Loving County, in northwest Texas, may have the highest trouble-to-resident ratio in the United States. With sixty-four inhabitants, as of the 2020 census, the county is the least populated in the country. Control of its top elected positions—sheriff, judge, constable, county clerk—can be swung by a handful of votes. Many of those vying for power are related to, and estranged from, their opponents. Election results are regularly challenged by the losing candidate, sometimes repeatedly; this past November, Loving County reran three races from its 2022 elections.

Driving the long, empty roads that lead to the county seat, Mentone, an outsider might wonder what all the fighting is for. This part of the state is mostly scrubland, alternately windswept and sunbaked. Roy Orbison spent part of his childhood in Wink, a city close by, and got out as quickly as he could. “There was a lot of loneliness in West Texas where I grew up,” Orbison told an interviewer. “We used to say it was the center of everything, five hundred miles from anything.” He once said, “It was tough as could be, but no illusions, you know? No mysteries in Wink.” The area is known for brutal heat with little relief; a town just up the road is called, aptly, Notrees. But Mentone is situated near the center of the Permian Basin, the nation’s most productive oil-and-gas field. As many as fifteen thousand oil-and-gas workers pass through the county daily, and the industry has made Loving County one of Texas’s richest jurisdictions per capita, thanks in part to the fracking boom. Tax revenue amounts to roughly a million dollars per resident, and the county budget has more than doubled since 2020. Many county jobs, including paramedic, maintenance technician, and clerk, come with six-figure salaries.

Yet Mentone has no church, grocery store, cemetery, or school. What it does have is a legacy of enmity stretching back decades. In the twentieth century, several families—the Hoppers, the Creagers, the Joneses—competed for control of the town. When Pamela Colloff surveyed the county’s “spiteful, tribal politics” for Texas Monthly, in the mid-nineties, she found elections that were “knock-down-drag-out fights” animated by “the tangled web of family rivalries, personal vendettas, and enduring grudges among locals.” Some of those clans have since dwindled or decamped for more populated areas. But the habit of feuding remains, though these days it’s largely confined to infighting between factions of the Jones family. “If we had a movie theatre, or a mall, or five thousand people, or even one thousand people, things would be radically different,” Steve Simonsen, the county attorney, told me. “There’s not anything else to occupy people.”

The most recent spate of drama ignited in 2021, after Skeet Jones, the county judge, reported that five cows had been found shot dead by the side of the road. A “confidential informant” from “the inner circle of the Jones family” helped an investigator specializing in livestock crimes, who came to believe that the judge was rounding up stray cattle and selling them at auction, according to a criminal complaint. Skeet said that his sales of strays had the blessing of the sheriff, and that the proceeds were given to charity. (The sheriff at the time denied making this arrangement.) The mystery of the dead cows was never solved, but Skeet and three other men were arrested for cattle rustling. (The charges have since been dismissed.) A few days later, after Skeet’s son showed up for jury duty, he was put in handcuffs. He and three others were arrested for contempt; according to Amber King, the justice of the peace, they falsely claimed residency in the county while actually living elsewhere. (These cases have also been dismissed.)

The incidents made visible the growing schism between Skeet Jones and his nephew, Brandon Jones, the county constable. Skeet’s faction maintains that they have been the subjects of political persecution. Brandon—who is widely suspected of being the livestock investigator’s confidential informant—has argued that his uncle runs the town as though he’s above the law. (Brandon declined to comment on the identity of the informant.) Both sides have filed a flurry of lawsuits and countersuits naming each other. (The filings, with their absurdly heightened rhetoric, can make for odd reading. In an application for a temporary restraining order and injunction against Brandon, one of Skeet’s allies claimed, among other things, that Brandon raised his eyebrows “in an intimidating manner” during a proceeding.)

Elections have become proxy battles in the family war, with each side furnishing candidates for local offices. (Loving County is, on the whole, a deeply conservative place, but a number of its elected officials—including Skeet—run as Democrats, as if the political realignments of the past seventy years had bypassed the county while its residents were consumed by more local concerns.) “Any voter can challenge the registration of any other voter, and, in Loving County, just about every vote we have has some kind of civil challenge,” David Landersman, the county sheriff, said. He also serves as the county’s voter registrar.

The feud in Loving County is marked by both intensity and stasis, with the two sides locked in a small-town version of trench warfare. One recent election was won by a single vote; another resulted in a tie. Then, in 2024, a third element entered the system, in the unlikely form of a hustle-culture evangelist from Indiana named Malcolm Tanner.

In 2023, Teresa, a woman living in South Carolina, was driving a snaking road down a mountain when a word popped into her head: “Texas.” Two years later, it happened again. This time, the word was “West.” Shortly afterward, she saw a social-media post by Tanner, a tall and confident self-proclaimed C.E.O. and real-estate mogul. Tanner spoke in a blend of political rabble-rousing and entrepreneurial uplift. He urged his three hundred thousand Facebook followers to head to a place that Teresa was hearing about for the first time: Loving County. “See you in Texas soon,” he wrote in a post. “Thank you all for saying YES to finding a true political home with us!”

Owing to its wealth, the county had caught the attention of political interlopers in the past. In 2005, a handful of libertarians attempted, with little success, to wrest control of the government. The idea of taking over the county occasionally circulates on X and YouTube as “the craziest deal in America.”

Tanner had pitched a number of grand visions in recent years. He was going to develop a dilapidated former Y.M.C.A. building in central Indiana into a hotel; he was going to host a Million Man March, also in Indiana; he was going to run for President and institute reparations for what he referred to as “melanated people.” None of his schemes panned out. Then, in 2024, he turned his attention to Loving County. Tanner’s followers could move to Texas, win elected positions, and receive “free political homes,” he claimed. (He also suggested a new name: Tanner County.) On Clubhouse, the live voice-chat platform, he hosted raucous, engaging meetings twice a day. “I retired, I was bored, and it was just something to do. I was meeting a lot of people, you know, melanated people from all over the world—good people,” Erica Marshall, a former member of Tanner’s circle who has become one of his most vocal critics, told me. Tanner was “very manipulative,” she said. “He’s managed to have people quit their jobs, leave their homes. They sold all of their things except the stuff that they could fit in their car, and they went to Loving County, just like that.” (Marshall never made it to Texas.)

In October, I drove to Mentone. It was my first time in Loving County and, given all I’d heard about the sparse population, I was expecting tumbleweeds and eerie Panhandle silence. But the town was bustling, the roads full of pickup trucks and heavy equipment; at the gas station, I had to wait in line for a pump, as oil workers commuted to and from work.

There’s no traditional hotel in Mentone; instead, I stayed the night in a man camp, a kind of oil-field version of an all-inclusive resort, complete with a cafeteria, a gym, and multiple game rooms. The next morning, I attended a proceeding for one of the ongoing Jones v. Jones lawsuits. In this instance, Brandon’s wife and father—Skeet’s brother—faced allegations including conspiracy and fraud stemming from the dead-cattle investigation. (They have denied the charges.) Around a dozen representatives from the two factions sat on opposite sides of the small, pecan-wood-panelled courtroom. The judge wore a bolo tie, and, after listening to brief opening statements, offered to recuse himself; when he was a prosecutor, he’d discussed a related case with the livestock-crimes investigator. Afterward, Skeet declined to comment, while some of the women sitting on his side of the courtroom chatted me up with tactical friendliness. (Residents have become good at identifying journalists in their midst; the county’s drama has been covered by the Times, Rolling Stone, and NBC, among others.) Outside, Brandon caught up with me. He said that he didn’t feel safe speaking at the courthouse, where both he and his uncle work, and asked to meet on the outskirts of town.

Small towns in Texas once operated like patriarchal fiefs, with a singular figure dominating local business, politics, and real estate; the town or county may have even shared a name with his family. (The nation got a taste of this big-man style of governing via Lyndon Johnson, who grew up in Johnson City, Texas.) In Loving County, Skeet’s critics maintain, the practice is ongoing. Skeet, who is in his seventies, has been the judge—Loving County’s top position—for eighteen years. (His father, Punk, was the sheriff for nearly three decades.) Skeet is also the majority owner of P&M Jones Family Ranch, a sprawling property and a significant generator of revenue. A number of county employees work for the ranch, live in properties that it owns, or have been sold ranch land for a fraction of its market value. Skeet, a member of a conservative Christian denomination that believes drinking is a sin, enforces an alcohol ban on ranch property. When I asked Simonsen, the county attorney, how it was possible to enforce this kind of informal injunction, he laughed. “I would call it more formal,” he said. “In town, there’s one place to buy alcohol, and everybody talks.” But Simonsen, who is married to Skeet’s cousin, said insinuations that the judge was exerting control by doling out property didn’t add up: “I’ve seen him help get people into houses, or sell people land at a good rate, and they become his political enemies.”

This style of family-power politics reliably produces dissidents and black sheep—in this case, Brandon, a son of Skeet’s younger brother. Tall, devout, and tightly wound, Brandon grew up in neighboring Winkler County before moving to the Fort Worth area, where he worked as a blacksmith. In 2012, he and his wife, Holly, relocated to Loving County, to help care for his father following his mother’s death. After he became constable, in 2017, he attended law-enforcement training, where some things he learned—for instance, that it was strongly frowned upon to hire close friends and family, because of potential conflicts of interest—made him question how Loving County was being run. The more he went against Skeet’s wishes, Brandon said, the more he was frozen out, among relatives and at work. He had the sense that people were talking behind his back; ugly rumors about his family began circulating around town. A whistle-blower lawsuit from a former county employee who is not related to the Jones family alleged that Skeet, his sister (who is the county clerk), and others “would often talk openly in their office about their beliefs that the [King family] and Brandon Jones were evil and discuss how God would rain fire on them and they would pay, and would work on County time to research lawsuits and legal allegations that could be brought against the Kings and Brandon Jones.” (The county settled the whistle-blower lawsuit, but Simonsen rejected the allegations. “I saw that woman every day, and she never once said anything about that to me,” he told me.)

A relative who’d also been ostracized by the family suggested to Brandon that he look into the psychological dynamics of abuse. Soon, he had new terminology to explain what was happening to him: DARVO, gaslighting, love-bombing. “You come out here and people show you kindness, they shower you with gifts—you can’t describe it until you’ve experienced it, and if you try to convince someone of it you look crazy for it,” he told me. “It’s a whole narcissistic abuse cycle that we’re stuck in—and it’s gone on for decades.”

In 2024, the county commissioners—who, according to Brandon, tend to defer to his uncle—voted to cut the constable’s salary from roughly a hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars a year to roughly thirty-one thousand dollars. “Five words—bad behavior and poor performance,” Skeet explained to the Houston Chronicle. The county also elected to halve the salary of the sheriff, who had beaten Skeet’s preferred candidate, and to eliminate two of six deputy positions. (Although Texas recently passed legislation punishing municipalities that defund the police, the law doesn’t apply to jurisdictions as small as Loving County.)

Not long afterward, law enforcement began receiving tips about “a guy doing online posts who says he’s going to come in and take over the government,” according to Landersman, the sheriff. Residents began to notice strange faces popping up in town. “You pretty much know everybody around here,” Caydee Carr, Skeet’s niece, told me. If you do see someone new, she said, “they’re wearing a uniform that says ‘oil field.’ ” The strangers—all of whom were Black, an anomaly in Mentone—were spotted filling up containers of water from spigots on private property. More than a dozen of the newcomers registered to vote.

Meanwhile, Tanner had bought two five-acre properties and announced online that he had “taken over” the county. He posted pictures and videos of smiling people hoisting lumber and framing houses. “Just gave 24 properties away,” he wrote. In August, Teresa put her dogs in her S.U.V. and headed west. She told me that per Tanner’s instructions, she’d already sent him a hundred-dollar monthly donation and registered to vote in Loving County. It took nearly twenty-four hours of driving to reach West Texas. In Mentone, she met a woman who led her even farther out into the middle of nowhere.

What she saw alarmed her. According to law enforcement, the group living at Tanner’s Loving County compound has comprised as many as thirty people, many of them women and children. Most were living in R.V.s or tents. There was no running water or septic system on the property, and the group appeared to be burning trash in a pit. Teresa claims that the meals were largely communal and residents were expected to abide by strict rules: no alcohol, drugs, weapons, or pets. If Teresa wanted to stay, she’d need to drop her dogs off at the local shelter. The R.V.s were all occupied, but she could order a tent and camping supplies on Amazon. “I’m looking around, like, they must’ve lost their cotton-picking minds,” Teresa told me. She went to stay in a motel. She returned twice more to help out with construction, but was even more dismayed; when Tanner crossed her path, he didn’t even introduce himself. (She has since moved to a city in the Permian Basin, and is no longer in contact with the group.)

After a Houston Chronicle story about the Tannerites went viral, last September, Mentone filled up with a different set of strangers: state troopers, investigators from the attorney general’s office, and F.B.I. agents. The state issued an injunction preventing people from living on Tanner’s property, in part owing to the sewage issues. But, when law enforcement went to serve the papers, Tanner was nowhere to be found; there are no signs that he has spent significant time in the county in months, sources told me.

After the injunction, the Tannerites relocated to the other five-acre parcel in Loving County that Tanner owned. (This property, too, is under action by the state.) Some people seemed to hope that the group would soon dissipate of its own accord. “The weather is very, very bad here,” Landersman said. “There’s big winter winds that come through here—that sends people out, even people with houses.” The group has dwindled in size, but, at least so far, some of the newcomers seem determined to stick it out. (Tanner did not respond to requests for comment, and one of his followers declined to be interviewed.)

In December, a video was posted to Tanner’s TikTok account recruiting new people to join the Melanated People of Power movement. A woman’s voice spoke over the sound of a humming generator, describing moving to Loving County as a “voluntary self-funded life-style choice for adults who believe in empowerment, community, and independent living.” The video suggested that prospective residents arrive with two two-hundred-and-seventy-five-gallon water totes, a propane tank, a water pump, and personal-hygiene items. This fall, sources told me, members of the group registered to run for every countywide office up for election in 2026. (Tanner himself is not a candidate; nor has he registered to vote in the county.) Simonsen told me that he was doubtful Skeet’s enemies would go so far as to vote for a stranger over him. “It’s one of those things where ‘I know that devil, but I don’t know the other devil,’ ” he said. But others were less certain. “The Tanners really throw it up in the air. We don’t know what they’re going to do,” Carr, Skeet’s niece, said.

Brandon Jones had little positive to say about Tanner. “I’m afraid that these people who’ve come here with high hopes, he’s going to leave them hanging,” he told me. After Brandon’s water bill was unusually high one month, a rumor started going around town that he was providing the compound with water, which he has denied. (He says that he had a leaking water trough.) But he sympathizes with some of the newcomers. They’ve been attempting to find a new way to live in a place that is hostile beyond just the environment. “They’re trying awful hard,” he said. “They’re sticking their necks out to be here.” ♦