Inside the ‘Whites Only’ Community in Arkansas

A group of Americans are building a “whites only” community in rural Arkansas they call the “Return to the Land.” They believe that white people and Western culture are facing extinction due to an influx of immigrants and minorities, and according to the group’s founder, access to the community is open only to people of white European ancestry who share common views on topics such as segregation, abortion, and gender identity.

Video footage shared by the group on its social media accounts show a bucolic setting with animals and children running around their 160-acre site, while members of the community build timber-frame homes, churches, and other facilities. A “few dozen” people are already living there full time, says Eric Orwoll, the group’s president.

Though the organization claims that Return to the Land is nothing more than a peaceful settlement of like-minded people, the online histories of the group’s leaders tell a different story. Members have espoused virulently racist and antisemitic views and repeatedly praised Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. One of the leaders says he is currently under criminal investigation in Ecuador. Orwoll himself has spoken about the coming of a second Hitler and praised KKK leader David Duke. He is also closely aligned to an international network of far-right influencers, extremists, and white supremacists, including Thomas Sewell, a neo-Nazi living in Australia who was the founder of a group that influenced the Christchurch shooter.

Despite this, the Return to the Land community has been lauded by far-right influencers and has already raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.

Return to the Land, which was first reported on by The Forward and Sky News, is actively scouting for other locations to create a network of similar communities across the country, with a development in Missouri apparently in the works. Inspired in part by the Silicon Valley-based concept of the “network state” and by a white separatist community in South Africa known as Orania, the group promotes itself on its website as a community designed to “promote strong families with common ancestry, and raise the next generation in an environment that reflects our traditional values.”

“They use a lot of innocuous language,” Morgan Moon, a researcher at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, tells WIRED. “Instead of saying they want to make a white ethnic community, they say they want to make a strong community of common ancestry. But at the same time, when we see their promotional videos and propaganda, what we see is that when they're depicting the failing modern society, they use imagery consisting of minority groups or the LGBT+ community. When they're showing the idealized parallel society that they're attempting to create with Return to the Land, they tend to only use white Aryan imagery.”

Orwoll has spent years building up an audience of like-minded followers on social media, primarily on YouTube, where he speaks about Western culture and philosophy.

In 2023, a group of Orwoll’s followers decided to buy the 160-acre plot in rural Arkansas. They chose the location because Orwoll lives nearby, the property was relatively cheap, and the building regulations were lenient. The county is over 90 percent white, which was also a deciding factor, says Orwoll, who also claims to be a classically trained musician who previously played with Shen Yun, a Chinese performing arts group run by the Falun Gong, a religious movement.

Return to the Land is set up as a private members association, and those seeking to join have to go through a number of steps in order to verify their identity and heritage.

“You fill out a questionnaire that'll give us an initial idea of where you're coming from, your values, who you are, your background and then there is a phone interview, and we make admissions decisions on a case by case basis,” Orwoll tells WIRED.

The application form for Return to the Land asks potential members to outline their ancestry and also respond to a range of questions about their social and cultural viewpoints, including whether they support foreign immigration, “transgenderism,” Covid-19 vaccines, and segregation. It also asks: “How often do you think about the Roman empire?” with answers ranging from “every day, at least once” to “a few times a week, probably” and “never.” This initial process only gets you approved to access private group chats on Telegram. For those who decide they want to move to Arkansas and become part of the community, “vetting for that level of involvement is much more thorough,” says Orwoll, though he declined to say what that process involved beyond conducting a “background check.”

Peter Csere, the group’s secretary, tells WIRED that the association currently has 300 members across the country. Orwoll says they have had interest not only from Americans, but also from people on other continents.

Despite being the face of the development, Orwoll himself does not live in the Return to the Land community right now. “I've not developed my homestead sufficiently to allow my four children to live safely there full time, so I have a house 15 minutes away, but I'm working towards moving into the community,” he says. In recent weeks, as Orwoll’s past has been closely scrutinized, researchers found videos in which Orwoll performed in online porn videos with his then-wife Caitlyn, who is now a resident on the Return to the Land compound. Orwoll has condemned porn addiction, claiming that it “emasculated” young men.

“In my early 20s I did plenty of things that I am now totally against,” says Orwoll, who confirmed on X that he appeared in the videos. “I considered myself a nihilist, did psychedelics and didn't respect traditional sexual morality. The lack of guidance I had and the way it threw off my early adult life informed the importance I later placed on traditional values.”

To date, the community has raised approximately $330,000 from land sales, according to a financial analysis conducted by the ADL's Center on Extremism. It is also running five separate crowdfunding campaigns on GiveSendGo, a Christian-focused crowdfunding platform. These campaigns have raised over $185,000 in donations. The latest campaign, which has a target of $100,000, was launched last month, and is designed to fund rallies across the country to promote the Return to the Land model. The campaign has already raised over $88,000; one of the top donations was for $5,000, to which the donor appended the white supremacist “14 words” slogan. Orwoll says that all of this funding has allowed him to quit his job and work full time traveling around the US speaking about the project.

One of the fundraising campaigns was specifically launched to help fund a legal defense that Orwoll believes may eventually be necessary. “I would prefer not to be sued, but I recognize that it probably will happen and the upside of it happening is that, should we win, case law would be decided in our favor,” Orwoll says.

While the Fair Housing Act of 1968 prevents housing discrimination based on race or religion, Orwoll believes that the structure of his group as a private member association will allow him to circumvent the law. The group has raised over $63,000 from supporters for what it calls “legal framework research.”

“The attorneys that we've consulted with believe that what we're doing is legal,” Orwoll says. “I think it is a debatable edge case, probably, but we believe it is legal.” When asked to provide the names of the legal experts who they are working with, Orwoll declined to divulge their identities.

Arkansas attorney general Tim Griffin tells WIRED his office has found nothing illegal about the community. “Racism has no place in a free society, but from a legal perspective, we have not seen anything that would indicate any state or federal laws have been broken,” Griffin says in a statement emailed to WIRED.

A spokesperson for Shannon Smith, assistant US attorney in the Eastern District of Arkansas, declined to comment on whether her office was investigating the situation. However, WIRED has learned that her office has referred the matter to the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. “They are better equipped to handle allegations such as these,” Smith wrote in an email shared with WIRED. The DOJ declined to comment on the situation.

Multiple civil rights organizations have condemned Return to the Land’s project and called on local and federal lawmakers and officials to shut down the project.

“We believe this development not only revives discredited and reprehensible forms of segregation,” Lindsay Baach Friedmann, a regional director at the ADL, wrote in a statement posted on X. “We urge the Arkansas Fair Housing Commission, local elected officials, and law enforcement to act swiftly to ensure that Northeast Arkansas remains a welcoming and inclusive community, not a refuge for intolerance and exclusion.”

The Arkansas Fair Housing Commission and Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not respond to WIRED’s repeated requests for comment.

The idea of Return to the Land was partly inspired by venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State, which promotes the idea of digital-first communities of people with shared values with the aim of gaining a degree of sovereignty. “That book was one inspiration,” Orwoll says. “I wouldn't say we're trying to emulate everything that Srinivasan writes about in the book, the more techno, crypto, and augmented reality aspects that he discussed doesn't exactly align with our values, but the core concepts of how to organize the network state, I think, were very useful, actually.” Orwoll posted about the book in the group’s Telegram channel earlier this year, urging others to read it.

“Imagine a network of a dozen high tech, high human capital, small White cities spread through the US south, exchanging workers, students and ideas,” Orwoll wrote on X in February.

The Return to the Land community has also been hailed as a huge success by far-right influencers and extremists on social media. “If you don't have the right to build a community on a private piece of land and live around the sorts of people you want to live around, then you don't have any rights at all,” right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh wrote on X about Return to the Land. “This is as basic and fundamental as rights can possibly get. Freedom of association.“

Many of the very people who have been most vocal in supporting Orwoll and his project are the same extremists who he has forged close relationships with in recent years.

Orwoll has long associated with white supremacists and promoted neo-Nazi ideals. Last year, Orwoll was a “VIP” guest at the America First Political Action Conference, an annual white nationalist gathering run by Nick Fuentes. “I have always considered you a brilliant and dedicated advocate for our cause,” Fuentes wrote on X recently in response to a post from Orwoll. When asked if Fuentes would be allowed to live within the compound, given his Mexican heritage, Orwoll tells WIRED “it would depend on a vote.”

Earlier this year, Orwoll invited Sewell, the well-known Australian neo-Nazi, to be a speaker at a conference dedicated to discussing intentional communities. Jared Taylor, who runs the white supremacist American Renaissance website, antisemitic influencer Lucas Gage, and Thomas Rousseau, the leader of white nationalist group Patriot Front, were also speaking at that conference. Rousseau has been interviewed by Orwoll on his social media channels on multiple occasions.

Moon says that she has also observed active clubs—many of which are run by Rousseau—taking part in events on the Return to the Land plot in Arkansas. Active clubs are a network of white supremacist groups who participate in physical training, preparing members for a war they believe they are fighting against a system designed to bring down the white race.

In a post on X last year, Orwoll wrote that “what really matters isn't which biological race you belong to or what your ethnic background is. What matters is what proportion of admixture you have from the ancient and spiritually superior root races.” In a follow up post, he said that anyone who disagrees with the statement needs some “ahnenerbe” teaching.

Ahnenerbe was a pseudoscientific organization created by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS in Adolf Hiter’s Nazi Germany. The group consisted of scientists and academics charged with proving that Germans descended from an Aryan race that was responsible for most of the world’s greatest achievements in everything from agriculture to art and literature.

Orwoll has also recently reminisced about a period in history when, as he portrayed it, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke was almost elected as governor of Louisiana, and “White Pride rallies … filled stadiums.”

When asked recently about his comments regarding the arrival of a second Hitler, Orwoll said that the Nazi Party leader was “a very controversial historical figure.”

“I'm not saying you're going to have to wait for a new person to start a new Holocaust,” Orwoll told Sky News. “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."

A deeply antisemitic, anonymous X account with the screen name Raven Resolve has repeatedly referred to themselves as part of the Return to the Land group. As well as promoting the movement on numerous occasions, the account has also claimed that Return to the Land is “forming a nationwide army of future warriors.” In the past, the account has said that the American government is the enemy. “The people who rule this country hate it and its people,” the account wrote in 2023. “It's a similar screen name to one of our member's screen names on our internal chats,” Orwoll wrote in an email to WIRED, without officially confirming that Raven Resolve was part of Return to the Land. “If it is him: Views expressed by our members don't necessarily represent the views of RTTL,” Orwoll added. “We have a program for authorizing someone as a representative, and if that X account is one of our members, he's not been authorized to represent us.”

Csere, the group’s secretary, who has repeatedly referred in social media posts to Nazis as “based,” tells WIRED that he was merely “trolling leftists.” When asked what his real view of Nazis is, Csere said: “The Nazis made a lot of politically conservative reforms that were popular among the German people, however, their method of dealing with foreign influence in German politics and society ended up backfiring.”

Csere is also facing allegations of financial fraud related to his departure from a vegan ecovillage he was part of in Ecuador. The group has accused Csere of owing the project $29,000 and stealing $30,000 in cryptocurrency. Csere denies the allegations, telling WIRED that “various owners of that former community owed me large amounts of money and did not pay it back.” He also says he has been prevented from selling land he owned in the development.

It isn’t just allegations of financial impropriety, either: Csere is under criminal investigation in Ecuador for stabbing a local miner. “My attorney says that he has never seen a case of clear-cut self defense where the prosecutor tried so hard to press charges, for so long,” Csere says, adding that the investigation is still active.

Ultimately, Orwoll and Return to the Land have also been emboldened by an administration they believe offer the best chance at making this project work.

“Right now we have the most favorable judiciary,” Orwoll said in a recent video posted on X. “We have the most favorable cultural climate and administration that we're going to get. I can't imagine someone a lot better than Trump being elected next time. I mean, I can imagine it, it's just not a realistic scenario. So we have a limited amount of time where we need to fight battles.”

Trump’s second term has been marked by hardline immigration policies including a massive uptick in ICE raids, the construction of draconian detention centers, and the embrace of the idea of “remigration,” a far-right European plan to expel minorities and immigrants from Western nations.

“The first thing that the Trump administration really did when it got in power was go after diversity programs and start attacking civil rights,” Chuck Tanner, a researcher for the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, tells WIRED. “Groups like [Orwoll’s] are attuned to that and want to use that to insulate themselves from prosecution or investigation for setting up deeply racist secessionist kinds of communities.”