I somehow missed all of the drama surrounding the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch. In case you also missed it, there’s a bit of backstory here. The Tenacious Unicorn Ranch (TUR) was a trans, anarchist alpaca farm set up in a rural part of central Colorado. The ranch was first set up in 2018 on rented land but in March 2020 TUR bought forty acres of its own land. Within months the group of about a dozen people were getting media profiles like this one at Vice.

One humid day in August of 2019, Bonnie Nelson loaded up a car and began a three day road trip. The destination: a small alpaca ranch in Colorado run entirely by trans people…

The collective prides itself on being self-sufficient. Its power system is 100 percent off-grid, utilizing solar and wind energy in addition to gas generators, and residents have built their own structures to house the ranch’s growing population—including a herd of nearly 100 alpacas. “They were doing basically everything that I’ve ever wanted to do,” Nelson told me of the decision to become part of the collective. “To be fair, it was a really easy choice to make.”…

In order to help with the costs, the group started selling their alpaca wool on Etsy—their first batch sold out completely—and created a Patreon profile that would allow others to offer them monthly donations…

Now, the collective is settling in and raising money via GoFundMe to build additional housing so that they can invite up to 20 new residents. (The ranch has a basic satellite internet connection, which Logue describes as “comparable to old dial-up speeds.”) The goal is to become a rural haven for queer and trans people—similar to the IDA community land project in Tennessee—and eventually, to help people in other states set up queer farming collectives of their own.

You can probably tell that even in this first story there’s a bit of a disconnect between the idea the ranch is self-sufficient and the fact, mentioned a bit later, that they are on Patreon and GoFundMe raising money.

In any case, the Vice story was just one of maybe a dozen or more profiles about this group. By June 2021 Reuters published a similar story focusing on the threats they were under from their conservative neighbors:

The ranch hand walks along rocky ground, the beam of her flashlight cutting through the moonlit night. She holds a shotgun loosely at her side during her patrol of an alpaca ranch founded as a haven for transgender and non-binary people…

Messages and calls expressing transphobic hatred and disdain for the ranchers’ anti-fascism began then, according to Logue. Reuters has reviewed several hostile and anonymous online messages, two containing death threats. One was an image manipulated to show a gun pointed at the ranch house.

In March, a volunteer escorted two armed men away at gunpoint after they were spotted climbing the hill toward the ranch house, Logue says. The identity of the men is unknown.

The ranchers talked about the hostility in media interviews, hoping increased attention would scare off harassers. Logue says they installed cameras, obtained body armor, began to build a taller fence, and stepped up firearms training.

The incident involving the two armed men escorted off the ranch came to be known as “the siege.” Eventually, Samantha Bee’s show dramatized the story in a clip titled “Tenacious Unicorn Ranch Is Pioneering a New and Queer Wild West.”

The Samantha Bee clip fails to mention that the resources the ranchers were using came primarily from donations. Just one of their GoFundMe efforts raised over $110,000. But there were many more. The group kept a high profile in the media and that allowed them to raise lots of money. As you can see at the end of the Samantha Bee clip they imagined a string of similar ranches in every state, but it was not to be.

By December of last year, the whole thing started to fall apart. Bonnie Nelson, who was highlighted in that first Vice story above and in the Samantha Bee clip, left the ranch and posted a long thread on Twitter explaining why. Her Twitter account is currently protected but the tweets still exist in an archived form. This gist of this is that self-sufficient ranch is not remotely self-sufficient and even the money raised online doesn’t go to the things it is raised for.

Apparently there was a whole lot of personal drama that was happening behind all of this. The individual known as Kindness, who Bonnie brought to the ranch to handle trauma, was apparently someone who claimed to have some kind of multiple personality issue, meaning they would sometimes behave as different people depending which personality was in charge. At some point, Kindness was accused of faking a disability by presenting with temporary blindness. Bonnie became offended, believing Kindness was experiencing ableism from others within the group.

It’s actually hard to parse what happened because nearly everyone involved has protected their tweets. The ranch’s Twitter and Instagram accounts are both down. But according to Wikipedia, before the ranch’s Twitter account went down, they tweeted something about being evicted from the ranch. I don’t know if that means the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch that spawned a dozen profiles is no more or if they’re just looking for a new home.

Generally speaking, this reminds me of what happens every time progressives get together to form a new utopia, whether its this ranch or the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle, the takeover of Evergreen State College or the Occupy villages set up in 2011. In every case, these new experiments in communal living are always praised by left-wing media and get lots of positive attention. And then, usually in a matter of months, the new utopia collapses in a heap of angry recriminations, often with some clear harm done to people inside the group. The far left never seems to learn that these mini-utopias they keep trying to create don’t work.

Update: Here’s an archive of the ranch’s last tweets dated March 2.