About Your New Neighbors

You may not like what I’m going to tell you. But as Napoleon is supposed to have said, “Truth alone has the power to offend.” 

About a year ago, I was finally able to move back to the South after a long search for property. The criteria was probably similar to anyone looking to escape from another part of the country: close to family, a little land, right demographics, good Church, and not an outrageously inflated price tag. 

It took three years of lengthy and thorough visits crisscrossing Upstate South Carolina, North Georgia, Southwest Virginia, and most of Alabama and Tennessee. We settled in middle Tennessee but far away from the sad sprawl of Nashville. 

Let me tell you what I saw over the last several years. 

Everywhere we visited, we spent time chatting with locals and going out of the way to shop and eat off the main drags, as well as working only with independent real estate agents and family referrals who live throughout Dixie. It was an eye-opening process on many levels. If your only travel through the Southern states is limited to the interstates, I’d encourage you to take the scenic route next time. 

It’s no surprise to confirm that the number of non-Southerners moving to the South is significant. While the percentage of the transplant population in any of the Southern states is only a single digit, in real numbers it is well over 100,000 in any given state with these newcomers not being evenly dispersed throughout, but concentrated in a small handful of areas. And not just the urban hotspots. 

The big cities are growing ,of course, and attracting a middle to left-of-center mostly White population. But with remote work now a fixed reality, small towns are where the newcomers are targeting as well and it’s these new neighbors out in the country I want to talk about.

I’m in a rural area, about 20 minutes out of a town of 12,000. Of all my immediate farms and neighbors, maybe 70% are Southern going back generations. Expanding the radius into the community of other homeschooling families and other like-minded people, not one is originally from the South. 

Here’s a sample of who they are:

• A successful businessman and Vanderbilt grad from Connecticut. Homesteading, five children, church going, American patriot with sons in the military.
• A government employee from Arizona with a black wife. Homeschooling four young kids, homesteading and trying to organize a Christian Nationalist group in the area. 
• A software engineer running his own company from Pennsylvania with a Chinese wife and three children who tells me he’s been red-pilled and is now Far Right and an extreme prepper.
• An insurance adjuster from Texas homeschooling seven kids, homesteading and a Trad Catholic. 
• A highly entrepreneurial farming family from North Dakota. Homeschooling five children, co-op farming, and trying to form a church.
• A successful land developer and entrepreneur from Indiana. Homesteading, runs a construction business with his family, homeschooling nine kids, runs a home-church with several other families.
• Army vet from Ohio. Single, entrepreneur getting into concrete and light construction. 

Plus multiple young families from California, all church going, conservative, almost all homesteading and homeschooling.

All these families talk about the networks of people they’re developing with most also being from other parts of the country. These are objectively good people and fine neighbors. They have quickly become active and entrepreneurial. They are making their mark and establishing legitimate communities of like-minded people who regularly get together to do real things that matter: supporting each other, improving the land, providing and producing for themselves and others, going to church and raising big families. They are conservative and conventionally pro-American but appropriately critical, even cynical. They have rejected much of the status quo and are retreating to God, family, and very local communities. For them, the South is a new frontier and a chance to start over in a comparatively unspoiled region. 

I ask them about Southern identity: did it play a part in your decision to move? Do you think Southern independence is a good idea? Is it possible? Is it something you’d want to be part of? 

While there have been no negative comments, they are not attracted to or terribly interested in Southern heritage and supporting its future. They are neutral. 

And why is that?

Sure, there’s a lifetime of anti-Southern propaganda. But as has been regularly discussed here at ID, the effort to project an attractive Southern identity outside of a Civil War context is sorely missing and urgently needed. 

But there is something else that does come up as an obstacle harming the ability to win-over the people setting new roots in Southern soil and that’s what is often a negative presentation of native Southerners. I regrettably must affirm. 

The Deracinated Southern Man

In all the places we spent time considering, no matter the state, there is the sad phenomena of urban and rural Southerners who are no longer Southern at all but instead a commercialized, emasculated, cartoonish rendition. They are the Deracinated Southerners.

Young or old, this is what I saw throughout the South: 

• Almost everyone is tatted up like a sailor or look like they’re part of the Motely Crue road crew. None of the newcomers have visible tattoos.
• There’s a noticeable negative sentiment about being decently educated that manifests in the ability to articulate and express themselves. 
• Obesity is the norm. I’ve written about this here as well. https://identitydixie.com/2022/05/11/dixies-fighting-weight/ With the newcomers, even moms with five or more kids, they are fit and healthy looking.
• Too many of the properties are a mess, some of the worst I saw were throughout South Carolina. It’s embarrassing and has nothing to do with income. My weekend routine includes picking up White Claw empties and beer bottles thrown along my fence line. 
• Young Whites, male and female, have embraced black culture, its music, attitude, and dress. It’s revolting. 
• In restaurants, while shopping, or at public events, too many people of all ages dress like vagrants. At a large get together of the newcomers (easily 100 people), everyone was presentable and clean. 

The majority of native Southerners are not like this, but a large minority are, enough so that it is frequently talked about with people moving in and who are not yet desensitized. 

We need to do better. We need to practice fraternal correction. We need to hold ourselves to a higher standard and actively promote and enforce a Dixie First mentality. Let it fuel a pride that manifests outwardly in every way. In our politics, our behavior, in how we engage with and treat our community and neighbors. In how we educate, start and run businesses, in our marriages…in everything we need to always be asking, is what I’m doing, presenting and saying benefiting my homeland and bringing honor? 

Our new neighbors are quickly forging their own identities. And it’s not Southern. They are going to soon be a felt force and it is essential that we incorporate them into an attractive cause led by noble Southern men and women.