosterone. The globalist “regime,” as Mike Cernovich described it in the documentary, has weakened America on a cellular level. The film called for men to take up weight lifting and a meat-based diet. “Well-ordered, disciplined groups of men bound by friendship are dangerous, precisely because of what they can do,” the masculinist health guru known as “Raw Egg Nationalist” said, over images of the American and Haitian revolutions. “A few hundred men can conquer an entire empire,” Raw Egg Nationalist continued. “That’s why they want you to be sick, depressed, and isolated.”

“Things are going to get worse before they get better,” he said. “How much worse isn’t exactly clear.”

I drove north toward Montana, where I visited with a man named Paul McNiel, whom I’d first met back during the fervid summer of 2020, at a Fourth of July picnic and anti-government rally headlined “Rage Against the State.” “I think that Livingston has the highest per-capita concentration of contributors to The New Yorker of any city in America,” he’d said when I introduced myself as a writer. McNiel is extraordinarily well read, and friendly with a number of literary types. He is a bit of a prepper, and while he is deeply Christian, he doesn’t consider himself right wing. “I don’t think the division is right-left anymore. It’s us against the machine,” he said, borrowing a phrase from the English writer Paul Kingsnorth—whose writings critiquing the power of tech and money in modern life have become popular among dissident types. He was dismissive of the local armed groups being flooded with new members. “At the end of the day,” he said, “if you’re not willing to shoot federal agents, then you’re not serious about it. They aren’t serious.”

McNiel had served in Afghanistan after college, and when he left the military, he’d taken out an almost unbelievable amount of debt, largely on credit cards, so that he could get himself in the position of buying his crown jewel, a trailer park in the small town of Belgrade, Montana, just outside of Bozeman. He now owned trailer parks as far away as Alaska. He had ridden the wave. “I always tell myself: No more deals. I want to stop, and I know I have to. But I can’t.”

He’d just bought a run-down country resort and tavern in the tiny town of Story, Wyoming. It was in a beautiful and secluded creekside cove of Ponderosas, a shady island amid the surrounding sagebrush desert. “Pretty good hideout, right?” he asked me, as we had a glass of wine and talked guns, European fiction, and the possibility of civil war. The place was a furious hive of activity. He was paying a couple dozen young members of Christian families to get it ready to open for the public. He was openly conflicted about his role in the churn shaping the West. “My guess,” he said, “in 10 years, there won’t be any blue-collar people left in Story.” A lanky and bearded minister from Iowa had come out with his family to help him work on the place, and there were a dozen or so kids in denim and homemade dresses rushing around, cooking, and doing some light demolition. The scene was a prime example of “crunchy conservatives,” an ecosystem described by the writer Rod Dreher—who champions localism and has long advocated that conservative Christians withdraw as a way of preserving their culture. It’s a process that eventually led Dreher himself to move to Hungary, where he has become a vocal supporter of the country’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán. “I love localism, but there is definitely a point where it can turn into blood and soil,” McNiel said. “I feel like my role is to argue for a localism that doesn’t go off the rails into exclusion.”

I asked him what he’d thought of the “There’s Gonna be a War in Montana” piece. He thought it over. In February of 2022, the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote a piece titled “Why We Are Not Facing the Prospect of a Second Civil War,” arguing that our first Civil War had been produced by a political-economic conflict between the systems of the slave-holding agricultural South and the industrial North, and that no such economic division between the right and left exists in America today. But a political-economic division is exactly what many conservatives and nationalists now see as shaping our politics: a divide between people who work in the so-called “real economy,” and the journalists and bureaucrats and bankers and everyone else who occupy the “managerial class.” “Trump better stand up and do what’s right,” Stewart Rhodes, the head of the Oath Keepers, said on January 6, calling from a Northern Virginia hotel where a cache of guns had been staged. “Otherwise, there’s going to be a slave revolt.”

Many liberal Americans do not actually understand how easy it would be to launch an insurgency in this country. “Everyone on the planet is redpilled on low-intensity warfare now,” a host of the dissident podcast Good Ol Boyz said recently, flicking at the way the Taliban was able to beleaguer and eventually defeat the American military, mostly using small arms. Pretty much every single guy in towns like Pinedale goes out to hunt elk every autumn, and the skills of overland navigation, long-range shooting, and use of high-quality optics involved in what is known as Western “spot-and-stalk” hunting are not very different from the skills involved in modern guerrilla warfare. Insurgencies are less a military war than a complicated political conflict, in which a few people demonstrate that they’re willing to kill, die, or go to prison, and dare governments to overreact, gaining support when innocent people end up shot or arrested. Blood becomes political currency, and it does not take all that much of it to create a conflict scenario.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” McNiel said, and gestured around at his hideout. “That’s why I’m here.”

He had invited me to an “open mic” he was hosting at his home in Livingston, a ramshackle place at the center of a trailer park on an island in the Yellowstone River. It was an odd combination of wholesome family fun and radical politics. Girls wore prairie dresses, and everyone prayed before a buffet of sautéed elk meat and apple pies. Children performed homespun skits, and men got up and gave slightly doom-laden speeches. “I want you to guess what the most important word you’ll all need to know in the years to come is going to be,” one guy asked the crowd. “It’s permaculture. Things are going to break down soon, and you had better be thinking about permaculture now to get ready.”

A few days later I met a very different sort of prepper, a crypto investor and founder of a venture firm called Chaotic Capital who’d moved to Montana with her husband after a highly involved process of figuring out where in America would be the best place to hole up. Her name was Julie Fredrickson, and she’d grown up in Boulder, Colorado, a town long ago transformed by monied transplants. “That’s the tension across all of the West,” she said as we talked in their new home outside of Bozeman, a kind of middle ground between full-on prepper compound and a sunny and elegant rural home, complete with an array of solar panels, food and supplements, a garden, and a store of guns and ammo. “What I think about prepping is, do you have what you need to be cut off for two weeks,” her husband, Alex Miller, himself the CEO of a crypto start-up, told me as he set out a spread of charcuterie on the kitchen island. “That’s basically what you need to be ready for most crises.”

“It’s almost strange how much we fixate on who are natives and what native means,” Fredrickson said. They were in their mid-30s and had been in New York City when COVID hit and store shelves started to empty, which led them to start looking for environs that felt more secure. “Because obviously, me saying I’m a native is a little silly—because sure, at some point we were not, clearly. But in my mind I’m like, the West is my home, has always been my home. I went to search for my fortune and came back, and then discovered that we have to go…I don’t know. I don’t know where you go after Montana, I guess.”

She and Miller, who’d grown up in Los Angeles and was a top-notch competitive pistol shooter, were members of a secretive group of tech-world people “planning for a post-state future.” The group was organized by Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase (and possible head of the FDA under Trump, time was), and has been at least partly folded into his Network State project. It is possibly the most influential, but by no means the only, collection of connected people who are now planning for exit. There are many competing ideas to form new city-states, the best known being the crypto city of Próspera, to be built in a free-trade zone in Honduras. But there are innumerable smaller groups. The right-wing podcaster Jack Murphy’s all-male group, Liminal Order, has recently turned to homesteading and prepping to “build sovereignty.” And the anonymous dissident-right figure known as Bennett’s Phylactery has founded a private group called Exit, which offers in-person gatherings and help with everything from how to use crypto to get out of the financial system to how to raise chickens. In this realm, it is taken now more or less as a given that America is so enervated and fractured that people need to think about fending for themselves until some dictator-like figure steps in. “Right now the crown of France is lying on the ground,” Bennett’s Phylactery said to a podcaster recently. “At some point somebody is going to figure that out and pick it up.”

“This is actually something that Balaji and the 1729 group have talked about,” Fredrickson told me. “I was one of the early members,” she said, noting that she thought the group now has a waiting list tens of thousands long. “And the big question that they have, that I guess is nominally somewhat related to the NRx folks,” she said, referring to the sphere of so-called “neo-reactionary” thought illuminated by Yarvin, “is right of exit. How hard is it to get out of the situation that you are in if you feel like you need to leave?”

“Balaji tends to look at it holistically,” Fredrickson said. Their cohort sees the Northern Rockies as one of a few places in America that will be livable in the coming decades, when life in much of the country is likely to be defined by heat waves, floods, storms, and fires. But they were concerned about living through what people in these spheres tend to call “managed decline,” a comedown period from the age of cheap fossil-fuel energy and rapid economic and technological progress, in which America’s so-called “state capacity”—our collective ability to do things—steadily degrades, our “real economy” hollows out, and political divisions worsen. It is a scenario that looks more like the long decline of the Roman Empire than it does cataclysmic collapse. And it’s this scenario—a muddling, unhappy, middle course—that most people in this sphere tend to predict is coming.

“I also speak woke and have all the left-wing friends,” Fredrickson told me. She had voted for Hillary Clinton. But “the funny thing is, the overriding concern is the same,” she said, “that infrastructure is not reliable, state capacity is declining.” She said they’d thought about moving to Michigan. “But Michigan’s got too much political turmoil, because they haven’t quite set where they’re at,” she said. “We didn’t want to be in a state where, if there is some kind of political drama, somebody decides to test out if a state legislature can change the outcome, I don’t want to be anywhere near that shit when it happens.”

She thought something had gone wrong with us physically too. “Endocrine systems get fried. There’s too much cortisol, you’ve been running on adrenaline, eventually you tap out. Everyone feels nuts right now,” she said, “because what on earth are we supposed to do with the fact that we’ve had this incredible rate of change for so long. We think we’re keeping up with it, but our bodies are like, ‘Oh, actually no. We have no idea what’s going on.’ ”

“There’s definitely the tension of how long can this last,” she said. “Unchecked growth is cancer,” she said, paraphrasing the environmentalist writer Edward Abbey, who wrote that “growth for the sake of growth,” the organizing principle of our entire global society, “is the ideology of the cancer cell.” The Abbey quote had been repeated to me just a few months before by Blake Masters, the young Republican candidate and former head of Thiel Capital who was then running for the Senate in Arizona. “The show can’t go on forever,” Fredrickson said. “It’s not going to happen overnight. But if we don’t start taking action now, it’s like, I’m sorry.”

Ergo, Miami. Just after I got back from Montana, in September, I flew there for an event called Urbit Assembly. This was their second annual gathering, a strange mix between a tech convention and a degenerate art fair, for people associated with a project Yarvin had launched long ago. Srinivasan was the project’s first investor, and Peter Thiel had been the major funder behind Tlon, a company named after a mythical world in a Jorge Luis Borges story that Yarvin had founded and that was still Urbit’s parent company.

No one has ever been able to easily explain Urbit. At the start of the conference, the head of the “Urbit Foundation” offered attendees a node on the network, worth millions of dollars, if they could explain it in one sentence. But the basic idea is that it’s a peer-to-peer, decentralized internet. And it’s also a software platform, and a network you buy into. And it’s also a subculture.

Yarvin, who is no longer officially associated with Urbit, wasn’t there, but he came up in conversation constantly. “Curtis Yarvin is everybody’s darling,” one reporter wrote trollingly in a piece about the weekend. “Curtis this, Curtis that. In Honduras with Curtis. In Dubai with Curtis. On the crypto island of Próspera with Curtis.”

Srinivasan gave the keynote. Kirn was there to do a panel. “Was that Indian Bronson?” I heard someone whisper at the opening-night cocktail party, and saw a young man nervously debating whether to approach the early employee of the crypto payment platform Swype, “the most handsome man in America,” according to the podcaster Jack Murphy. He’s also, as was fairly typical in this world, a critic of liberalism—not liberalism as represented by the Democratic Party, but of the entire Enlightenment idea that individual desires and freedoms should shape society. He had just cofounded a new dating app called Keeper, a project that arose at least in part from his view that the sexual revolution and our new culture of dating and breaking up into our 30s and 40s has actually been disastrous for women who want to get married and have children. “My personal stance is that every able-bodied adult American man should own an M4A1, an M320 grenade launcher,” I’d heard him joke to Murphy once. “He should have a full battle load-out.” But he was critiquing America’s conception of gun rights as too individualistic and atomized. “To me this should be like an imposed duty—I don’t really subscribe to a very liberal framework of the Second Amendment.”

This kind of talk was a running theme. The party the next night was at a mansion owned by John Backus, who’d just sold a crypto company for $250 million, where I met a young blond VC named Riva Tez, who flashed me the butt of a prop pistol in her purse and would later give a keynote speech critiquing the entire idea of liberal rationality. “The world of reason is overrated,” she said. “We’ve been fucked by the Enlightenment.”

There were a lot of plans afoot. She was working with Dryden Brown, the cofounder of a plan to build a city-state in the Mediterranean called Praxis, a place for “exceptional men and women seeking more vital lives.” There was an entire panel on “Forking the American Codebase,” which described how systems like Urbit could offer a “new American Revolution,” where the degraded systems of our national “meatspace” could be supplanted by new technological platforms. It was a kind of practical politics for a world where politics no longer worked. “No voice, just exit” was the mantra.

I met a man named Jon Stokes, a Harvard Divinity School graduate from small-town Louisiana who’d cofounded and sold the media company Ars Technica to Condé Nast (which owns Vanity Fair), and was a big figure in the online prepper world. Stokes had also helped to found a sophisticated and slightly esoteric pro-gun group called Open Source Defense. And, it turned out, he was a member of Srinivasan’s 1729 group.

“Balaji has a thing with the media,” he said. “So I definitely can’t talk about that to you.” But he was happy to get into why he was interested in prepping. I asked him whether all the chaos it seems we’re experiencing is just part of the usual course of history, no different, except for the hyperspeed of the internet, than the upheavals that had swept the world in the 1960s. “I guess that’s the trillion-dollar question,” he said. “I would be inclined to agree with you that it’s falling apart at a deeper level.”

“One of the things that is fascinating to me about the Network State idea,” he said, “is this idea that a community gets together around a moral premise.” He thought America lacked this now. “If I had to pick one thing, I would say that there’s something about the level of inequality, and I know that’s a very lefty thing to say,” he said. “There is something about the shocking and staggering degree of inequality that feeds a lot of this.”

“I think liberalism has failed,” Stokes said, perhaps echoing the title of the best-known expression of this kind of thinking, Why Liberalism Failed, by the Notre Dame political science professor Patrick Deneen. The book, surprisingly, has even been praised by President Barack Obama, who said he mostly disagreed with its conclusions but noted “an increasing disillusionment with the liberal democratic order” and a worrying “loss of meaning and community” when he recommended it on Facebook in 2018.

“This thing where you could be a civil libertarian and an atheist and I could be a backwoods Pentecostal or a Muslim, but we can all come together and we can adjudicate some of these things and we can live in community,” Stokes told me, “I think that has broken down.”

“Peter Thiel would agree with this,” he said, referring to Thiel’s interest in the French philosopher René Girard. “There was a sort of quasi-Christian state religion superstructure that set a larger bound around what was acceptable and what wasn’t. And now that’s fallen apart.”

“Balaji says the community has to have a point,” he said. “And it has to be a point that transcends just, we’re gonna make money and get material stuff. Liberalism doesn’t acknowledge a point.”

“So that’s like to the civil war question, man,” he said. “I think if my middle model is something like the ’70s, which is bombings, political assassinations, that I think is very, very reasonable as an expectation.” But he was, he said, “as prepped as I can get. I don’t even know what other stuff I could buy.” Now, he said, “I honestly think these days about moving to Singapore.” He’d visited recently, and despite the fact that he was a civil libertarian, he’d found it an oddly appealing contrast to America. “I was like, man, this place is actually truly very high functioning and they care about it. They’re involved in a collective thing,” he said. “And they have a kind of benign nationalism.” He shrugged. Could be worse.

It was a hot and muggy morning in the open-air conference space when Srinivasan gave his keynote. He wanted to make a practical case for his “crowdsourced territory,” in which self-selecting communities would use crypto platforms to band together and buy themselves a country. “Starting new countries is possible, preferable, and profitable,” he said, and drew a parallel between the American empire of today and the breakup of the French and British colonial empires. “As empires decay you get new countries,” he said. He pitched it as an opportunity for people who’d missed America’s empire-building in the West. “Ambitious people now have an alternative in these frontier societies.”

I wandered over to the edge of the crowd, having been warned in advance that Srinivasan wouldn’t be willing to talk to me. I took a beer from the open bar and a hand-rolled cigarette from the artisanal cigarette stand, and asked for a light from a guy charging his laptop at a standing worktable. He’d been talking about the Network State idea. “That’s what a lot of these new city-states are going to look like, there are people going to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, to Colorado, do you know about this shit?” He began to explain to me how decentralized autonomous organizations and Web3 platforms like Urbit helped make these ideas possible. I mentioned that I’d been curious about this sort of thing when I made a recent trip to Montana. “I just wrote a Substack about Montana,” he said.

So here was the guy who’d gotten me started on my whole summer peregrination, a 37-year-old ad copywriter named Isaac Simpson who lived barely miles away from me and was indeed very far into the “scene” of this whole dissident right. We headed down to an Irish bar to chat and watch football. We ended up talking about rainbow flags he’d seen in Bozeman. “Man, I don’t care if somebody fucks guys,” he said. “What that flag really represents is sameness. It’s this one single worldview that is going to take over everything, and what that really means is just money. You go to these places where every single bar now looks exactly the same, the same IPAs, the same hamburger, the same interiors. It’s all called ‘local’ but actually what it is is fucking private equity investment. And it’s just empty. There is no culture or life in that stuff. And people fucking hate it.”

The Miami Dolphins won a thrilling game. That night there was a small gathering at a suite in the swank Faena Hotel in Miami Beach. People were doing coke, and there were several cases of White Claw piled on a counter. I quit smoking long ago, but every time I end up around people in this scene I seem to start again. I went out to the balcony to bum one and found myself face-to-face with Kirn. I told him that the guy who’d written that Substack post about Montana was at the party. He grinned. “Let’s do this,” he said, and led me over to where Simpson was sitting. Kirn reached out to shake hands, but Simpson looked up with a set jaw. “No, we aren’t doing this,” he said. “Fuck that.” He’d been badly stung by a famous writer. Kirn sat down anyway.

They talked for a very long time. People kept going to the bathroom to do drugs. Finally, somebody announced that the party had to break up, and a group of us wandered out to the beach under the moonlight. People were doing ketamine and skinny-dipping. I had an 8 a.m. flight but went for one last swim. “Nothing is normal anymore,” I heard a guy mutter, apparently to himself, as I headed toward the water. “And it never will be again.”

This story has been updated.