US housing rights experts say a community restricted to white residents is illegal, but the creators believe they could win a potential challenge in court in the current political climate.
In the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, nearly an hour from the closest city, a small group of homesteaders is building an exclusive community from scratch.
Applicants to the community are screened with an in-person interview, a criminal background check, a questionnaire about ancestral heritage and sometimes even photographs of their relatives.
The community’s two architects – a classically trained French horn player who has livestreamed his own sex videos, and a former jazz pianist arrested but not charged for attempted murder in Ecuador – say they must personally confirm that applicants are white before they can be welcomed in.
“Seeing someone who doesn’t present as white might lead us to, among other things, not admit that person,” said one founder, Eric Orwoll, who moonlights as a Platonic scholar on YouTube but is now focused on developing 160 acres in Ravenden, Arkansas, into a community strictly for white, heterosexual people called Return to the Land.
The far right is surging in the United States, driven in part by white nationalists exploiting economic anxieties and a populace increasingly frustrated with the political status quo. Now, as the Trump administration rolls back diversity, equity and inclusion policies; cracks down on immigration; and offers pardons to white supremacists, some see an opening. In creating their community, the founders of Return to the Land are testing antidiscrimination housing laws that have been in place for 57 years.
The community’s other founder, Peter Csere, was arrested in Ecuador for stabbing a miner and is accused of stealing tens of thousands of dollars from a vegan community there. He and Orwoll say they believe Return to the Land meets the requirements for a legal exemption for private associations and religious groups that offer housing to their members.
Tim Griffin, the Arkansas attorney general, opened an investigation into potential legal violations by Return to the Land after reports on the community were published earlier in the summer in The Forward and on Sky News. Jeff LeMaster, his communications director, said in a statement, “We’re continuing our review of this matter.”
ReNika Moore, the director of the racial justice program at the American Civil Liberties Union, disputed the men’s claims that Return to the Land is legal.
“Federal and state law, including the Fair Housing Act, prohibit housing discrimination based on race, period,” she said in an email. “Repackaging residential segregation as a ‘private club’ is still a textbook violation of federal law.”
Representatives for America First Legal, the conservative advocacy group, did not respond to a request for comment on the community’s legal status. Representatives for Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas also did not respond to a request for comment.
To date, there have been no legal challenges to Return to the Land. But John Relman, a civil rights lawyer who specialises in fair housing violations, said the group could be sued under not just the 1968 Fair Housing Act but also multiple sections of the US Civil Rights Act of 1866.
“You’ve got a smoking gun case of intentional discrimination,” he said. “I think they’re misguided when they say that they’re home free.”
But Return to the Land says it sees an opening under a federal Government that has pushed the boundaries of laws and norms, especially when it comes to race.
“Return to the Land needs to strike while the iron is hot,” Orwoll wrote on a fundraising page for the group, which has raised nearly US$90,000 ($154,000).
“They see right now as a very opportune time. They see a friend in the White House at the highest level,” said Peter Simi, a professor of sociology at Chapman University in California who is an expert on extremist violence. “They see themselves quite literally in various positions in the administration, including the Department of Justice and Department of Defence.”
The timing, Orwoll and Csere said, is right. “I would rather the precedent is set and the discussion is had while there’s a relatively favourable cultural and legal climate for it,” said Orwoll. “So if we’re going to fight this battle – and it’s a battle that’s going to be fought at some point – it better be now.”
40 occupants and some goats
Return to the Land is the name of both the 160-acre compound, which has about 40 residents, and a private association that Orwoll said “hundreds” have joined, paying a one-time US$25 membership fee and earning acceptance after sharing information online about their ethnic background.
Orwoll and Csere, with three other men, run a limited liability company founded in September 2023. Nearly two weeks later, they bought the land in Ravenden for US$237,000, property records show. Members of the association can buy shares currently valued around US$6600 each in the LLC. In exchange for each share, they each receive 3 acres in the compound.
Orwoll and Csere initially welcomed media attention into their compound, eager to draw in new recruits and also traffic to the donation pages for cryptocurrency and precious metals on their website.
They are now more wary.
Orwoll, 35, recently gave The New York Times a limited tour, allowing entry to the property through a gate that had a lock. He sat on a folding chair in his office, housed in an insulated shed with air conditioning and fibre internet, two pianos and shelves full of philosophy texts. Before a photographer could snap pictures, he pulled a copy of Mein Kampf from a bookshelf and turned it around to hide its spine.
The compound feels isolated from the rest of the world. Ravenden is a tiny strip of a town that has about 400 residents and one barbecue restaurant. The closest grocery store is inside a Walmart Supercenter 30 minutes away. The town mascot, a raven, is commemorated by a 12-foot stucco statue on the side of its main road.
At the compound, rough gravel roads have been carved by bulldozer into the rugged, wooded terrain. Orwoll showed off one trim, two-story white cabin with an American flag flapping above its front door, and a rising community centre he hopes will one day host dinners and events. Down past a creek was a pen of milk goats, both mothers and babies, guarded by Lucy, a white Great Pyrenees, on a long chain.
The rest of the compound, he said, was off-limits because of residents’ wishes. He declined to say how many cabins have been fully built, but some members, he said, already have installed solar panels, dug septic and water systems, and installed generators for electricity.
From Plato to Orania
Orwoll grew up in La Mirada, California, outside Los Angeles, and in high school, he considered himself a libertarian. He studied the French horn at the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, before moving to Milwaukee to join the orchestra with Shen Yun, the classical Chinese dance and music production.
While Orwoll considers the group a cult, he said, “I liked a lot of how they did things, though. They’re very efficient. I thought it was interesting having a compound like they have.”
Despite never studying it formally, he’d always been drawn to Greek philosophy, and he eventually started uploading homemade videos about Plato and collective consciousness to his YouTube channel.
He attracted a following, including some commenters who responded with arguments about demographic shifts in the United States. They repeated ideas from what’s known as the Great Replacement theory – a conspiracy theory that non-white populations will replace white people through birthrates and mass migration – and racist pseudoscience about human intelligence and its link to genetics, an idea that has been broadly debunked by experts.
Those comments, he said, began to convince him that white people in America were being persecuted and that the fabric of the United States was fraying as its non-white populations grew. “I got red-pilled,” he said, using a term for awakening to a supposed hidden truth. “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 said.
Between his recorded musings on Plato, he began weaving in videos about elites in the United States and theories on how the genetics for blonde hair and blue eyes spread across the globe over history.
The videos caught the eye of Csere, 36, a Connecticut-raised jazz pianist. The two men struck up a friendship online.
“Eventually, I realised there is a genetic component to IQ, and it’s one of those things that people like to pretend doesn’t exist because it’s politically inconvenient,” Csere said, repeating the theory in an interview on the compound. “You have cultures that invented the wheel thousands of years ago, and then you have cultures that never ever invented the wheel until it was given to them by somebody else.”
He said he became interested in Orania, a town for white people in South Africa established at the end of the apartheid era that is restricted to Afrikaners – South Africans of European descent – and has been largely ignored by the South African Government.
Unfulfilled by life as a musician, Csere said he began searching for something with “more meaning”. He first embraced veganism and a “need to become a hippie” and formed an eco-village in Ecuador. The village, Fruit Haven, publicly accused Csere of fraud and theft on its website. In a statement, it accused him of absconding in July 2023 with thousands of misappropriated dollars and said that he once stabbed an Ecuadorian miner, causing him a collapsed lung, and was arrested on a potential charge of attempted murder in Ecuador. He has not yet been formally charged. The Times reviewed documentation of the arrest as well as emails from members of the community begging Csere to return their funds.
Csere said the stabbing was an act of self-defence during an altercation, and he left the country many months after the incident. He disputed the idea that he owed money to any members of the community.
“They’ve been trying to press charges for a long time and were unable to,” Csere said of Ecuadorian authorities. Members of the community were “trying to generate drama” by discussing the incident and claiming he owed them money, he said.
‘Well, it was bad’
Csere designed the structure of Return to the Land. He and Orwoll believe the structure is legal because a line in the Fair Housing Act allows an exemption for private associations and religious groups to give preference to their own members when offering housing. It’s a rule, legal experts say, designed to allow groups like churches to offer a house for clergy on their property.
Orwoll argued that other groups have communities designed exclusively for members of one race or religion; he pointed to EPIC City, a master-planned Muslim-centric community in Texas, as an example.
Those communities do not explicitly bar outsiders. Rather, they are designed with amenities that would attract certain people. EPIC City, which has a mosque and halal markets, was investigated by the Justice Department for potential civil rights violations. No discrimination was found, and that investigation was dropped in June, although the state of Texas is continuing its own inquiry. The developers have said they will welcome residents of any faith.
But Orwoll and Csere believe the rule they’ve homed in on from the Fair Housing Act gives them grounds to restrict membership to those, as they put it, with strict European heritage. They’ve rejected applicants that they believed did not appear to be white enough.
“They didn’t seem like a white person,” Orwoll said. “They didn’t look like a white person.”
The founders said many residents do not support President Donald Trump or are apathetic to his presidency. Unlike many of Trump’s most ardent supporters, most residents of Return to the Land are not particularly religious.
Orwoll voted for Trump, he said, but only because the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency seemed like a worse option. Csere criticised the Maga movement’s “rabid support for Israel”.
On his X social media account, Csere uses antisemitic slurs and says that the Holocaust never happened but should have. When asked in an interview about the genocide, he contradicted his X posts and said he believed the Holocaust happened. “Well, it was bad,” he said.
Men, women and children
On a Monday in August, four children giggled and played on a rusty seesaw under the shade of a few trees.
There are about a dozen children living at Return to the Land – Orwoll declined to give a firm number – and all are homeschooled, he said. “I’d rather leave it to the parents to educate their kids how they want,” he said.
Orwoll and his ex-wife, Caitlin Smith, have four children between the ages of 2 and 8. Living in the community, Smith said, has been great for her children because it has given them “people to play with that we could trust”.
The pair met at music school; like Orwoll, Smith, 31, who is originally from upstate New York, plays the French horn. Before they had four children, the pair made live sex videos for money on the porn site Chaturbate.
“When I was doing that, I was a moral nihilist. I was not yet a Christian,” Orwoll said of the videos. “I had a different worldview and value system, and part of my rationale for going toward more traditional values was seeing the mistakes I made when I did not have them as a young person.”
Smith declined to comment on the videos. According to her profile page, which is still visible, with the videos, she listed a preference for men, women, trans people and couples. At Return to the Land, gay people of any race are barred.
Smith is now remarried to another man, and they live on the compound. She sat next to Orwoll and his new fiancee, Allison, who declined to give her last name, saying she was fearful of being targeted for her views.
“This is how I’ve always wanted to live – returning to the land,” Smith said. “The most important thing about this project for me is being able to actually vet my neighbours. You can move to a nice area, and in 10 years, you have no idea who’s going to be living down the street. What makes a person a person is their whole past, who they are now. And the genetics as well.”
Orwoll hopes to one day welcome around 200 men, women and children to Return to the Land in Arkansas. He said supporters nationwide have expressed interest in following the Ravenden model to build their own communities. The website of Return to the Land shows five additional projects – two more in the Ozarks, one in the Deep South and two in the Appalachian Mountains.
Orwoll has a trip planned to Missouri soon, he said, to look at potential land sites for a community there and to “vet people who may not necessarily be fully vetted”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Debra Kamin
Photographs by: Whitten Sabbatini
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