A group of white nationalists in Arkansas operating under the name Return to the Land (RTTL) is building a “whites only” compound, the latest attempt by organized racists to build exclusive spaces to protect their perceived racial and cultural superiority.
Beyond constructing their own segregated community, group members have attempted to develop a legal framework that they claim enables RTTL to skirt federal and state civil rights laws intended to stop racial segregation in housing. This tactic is one they hope other racist groups will emulate.
Founded in September 2023 by Eric Orwoll, Peter Csere, Gavin Baker, David Leksen and Scott Hollowood, RTTL owns approximately 160 acres outside Ravenden, Arkansas, according to business and property records. Construction on the first community at RTTL’s Ravenden compound began in 2024. According to reporting from Sky News, around 40 people currently live there. Orwoll, the group’s president, claims that RTTL has more communities in the works, including in Missouri, Tennessee and Washington state.
RTTL has described itself as a “private membership association (PMA) for individuals and families with traditional views and European ancestry.” Its leaders claim they are not in the business of selling land and therefore do not need to follow laws intended to stop racial segregation in housing. RTTL’s legal theory has yet to be tested in court; however, the Arkansas attorney general’s office said it is reviewing the matter. Other experts have said this is a clear violation of the law. “Federal and state law, including the Fair Housing Act, prohibit housing discrimination based on race, period,” ReNika Moore, director of the racial justice program at the American Civil Liberties Union, told The New York Times. “Repackaging residential segregation as a ‘private club’ is still a textbook violation of federal law.”
RTTL’s Arkansas property is 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. 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.”
A history of white separatist compounds
Orwoll, RTTL’s president, grew up in La Mirada, California, before leaving to study music in New York state. That training led him to audition in 2013 for the Chinese dance group Shen Yun, whose orchestra he played in for six months. Around the same time, he started a YouTube channel where he posted videos of himself discussing philosophy with titles like “Collective Consciousness Explained” and “The European Origins of Behavioral Modernity.” According to an interview with The New York Times, his interactions with commenters on his YouTube videos led Orwoll to became “red-pilled,” a term white supremacists use to describe becoming aware of supposed racial differences and the alleged persecution of white people. “If we never had mass immigration, if we were still a homogeneous nation, we would not feel as much of a need to form communities like this,” he told the Times.
“Community” is something Orwoll talks about frequently. White people, he seems to argue, can only feel true belonging among other white people. Recent attempts to contend with the reality of racism in America — like discussing colonialism in school, as he mentioned in one example in a recent interview — have harmed white people, Orwoll claims, leaving them “with a negative self-concept of our race.” White people have become “atomized,” “deracinated” and left without a sense of identity or community as a result. Research does suggest that people in the United States are experiencing what the U.S. surgeon general in 2023 called an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” but it is brought on by factors including overwork, lack of time with family, technology and racial discrimination. (The relationship between discrimination and isolation, research shows, increases for people with darker skin tones.)
Orwoll, however, points his finger at multiculturalism, arguing that white people should focus on building their own institutions within their own segregated community. He says this has been denied to white people — never mind that research shows communities are more segregated than they were a generation ago, most white people live in majority-white neighborhoods and school segregation is increasing.
The choice to build Return to the Land’s whites-only compound in Arkansas was strategic. In addition to being near where Orwoll already lives, the county where the group’s land lies is over 90% white. Like RTTL, white power adherents have historically chosen to build compounds in areas of the country that are overwhelmingly white, hoping these places would be the seedbed of an eventual white separatist nation.
In the 1970s and 1980s, especially, many hate groups and extremists embraced what they called the “Northwest Territorial Imperative,” a plan to establish a white ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest by slowly taking over the region and ousting uncooperative white people. They chose the region because of its racial makeup, natural resources, abundant rural land and history of racial segregation. (The Oregon Constitution, for example, explicitly banned Black people and forbade Asian people from owning property or voting.)
One of the leading proponents of this strategy was Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler, who purchased a 20-acre property in Hayden Lake, Idaho, in the early 1970s. His compound would become an important gathering place for many of the most prominent and violent white power activists in the country and was the site for Butler’s annual “Aryan World Congress.” Someday, Butler hoped, “pure-blooded white people — an estimated 33 million Americans who claim roots in the twelve Aryan Nations — will abandon most of the continental United States to live in an all-white Republic in the Pacific Northwest. … Hayden Lake will be the capital.” Butler’s plan was not to be. In 2000, in a case brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a jury forced Butler to hand over his property to a woman the group’s security guards had fired at and beaten when she and her son stopped their car outside the compound.
Other white power groups have, like RTTL, chosen rural Arkansas as the nucleus of their imagined ethnostate. In the 1970s, the Christian Identity group The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) built a 224-acre compound along Bull Shoals Lake in Arkansas, where it offered “End Time Overcomer Survival Training School” and custom gunsmithing to fund its activities. The group’s operations shut down in 1985 after the FBI raided its compound and found a massive supply of cyanide the group planned to use to poison the water supply of an unknown city.
A new twist on an old idea
While both Aryan Nations and CSA have folded, many other groups have formed to pick up their mantle over the years. Pioneer Little Europe bought up lots in a small town in North Dakota, while Harold Covington’s Northwest Front and the violent accelerationist group The Base encouraged their followers to move to the Pacific Northwest. More recently, neo-Nazis Billy Roper and Chris Pohlhaus have attempted to build white settlements in the Ozarks and Maine, respectively.
Return to the Land is distinct from its forebears in a crucial way: The group is explicitly building a framework to legally — it argues — enforce segregation at a community level. This is unlike, for instance, Aryan Nations or National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group that operated a compound in West Virginia. Those compounds were owned by a single group leader, who therefore had the legal right to choose who was welcome to their private land. RTTL is instead building a segregationist community model, where families and individuals can essentially lease undeveloped land, but collectively determine who can be a member of the community.
RTTL’s concept has two layers. A limited liability company (LLC), Wisdom Woods, owns the land that will become an all-white community. A private membership organization — using an application that asks potential members about their beliefs around segregation, immigration and “transgenderism” — vets individuals and families. Those who are approved can then buy shares of the LLC, which are tied to specific lots on the plot of land. “LLC statutes allow for ‘share transfer restrictions,’ making transfers private and beyond the reach of federal housing laws,” Orwoll and Peter Csere, the group’s secretary, wrote in an article announcing their project last year in the white nationalist publication American Renaissance. “The PMA further restricts membership, ensuring a cohesive community. As a result, we’re able to exercise our right to free association privately and securely,” they argued.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws discrimination based on race and other characteristics, “is there for a reason. And this is a way around it?” a Sky News reporter asked cofounder Csere. “Yeah,” he answered.
The group has raised almost $70,000 on the platform GiveSendGo to fund its “legal framework research,” which it says will include hiring an attorney who specializes in discrimination law “to ensure we are complying with the FHA and other civil rights legislation” and creating new LLCs and a nonprofit related to further expand the project. Altogether, RTTL has raised over $185,000 on GiveSendGo campaigns.
‘We want all the browns gone’
Orwoll has been on a steady media tour throughout the summer, appearing both in mainstream media outlets and on a broad array of right-wing podcasts and livestreams. He is, in part, selling the community itself. A Sky News interview features many of the people who have come to live on the compound, including a married couple who first met there. Some of the residents have brought their children, all of whom are homeschooled by their parents. They have plans to build more facilities, including a community center.
Throughout their various media appearances, Orwoll and the other residents repackage and peddle segregation as something moral and necessary. One resident told Sky News the compound was about “trying to embrace our culture and our heritage. It’s been denigrated, if you ask me.” Another told the outlet, “It’s a loving movement.” All emphasized that their whites-only community was not about exclusion, but celebrating their own racial group — a common argument among white nationalists seeking to make their racist beliefs more palatable to a public audience.
The Christian nationalist Joel Webbon, who offered Orwoll a sympathetic interview, suggested that the group was taking a righteous path. He argued that the country has a “two-tier system” in which “the laws apply to some but do not apply to others,” resulting in a country of unruly Black people and resentful white people. “We’ve seen this when it comes to admission in universities and the standards, you know, academically. We’ve seen this politically. We’ve seen this in terms of, you know, legally, with crime and all these kinds of things.” Segregation, he said, would help to avoid a dire outcome. “And at a certain point,” he told Orwoll, “people are going to take it into their own hands. And the reaction, or the response, to say, ‘We’re going to separate and work hard and do our own thing,’ given historically, the other alternatives, that is a pretty humane, merciful and kind response.”
Despite their talk about RTTL being a “loving movement,” founders of the group denigrate non-white people, praise Nazis and claim Jewish people are conspiring to harm white people. Csere, who has constructed the legal framework for RTTL, has a long history of racist and antisemitic online posts. “The automatic base nature of Africans is that of a brute animal. The base nature of Europeans is still ‘made in the image of God,’” he posted to RTTL’s Telegram chat in May 2024. In a June 8 post on X, Csere wrote: “Deport everyone with skin tint ‘light mocha’ and below. Immigration should have never been opened up to non-Europeans.” About a week later, in response to an X post that favored deporting just undocumented people, Csere clarified his racist position, writing, “Speak for yourself. We want all the browns gone.” In a July 2025 post on X, he claimed the Holocaust did not happen, and asked, “But would you like to talk about why it should have?”
Orwoll, according to The New York Times, pulled a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf off his shelf and hid the spine before a photographer could take a photo of it on his shelf. Another member named Caitlin made a post on X in July commemorating the 100th anniversary of the same book. Orwoll has repeatedly claimed the criticism RTTL faces comes from Jewish people. When Forward reported on RTTL’s activities in June, Orwoll posted to X a week later, writing: “We have big plans. The Jews trying to harass us miscalculated.” After the Daily Mail revealed that he used to star in livestreamed porn with his then-wife, Orwoll called the reporting “Jewish smear tactics.” In another X post, he claimed, “Organized Jewry is coming after me for having a White neighborhood.”
Orwoll and RTTL have united various factions of the far right in support of their segregationist project. Far-right Daily Wire talk show host Matt Walsh claimed that the project is “as basic and fundamental as rights get. Freedom of association.” Keith Woods, a self-described “ethno-nationalist,” praised Orwoll for using mainstream media to introduce millions of people to their segregationist ideas.
Racist and antisemitic livestreamer Nick Fuentes said he sees huge promise in RTTL. “If his model survives legal challenges and scrutiny, that is a real political victory which is greater than all of the overrated ‘metapolitical’ victories” — or those that help white supremacist ideas circulate in the mainstream. “I hope he succeeds,” he concluded in an X post.
The legal climate, Orwoll hopes, will be friendly to his group. President Donald Trump, Orwoll noted in his interview with white nationalist Jake Shields, “is relatively conservative in his appointment of judges. And so, as a result, I think if Return to the Land is challenged in the next three years, it’s probably the best time for us to be challenged.” He also told Shields they chose Arkansas because it is 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.”
Trump’s administration has, elsewhere, introduced policies that seem designed to reintroduce segregation and to expunge the experiences of Black Americans and other people of color from the historical record. His administration has tried to purge all diversity, equity and inclusion efforts from the government, has stripped books about the history of marginalized people from the U.S. Naval Academy library and is now targeting the Smithsonian Institution with a “comprehensive review” to “remove divisive or partisan narratives.” The Smithsonian museums, Trump explained in a social media post, focus too much on “how bad Slavery was.” He has outfitted his administration with racists and extremists, including many who have publicly aired their support for the white supremacist “great replacement theory.” More recently, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has been posting racist social media propaganda eerily reminiscent of that produced by white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups.
Segregation has long been a goal of the white power movement. RTTL is acting now because its members think they can get away with it.
Image at top: Most of the homes on the compound were built by the residents. Some already have solar panels, generators for electricity, and septic and water systems. (Photo illustration by the SPLC; source images by Whitten Sabbatini/The New York Times/Redux and iStock)