Welcome to The Citadel, a planned fortified community in which future far-right residents will live behind a wall, in poured-concrete dwellings, and manufacture guns for a living while waiting for the collapse of civilization. Excerpts from The Citadel’s website: The Citadel is evolving as a planned community where residents are bound together by: Patriotism Pride […]
Welcome to The Citadel, a planned fortified community in which future far-right residents will live behind a wall, in poured-concrete dwellings, and manufacture guns for a living while waiting for the collapse of civilization. Excerpts from The Citadel’s website:
The Citadel is evolving as a planned community where residents are bound together by:
Patriotism
Pride in American Exceptionalism
Our proud history of Liberty as defined by our Founding Fathers, and
Physical preparedness to survive and prevail in the face of natural catastrophes — such as Hurricanes Sandy or Katrina — or man-made catastrophes such as a power grid failure or economic collapse.
The Citadel is not your typical planned community where the developer’s objective is selling cookie-cutter homes at the highest possible profit-margin.
The Citadel is not profit-driven. The Citadel is Liberty-driven: specifically Thomas Jefferson’s Rightful Liberty.
Marxists, Socialists, Liberals and Establishment Republicans will likely find that life in our community is incompatible with their existing ideology and preferred lifestyles.
DESCRIPTION: The Citadel Community will house between 3,500 and 7,000 patriotic American families who agree that being prepared for the emergencies of life and being proficient with the American icon of Liberty — the Rifle — are prudent measures. There will be no HOA. There will be no recycling police and no local ordinance enforcers from City Hall.
But there will be ordinance enforcers of some sort. There will have to be; no community can do without them. Given the ideological orientation and militancy of this walled city, these ordinance enforcers are likely to be — how to put this? — unsubtle.
For the record, the city fathers know that you’re thinking they’re just a bunch of racists or anti-government militants who want to make a Last Stand against the gummint. They want you to know that they don’t care what your race is; as long as you share their ideology, you are welcome. And, they want you to know too that they are not preparing to withstand a military or governmental assault. So there’s that.
You know, if the organizing principle here weren’t right-wing militancy, and if the town weren’t planning to support itself via gun manufacture, I would be supportive of this venture as an experiment in building intentional and resilient community. It sounds, though, like a place where angry Tea Partiers are planning to hole up building guns and watching Hannity, and waiting for the end of the world. I don’t think this will end well for them, but I could be wrong.
A better example may be the lay community that I hear is developing around Clear Creek, a traditional Benedictine monastery in eastern Oklahoma. Five years ago, Slate wrote:
Scores of families have purchased land nearby to raise their families in the shadow of the monastery, where they often join the monks in their liturgical celebrations. These families tend to be the crunchiest of the Crunchy Cons, into home schooling, the “local foods, local
Clear Creek Monastery
markets” movement, and sustainable farming. This growing community is one of the surest signs of Clear Creek’s importance. This follows the classic spiritual pattern: Saints traipse off into the wilderness, and the world eventually follows, unbidden, as with the Cistercians, who turned the swamps and fens of Europe into arable land and saw communities spring up around them.
I’ve never been there, but on my old Beliefnet blog, I mentioned this community a few times. How have things gone for them? Anybody know? I’m going to try to make a pilgrimage there later this year, and see for myself.
Ask yourself, though: which community sounds like a place of light and confidence, and which sounds like a place of darkness and fear? Why is that? What makes a resilient community, anyway? Weaponry, walls, and anger? Not over the long term, it seems to me.
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Republicans will likely find that life in our community is incompatible with their existing ideology and preferred lifestyles.
Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.