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” ceremo