One eager customer is 38-year-old TheoBro #Andrew #Isker
—the pastor who interned at Wilson’s church,
studied divinity at New Saint Andrews,
and co-wrote a book on Christian nationalism with #Andrew #Torba,
the openly antisemitic CEO of the social media platform #Gab.

In July, Isker announced on X that he planned to move his family of seven to lead a church in a New Founding community in Tennessee.

Life in his native Minnesota, he said, had become untenable because of permissive laws around trans rights and abortion,
not to mention how hospitable the state has been to #refugees.

“Minnesota is one of the top destinations for resettling foreign people hostile to our way of life,” he said.

That month, Isker spoke at a Texas conference about the
“war on white America”
alongside #Paul #Gottfried,
the mentor of prominent white nationalist #Richard #Spencer.

The conference was hosted by the "True Texas Project",
a far-right group with ties to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Like many TheoBros,
Isker sees much to like in Vance.

In early July, before Trump announced his running mate, Isker referred to him as
“Senator JD Vance (R-Heritage America).”

In late July, he posted a video of Vance and told his 29,000 followers,
“You need to double down on childless cat lady discourse.
Kamala sees happy, large families and hates them.
She wants them destroyed.
She wants you to never be able to have this.
She is a nasty, bitter harridan who hates all that is true, good, and beautiful.”

One problem is that there simply are not enough TheoBros to populate Christian communities like the one Isker plans to move to.

Enter #William #Wolfe,
the founder of the
"Center for Baptist Leadership", which aims to persuade members of the Southern Baptist Convention that it,
the largest of all Protestant denominations in the United States,
has fallen prey to the corrupting forces of liberalism.

Baptists are only the beginning.

Wolfe wants to win over the entire evangelical mainstream,
which he and other TheoBros refer to as “#Big #Eva.”

In August, he posted on X,
“Once you realize that Big Eva thinks it’s a bigger sin to desire to preserve the customs, heritage, values, and cultural homogeneity of your own nation
than to kill the unborn in the womb, you can better understand their moral framework.”

An even more well-connected Wilson emulator is
#Josh #Abbotoy,
executive director of "American Reformer"
and managing partner of a venture capital fund and real estate firm called "New Founding".

A former fellow of the right-wing think tank the #Claremont #Institute, Abbotoy reported that he recently participated in a #Project2025 presidential transition “strategic planning session”
hosted by the right-wing think tank the #Heritage #Foundation.

Bucks County Beacon reporter Jennifer Cohn revealed venture capitalist #Chris #Buskirk was listed as the editor and publisher.

In 2022, Buskirk co-founded the #Rockbridge #Network,
a collection of powerful Trump donors including Catholic judicial kingmaker #Leonard #Leo and Silicon Valley billionaire #Peter #Thiel.

Another co-founder of the Rockbridge Network?
None other than
JD #Vance.

Thiel, Vance’s mentor and former employer, is also a major funder of the National Conservatism movement.

Obsessed with global birthrates, Thiel spent $10 million on his protégé’s successful 2022 Senate campaign.

In July, shortly after Trump had announced Vance as his running mate,
Cohn surfaced a tweet by New Founding’s network director,
#Josh #Clemans:
a photo of Vance with several New Founding staffers.

The caption read “Our guy.”

New Founding lists as a partner the "Society for American Civic Renewal",
a secretive fraternal order founded by Indiana shampoo baron #Charles #Haywood,

who describes himself as an aspiring Christian “#warlord.”

According to founder #Nate #Fischer, New Founding wants to “form the backbone of a renewed American regime”
and that its members
“understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise.”

But its main public-facing project appears to be turning tracts of land in Appalachia into Christian communities.

Promotional materials describe a community of
“unmatched seclusion”
where
“simple country faith”
protects local culture from rainbow flags and crime.

Potential buyers, he advises, should not delay.

“Who’s going to grab the land?
Is it going to be good, based people who want to build something inspiring,
something authentic to the region’s history,
or is it going to be Bill Gates and BlackRock and hippies from California?”

#Vance sits somewhere in between these two tendencies
—at 37, he’s a venture capitalist who is young enough to be exposed to the dissident online currents.

But he’s also shaped by the most deeply traditionalist thinking of the American right.

He is friends with #Yarvin,
whom he openly cites as a political influence,
and with #Dreher,
who was there when Vance was baptized into the Catholic Church in 2019.

I’d been writing about #militias and right-wing stirrings in the #rural #West for years,
but I didn’t really understand how this alchemy worked until I first met him last July.

I’d gone back to Ohio to see my uncle, who was dying of cancer.

Vance and I both grew up around Cincinnati,
immersed in a culture of
white rural migrants who had come from coalfields and farm towns
to look for work in the cities of the Midwest.

We had met as a kind of experiment
—I was going to be in town anyway,
and because my uncle was sick,
I was thinking a lot about the place and what it meant to me.

On a whim, I asked an editor at a conservative magazine if I could write something from the perspective of a skeptical leftist.

Vance suggested that we meet at a diner where my dad had often taken me as a kid.

He was barely registering in the polls at the time.

Vance believes that a
well-educated and culturally liberal American elite
has greatly benefited from globalization,
the financialization of our economy,
and the growing power of big tech.

This has led an
Ivy League intellectual and management class
—a quasi-aristocracy he calls
“the regime”
—to adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly oppose those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up.

In the Vancian view, this class has no stake in what people on the New Right often call the “real economy”
—the farm and factory jobs that once sustained middle-class life in Middle America.

This is a fundamental difference between New Right figures like Vance and the Reaganite right-wingers of their parents’ generation.

To Vance—and he’s said this—culture war is class warfare.

Vance recently told an interviewer, “I gotta be honest with you,
I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine,”
a flick at the fact that he thinks the American-led global order is as much about enriching defense contractors and think-tank types as it is about defending America’s interests.

“I do care about the fact that in my community right now
the leading cause of death among 18- to 45-year-olds
is Mexican fentanyl.”

His criticisms of big tech as “enemies of Western civilization”
often get lost in the run of Republican outrage over Trump being kicked off Twitter and Facebook,
though they go much deeper than this.

Vance believes that the regime has sold an illusive story that consumer gadgets and social media are constantly making our lives better,

even as wages stagnate and technology feeds an epidemic of depression.

People often struggle with what to make of Thiel’s involvement in this ecosystem.

Last year the journalist Max Chafkin published a biography of Thiel, titled
"The Contrarian"
in which he described #Yarvin as the
“house political philosopher” for a network often called the #Thielverse.

The book focuses heavily on Thiel’s political maneuverings,
describing how he evolved from being a
hyper-libertarian to someone who now makes common cause with
nationalists and populists.

And it explains how Thiel helped both #Cruz and #Josh #Hawley on their paths to the Senate.

The Contrarian ends with a dark picture of the billionaire trying to extend his political reach ever more overtly
by funding and shepherding the campaigns of #Masters and #Vance.

“Masters and Vance are different from Hawley and Cruz,” Chafkin writes;
the former two are “extensions” of Thiel.

This is only partly true. It would be just as accurate to say that Thiel has been influenced by the intellectual currents and political critiques of the "New Right" that he’s now helping to support.

Many of these people are friendly with Thiel, or admire him,
but are by no means beholden to him.

And many of them hold views that would seem to make Thiel,
a tech oligarch currently worth around $8 billion who recently resigned from the Meta—née Facebook—board of directors,
their natural enemy.

This New Right is heavily populated by people with graduate degrees,
so there’s a lot of debate about who is in it and whether or not it even exists.

At one end are the NatCons, post-liberals, and traditionalist figures like "Benedict Option" author #Rod #Dreher, who envision a
conservatism reinvigorated
by an embrace of localist values,
religious identity,
and an active role for the state in promoting everything from
marriage to
environmental conservation.

But there’s also a highly online set of
Substack writers, podcasters, and
anonymous Twitter posters
—“our true intellectual elite,” as one podcaster describes them.

This group encompasses everyone from
rich crypto bros and
tech executives to
back-to-the-landers to
disaffected members of the American intellectual class,
like "Up in the Air" author #Walter #Kirn,
whose fulminations against groupthink and
techno-authoritarianism have made him
an unlikely champion to the dissident right and heterodox fringe.

But they share a the basic #worldview:
that individualist liberal ideology,
increasingly bureaucratic governments,
and big tech
are all combining into a world that is at once
tyrannical,
chaotic,
and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning
—as Blake Masters recently put it,
a “#dystopian #hell-world.”