Inside the whites-only settlement in Arkansas: The group building a 'Fortress for the White Race'

Sky News

12 hours ago

by Tom Cheshire, Data and Forensics Correspondent
"You want a white nation? Build a white town," Eric Orwoll says, in one video posted on social media. "It can be done. We're doing it."
As the Arkansas sun beats down, dozens of men are hammering posts into the red-brown earth, building a fence to mark out the boundary.
Over the last year and a half, high up in the hills and woods of the Ozarks, the group has been working hard: levelling the land, laying roads, building cabins. There are wells, a community centre and a school house, where the children do their lessons.
The settlement sprawls over 160 acres and it's called Return to the Land. Its founders say it is an "intentional community based around shared ancestry".
Writing on X, they are more straightforward: "We started a Whites only community."
Around 40 people live here and hundreds more, from all around the world, have paid to be members.
Warning: this report contains themes of racism and homophobia which some readers might find distressing
Orwoll is the leader of Return to the Land, or RTTL.
Blonde-haired and blue-eyed, he says he is building a "fortress for the white race". And he has invited me in.
RTTL is at the vanguard of an ethnonationalist movement that has been organising online – a network that aims to define countries by ethnicity but which links across borders.
There are plenty of Nazi references on the group's public chat on Telegram. Peter Csere has posted the phrase 1488. 14 refers to the "14 words", a white supremacist slogan. And H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so 88 means HH, which means "Heil Hitler". He says that is "a funny comment, a throwback".
Orwoll, in his videos, has talked about the coming of a second Hitler, saying he won't arrive unless people "do the work".
I ask him about this.
"Well, there I am, honestly, I'm addressing the sentiments of my audience," Orwell says. "Hitler is a very controversial historical figure. I think the mainstream view is one-sided. It's informed by World War II propaganda, but also the contrary position that Hitler did nothing wrong, that many people online say: that's also a one-sided view.
"I think all historical figures are complex, multi-dimensional, but when I say, 'you're gonna have to wait for that new Hitler to arise', I'm not saying you're going to have to wait for a new person to start a new Holocaust. I am saying you are going to wait for a charismatic leader who is going to advocate for your interests because that's how a lot of people see Hitler."
Orwoll insists what he is doing is entirely legal, because it is a private club and so exempt from equality legislation. Experts I spoke to doubt that.
But the group has invested tens of thousands of dollars in legal research and believes that it has created a viable framework for many more communities to come - both in the US and worldwide. Three other settlements are under way right now, all part of what Orwoll sees as a "path to power".
THE LAY OF THE LAND
Friday evening, and around 20 members of RTTL are sitting outside on the benches in the communal area, eating burgers and drinking warm milk, fresh from the goats kept on the land.
Many of the wider group did not want to be here with journalists; I'm told they include law enforcement officers and federal agents.
The site is at the end of a dirt road, through a small river and then up into the hills. The nearest community is Ravenden, population 423. These are remote parts and RTTL chose them deliberately. This is an online movement that picked Arkansas for its real world action because of its low land prices and less demanding building regulations.
It is scratchy living, extremely hot even in May, and full of ticks that burrow into people's skin. I'm interested to see what makes people give up their old lives for this.
David and Caitlin are two of them. They were among the first to sign up more than a year ago, separately. They got married last month.
"Somebody had posted a video of Eric," David tells me. "I saw videos of him building stuff, and thought, 'Oh man I got to come check this out'."
Caitlin felt the same.
"I figure there's nothing else like this in the country, it should at least exist. Do people really think we should never be able to choose our neighbours?"
IS THIS EVEN LEGAL?
This is a worldview that is shared by everyone I speak to, a reaction against what they see as left-wing politics pushed too far.
But many of the opinions we hear have become relatively mainstream: that mass immigration is out of control, that Western societies are in danger of losing their fundamental character as a result.
That evening, it starts raining hard, and lightning flashes across the valley. People shelter inside the portacabin schoolhouse, furnished with pianos and shelves lined with books, mainly Neoplatonist philosophy, Orwoll's particular passion.
More goat's milk is served before everyone goes back to their own cabins.
The next day, Orwoll organises the work party, a mixture of members and people who have come to check out the project.
To join the group, you have to sign up to the Private Members Association, or PMA.
Followers of "non-European religions", such as Islam, are banned. So are gay people. Anything that doesn't conform to what RTTL calls "traditional views" or "European ancestry".
This is RTTL's logo, a rune, inspired by Norse mythology. It sits around the camp...
...and on their website. RTTL classes itself as a Private Membership Association (PMA). The PMA is what they believe keeps this all legal.
Once people have been vetted, including with a video interview to confirm their ethnicity, they can buy shares in the Limited Liability Company or LLC.
Those shares translate to acres of land that members can build on.
The private members' club
That means, RTTL believes, they can circumvent civil rights legislation, such as the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination in housing based on race, colour, religion, sex, national origin, familial status, and disability.
Peter Csere is Orwoll's de facto number two, providing the details to fill out Orwoll's vision, including the legal framework. I ask whether this legal structure is designed as a way around the civil rights legislation - and Csere agrees.
"But is this a loop hole?" he asks. "Or is this your way to maintain your right to free association, your right to various other rights that we have in the Constitution?"
The civil rights challenge
Barry Jefferson is the president of the Arkansas branch of the NAACP, America's oldest civil rights organisation.
"I just truly believe that we don't need to get back to the Jim Crow era [of segregation]," he says. "We've been through that before. I think no one should be discriminated against because of the skin colour.
"If you really look deep into Civil Rights Act, it doesn't state that. I think they're misunderstanding what it states because there have been many organisations that tried to carve that out.
"That's not right."
The Arkansas attorney general, Tim Griffin, gave me this statement:
"This is the first I've heard of these allegations. Racial discrimination has no place in Arkansas or anywhere in a free society. These allegations raise all sorts of legal issues, including constitutional concerns.
"My office is reviewing the matter."
Growing a white population
A lot of this is reaction to identity politics - critical race theory, and movements like Black Lives Matter.
And fundamentally, this is still identity politics - but white identity politics. This is a safe space, just for people of European ancestry.
While the men labour, the women of RTTL are at work too, looking after the six children who are home schooled here, and preparing the food for tonight's community dinner. The theme is colonial. Niki is 32, Alison 29 and Caitlin is 31 - none of them want their surnames to be included here.
This is vital to RTTL's mission, which aims "to promote strong families with common ancestry". And it has an online fundraiser, to give, quote "cash rewards to parents of newborns as a means to incentivize population growth". Just before we arrived they donated $1,000 to a family for having their sixth child.
Like many far-right movements before them, RTTL's mission is to show that by excluding others, they can live purer, more natural lives: as they put it on their website, quote, "to cultivate wholesomeness, beauty, health, and hope".
So I watch on as the group plays kickball, a cross between football and rounders, before they head down to the creek for a swim.
FEARS OF A RETURN TO SEGREGATION
As much as RTTL might like, they do not exist in a separate world. Pocahontas is the nearest proper town to the settlement, a half-hour drive away.
In a quiet residential street lies the Eddie Mae Herron centre, a low wooden building that used to be a small school.
Until 1964, it was called the "Pocahontas Colored School" and it's where Pat Johnson was educated in the 1950s. She lived her formative years under segregation, when African American children were not allowed to attend schools reserved for white students.
'We could not go to school together,' Johnson, tells me. 'We couldn't eat together. We couldn't do everyday things together. So the way I felt as I grew older, that each day, that you leave your home, you were under rejection.'
When I explain what Return to the Land is doing, not so far away, she worries that segregation, or at least the attitudes that allowed it to flourish, are returning:
'When you hear things like that, it causes you to be fearful and you don't know who to trust.'
'I think it's the change of our presidency,' Johnson says. 'That's what I'm going to say, because I feel like that's where the change is. It's allowing people to have the right… to be open for hatred."
And the data backs that up.
There's been a rise in white supremacist incidents - demonstrations, flyering, meetups and recruitment drives - over the last four years, according to ACLED, which monitors violent conflict and protest around the world.
A fortress for the white race
It's my last day at RTTL and Orwoll is giving a flute recital.
"It's a German flute. It was a very popular instrument in colonial America," he says.
Orwoll studied music at university and he plays well. His is one act in a concert put on for our entertainment, the theme, once again, colonial. Peter Csere plays the piano. Caitlin sings a song about the Virginia settlers.
Orwoll would prefer those times, would prefer the US to be an entirely white country. "I would probably feel more comfortable there because I'm white and that's the way this country was when my ancestors came there."
That ignores the indigenous Native Americans who were there before the Europeans, or the slaves brought over in bondage from Africa.
For all Orwoll's talk of different cultures or moralities, skin colour is what matters to him.
I'm white. And when I ask whether I would be accepted into RTTL on that basis, Orwoll says I probably would.
I point out that I don't know anything about "White American Culture", but that he'd rather have me than say, an American from a mixed heritage background. The problem, he says, is their children.
"Even if an individual has all the same values that I have, if they have an ethnic identity that other people share and care about, their children will also have that identity and their children might not necessarily have all the same beliefs that they have."
Orwoll believes in the far-right conspiracy theory of "white genocide", that white people are being destroyed, deliberately, by mass immigration and cultural indoctrination. RTTL is his response to this.
"When I was a kid, I suppose I interpreted racism to be judging someone solely on the basis of their race. And is that a good or bad thing?" he says.
"I think the basic moral consensus treats it as automatically a bad thing without a lot of reflection."
Orwoll believes social media makes his movement "far more possible".
He has a network, a legal framework, and a settlement. "I would like to have more communities so that people in all parts of the US have this as an option if they want. I would also like us to network and branch out internationally."
If this is the first "fortress for the white race", Orwoll would like there to be many more to come.
CREDITS
Reporting team: Tom Cheshire, Maz Poynter and Chris Gordon
Editor: Chris Howard
Production: Maz Poynter, Sara Thompson, Kaitlin Tosh, Kate Schneider and Michael Drummond
Graphics: Taylor Stuart, Annie Adam and Reece Denton
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