Westarctica's DIY dictator lives in PA

Travis McHenry had never heard of a micronation when he started his first, almost by accident, in the Kittatinny mountains of northeast Pennsylvania.

“My friend, her parents owned a house in the Stillwater area of Columbia County, and they had issues with their neighbors for years,” he told PA Local by phone. “I was 14 or 15 years old and felt like maybe I could solve this problem.” 

McHenry says he put up “No Trespassing” signs decorated with skulls and crossbones. He patrolled the property line with a pellet gun. After he says he was shot at with a real gun, he proposed declaring the land an independent country, the Kingdom of Casbah. 

The friend’s parents initially humored him but eventually told him to “knock it off,” he recalls. The friend group that had “begrudgingly” gone along for the ride “grew up and moved on.” 

The fiefdom was over but only a prelude.

Years after Casbah’s quiet collapse, McHenry would orchestrate one of the largest land grabs in history, staking a completely symbolic claim to a 620,000-square-mile, Alaska-sized chunk of melting Antarctica and proclaiming it the newest micronation on Earth: Westarctica. 

McHenry, a Bloomsburg University alum, would appoint himself monocratic ruler without ever setting foot there, and 2,300 people (and counting) would voluntarily become fully remote Westarctica citizens. Online elections held last year crowned a new prime minister, the third ever.  

No one lives in the area, aside from the occasional transient scientist. Antarctica is the only continent without a native population.

No established nation has a territorial claim there either, for good reason. More on that in a moment.

Technically nothing is stopping you from launching a new country of your own. There’s also nothing requiring anyone else to recognize it as such, leaving micronations a sort of strange role-playing exercise — a bizarro world of nations unto itself, the loosely governed lands of make-believe. 

Micronations are not real nations or legally binding. They’re mock states. Some say performance art. Micronationalists call it a lifestyle.

There have been hundreds of micronations on Earth, with names like the Republic of Slowjamastan and Principality of Islandia. Together they form a tapestry of largely unrecognized and self-proclaimed sovereign territories with varied founder motives — some militantly anti-government, others merely subversive, experimental, self-determinist, or doing it for the LOLs. 

While the advent of the internet turbocharged the movement, it isn’t new by any means. Scholars point to Scott County, Tennessee, which, angered by the state’s joining of the confederacy, declared itself the independent State of Scott in 1861. John Lennon of The Beatles, facing deportation, conceived the intangible micronation of Nutopia with Yoko Ono in 1973.

President Kevin Baugh of Molossia, maybe the most high-profile micronation in existence today, told PA Local by phone from his corner of the Nevada desert: “I don’t necessarily think it’s … role-playing. Maybe there’s a certain amount of that, but really for most micronationalists it’s the exploration of what makes a country a country. And we explore that every single day.” 

Baugh, a U.S. Army vet and “benevolent dictator” who’s banned spinach and onions in Molossia because he doesn’t like them, acknowledges it’s all a little “tongue-in-cheek.” McHenry said humor also works to keep extremists at arm's length.

The Republic of Molossia’s citizenry includes Baugh, his wife, their four dogs, and dozens of extended family members who live outside the walls of the 11-acre domain, which draws its fair share of tourists and news crews to a dusty strip of land an hour south of Reno. 

Molossia briefly expanded into Pennsylvania in 2006, when McHenry offered Baugh an annex, so to speak, on family land in Columbia County, a short drive from Ricketts Glen State Park. McHenry says the land was granted to an ancestor by William Penn’s son, John.

Baugh and McHenry called it the Protectorate of New Antrim. 

The arrangement weathered a dispute over a Molossian tobacco ban that McHenry resented, a showdown with another micronation — dramatized in the official lore and dubbed the Battle of Lake Jean — and ended when McHenry left to pursue acting in Los Angeles in 2009. (He’s currently splitting his time between Pennsylvania and Brazil, where his fiancée lives.)

Westarctica started years before the Molossia Accord, but McHenry had stepped away for a time, he says amid scrutiny from his higher-ups in the U.S. Navy.

“I just wanted a place where I could be alone,” McHenry told Conde Nast Traveller in 2016 of his South Pole venture. The plan backfired spectacularly and McHenry was ultimately deluged with administrative tasks, emails, and social media notifications.

Jordan Farmer, a fellow military veteran and health care technology worker based out of Tucson, “went down the micronation rabbit hole” after seeing a 2017 Vice News documentary on the annual MicroCon gathering. He was later elected Westarctica’s prime minister — a position he no longer holds — and remains a citizen and administrator of a members-only Facebook group.

“Micronationalism saw a huge surge in popularity during the 2016 to 2020 time period, especially from those here in the United States, and I think a lot of that had to do with a sense of hopelessness with the way political discourse was headed at the national level,” Farmer said. 

“I think the types of people we [meaning Westarctica] attract are a little more eco-minded, those who are concerned about climate change.”

Westarctica, founded almost 20 years ago on the continent’s western tundra, lists a climate change-focused mission on its website and the goal of initiating related conversations via “one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet.” While awaiting international recognition from the United Nations or a member state, with no takers so far, McHenry has made it a climate-focused nonprofit.

Those applying for citizenship are digitally vetted. There’s a nominal filing fee — Farmer puts it at around $5, noting other micronations charge hundreds or thousands of dollars for theirs, often providing dubious travel documents to justify the cost. Westarctica does not.

“We ask for a brief description of why they’re trying to join and it’s obvious some people are trying to immigrate out of their current nation, places like Pakistan, and as much as we feel for those people, we’re not in a place to do anything for them,” Farmer says. “We don’t provide passports. We can’t help them get a Visa. And so we let them know.”

McHenry says Westarctica citizens run the gamut, from high school grads to PhD recipients, most of them “looking for something a little extra in their lives, something just a little different from the daily humdrum existence.” 

Westarctica is structured like a constitutional monarchy with McHenry on top and dressed like a junta leader. He says the citizenry has embraced it. It’s also possible no one else wants to lead. (In Molossia, there are no elections because Baugh says, “No one is interested in this job.”)

McHenry plans to vote in November’s U.S. presidential election. He “leans Democratic.” 

But the same citizenship that allows him to cast that ballot may be standing in the way of legitimizing his claim to Westarctica, he theorizes, citing past conversations with lawyers. 

McHenry points to a 65-year-old, scientific research-minded treaty in which 12 countries — the U.S. among them — barred claims to the area by their governments and citizens. (Fifty-seven countries have joined in total.)

“I would have to go to a place where The Antarctic Treaty is not valid, you know, some sub-Saharan country or something, and make the claim again,” McHenry said. “Then it could be considered legally valid, but whether the claim was recognized [by the international community] would be another story…” 

It probably wouldn’t be. The hurdles to micronation actualization are many, and the diplomatic risks for established nations recognizing upstarts almost always outweigh any reward. 

McHenry isn’t planning to renounce his U.S. citizenship, and he isn’t giving up on his Westarctica quest either, claiming the eponymous nonprofit is now registered with the NGO branch of the United Nations, calling it a “first foot in the door.”  

Not everyone cares. 

“We do have those in our community who treat it as, ‘Oh, that’s absolutely our goal,” Farmer said of international recognition. “But I think most of us realize that’s a pipe dream. It’s not something that’s likely to ever happen. It’s more about making a statement, you know, hopefulness.”

—Colin Deppen, newsletter editor