Kevin Baugh pays his Story County property taxes every year, but he labels the payment foreign aid. This deep dive is the biography of a childhood daydream that never ended: the Republic of Molossia, an unrecognized micronation on 11.3 acres near Dayton, Nevada. We trace its origins to 1977, when a teenage Baugh inspired by the satirical film The Mouse That Roared founded the Grand Republic of Vuldstein and made a friend king, through iterations like the Kingdom of Zaria and the United Provinces of Utopia, to the 1998 land purchase that gave the project physical territory.

We explore the nation-building that followed: a flag that is Sierra Leone's inverted, the Bank of Molossia issuing plastic Valora coins pegged to the US dollar, a national anthem, a non-alcoholic national drink of Sprite, grenadine and pineapple juice, and a legal code ba ...