Are We Not Men? We are Kudzu!

Twin Oaks Community

3,089 words

The Kavanaugh/Blasey-Ford/#MeToo cluster-debacle has me lately remembering Rebecca.

Bear with me.

I was living in Seattle and working for a municipal codes publisher as a proofer. Our desks abutted, so we spent a lot of our day tossing anything we could think of by way of conversation over the cubicle wall to break the deadly-dull monotony of our jobs. She, at twenty-one, was half my age. She had started to become what I perceived as flirty. Surely I was mistaken.

Rebecca had never learned to drive. She was a city girl from Portland and had always taken the bus wherever she needed to go. But her parents had offered her a car they no longer wanted. She only needed to get her license. One day, when she was discussing this with another girl in our department (and hinting loud enough so I would overhear), I found myself offering to teach her to drive.

Thus began a whirlwind romance that I count as one of the best times of my life. It was a wildly passionate time. We got no sleep! And you can easily guess why. We’d groggily do our jobs during the week and then on weekends take off exploring the country as far north, south, east, or west as we could go and still make it back by Monday morning. We put some miles on my little Tercel, I mean to tell you! Vancouver, Victoria, Whistler, Glacier National Park, the Pacific coast, the Canadian Rockies, Idaho – drivin’ by day, lovin’ by night.

But like all good things, it couldn’t last. And didn’t. And when it ended, it ended badly. Which brings me back to #MeToo. As our relationship careened toward its ugly end, I found myself reminded of the depth of the female propensity to lie, for projection, and the utter turncoat vindictiveness and slippery loyalties of the cheating (yes, of course) female. In rather short order, as a result of all the above, I was fired from my job, not coincidentally by another female – a committed ballbuster, if ever there was one: the company President.

I had been in Seattle for a few years, but had not really established any strong friendships. I was feeling pretty low and turned to everyone I knew, and even tried to make new friends, in an attempt to deal with my anguish. But after a couple of months, I decided to leave and return home to my native South Carolina. Maybe it’s just me, but Seattle, in my opinion, is a very lonely place. Uniquely so; I’ve lived in other large cities, but none were nearly so emotionally dark. It’s not surprising that the city has a high suicide rate. There’s something about Puget Sound that sucks in all manner of human flotsam and jetsam. Freaks, loners, losers – everyone I knew was from somewhere else. And seemingly all running away from something.

I had some money saved, so I decided to take a hike on the Appalachian Trail. I had made several long backpacking trips on the AT before, ranging from six hundred to two thousand miles. I love the woods, and I love to walk. It’s a great adventure that I would strongly recommend to any and all of our ilk. It’s an almost exclusively white experience, for starters. And it has many lessons to teach. At the end of your hike, you will be in the best shape of your life. For better or worse, most of the hikers you will meet are young, college-aged people. And yes, mostly liberal – they are but children, after all. I was a liberal myself back then. Even at 43, I hadn’t yet figured it out.

But this is not about the AT or Rebecca. It’s about what I did next.

I had just lost the best relationship of my life to that point, lost my job, and was in the process of losing my mind. I was feeling the old existential angst. Besides which I was a dumbass liberal. So what did I do? I went to a commune. Of course!

I did a three-week formal visit to Twin Oaks farm, just outside of Charlottesville, with the notion of moving there permanently. The three-week visit is a sort of visitor-paid audition for membership, to see if you fit in with the residents and their way of living. At the end of that time, you get a thumbs up or down, and you can move in or hit the bricks accordingly.

I’ve been an observer and devotee of Alt Right politics since just after Obama’s reelection, and lately find myself concerned at the slow pace at which our dream of a white homeland is being achieved. I want, in my small way, to try to shake things up a bit. I want to see if there is anything to be learned from my Twin Oaks experience.

My last piece here was a critique of the chronic, distracting idea that space colonization somehow figures into the Dissident Right vision. I stated my agreement with the idea that a space program is a good thing. There are many benefits to be derived from such a pursuit. But colonization is the stuff of fantasy. Whether you agree or disagree, the point to focus on is the distance between that conception and that of a White Nationalism with boots firmly on the ground. Fantasies of space colonization are a diversion. I’m not getting any younger, and my patience is limited for such nonsense. Focus, people.

The idea, as I understand it, is that dreams of space colonization are supposed to somehow motivate us to achieve our dream of a white homeland. It won’t. It’s procrastination: putting off today’s task for a tomorrow that will never come. This is not how one advances, either as an individual or as a movement. The way to advance one’s mission is through setting and achieving small, attainable goals at first, that will grow as more power and resources become available to achieve them. This should be our focus: setting White Nationalist goals and reaching them, not trusting our future to a handful of employees of a government that hates us, only to realize at some point well into the future the impossibility of achieving the Star Trek fantasy due to the hard limits of energy resources. And at that time, because we’ve been reaching for the stars instead of building our community, we still won’t have founded Whiteland (as I’ll call it, for the sake of convenience). And even if we do somehow manage to achieve it, given our current social trajectory, it will amount to nothing more than sending a diverse (there’s that word) group of humans into space so that their descendants will all be of mixed race. You know that is what would happen.

Back to the commune. Established in 1967 by a bunch of useless hippies, the intentional community of Twin Oaks has nevertheless managed to survive, and by some standards even prospered. I won’t waste time on its history, as it’s of no great interest to you or me. I only want to explore the idea of starting our own community, based on the lessons of my Twin Oaks experience.

Twin Oaks is situated on four hundred fifty acres of Virginia farmland. They have approximately a hundred full-time members, with roughly a dozen prospective members doing their three-week “audition” visits a couple of times each year (with many more touring the facility on weekends). These prospective members pay a small fee – sixty dollars, when I was there – to attend. It appears, if I may be so cynical, that a secondary reason for these visits is to bring in supplemental labor to do the dirty jobs that the regulars don’t want to do.

Though the property had been paid off nearly twenty years earlier, work was still nevertheless required (forty-two hours per week) of all members and prospective members. The community had several businesses: They hand-wove hammocks for sale on a wholesale basis, made tofu for various local restaurants and grocers, did book indexing, and had an organic seed business.

The regular members didn’t weave hammocks. This easily learned, but rather boring, job appeared to be carried on solely by the prospective members. One quickly got creative, coming up with other tasks to do (which had to be approved by the powers-that-be) in order to avoid weaving hammocks. I, for example, after working in the communal kitchen and finding not a single usable knife, requested that I be allowed to spend an afternoon sharpening knives. Other work I did included bee-keeping, chasing down escaped cows, and “picking out” (learning by ear) songs on a guitar and teaching them to members who were putting on a show for the community. (The performance was considered work, as well.)

I wanted to work in the dairy and the sawmill. (Their hammocks had some wooden parts that were cut from oak trees harvested on the property.) I wanted to learn tofu and cheese-making. But you couldn’t always get the assignments you wanted. The dirty job I did not want but could not avoid was cleaning mold off the walls and ceilings of a members-built structure that had been abandoned for exactly that reason. Air conditioning was allowed only in one building that was reserved for the elderly, so this partially underground and poorly-ventilated building necessarily hd problems with mold and mildew. Twin Oaks grew much of their own food, so there was work available in the fields – work I was all too happy to leave for others, as I’m not a big fan of working in the hot Sun.

I also cleared a fallow field that had become overgrown. This experience pointed to one of the problems with communal living: deferred responsibility. I could hardly find a tool – whether it was a bush axe, machete, loppers, or whatever – that was not broken, let alone sharpened. So, once again, I had to go on sharpening duty. When things are owned collectively, no one takes care of those things. Tools broken or abused were somebody else’s problem, and were generally not repaired.

As a woodworker, I was interested in checking out the community’s wood shop – a separate facility from the sawmill. I found the same irresponsibility there: neglected tools, broken or missing parts, poor organization, and so on.

Twin Oaks sells itself as an egalitarian community, but hierarchy, it seems, is inevitable. The long-time members were the leaders. They organized and led meetings, and appeared to make a lot of decisions. These decisions were purportedly made democratically, but most of the members didn’t show up for the meetings. The long-timers had the cushy jobs, of course, many of which involved merely talking to the “new meat” (as they termed us – and yes, a sexual connotation was implied). This was necessary to let the newbies know how things worked. Necessary, but nonetheless cushy.

There was one male long-timer I remember in particular. He was said to be from a wealthy family. Appearing younger than his actual age (early forties), he was tall, quite good-looking, very outgoing, a natural leader, and a genuinely nice guy. Every woman on the property had a story about him. They all pined for him. He had slept with every woman at the place! This was despite the fact that he was part of a three-way marriage to a woman and her other husband. Such promiscuousness is a problem, and should be discouraged. His behavior resulted in many jilted women leaving the community. Hierarchy is inevitable, but so is the resentment when it is unjust. Pushback is warranted in such cases.

The physically attractive at Twin Oaks got plenty of sex, the homely got none. Unless you were a female, that is. Men, sadly, significantly outnumber women in communes. And the females are generally not of the highest quality. Too many fat chicks – although nevertheless, they never lacked attention.

In the “other” column, there was one gay male and one male-to-female tranny, a burly ex-Navy man with anchors tattooed on his forearms, long hair, long nails, usually wearing a short skirt, and with an apparently intact penis.

On the plus side, communitarian living was a very white experience. There was one black female, a former member, who was an established fixture in the Acorn community (an offshoot of Twin Oaks, located seven miles away). Directly or indirectly, Twin Oaks birthed several other communities in addition to Acorn. There’s Living Energy farm, the Sapling community nearby, and the East Wind community in Missouri. And that’s the lesson that I’m trying to impart – make a start, and then grow. Dreams don’t get it done.

Drugs were not a problem at Twin Oaks. Nobody could afford them, for the most part. There was a very small structure on the property that was the only place where smoking was allowed. On one occasion, I got a whiff of marijuana smoke as I was walking by.

When members joined, they were expected to give all of their money and resources – vehicles, for example – to the community. Who knows how many actually did. I don’t imagine many who come to such a place have much to give. Members were paid a very small wage for their work, and were allowed to go into town every so often on a regular schedule – but not whenever they wanted. The community maintained a small fleet of vehicles for such trips and various other necessary excursions.

I was invited to join the community, but declined. One long-timer described me as a conservative, which puzzled me at the time. My biggest problem with the place was that there was just not enough privacy. There were a limited number of communal houses on the property, and apart from having your own room, you shared every other space with your dozen or so housemates. Community members must of necessity be very sociable. I am not. While most every night, my housemates in the guesthouse would be off playing board games or just hanging out and talking, I was usually the only one who stayed behind to read in peace and quiet. Commies love to talk. They can’t get enough of it. They never shut up.

Television was not allowed (good idea), but there was a movie night two or three times a week. There were also a couple of decrepit computers for Internet access.

I think you have a fair idea of what life was like at Twin Oaks community. So what do I propose we do with this information?

There’s an expression: “Wherever you are, with what you have, right now.” Start small, but start now. The prospects that the Trump administration will ever start protecting us and our “evil” ideas seem remote. Even just arranging a conference is difficult these days. But what if all the Dissident Right groups got together, pooled resources, and bought a piece of land on which to build a meeting house? Ideally, such a place would be remote enough to make it difficult for the Antifa to reach it, and should be situated in such an area that additional adjacent properties could be easily added to increase the size of our seedling empire. But, of course, vandalism would always be a possibility, so there would need to be permanent residents to protect the place.

People who choose to live in communes are generally not ideal citizens. They tend to be creative types, footloose people in their twenties experiencing the world for the first time and anxious to drink it all in. And they tend to not stay put for very long, especially in a “boring” rural setting. But you fight with the army you have, right? And the surest way to lose is to avoid the necessary fight.

It appears to me that the only sources of income our movement has come from donations and book sales. Neither of these attract the kind of numbers, both in terms of cash and people, needed to form a stable base on which to build our new society. What if we – on this newly-minted island of white sanity – were to start various businesses? We wouldn’t make hammocks, and we sure as hell wouldn’t make tofu, but there are things we could do to get the money flowing into Whiteland. I have a few skills that could be the basis for a company or two. I’m sure many of us are similarly endowed.

May I suggest we locate Whiteland near the Appalachian Trail? We could open a hiker hostel, and not only increase our income, but present our message to many dozens of youths every year. We may even win some converts. Count on it! And some, if allowed, would choose to stick around, leading to a rapid population expansion. Additionally, as many (young, strong, and fertile) women hike the AT, this would be a good way of attracting the attention of that difficult-to-access market.

Locating in the mountains would ensure a more welcoming environment for our White Nationalist venture, as mountain towns are almost invariably conservative. And just as with Twin Oaks, members who can’t hack the rural existence would likely migrate to the nearest town, in essence “taking it over.” Again, expansion – slow but steady growth.

Let me say that I do not propose this path as an end-goal. If this is as far as we can go, we have indeed failed. Think of this as only a beginning, and a way of productively biding our time until our day arrives, as it surely will. It would also be an effective way of working the bugs out of our ideas of what Whiteland should be, from a sociological perspective.

A movement cannot sustain itself without a chain of successes. No one is willing to wait forever. A movement that doesn’t have a series of accomplished goals to which it can point will be discredited, and eventually abandoned. These proposals are mere baby steps. Surely, building a meeting hall on cheap land we own is not too tall an order as a first step. As our European brothers are legally hogtied in their own countries, I imagine they also might be willing to contribute to our efforts.

This is achievable. This is not vaporous. This is something beyond mere words on a computer screen. We need but to plant our seed on a little patch of ground to then, like kudzu, overrun the globe and bring in the new zeitgeist. Put on your work boots and let’s get to it!