Lacorne is less enthusiastic. Sure, Bitcoin is a fine currency for anonymous trading, but it doesn’t look great to the outside world. But switching to a Liberland bank might be an aid to tax evasion, one audience member points out.

"Not tax evasion, tax management," Lacorne says, shaking one finger in the air.

I spoke with Bitcoin George by phone after the conference to probe a little further into his background. George keeps his last name under wraps; on Facebook, where so much intra-Liberland communication takes place, he's known simply as "Happy George," and this is how he identifies himself to me. "There're tax havens, there's a lot of offshore places, there's a lot of free countries, there's a lot of free places,” he said, “but there isn't the place that is really a kind of bastion or… testing pad or testing track to see what happens when a government is limited—not by goals, not by some weird constitution, but by Bitcoin."

I ask him whether he'll take part in Liberland events going forward. "I want to do Liberland yoni massage conferences," he tells me. He describes this as a “special, very powerful love-centric massage.” Later, via Facebook, he offers me a free yoni massage. He follows up with a GIF of one fox kneading another fox's back, a red heart rising above them and then bursting like a bubble.

Just before noon on the second day of the conference, Jedlička announces that anyone who hasn't yet checked out of the hotel needs to do so immediately. This comes as a surprise to many of us, who did not know that the second leg of the conference was to take place not in Novi Sad, as stated on the registration website, but in the town of Sombor, closer to the Croatian border and to Liberland.

In Sombor, chaos ensues because Team Liberland apparently has not confirmed the hotel reservations for the conference attendees. While we wait on the street with our bags, I introduce myself to an American woman, here with her husband, who wears precisely the facial expression of someone whose spouse has flown her out to small-town Serbia to attend a poorly organized conference for a nonexistent country populated by men exercising their right to offend.

I think we could be friends. Not a lot of estrogen around here, I remark. Her husband steps in to explain: Men are more adventurous, and they're the ones who like to conquer the world. Women, he says, prefer the security of the home.

It's already dark by the time we're all checked in and on our way to a party the president has set up for us at a restaurant in Croatia. After one too many altercations with the Croatian police, Jedlička himself was served with a ban from the country, so he won't be joining us. As our bus arrives at the border, a member of the group instructs us not to mention Liberland.

"I want to do Liberland yoni massage conferences," he tells me. He describes this as a “special, very powerful love-centric massage.”

Everyone gets a stamp in their passport except for a young Austrian man with a mane of tangled hair. I’d met him that morning over breakfast, and when I asked his name, he’d quietly pulled my hand to his lips. But when Allahwala suggested that Trump’s candidacy had mobilized the Ku Klux Klan, he said that the KKK had come out of the Democratic Party. And besides, the KKK hasn't had nearly the influence that the Black Lives Matter people have had.

Border police interrogate the Austrian while the rest of us wait hungrily. This is not his first rodeo with the Croatians, I later learn. In the year after the country was founded, the Liberland Settlement Association regularly sent groups of activists to the area knowing that they would be arrested, and then spent thousands of Euros’ worth of governmental funds to bail them out of jail. Border officials recognize the Austrian, our passports are collected again, and our cover is blown.

Time inches towards midnight as we wait for him to be released. Men begin to smoke on the dark bottom floor of the bus. Jim Turney, former Chair of the Libertarian National Committee, tells several hours’ worth of American political stories to a captive audience. A guy in his early twenties who has longboarded to the conference all the way from the Netherlands says, gleefully, that we are all going to jail. (He also boasts that he hasn't changed his clothes for the past six weeks.) We're forced to leave the bus and not allowed to bring anything except cigarettes with us. It strikes me as oddly Serbo-Croatian that cigarettes are allowed.

Don't worry, says one guy to our group: our Croatian bus driver has “fixed it.” Nothing appears fixed.

After four hours at the border, the police send us back to Serbia, and those of us from outside the European Union are forced to sign documents confirming that we were refused entry to Croatia. And this is when something changes for me. At one in the morning, exhausted and hungry, and with a bus full of men who are thrilled to be in conflict with an establishment, I, who have nearly every privilege in the world, feel stifled, ripped off, and unfree. I’m pissed at a president for leading me astray, mentally calculating who else is to blame, and indignant on behalf of my gender about the baseless enthusiasm of the men on the bus, including the guy next to me, who continues to ask probing questions about my sex life. This is the closest I’ve felt to being a Liberlander. But it doesn’t ignite a revolutionary fire beneath me. It just makes me want to take a nap.

I’ll need to hire a lawyer to appeal the Croatians’ decision, and maybe that's why I'm invited to fly back to Prague in Air Liberland. Over the roar of the six-seater’s engine, I ask Jedlička about his ragtag group of supporters. “I’m happy that Liberland has brought together such a great group of people,” he says. “I had to tell only one person so far to stop representing Liberland.” He tells me it would be nice if I could write about the people of Liberland. “It’s so many people I tend to forget some of the important ones.”

“But no women,” I say.

“No, no—we’ve got Monika,” he replies. (Chlumská has since left her role as Foreign Minister. She was replaced by an Ecuadorian-Italian man named José Miguel Maschietto, the subject of music-world scandal and an entertaining YouTube video accusing him of Catch Me If You Can-style international deception. Maschietto was swiftly dismissed after a journalist for the BBC shared this information with Jedlička. He was replaced by Thomas Walls, an American, who recently told The Washington Post that a prominent supporter of the Liberland movement was a close adviser to a Trump cabinet member.)

We fly over the micronation, and Jedlička smiles down at his country. I wonder if he fears that those three square miles could someday disappear, or be taken from him, and that's why he feels the need to check in on them so often, as if to make sure they're still there, still unpopulated. This pet project of Jedlička’s strikes me as something akin to buying and naming your own star: an investment that manages to shine regardless of the fact that it isn’t, technically, even yours, and that it may have fizzled out a long time ago.