Eric Orwoll (left) and Peter Csere

Ravenden, Arkansas

About an hour into my visit to Return to the Land, America’s only whites-only, no gays, no Jews, no Muslims community, it was clear I was in danger of being kicked out. “You are ruder and pushier than the reporters who interviewed us from The New York Times and CNN,” said Eric Orwoll, the co-founder of the settlement. I had traveled to this hamlet outside Ravenden, in northeast Arkansas, to make a video about the community for my YouTube channel and to write a piece about my travels in Arkansas for The Spectator. I hadn’t come to pick a fight with them or insist that the Feds close the place down. But Orwoll didn’t like my questions or my habit of interrupting his lengthy sermons on the need for a whites-only town.

What did I ask that troubled Orwoll, 35, and his white, Millennial and Gen Z compatriots? There were two lines of questioning that seemed to irritate him the most. First, I wanted to know why they felt the need to formally exclude so many groups in a very conservative corner of Arkansas, outside a town that is 97% white. Orwoll and the others I interviewed conceded that even if they had no exclusionary rules, the groups they deem undesirable would be unlikely to move there anyway. But they said it was important to create the rules because the demographics of the area could change anytime if an employer decided to import workers, for example. They said they wanted to build a whites-only community that would endure for generations even as the demographics of the country changed.

The other line of questioning that disturbed them was when I asked Eric and two others in the community if they’d rather have a black conservative or a white liberal in their community. Their answer was unanimous: they said they’d take the white liberal, because that person could change their ideology. (Orwoll and fellow co-founder, Peter Csere, noted that they were once more liberal but had changed over the years.)

I also asked them what it was about these other groups that made them undesirable in their eyes. Orwoll wouldn’t entertain this question. Csere claimed that gays have higher rates of child molestation, which is not true. He also pointed to a gruesome, but quite rare, Jewish circumcision ritual called Metzitzah b’peh, in which ritual circumcisers use their mouths to suck blood away from the wound on the baby’s penis. Csere said he wouldn’t want to live near people who do that, but again, this is something practiced in a handful of Orthodox Jewish communities in New York, not in the outback of Arkansas.

As our interview grew contentious, Orwoll said that he “couldn’t recommend me” to the rest of the community. He’s Return to the Land’s godfather, so this meant I couldn’t interview anyone else who lives there. He also declined my request to get some drone shots of the community. It was akin to being asked to leave. What I found particularly striking about how thin-skinned he was is that I didn’t even ask him about a host of controversies the media dug up on him and the others.

For example, The Daily Mail and other media outlets reported that he and his ex-wife, who is also a member of the community, used to livestream sex on a porn website, where her profile said she was open to men, women, and trans people. The New York Times said he had a copy of Mein Kampf in his home. Multiple news outlets reported that Csere stabbed someone (he says in self-defense) in Ecuador, and that he owed members of the vegan commune he founded thousands of dollars.

I didn’t ask about any of that because, to me, none of it was relevant to the story I was there to cover. I also didn’t get into the legality of the community because I’m not a lawyer, and the legal question isn’t as interesting to me as questions about why they think non-whites, gays, and others are undesirable to live near. But nevertheless, my questions were deemed too hostile, and I was cast out.

In any case, last night another vlog about Return to the Land popped up in my YouTube feed from a popular YouTuber, Nick Johnson, who has more than a million subscribers. Johnson treated Orwoll and the others to an hour of nothing but softball questions. In that hour-long vlog, he never asked any of the questions I did above or any other challenging questions. But Johnson’s viewers loved his vlog. I spent perhaps twenty minutes reading through the most liked comments, and I didn’t see a single critical one. In fact, most praised him for treating them fairly, and many expressed support for the community or even said they would like to live there.

In other words, the vlog was a hit because Johnson all but endorsed their community, and the algorithm worked, as the video made its way to people sympathetic to the Return to the Land cause. By contrast, my vlog was only 75% liked, compared to my channel average, which is 96% liked. Some commenters skewered me as a left-winger with an agenda, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Others left openly racist comments detailing why they thought it was entirely logical to want to avoid living near gays, blacks, and other groups. (I deleted them all.)

I come away from the experience believing the young people who have founded this community are right-wing snowflakes who are brazen enough to start an exclusionary community but too think-skinned to answer challenging questions about their motivations. I have no idea if they are breaking the law or not in excluding various groups. To me, founding a community where people are judged based on their appearance rather than the content of their character is racist and un-Christian. That doesn’t mean I think the Federal government should go in and close the place down. If they want to live out in the middle of nowhere and exclude various groups, I say, “knock yourself out,” because I sincerely doubt any of the excluded groups would want to live there anyway. Any attempt to shut them down would simply create sympathy for them.

But I think this community’s founding principle is, essentially, racism, and so I wasn’t going to give them an uninterrupted platform to spew their half-baked ideas with no pushback. My takeaway from seeing the reaction to Johnson’s video is a deep sadness regarding our media landscape and how it creates delusions and divisions. Most content isn’t created for or directed to a broad, general audience but rather with specific groups in mind. Big tech algorithms function well to direct partisan content to the “right” consumers. I’m pretty sure most Americans don’t think exclusionary communities are a good idea, but anyone consuming content like Johnson’s — and then viewing the comments — would conclude the opposite. The result is the normalization of racism as a rational and even practical choice. I used to believe that racism in the U.S. was declining, but now I’m not so sure.