I really want to say something vile about the kind of people who think they’re better than everyone else because of their skin color.
But let’s just sit with the irony for a second.
These white supremacists are building a whites-only “Return to the Land” town—on stolen land.— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) July 25, 2025 at 9:25 PM
Hat tip to commentor Soprano2 for alerting me to this latest iteration of an old, ugly project. From the Springfield News-Leader, “Springfield leaders urged to ‘speak up’ against plans for Whites-only enclave nearby”:
Following widespread reports that a new Whites-only group called Return to the Land wants to expand into Missouri — specifically, the Springfield area — the Anti-Defamation League and others are speaking out. The relatively new group is based in northern Arkansas.
The ADL Heartland wrote July 25 on X, formerly Twitter, that it is “concerned about recent reports claiming a White supremist group has plans to expand into Missouri.”…
The RTTL group has been chronicling the progress of the work on X, where it has garnered more than 5,200 followers since joining the platform in November 2024. It has publicly stated interest in similar communities springing up in the Ozarks and the “deep south” and the Appalachian region.
The News-Leader has left messages seeking comment with Eric Orwoll, co-founder of Return to the Land. He has more than 34,000 followers on X…
This week, in an online interview with Keith Woods, far-right Irish author of the book “Nationalism: The Politics of Identity,” Orwoll talked about the settlements under development in Arkansas.
“The community thing is pretty safe. We are simply exerting our right to exist on our own. We are not marching down the street and we’re not occupying conspicuous public spaces like owning businesses,” he said.
The Return to the Land website lists a 150-acre property founded in October 2023 and now home to “numerous families” with more construction underway. It is referred to as “Community I.”
A second Arkansas community was founded in January 2025, according to the website and another — which includes the Springfield area — is described as “in the initial planning process.”
In a section on its website, the group said starting a new RTTL community is a time-consuming and complex process and much research is required.
“We need to make sure that any state where an RTTL neighborhood is located is favorable to conservatives and has strong laws in place,” the group noted, citing homeschooling, gun, self-defense laws. “Some states will be put on hold for now. We will prioritize ‘easier states’ first then will decide if it’s worth starting neighborhoods in the ‘hard states.'”…
Much more at the link.
The video clips here are from an NBC news report, but I haven’t been able to find an online source for the original story (if you do, please link in the comments!).
ETA: Thank you, BethanyAnne:
Sky News semi-transcript.
I’m also curious to know how they’re bankrolling this project. Some of the ‘pioneers’, presumably, have their own savings (or family money), but I get the impression the ‘community leaders’ are not the ones doing manual labor on-site. ‘Follow the money’ is always a wise maxim when dealing with Bold Independent Individualists…
So these white supremacists building a whites-only “Return to the Land” town in the Ozarks—what’s their source of income while living in complete isolation from society?
Please tell me they’re not collecting welfare benefits.
Anyone normalizing Hitler as a product of propaganda isn’t just wrong…
🧵— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) July 27, 2025 at 10:07 PM
…they’re dangerous. That’s exactly how the last nightmare started. We are not doing that again.
That dude needs a history lesson. We’ve lived through this before.
American towns weren’t just whites-only, thriving Black communities were burned to the ground or flooded.
Black people were lynched while white families, kids included, watched. All for speaking out or simply existing in the wrong place.
A return to Jim Crow wouldn’t satisfy these folks. They’re reaching for something even darker.
-end-
===
This idiot believes this country was a white country when his ancestors arrived.
— Bailey Price (@baileyprice.bsky.social) July 27, 2025 at 11:18 PM
Soprano2
We got an e-mail from the city manager today saying that he and City Council are condemning this in the strongest possible terms. I have no doubt, because this kind of crap is bad for business, plus it’s just plain BAD.
J. Arthur Crank
Will there be bears at that “community”?
Also too: I could do without an image of Fucker Carlson (whose boyhood nickname surely must have been “Mother”).
BethanyAnne
This is the source that I saw for it earlier:
news.sky.com/story/inside-the-whites-only-settlement-in-arkansas-the-group-building-a-fortress-for-t…
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Nothing has changed in the Ozarks.
There are white supremacist churches and groups with their own little compounds littered throughout the I-44 corridor. There was one in Dixon (southwest of me, west of Ozark Hillbilly) for years. I think the old crank that owned the land finally died and his kids were either in jail or dead themselves so it went away.
Lots of meth dealing, etc. The movie “Winters Bone” remains the best dramatic depiction of the region.
And while Springfield and the area around it was known for a long time as the bat-shittiest, craziest area in the state, that’s not really the case vis a vis Springfield anymore. Now, drive an hour in any direction and it’s still bat-shittiest, crazytown.
This reddit thread, to me, is like a geographic who’s who from my time back there. I knew way too many of those towns.
reddit.com/r/missouri/comments/16yh9od/are_there_any_sundown_towns_in_missouri_or_any/
Lapassionara
There was a group that wanted to do this kind of thing in South Carolina several years (maybe several decades) ago. They called themselves “the Exodus Project,” and their goal was to get a big enough group so that they could take over the SC government and get the state to leave the union. I don’t think history was their strong suit.
Do they plan to grow all their own food? Or will they stoop to going into nearby towns to buy supplies? Where no doubt there will be people that aren’t like them?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Pushing Drugs.
Baud
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
That’s what you get when you get rid of DEI.
Harrison Wesley
Why would anyone want to live with these people? They sound horrible.
New Deal democrat
For those who might be interested, this is a long but terrific Bloomberg News article, “DOGE-pilled,” about Luke Farritor, a 23 year old programming genius who went from writing a program enabling scientists to read an entire library of ancient scrolls burnt in the famous eruption of Vesuvius, to helping compromise and/or destroy numerous government departments, including USAID and the CPSC.
It’s almost like reading a (much more realistic and riveting) biography of how a kid turns into Darth Vader, and partly a terrifying examination of the fascist techbro culture that has consumed Silicon Valley.
Well worth your time and effort:
bloomberg.com/features/2025-luke-farritor-doge/?srnd=phx-businessweek
Soprano2
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: You don’t have to drive an hour, a half hour will get it for you in some directions. Springfield is a lot better than it used to be. For one, the MAGA’s never succeeded in taking over our school board. Do you know who Frazier Glenn Miller was? A crazy white supremacist crank from Aurora, they published his letters in the local paper. That was some crazy ass shit for sure. He went to Kansas to shoot Jews, and ended up shooting people who weren’t Jews. He died in prison. So yeah, there are people around here who would welcome a community like the one these people are planning.
BellyCat
But… but, who will do the lawn care?
lowtechcyclist
If these ‘communities’ are each on someone’s private property, then the owner can allow or bar whoever they want from their property.
Any construction, of course, would still have to comply with local and state codes. A friend of mine bought a 20-acre lot several years ago in a wooded area nearby, with the notion of building houses for himself and his wife, and for both of his children and their families, on it. Getting the county to approve the required subdivision took three years. I bet a lot of these bozos have no idea what they’re getting into with respect to that.
cain
I’m happy to see them separate themselves from the rest of the country.
Unlikely they can vote since their domicles have to be recognized. I don’t think hte U.S. postal service is going to show up there any time soon.
They look like some kind of modern day pioneers cosplaying the old simple days or something. They look foolish.
They also look like easy marks for conmen and political aspirants looking for a way to launch a right wing campaign.
kindness
Seeing this group I’m reminded of that scene from the movie Deliverance where we’ve all been warned… run for your life when you hear banjo music.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@lowtechcyclist:
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahaha. There ain’t no zoning and codes in red, rurl Misery. Well, at least in massive swaths of it–we built our house and had to pull nothing, get nothing inspected. N.O.T.H.I.N.G.
Sure, there are are national codes but they typically ain’t enforced or enforceable in many of those very bumfuck counties. Again, I know, I lived and built and restored in one such bumfuck county.
Good example is sewage disposal. Live on a property that’s at least 3.12 acres in size and you don’t need septic. Most bubbas will cobble together a pond, run a pipe into that and call it a day. Again, enforcement is lax on a good day.
Soooooo, any rurl cracker with a hankering for keeping the gubmint out for any variety of reasons can pretty much do what they fuck he wants as long as he owns the property and is current on taxes. Now, don’t pay your property taxes, such as they might be, and then it’s a different story. Doesn’t matter how red and rurl the county might be, county commissioners of every stripe will want their tax cut.
hells littlest angel
Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice? What Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice?
ColoradoGuy
The return of Sundown Towns. Fortunately, it doesn’t look they will be on any major highways, so nobody will be forced to drive through them. Good question who will put in the labor to build them, or who will drain the septic tanks when they fill up.
They’re still going to have to drive into the nearest town to get diesel for their F250’s. Yes, there’s biodiesel, but that turns solid with the first good freeze. And toilet paper. And Mountain Dew. The irresistible pull of the nearest Walmart.
lowtechcyclist
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Funny, that’s exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of. All I can say is, ick.
Dan B
I just checked out the map of Ravenden. It’s very close to where we lived in Arkansas, maybe ten miles. I feel very creeped out.
Baud
I wish there were a Jackal Only enclave.
laura
@New Deal democrat: i long for the day Luke Farritor and the rest of the doge boys get lengthy prison sentences and that is the most charitable thing I am capable of saying on his and their behalf. Otherwise, Luke’s gonna be a mayor of one of these cracker towns.
XeckyGilchrist
@J. Arthur Crank: “Will there be bears at that “community”?”
LOL, exactly what I was thinking. I hope this bullshit falls apart as spectacularly as that one did.
Searcher
What’s the most successful of these projects?
The problem with trying to establish an enclave like this is that (a) you move where there’s jerbs and (b) the person establishing the enclave wants to be In Charge, and no one wants to deal with the sort of person who wants to be In Charge.
So unless you’ve already got someone in charge (eg, cults) or you have a built in economy (eg, communes), “hey everyone come move to this cool place with me” is really not a compelling sales pitch. You tend to get a handful taking you up on it before someone realizes they can just as easily go start their own enclave and start exhorting people to come join their fiefdom instead.
H.E.Wolf
Harry Truman would have had something to say about this activity in his beloved home state… and it would have blistered the ears and hindparts of these benighted fools.
trumanlibraryinstitute.org/civil-rights-2/
hells littlest angel
@Baud: Such an enclave would exclude fascists and racists, and thus we would be illegal, anti-conservative discrimination.
XeckyGilchrist
@New Deal democrat: How tragic. I remember hearing about the scrolls project and thinking that was fantastic. I hope Farritor catches a clue.
Miss Bianca
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Gods, you make me shudder. And I thought my rural red CO county was bad! Hell, we’ve at least *heard* of building and sanitation codes, even if we can’t always be bothered to abide by ’em.
Soprano2
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Christian County didn’t have any zoning until a developer proposed building a large trailer park across the road from a subdivision with houses worth several hundred thousand dollars. Imagine their horror when they discovered there was no legal way to stop it! These people who don’t want government interfering in their lives suddenly wanted some interference. It was inevitable, Ozark and Nixa grew like Topsy in the ’90’s and 2000’s. I barely recognize them now.
Polk County is still terrible, though. I shudder to think of south central MO.
Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin)
Was it here that I read about “Glenn Besckistan” and some other wingnut Utopias that just haven’t quite come into being?
I was so delighted as a kid to learn “utopia” is Greek for “no place”. Thanks, Thomas More.
Darkrose
Reminds me of the Neo-Confederate Meeting sketch from SNL:
Beck Bennet: If they’re gonna keep coming here, then we’re going to go someplace else. Our own place for our own people, all right? No immigrants, no minorities. An agrarian community where everyone lives in harmony because every single person is white.”
Adam Driver: I know that place—that sounds like Vermont.
lowtechcyclist
The idea of “back to the land” sounds great until you find out how much work is involved in scraping a living from it.
Yeah, drugs will probably be their real source of income.
NutmegAgain
@Lapassionara: Right. “Exodus Project” ? Really? and I’m sure they have restrictions of Xtians only. The irony is unfathomable.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: We would annihilate each other within a week.
Hoodie
“Ozark white supremacist” is too hilarious to contemplate. That’s a special kind of delusion.
Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin)
What would Ozarkhillbilly think of these clowns? I miss him.
Professor Bigfoot
I’ve said for a very long time that conservatives know good and damn well they’re not going to fight the US Army, they couldn’t stand before a single Marine fire team.
But what they CAN do is ethnic cleansing, attacking and killing their fellow citizens for the crime of not being sufficiently like them. As their grandfathers did to Tulsa and Rosewood and Elaine.
I don’t own guns to fight the government. I own guns because conservatives do.
Geminid
@H.E.Wolf: I read a biography of Truman that had a funny anecdote.
Some parts of Missouri were strongly Democratic in the early 20th century. One of Truman’s aunts was told of a young woman who had never even met a Republican until she went off to college,
“Didn’t miss much,” the aunt remarked.
Professor Bigfoot
@BellyCat: Ummm… the same ones who picked the cotton, I suspect.
ETA— at least, I’d wager that’s the plan.
Geminid
Duplicate
WaterGirl
@Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin): You are not alone in that.
laura
@Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin): He’d be a’gin it. It would have rubbed him wrong based on what I remember of his capacity for kindness and empathy, and his life experience dealing with a narcissist. But I bet he’d have had their number from jump.
Sister Golden Bear
@J. Arthur Crank:
I’m in negotiations with the bears about moving in. A sticking point is the bears’ concern the garbage will be laced with by-products from meth cooking.
Sister Golden Bear
@Sister Golden Bear: The back up plan involves airdropping hordes of large hairy gay men in from San Francisco.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin): Thomas Moore burned a lot of “heretics” too. I never know quite what to do with him.
Darkrose
@Sister Golden Bear: I would pay money to watch the Folsom Street Fair Skydiving Team in action. Bonus points for a video with “How It’s Done” from KPOP Demon Hunters as the soundtrack.
Ohio Mom
I’m stuck on the question, what is white culture, anyway?
There is a white culture, or several overlapping subcultures, even if we are something like the fish who don’t know they are in water about our experience with it/them.
One thing I am sure of is that the colonial era music that pair in the video are performing is not part of contemporary white culture, pop music is — ironically, that music has very Black roots.
Anyway, you don’t have to give an introduction before you play your in-groups’ music like they do (“This is a three penny pipe” or whatever that flute was), a real cultural or ethnic group already knows their music. And can sing along.
Return to the Land is a funny community in that it’s a very narrow age range, an authentic cultural community has all generations, and the mix of ages gives you a sense of continuity.
Growing up, the oldsters in my life told stories and anecdotes that cemented our shared identity as Jewish Americans.
I am thinking right now about my Uncle Henry’s stories about his experiences in the army, where he met Southern Americans for the first time. As a first generation Jew in New York, he ate rye bread, bagels, bialis, challah — all from the neighborhood bakery. He was flabbergasted that the Southerners considered the Army’s spongy white bread a gourmet treat.
So maybe the people on the video should be chowing down on Wonder bread in shared communion.
It seems obvious to me that most of the recruits are very lonely people who are thrilled to have a group to belong to. Maybe there is an argument that anomie should be considered part of white culture.
Darkrose
@Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin): Things I learned from video games: the main character’s guide in Utopia is named Hythlodaeus, which is “Speaker of Nonsense” in Greek.
persistentillusion
@Sister Golden Bear: LOL! Striking hearts into the hearts of simple-minded, incel, unattractive people everywhere!
Rick Dyer
I think you are missing the point. This is self selected concentration camp for redneck morons
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
But what a glorious week it would be.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: True.
Aussie Sheila
Counting down the weeks till reports surface of wife beating and child abuse in these ‘communities’.
As sure as the sun rises in the east, these types of people are fleeing social scrutiny and accountability. They don’t fear ‘the brown/black people’. They fear the potential for social and criminal sanctions arising from their terrible personal behaviour.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Thomas More’s skull exhumation:
smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/english-church-wants-to-exhume-the-skull-thomas-more-tudor-statesman-b…
Josie
I would have liked for the interviewer to ask for a description of “white culture.” What are some of the tenets of white culture, the literature, the music, the stories of ancestors? It seems to me that “white” is used by these people to cover racism and has nothing to do with culture. I’d really like to hear them answer that question.
dmsilev
@Sister Golden Bear:
The helicopters carrying them will change their soundtrack from Ride of the Valkyries to It’s Raining Men.
Right?
lowtechcyclist
@Aussie Sheila:
I wonder how many of the men who would uproot their lives and move to something like this would have wives and children in the first place.
Darkrose
@lowtechcyclist: I suspect the wives and children won’t have a choice, like the asshole who moved to Russia to escape the woke. His sons were adults, so they chose to stay in the US, but his young daughters and his wife are stuck there.
Harrison Wesley
@Darkrose: You sure the English translation isn’t ‘Donald Trump?’
ruckus
@Harrison Wesley:
They sound horrible.
It’s far worst than just sounding horrible. These are people that can’t recognize anyone that doesn’t look like them. They are idiots, morons and bigots. And each of those characteristics don’t just exist they are three sides to a defective human being, that thinks that anything that doesn’t look, sound, act like them is not just worthless but should not be breathing.
ruckus
@Josie:
You are right about the covering racism, it’s those that don’t shout their racism from rooftops – but are still all in on it.
Montanareddog
@Baud:
The horror… The horror…
bluefoot
@Darkrose: That would be pretty awesome. I would pay money to see that.
Baud
Via Reddit
cain
@Ohio Mom: thrilled because everyone went no contact with them.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Baud: MORE COVERUP!!!
Craig
@XeckyGilchrist: more likely he’ll go make a bunch of money at Palmer Lucky’s private defense firm.
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: So, the stuff Wyden is digging in to. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.
The Audacity of Krope
I detect active tinkering on the site.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@MagdaInBlack: I assume he had a contingency plan when he sent his “recommendations” to the DOJ last week.
finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/as-trump-sits-on-key-epstein-files-wyden-lays-out-follow-the…
WTFGhost
@MagdaInBlack: Here is a place where I don’t get people thinking Epstein is a “distraction.” If you can’t fold “and he’s running cover for corrupt billionaires and a deceased pedophile” into your message, as a kind-of “by the way…”, then maybe you need better messaging… I’m not wrong, here, am I?
MagdaInBlack
@WTFGhost: Nope, you ain’t wrong.
JoeyJoeJoe
@Geminid: in his book, Fishbait Miller (former House doorman), wrote that when he moves from southern Mississippi to DC, he encountered a type of person he had never seen before – a Republican
The Audacity of Krope
Personally, I would rather the government and our political discourse be focused on matters of day to day importance to the average citizen. My ideal for a situation like this with Epstein is that they be rigorously investigated upon any complaint and nothing hits the news until the full court process has transpired.
That isn’t the world we live in, though, and I hardly want for Trump to be the first beneficiary of any improvements to our criminal justice ethics.
JoeyJoeJoe
@dmsilev: I think that very thing happened in a Simpsons episode. Mr. Burns was tracking down Homers mom in a helicopter while Ride of the Valkyries was playing, and then It’s Raining Men started playing. Smithers admitted to taping over part of the song
Soprano2
@Baud: This makes me think even more that the real FFOTUS Epstein scandal is financial.
The Audacity of Krope
@JoeyJoeJoe: No matter what it is, Simpsons already did it. South Park did an episode discussing this.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: isn’t Darien, CT essentially that?
Timill
@Soprano2: What, like Epstein’s accounts will show Melania’s earnings?
Sister Golden Bear
@Darkrose: “Who’s your Daddy now!”
Ramona
@ColoradoGuy: and doctors and hospitals… I feel bad for their children!
apocalipstick
@Soprano2:
Reed’s Spring is the new Nixa.
Wright County gave tRump the highest vote percentage of any county in the state.
Gretchen
@Soprano2: Is that the Jewish Community Center shooting? There is still heavy security presence there. They have a terrific daycare but some parents hesitate to send their kids there considering the current climate and the crazy past.
apocalipstick
@lowtechcyclist:
Almost all of them.
satby
@Ohio Mom: I’m stuck on the question, what is white culture, anyway?
Yeah, I watched most of that and thought the same thing. There is no such thing as “white culture”. And American culture is a mulligan stew of influences from many cultures and races. This group’s political theory is malignant ahistorical bullshit formulated by pathetic frightened children. Dangerous, but basically just assholes.
Nettoyeur
@Gretchen:
Glidwrith
@satby: Yeah, I can’t think of anything that is “white culture”. Unlike a lot of people, you have to go back five generations before you get to an immigrant in my husband’s or my family tree. There’s simply no cultural traditions we have that aren’t from the amalgamation of cultures in the US.
Between the two of us, there’s French, German, Danish, Jew and Native American. What culture are we supposed to claim?
Instead, we celebrate any holidays that we can get time off for and chow down on just about any ethnic food we can get our hands on. Celebrate life and family, because you never know when it gets taken away.
Anne Laurie
Hand to Murphy, I can honestly claim the same thing. My Bronx neighborhood, in the 1960s/70s, put the ‘parochial’ in parish.
rikyrah
As long as these places are clearly labeled SUNDOWN TOWNS, I don’t care
Paul in KY
@Baud: What a citadel on the hill that would be! Probably would name it Baudington or something like that.
Paul in KY
@HopefullyNotcassandra: He was a real weirdo. Couldn’t even make a minor compromise (signing that document) that would have saved his life (and helped his family). Really had a stick up his butt.
Paul in KY
@Ohio Mom: In Pike County, KY (where my dad was from), they made great bread (if you could afford to get your grain ground up at the local mill). I think those crackers might have been ooohing at the fancy ‘city bread’ like one could get up in Lexington or some metropolis like that.
Paul in KY
@dmsilev: YMCA would be another good choice.
Kent
Fuck no. No one gets to do this in OUR country.
If they want to create their white-only Bantustan they can immigrate to Russia or some other place to set it up, not the United States of America.