Footman Phil Strikes Again

Long ago, in pre-historic times before written records existed, it must’ve been much easier to identify threats to your safety. The Earth, at the time, teemed with roving tribes of men and wild, mythical creatures whose presence gnawed at the mind of agricultural peoples who constructed settlements around the production of food. That the hinterlands beyond the city walls were dangerous was self-evident and required no beggaring. 

The modern world is different. The enemies are less visible. The terrain is more familiar, yet simultaneously, more inaccessible. The “threat” that rural residents pose to urbanites is basically non-existent. But the firmware to stoke such fears remains.

There is a market for propaganda that plays up this divide. That’s why we get NewsChannel 5’s “Footman” Phil Williams—a brave truth teller who wanders out into the wilderness and reports back to us about the dangers that lie outside the city walls. Williams is a generally unimpressive gum shoe reporter who, at the tail end of his career, has taken up the torch of town crier, warning those that live in Nashville’s urban enclave not to leave the 440 loop lest they encounter a raving MAGA-tard.

Phil has recently directed his scrutinizing eye toward a Millersville police officer he deemed the “conspiracy cop” and an increase of racist flyering incidents in Nashville. These stories fall neatly into the dominant narrative of “increasing white supremacy” set by media outlets like MSNBC and the New York Times—not to mention NGOs like the Southern Poverty Law Center—in the leadup to the 2024 presidential election.

Millersville is 20 miles outside of Nashville, straddling the line between Robertson and Sumner county, so when the Footman began rolling out his series of reports on the “conspiracy cop,” it raised our eyebrows a bit. But his latest effort to portray the state of Tennessee as a dark, wooded backwater takes us much further afield to Gainesboro, Tennessee—population 920—the county seat of Jackson County..

It is odd for a Nashville reporter to be so concerned with a town 80 miles east of Music City. Out here, Phil tells you, racists are moving in. They are ten feet tall and breathe fire. Tracks from their cloven hooves can be seen all over town. Don’t believe me? Listen to this podcast. 

I wish I was joking, but the recent Phil Special is an annotated account of C.Jay Engels and Andrew Isker’s podcast: two men who have elected to leave their respective home states of California and Minnesota to settle in Jackson County. “Aiming to 'radicalize Main Street,' Christian nationalists set sights on tiny Jackson County, Tennessee” reads the headline.

Their reasons for selecting Jackson County of all places mostly has to do with Josh Abbotoy’s RidgeRunner venture, which has purchased land in the area in hopes to attract those who have, since Covid, become disillusioned with city-life in America and seek to settle down somewhere quieter and, broadly, more culturally conservative.

Before Phil published his report, I was writing a profile of RidgeRunner, framing it within the context of the many charter city projects that have sprung up in the past decade. RidgeRunner doesn’t technically qualify as a charter city, and it sits more easily in reality than other ventures such as Praxis, which, at its inception, sought to build an autonomous city in the Mediterranean by leveraging its members credentials and economic output to negotiate terms. On the surface, Praxis and RidgeRunner may seem unrelated, but what they have in common is an attempt to form intentional communities around shared values—a defining hallmark of civilization since time immemorial.

Following the mass exodus from blue to red states during COVID, RidgeRunner is betting that there is still latent demand for those hoping to relocate to more conservative areas. Josh tells me that what distinguishes RidgeRunner’s ambitions from other charter cities is their focus on family and culture and less on economic opportunity. “The new factor is politics, culture, and religion,” Abbotoy told me over the summer. “A lot of traditional developers are nervous about that. They want to stay away from it. But it's actually something that really matters to people, especially more conservative people.”

In my discussion with Isker, he cited Minnesota’s 2023 Trans Refuge law, which empowers the state government to remove children from parents who refuse to accommodate their child’s gender dysphoria as the final indication that his home state was no longer friendly to his values. Engels, who moved from California, echoed this point, emphasizing that his decision to relocate was motivated entirely by a desire to establish himself in an area more friendly to his family’s religious values.

One can quibble about whether these conservative blue state refugees qualify as carpet baggers but that is ultimately up to Jackson County residents and leadership to reckon with. Why a Nashville journalist would spend time and money flying helicopters over private property 80 miles away and pestering locals is a far more compelling question to me than the highly-relatable instinct that people have to move to places  where they can be around people they have something in common with.