Whites-only community plotting expansion to another state as its efforts to build a ‘white nation’ continue
The man appearing on the local TV news segment looks innocuous enough: clean-shaven, with short blond hair, he wears a smart blue polo shirt and Apple earbuds, and is framed by a shelf full of books. Then he proceeds to talk about the new community he’s creating in the Ozark mountains of Missouri: “We want to create spaces for white Americans to celebrate their unique heritage and preserve their culture,” he says. “And that can be communities like we’ve formed here, or it can be campgrounds or just community centres.”
Eric Orwoll, president of Return to the Land, is talking to KY3 TV to explain why he intends to purchase more acreage in Arkansas in order to expand his whites-only settlements beyond the one he’d already established on more than 150 acres in northeast Arkansas.
In the heart of the Ozarks, Orwoll’s exclusive community is apparently growing, and marks a resurgence of racial segregation in the United States.
What’s even more troubling is that movements or communities like this have become emboldened under President Donald Trump’s administration, whose rhetoric and policies have created fertile ground for them to flourish.
Return to the Land was founded by Orwoll, a classically trained French horn player, and Peter Csere, a former jazz pianist, both of whom have chequered pasts. Orwoll, who The New York Times reported once live-streamed his own sex videos, found himself drawn to far-right politics after engaging with commenters on his YouTube channel espousing the “great replacement theory”, a conspiracy that falsely claims non-white populations will “replace” white people through birthrates and mass migration.
This “red-pilling” moment, as Orwoll describes it, led him to believe that white people in America were being persecuted and that the only solution was to form communities like Return to the Land. Csere, meanwhile, who was arrested for the attempted murder of a miner in Ecuador (he claims it was self-defence and that the case is still unresolved), was inspired by Orania, a whites-only town founded in 1991 in South Africa to preserve Afrikaner culture and which has grown significantly since the end of apartheid. Csere and Orwoll, it seems, were kindred spirits.
Orwoll has openly acknowledged that the group bars applicants who don’t present as white. It evaluates potential residents through face-to-face interviews, criminal background checks, and detailed ancestry questionnaires. In some cases, applicants must even submit family photographs.
Videos posted to the group’s social channels depict a pastoral scene with animals and children playing while residents raise timber-frame houses, churches and other structures, but it’s still not entirely clear how many properties have been built.
“Membership” does not necessarily mean you have to move on to the property. While Csere has said Return to the Land has 300 members across the country, Orwoll told Wired magazine only a “few dozen” were already living on the 160-acre site in Arkansas full-time, despite his claim that “hundreds” have signed up, paying a one-off $25 (£19) fee.
The pair designed Return to the Land as a bastion of “traditional values” and “European ancestry”. Its legal structure, which they believe exempts them from anti- discrimination laws, is a bold attempt to challenge America’s Fair Housing Act and set a precedent for racially exclusive communities.
Csere tells me that he thinks the time is ripe for what they’re building because “racial tensions in modern society are only increasing”, that it’s a “topic that’s been ignored for a long time”, and that the “Overton window has shifted far enough so that people in the mainstream now want to talk about these ideas”.
I ask whether he agrees that Trump’s election has made Return to the Land more permissible. “It’s possible,” he says. “We’re not huge Trump fans. We don’t see him as the guy rooting for us. He’s not some kind of saviour for us.”
Still, even if Orwoll and Csere downplay their allegiance to Trump, his words have undeniably fed into their project. From railing about the erasure of “white history” in American schools and museums (the US president has called for “patriotic education”) to amplifying conspiracy theories about white South African farmers being targeted and giving them “refuge” in the US, while pushing travel bans and promoting heavy-handed ICE tactics to keep others out, Trump is clear about what and who he believes needs “protecting”.
In his executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, he stated: “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
In January, he signed executive orders dismantling federal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes, stripping DEI language from policies, and rescinding longstanding anti-discrimination mandates for government contractors.
Most recently, his administration has demanded revisions to Smithsonian museum exhibits that addressed slavery, racism and colonisation, accusing them of being “woke”. He has described some of the largest cities in the country – cities like Baltimore and Washington, DC, which are run by Democrats and have majority Black populations and Black mayors – as dangerous and filthy.
It is this kind of rhetoric which serves as a catalyst for the resurgence of far-right ideologies and normalisation of racism, and gives validation to the Return to the Land project.
I point out how ridiculous it sounds to start an organisation because of the notion that white people are oppressed in America. White people make up 60 per cent of the US population, compared to Hispanic and Latino people who make up 19 per cent and Black people who make up 12 per cent.
“It’s not so much about what’s happening right now,” Csere says. “It’s where we see it leading in the future. We’re projected to become a minority.”
US census population projections show the country will become “minority white” in 2045: 49.7 per cent of the population compared to 24.6 per cent for Hispanics, 13.1 per cent for Black people, 7.9 per cent for Asians, and 3.8 per cent for multiracial populations.
In the Trump era, the great replacement theory, once only really taken seriously by nutty conspiracists on the far-right fringe, is being increasingly platformed by the mainstream. A report by The New York Times documented over 400 occasions where right-wing host Tucker Carlson promoted the notion that political leaders are deliberately altering the country’s demographics through immigration policies.
In a campaign advertisement, Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, claimed Democrats were seeking to “replace” the electorate by encouraging large-scale migration. And Ron Johnson, the Republican senator for Wisconsin, argued the Biden administration was pushing for “open borders”, questioning whether it was designed to reshape America’s demographic makeup in order to secure long-term political dominance. These conspiracy theorists are being described as the “dank right”, and is growing despite the rhetoric not being rooted in reality.
Csere says that “it’s pretty much undeniable that mass immigration has resulted in crime skyrocketing”. I tell him that the opposite is true – both in America and in Europe (in the UK, recent rows over housing migrants in places like the Bell Hotel in Epping have become flashpoints, with opponents tying temporary accommodation to a feared “crime wave”). These episodes show how migration anxieties are quickly grafted onto stories of lawlessness, even when the data doesn’t back them up.
Last year, for instance, using data from 55 countries over three decades, a comprehensive study by economists Olivier Marie and Paolo Pinotti showed no correlation between higher immigration rates and increased crime levels.
“Statistics can be manipulated,” Csere says, adding that he isn’t qualified to comment on specific research he hasn’t looked at. “Even if that were the case, there are reasons other than crime, such as a clash of incompatible cultures and values.” Csere then recounts a debunked story about Haitian migrants living in rural Ohio getting arrested for eating a neighbour’s cat. The story isn’t true. But in a world where repetition, not evidence, decides what people believe and social media amplifies those falsehoods, they start to feel real, which leads people to feel that something “must be done”.
The story of Return To The Land is not new. From the late-19th century to the Forties, America was dotted with “sundown towns” where Black people were forbidden to appear after dark. These communities were not confined to the Jim Crow South but were widespread across the country.
Between the Twenties and Fifties, a sinister alliance of private industry and federal policy, backed by real-estate boards and developer practices, entrenched segregation through racially restrictive covenants. Barring non-whites from buying or leasing properties, these covenants were a legal mechanism for maintaining white supremacy. In the 1970s, Trump and his father, Fred, faced a lawsuit alleging that they had denied rental opportunities to Black applicants in mostly white neighbourhoods in New York City. Without admitting guilt, the pair were required to revise their rental practices.
There were communities like Levittown on Long Island, where in the Forties and Fifties, Levitt & Sons’ developments excluded Black buyers, or Anna, Illinois, which remained effectively all-white for decades from the early 20th century. Return to the Land is a modern echo of historical injustices that should be all-too familiar to most Americans.
The legal framework that Return to the Land is navigating is complex. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibits housing discrimination based on race, but Return to the Land argues that its structure as a private membership association exempts them from this law. They point to a line in the Fair Housing Act that allows an exception for private associations to give preference to their own members when offering accommodation. Housing rights experts might argue that a community restricted to white residents is still illegal, but its creators believe they could win a potential challenge in court, citing a favourable political climate.
Simon Birkett runs The Woodlander Initiative, which aims to ‘safeguard the freedoms of the British people’ (Via HOPE not hate)
Last month, Return to the Land posted an interview that Peter Csere and another prominent member did with a British man who is attempting a similar project in England. Wiltshire-based tattoo artist Simon Birkett runs The Woodlander Initiative, ostensibly a land-purchasing scheme, with family, nature and community at its heart, but which anti-racism advocacy group Hope Not Hate says is a project to create whites-only enclaves in every county.
They have already bought land near the village of Llanafan Fawr, where TWI will reportedly hold its first “family camp” from 13 to 14 September. On its website, The Woodlander Initiative describes itself as “a British organisation working to improve the future and safeguard the freedoms of the British people”. It says it was formed “in order to give us, the people, a way to take back control of our land, our freedom and our future”.
This language is also echoed in the Operation Raise the Colours campaign, which throughout August urged supporters to display the St George’s Cross and the Union Jack in public spaces throughout the UK, to “take back control” and supposedly reclaim a disappearing national identity.
In an interview with Csere, Birkett says: “I’ve got to start with how very similar the two organisations are. We launched at roughly the same time as Return to the Land with no idea you guys are forming. … [I] instantly thought, wow it’s exactly the same as ours.”
Birkett says his organisation has so far “bought four different locations spread throughout the UK, 20 acres in total [and] we decide who can come on to that land, and we decide who can’t. It is for members only… we’re in control. For years everything’s been taken away from us, but we can take back land and control for our own people.”
According to Hope Not Hate senior researcher David Lawrence, the far right in Britain has long dreamed of establishing whites-only communities, and similar efforts have been pursued by Combat 18, the British National Party, and the now-proscribed terrorist organisation National Action. When he was younger, Birkett was a member of the British National Party but he denies The Woodland Initiative is a white supremacist organisation and insists that membership criteria does not take account of a person’s colour or ethnicity.
The normalisation of views previously considered extreme but now being repackaged as being about “traditional values” and “community”, has laid the groundwork for these initiatives to exist. Return to the Land is a stark reminder of the ghosts of America’s segregated past, but such a vision of exclusion would have seemed unthinkable in the UK a few years ago. The shifting tide of nationalistic rhetoric suggests it may no longer be beyond the realm of possibility.
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