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........

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