Inside America’s controversial ‘whites only’ settlement
Deep in the hills of the Ozark Mountains, former amateur porn star Eric Orwoll is building a “fortress for the white race”.
Deep in the hills of the Ozark Mountains, in the northeast of the US state of Arkansas, Eric Orwoll is building a “fortress for the white race”.
Mr Orwoll, 35, is president of Return to the Land (RTTL), a white nationalist “private membership association (PMA) for individuals and families with traditional views and common continental ancestry”.
Blacks, jews and gays are explicitly barred from the 160-acre (65 hectare) settlement, which is slowly taking shape with around 40 members now living there — including half a dozen children who are homeschooled on the property.
RTTL insists the whole thing is perfectly legal, as a result of the PMA structure.
To buy land in what RTTL calls its “intentional community”, applicants must first become members of RTTL.
The group has strict membership requirements — chiefly that applicants must be of European heritage.
Once they are members, they can buy shares in RTTL’s limited liability company (LLC). The shares translate to plots of land within the settlement that they can build on.
The LLC has eight unidentified founders who pitched in between $US10,000 ($15,000) and $US90,000 ($135,000) in start-up funds, public documents show.
The legal structure was designed as a way to circumvent the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned segregation and discrimination in public places such as swimming pools, libraries and public schools.
“What we’ve done here is establish a place where we have control over who our neighbours are, and that is just for the sake of preserving our culture … white American culture,” Mr Orwoll told Sky News correspondent Tom Cheshire.
“It’s free association. So we’re not trying to keep other people down, this is a small settlement in the middle of the Ozarks. You don’t let everyone into your home.”
RTTL, which has close ties to neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups including Patriot Front and Australia’s National Socialist Network (NSN), was formed around 18 months ago. In addition to its 40-odd current residents, the group claims to have hundreds of paid members and plans to expand into Missouri, Tennessee and Washington state.
Mr Orwoll has kept a close eye on the activities of Australian neo-Nazis Thomas Sewell and Joel Davis.
“Joel and Tom have the courage of their convictions,” he wrote in a recent X post.
“Will it ultimately pay off for them? It could. Australia is a lot Whiter than the US, and the migrants came much more recently. There’s a non-zero chance they could take their whole country back.”
RTTL leader Peter Csere, who masterminded the legal structure, told Sky News he didn’t care if “people on the internet … call me racist”.
“I don’t really know or care whether that term applies to me or not. Maybe,” he said.
Group member Niki, asked about RTTL’s exclusion of non-whites and LGBT people, argued “they can have their own communities, and they already do and I think that’s great for them”.
“If other people are allowed to do it, I don’t really see why whites aren’t allowed to do it,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Mr Orwoll, a blond-haired, blue-eyed California native, has been on a PR blitz in recent months, appearing on right-wing podcasts and inviting journalists and news crews from all over the world to shine a light on his controversial experiment.
Speaking to The Times, Mr Orwoll said engaging with the media was a “necessary evil”.
He believes he has just three years to sell his segregationist vision to the public — anticipating a Democrat will return to the White House in 2028 and shut down his community.
“Less than 50 per cent of children born in the US today are white,” he told Sky News.
“There is something to your background that informs who you are, your sense of identity, and we don’t want that sense of identity being taken away from us involuntarily. So we’re taking control of that situation and creating an environment where my kids can celebrate their identity.”
He claimed “we are forced to accept people into our neighbourhoods, into our businesses and into our lives who won’t share our background, who won’t share many of our cultural priors, even our moral priors”.
Asked whether he was racist or segregationist, Mr Orwoll said he questioned the “moral frame”.
“Why is it wrong to identify with your own people, to want an integrated culture where you can be yourself?” he said.
“Return to the Land is not a supremacist group, it’s not a hate group, it’s not even a white nationalist group. We are white identitarians who value our identity and want to preserve it.”
While RTTL touts its conservative, family-oriented values, it was revealed earlier this year that Mr Orwoll and his now ex-wife — who lives on the RTTL settlement with her new partner — had produced homemade online porn videos.
“It was something I was very ashamed of,” Mr Orwoll told The Times.
“I was a nihilist at the time. I was not Christian, didn’t really believe in traditional values or any values at all.”
The legality of RTTL is likely to be tested in court.
Mr Orwoll has previously stated that he chose the southern state because it’s a “very red state, so if our case goes to trial at any point, we’re very likely to have a judge that’s on our side”.
Earlier this year, Arkansas’ Republican Attorney-General Tim Griffin announced his office would open an investigation into the group to ensure it was not violating any state or federal law.
However, Mr Griffin’s office told the Missouri Independent in July that the probe had not turned up any illegal activity.
“Racism has no place in a free society,” he said in a statement to the newspaper. “But from a legal perspective, we have not seen anything that would indicate any state or federal laws have been broken.”
Speculation that RTTL could expand across the nearby border also drew the ire of Republican Attorney-General Andrew Bailey, who said racial discrimination “has no place in Missouri”.
“Attorney-General Bailey is committed to protecting the constitutional rights of all citizens,” his office said in a statement.
“The landmark Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer, which originated in St. Louis, made clear that government cannot enforce racially discriminatory housing practices, and Missouri will not tolerate efforts to revive them.”
Jay Richardson, Arkansas state representative and member of the Legislative Black Caucus, called for further investigation into the group.
“The discriminatory private housing development in Sharp County represents a troubling moment for our state,” he said in a statement.
“While Attorney-General Tim Griffin has issued preliminary statements about ongoing investigations, the fundamental issue remains clear — this private ‘members only’ association that excludes people based on race, religion, and sexual orientation runs counter to Arkansas values and potentially violates civil rights protections.”
In a video responding to bipartisan condemnation from politicians, Mr Orwoll said “all Americans regardless of their ethnic, racial or religious background, have the unalienable right to freely associate and peacefully assemble”.
“We have the God-given right to form communities according to whatever values we hold dear, and the government does not have the right to tell free American citizens what values they have to live according to in their own private lives,” he said.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights watchdog, said RTTL’s Arkansas settlement was “far from the white power movement’s first attempt to build a white separatist community”.
“For decades, the movement has built compounds like RTTL’s to allow members to remove themselves from multiracial society, build revenue streams and engage in paramilitary training to prepare for what many in the movement believe to be an impending race war,” the SPLC writes.
“But no others have launched an outright attack on the Fair Housing Act (FHA), a legal cornerstone of the Civil Rights Movement enacted in 1968 to prohibit discrimination in housing based on race and other characteristics.
“Orwoll has suggested they will succeed, in part, because of their timing: ‘Even though we’re small now,’ he said in a recent podcast interview, ‘the cultural climate is with us.’”
Originally published as Inside America’s controversial ‘whites only’ settlement
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