Timesuck with Dan Cummins - Short Suck #57: Return to the Land: The Ravenden Experiment

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

Deep in the Ozarks, outside a tiny Arkansas town, a group of white nationalists believe they’ve found a legal loophole to resurrect segregation in America. They call it Return to the Land — a “traditionalist” community built around shared values, shared land… and shared race. Will they be shut down? Or will the be allowed to have, essentially, a new Sundown town?  For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Cozy get-togethers around a campfire, weekly community meal, singing songs, planting gardens, looking after farm animals. Sounds pretty idyllic, right? Kind of life a lot of people fantasize about, something like an endless summer camp, a place to unplug from the chaos of the world and build real connections with the people around you, a place where you might not know everybody when you arrive, but you're quickly bound together by a shared sense of purpose, that you're here to chart a new way of living for yourself and hopefully for future generations. generations away this beautiful, pure, and healthy. In the woods of the Ozarks, near a tiny 400-personish town called Ravenden, a community called Return to the Land claims to offer exactly that.

Return to the land's pitch is simple. Shared land, shared work, shared purpose. No need to leave a leave for a real life or a boring office job. No dealing with difficult neighbors or the persistent low-level anxiety of stranger danger. No feeling like you or your way of love. life is getting displaced. Sound good? You want to join? Great. You just have to meet mostly one simple criteria. It's not based on your income, not on your experience, not what you can contribute even. All you have to be is white. Words and ideas can change the world. I hated her, but I wanted to love my mother. I have a dream. I'll plead not guilty right now. Your only chance is to leave with us. We live in a country where, hypothetically, everyone should be able to live how they want, right?

I mean, as long as you're not hurting anyone else and depriving them of basic rights and freedoms, nothing should stop you from living around people who think, talk, and live the way you do. Indeed, for many of us, this factors into choosing where we're going to live, even if it's not always at the conscious level. If we don't find ourselves live in someplace out of necessity, say proximity to family members, a job, etc., We're usually drawn to places where people are similar to us. Right, this is definitely true for me. I fell in love with New Orleans, especially the area of the bywater and the marony,

because it's where a lot of artists live, a lot of creatives, a lot of progressive people into creative expression. You see and feel that expression, at least I do, in the areas of restaurants, coffee shops, art galleries, music venues, museums, community gardens, record shops, et cetera, et cetera. You see the creativity in the art installations and people's yards, the murals on the sides of warehouses, statues and the parks. You overhear it in lively discussions on front porches and on the street.

I've spent most of my life living in areas without much of an artistic community. And I've met a lot of great people in these communities, right? Amazing friends enjoyed my life immensely in many ways. But if I got to pick, if I got to choose, if there were no family or marital considerations at various points in my life, I would not have lived where I lived, or at least not for as long as I lived there. right guessing a lot of you are pretty happy with where you're living you probably have some great friends some favorite restaurants some family you don't regularly want to murder but if you got to choose if you could live anywhere would you keep living where you're living or would you try to live around other people like you in some way snowbirds for instance do this in a sense right they tend to be older retired people who move to tropical areas to live out their golden years you know at least the winters uh they tend to do this only after they've made enough money and earned the

freedom to walk away from a nine to five, most of them probably would have liked to have done what they're doing sooner. If they could have chosen, left-leaning young people, typically seek out big cities like New York, L.A., San Francisco, places where they're willing to live with roommates and overpriced apartments or houses where they're willing to work two jobs and still not safe for retirement because the music scene, the fashion scene, the culture, the nightlife, the dating pool, the amount of progressive people to talk to is worth a sacrifice for them. Or consider all this on a neighborhood level.

Some people of the same demographic might want to live around something they interact with on a day-to-day basis, like families with young kids living in areas with plentiful playgrounds or a Muslim community congregating around a mosque. But how far would you go to live around people who were similar to you? How similar do they have to be to you? Do they have to all have the same values, the same level of education, the same cultural backgrounds? Do they have to look like you? Of course, for many years the idea that you had a right to live around people who looked the same, same as you was the dominant way of thinking in the U.S.

Dode had a different name, right, segregation. But it was only one group of people getting to do the picking when it came to what neighborhoods they got to live in, what places they got to go to, the expense of other people who were told where they had to live and where they got to go. Segregation codified in the south by Jim Crow laws and practiced indirectly across the country affected almost every aspect of daily life, mandating the segregation of schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains, restrooms, buses, trains, restaurants, and more. whites only in colored signs, designating which bathrooms people could use, which seats they could sit on, or which water fountains they could drink out of, were constant reminders of the enforced racial order.

While southern states had Jim Crow laws, de facto segregation was practiced in the northern United States via policies, practices, and attitudes that strongly encouraged discrimination. Or they just made it clear that the black people were not welcome. It's very, very straightforward. In 1909, after what sources term a spectacle lynching in the towns of Anna and Jonesboro, Illinois, expelled their African Americans. Such places were often called sundown towns owing to the signs formerly posted at their city limits. Signs that usually said some version of a racial slur, followed by words like, don't let the sun go down on you in name of town. Anna and Jonesboro both had such signs in the 1970s still.

And this was not uncommon. Beginning in around 1890, continuing until 1968, white Americans established thousands of so-called sundown towns. Sometimes the black population was driven out via discriminatory laws, like forbidding them from owning property. Or the white population just harassed and sometimes killed those who violated this unwritten rule. Well, I guess it was kind of written on signs. Some sundown towns also kept out Jewish people, Chinese people, Mexicans, Native Americans, other groups. At the same time, the more that Jim Crow laws and sundown towns cut off black communities and the more the white businessman refused to cater to black customers,

the more possible it became for enterprising African American entrepreneurs to create viable businesses of their own, which also pissed a lot of white people off back then. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, black communities created their own economic powerhouses. These areas often referred to as black wall streets, became centers of entrepreneurship, wealth building, and cultural innovation. One of the most prominent examples was Tulsa, Oklahoma's Greenwood District, the most famous Black Wall Street, home to hundreds of black-owned businesses, including banks, theaters, and hotels.

You know, lots of affluent black residents living there because of these successful businesses. There was also Sweet Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia, dubbed the, quote, richest Negro Street in the world at one point, the birthplace of Martin Luther King, Jr., home to a variety of major black financial institutions. because black people could only spend their money at black businesses, this meant that money stayed inside black communities, what economists called a captive market. And because black doctors, lawyers, and teachers served dense local networks, expertise, stayed concentrated as well. And this made many black families become more prosperous,

which allowed them to establish lending networks, give informal credit, and provide mentorship to boost other people further along as well. As this happened, various surrounding white communities grew enraged at the idea of people they considered their inferiors living better than they did, and they sought revenge. One of the worst acts of racial terrorism in American history was a 1921 Tulsa Race massacre when white mobs aided by law enforcement looted and burned the Greenwood District, killing hundreds, and displacing thousands of black residents. Similar massacres occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina, Occoee, Florida, Rosewood, Florida,

Knoxville, Tennessee, leaving thousands homeless and without resources that might be able to have flowed into the next generation and then the generation after that and so on. By the mid-20th century, growing social movements and legal challenges began pushing for desegregation. Legislation that prohibited segregation cases like Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 paved the way for a fully integrated society. And yet, some measure of separation has persisted. Some of this comes from the lasting effects of racism. Shoal Creek, one of the most exclusive country clubs in Alabama, drew controversy in 1990 when it declared that the club would not be pressured into accepting black members.

The country club is our home, and we pick and choose who we want, said Hall Thompson, the club's founder. We have the right to associate or not associate with whomever we choose. well, a bunch of financial pressure followed that remark and when the club would no longer be considered for major PGA tournaments after that and lose all of the millions of dollars that came with those televised tournaments wouldn't you know it, they immediately changed their minds.

Also, I looked up Hal Thompson and he looked exactly like the kind of dude who did not want to associate with people who weren't his canned. He literally looked inbred. Not kidding. Look him up. Hall W. Thompson. Beady little. eyes. Lips so thin, they were non-existent. Big bulbous, long life, a drinking too much

tumor of a nose. He legit looked unhealthy and hateful around the time he said that. Of course he did. So many of these guys do, it seems. It's like their hateful mentality just infects their physical appearance. Or maybe their physical appearance led to their hateful mentality. Time magazine article later reported that industry experts estimated that three quarters of the nations, 5,232 private golf and country clubs had no black members. a few decades ago, making those spaces segregated, if not outright, at least in practice. Then there are spaces where separation is intentional in another way, like historically black colleges and universities, HBCUs. HBCUs came about because black Americans were not allowed

to attend many predominantly white colleges and universities. So if they wanted to further their educations, well, they had to build their own institutions. Over the next decades, many HBCUs grew into centers of academic excellence, producing generations of black doctors, lawyers, educators, and leaders, and also many white doctors, lawyers, educators, and leaders, because white students will be allowed to attend. Actually, white students make up roughly 11 to 24 percent of the total student population across HBCUs now. Some like Bluefield State College and West Virginia State University have very large white student

populations. In any case, the difference between these two ideas, Country clubs and HBCUs in this example is intuitive to most, but not all of us. With our human reasoning, most of us can recognize the difference between exclusionary segregation, keeping others out to maintain dominance or advantage, and affinity-based or protective spaces where people choose to gather around shared identity and experience after they have been disenfranchised and excluded. But that distinction can get blurry, and sometimes people choose to weaponize that blurriness.

for decades neo-Nazi and other white nationalist groups in the United States have promoted the creation of separate land, communities, and economic institutions reserved for white people and their descendants. They've ignored largely the reasons for historical segregation and have argued, well, that if other communities get to build spaces to preserve their culture, circulate resources internally, well, why can't white people have the same goddamn thing? Right?

They're sick and tired of us white folk being continually put through the fucking ringer in this country. Oh, no one's had it worse than us, especially a straight white men. God damn, no one has fucking had it harder than a straight white men. Open your eyes, sheeple. Why don't we have a month, right? Why don't we have our own parades? That actually is the mentality. One of the best known plans for a white ethno state was the Northwest Territorial imperative,

the idea that the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana could be formed into an all-white conglomerate. I mean, certain parts of these states, certain towns, anyway, or almost all white already, right? I grew up in one. The Northwest territorial imperative was popularized by white nationalist during the 1970s and 80s, but its origins are quite a bit older. The idea of the West Coast being a separate country actually goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson, who imagined the Pacific Northwest, quote, as the germ of a great free and independent empire on that side of our continent. I wrote that in an 1813 letter to John Jacob Astor.

Did you know that? I did not. Yeah, Jefferson believed that a nation spanning the vast continent might be too large to be governed by a single unit with the western mountains posing a natural divide. He wrote that nature herself has marked out Western America for the home of an independent nation. That idea simmered for almost 150 years, in part pushed along by concepts like manifest destiny before the arrival of the American Civil War. Then looking for allies in its fight against the U.S., the Union, the Confederacy started thinking, what if the Pacific Northwest got in on the pro-slavery side? There were signs that seemed to indicate it could happen. Back in 1844, when Oregon was still a territory,

a law was passed subjecting to lashings any free black citizen who did not leave, as in the whole territory, just fucking get out. I did not know that either. So much crazy shit in the history books. Imagine walking to something like mercantile in Oregon's first city, Oregon City, as a black fur trapper in 1844.

And then some deputy approaches you and he's like, hey, you need to leave. You aren't allowed to be here. And then you try and de-escalate things. You're like, okay, fuck, all right. Walk on out of the store. Now you're standing outside of the store thinking, you know, how are you going to get what you went into that store to buy?

And then the deputy approaches you again. He's like, hey, I said, you need to leave. You aren't allowed to be here. Like, what the fuck? You're trying not to get arrested, you know, trying to get killed. So now you walk on out of town entirely. Now you're standing outside the city limits thinking, God damn it.

Now what am I supposed to do? And then he approached you a third time. He's like, you deaf? I said, I need you to leave. You aren't allowed to be here. You're like the whole fucking area? Yeah. That law was soon repealed.

But then an 1849 law prohibited African Americans from coming to the territory. That too was repealed. But still, so fucked it was ever passed. Oregon was accepted into the union as a non-slave state, but its 1857 Constitution prohibited any African Americans from moving to the state who were not already residents.

So clearly not a terribly open-minded place. Imagine that situation too where you're like one of eight African Americans already living here. You're like, oh, fuck, it's just us, huh? Just us eight? Okay, that's not awkward. Yeah.

This old school West Coast attitude got some people down south of planning. One plan outlined in 1860 indicated, quote, slaves were to be procured by inviting coolies, South Sea Islanders, and Negroes to immigrate to California, and then reducing them to slavery. The new Pacific Republic, as those southern schemers dubbed it, would feature an aristocracy with inherited nobility and limited suffrage.

They were trying real hard to keep slavery around by just making it sound less slavery. Another concept, imagine the new country encompassing all or parts of what are now California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, broken into 10 states, of which half would be permanent slave states. Many Pacific Republic advocates also wanted to extend slavery and white colonization down into Mexico. The West Coast secession movement was real and serious and backed by many of the West's most prominent politicians, including California's first senator William Gwynn and Oregon's first Senator Joseph Lane. But ultimately, the states did not go for it. On January 30th, 1860, the Washington Territorial Legislature passed a resolution that said in part that we utterly discontinence as fraught with insipient treason and the insidious offspring of reckless aspirations and disappointed ambition or culpable ignorance,

all projects for Pacific Confederacy. God, they'd love to use bigger words back then. Oregon lawmakers are the same calling the Pacific Confederacy a weak and wicked scheme. And so a pro-slavery white-dominated Pacific Republic was officially rejected over 150 years ago, but the tendencies in the Pacific Northwest that had allowed the idea to flourish have remained. In little pockets and little echo chambers. Various people have picked up on these vibes and tried running with them in recent decades. And before I talk about these peoples, time for today's first at two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads, please sign up to be a space lizard on Patreon,

get the catalog ad-free, get these episodes early and more. Thanks for listening to those ads, and now let us return to the 1970s, learn about some of these goobers, trying to launch separatist supreme movements in the northwest. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Northwest Territorial Imperative was popularized by white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups as a plan to relocate to Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and western Montana to turn the region into a white ethno state. One of the leading proponents of this strategy was Aryan Nations founder of Richard Butler, Dickie B, who purchased a 20-acre property just two or three miles from where I record in Cordillane and 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 it was a site for Butler's annual Aryan World Congress, where the world's most limited minds gathered to fucking not figure things out.

someday Butler hoped, quote, pure-blooded white people, an estimated 33 million Americans who claim roots in the 12-Aryan nations, will abandon most of the continental United States to live in an all-white republic in the Pacific Northwest. Hayden Lake would be the capital. Oh, Gilead, but 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. car outside the compound. I've mentioned that in a few episodes over the years, if it sounds familiar here. Butler died in 2004. He also did not look exactly superior. It looked like a fucking dork, who was last picked for dodgeball and PE, like the kind of guy that girls dreaded in the weeks leading up to homecoming, right? Please don't ask me. Oh, please don't ask me. I'll fucking,

die if fucking dick asked me to homecoming. He wasn't the only dude in recent decades to bring embarrassment to the Northwest. From the idea of the Northwest Territory imperative, a man named Harold Covington. Oh, Harry, he founded the Northwest Front, an organization intended to carry out that plan. His racist views were largely born out of his experiences with racial integration in school in the 1960s. He was described by teachers as a gifted student. He won a place at the annual governor school for gifted boys, but one of his teachers there said that he was a bright, creative boy, but his intelligence should be channeled before he does something destructive to society.

That's a hell of a thing to say about a kid. They were like, yeah, this kid's, he's smart. He's book smart, in a way, but also fucking dumb and dangerous. We've got to keep an eye on him. He briefly wrote for his school's high school newspaper in an activities column, but then got kicked off, got fired essentially, not long after getting able to do that, because he used his column to express his complaints, mostly about, uh, the school's black students in general.

1972, while a member of the U.S. Army, Covington had wormed his way into his first neo-Nazi organization. That's what you know you've led a fucking pretty terrible life when you're like, well, back in my first neo-Nazi organization, he would then move to Johannesburg in South Africa in December of 1973, where he would work as a payroll clerk before moving later to Balewayo, Bolo, Bolo, Bolo, Bolaio, Rhodesia, now Balao, Zimbabwe. Covington was a founding member of the Roaldi. Rhodesian white people's party. Sounds sketchy.

Later claimed to have served in the Rhodesian army as a mercenary. But according to his son and also official records, he was not a mercenary. He was a filing clerk. Uh-huh. And briefly, a filing clerk. No combat. Didn't even sniff combat. Definitely not a mercenary.

Sounds about right for one of these guys. He would be deported from Rhodesia in early 1976 because of being super racist. Did you see that coming? This came after Covington sent hostile letters to the Balawayo. Hebrew congregation that caused members to fear for their safety, you know, letters with that whole tone of the Jews control the world, but I'm fucking sick of it. Not long after that, Covington moved back to North Carolina, set his sights more domestically tapping into the Northwest Territorial imperative. He would call his new plan, the Northwest Front. And in his words, it would be, quote,

kind of like the white version of Israel. I don't see why the Jews are the only people on earth to get their own country, and everyone else has to be diverse. Maybe he wasn't a big history fan. I'm actually not a Zionist. I think a country dedicated to anyone, culture, religion, race, et cetera is an absurd notion, actually, and a recipe for never-ending disaster. But that being said, I do understand the historical reasoning for Israel's existence. And that reasoning does not apply to non-Jewish white people. Historically, no one has been persecuted less in the entire world than non-Jewish white people. Surprise Covington wasn't a bit more familiar with that whole, you know, age of colonization thing, the lasted from the 15th to the 20th century, World

when white Christian Europeans, you know, kind of ran roughshod over about 90% of the planet. Covington knew precisely what was at the center of his plan, as he had put it, of course, it's racism. What's wrong with racism? It's the purest form of patriotism. What is it? As the group's draft constitution said plainly, the Northwest American Republic shall be a homeland solely for the use and habitation of white people, of all nationalities, cultures and creeds worldwide,

in order that Western civilization may be preserved and white children may be raised to responsible adulthood and safety, prosperity, and tranquility. It's fucking, this is great. I'll talk about this later, but just the whole notion of like to be white is just absurd at this point. We're also fucking mixed.

Or so many of us are, and it's just going to get more so. Numbers on the Northwest Front are hard to come by. The group does without formal membership, but the Southern Poverty Law Center maintains Northwest Front as one of the foremost white nationalist group, excuse me, in the region. But after Harold Covington died in 2018 at the age of 64, no one really stepped in to carry his torch forward. And even if they had, would it have worked?

Probably not. Before moving forward, I need to say that Harold Covington's genetics, they do look even weaker than both Richard Butler's and Hal Thompson's, or Hall Thompson's. Which is saying quite a bit. I can't believe he was married and had two kids. He truly had the look of a deranged school shooter, someone who got picked on all throughout his childhood for both superficial and also valid reasons. I wonder if physically presenting as an in-sell with a complicated relationship with an overbearing mommy is a prerequisite for being a white supremacist.

Like, I'm actually being somewhat serious. Like, if they'd just been born with more natural charisma, if more people had been drawn to them, had wanted to be their friends, wanted to make out with them. If they did better in sports, then would they have just never gotten so angry and bitter, you know, to only want to live around their own kind?

I just want to live around my own kind. Other dorks. I'm sick of not being around dorks that made me feel bad by myself. creating a white ethno state in the U.S. is in practice almost impossible, at least currently, you know, shit can always change, you can always regress or regress more, can't sleep on that shit. There are at the moment only two ways it could happen, legally or by force. Legally, secession has already been ruled out in Texas v. White, way back in 1869,

the Supreme Court made it clear that states cannot leave the union and that precedent has held for over 150 years. Hopefully, hopefully he keeps holding. Forming a new state within the U.S. is technically possible, but requires approval from both Congress and the states involved something extraordinarily unlikely for a project built on exclusion. Some point to indigenous nations as examples of separate entities within the U.S., but that comparison doesn't hold. Those nations are recognized as pre-existing societies that long predate the concept of the United States, not newly created states designated to or designed to exclude others. Also, as I've covered in previous episodes, the reservation system has done a lot more harm than good to many tribal members. I mean, just look at the wildly alarming rates of violence towards indigenous women and how much more frequently they disappear than any other demographic in America, for example. You know, on some reservations, Native women face murder rates more than 10 times the national average.

Homicide is roughly the third leading cause of death among indigenous women ages 10 to 24 on reservations. And that doesn't take into account the alarming rate of women who go missing. from reservations who have likely also been murdered. Anyway, the legal avenues for forming a white ethno state pretty much non-existent at the moment. That leaves white nationalists with trying to create one through force. But taking land from the U.S. government would mean confronting one of the most powerful militaries in the world and effort that would almost certainly fail. I mean, despite the disgusting and treasonous mass pardon they were given, the January 6th insurrectionists,

they haven't fared too well. And they didn't even go up against the military. military. Most of those proud boys and oathkeepers' lives are still in shambles, just like they were before the insurrection. Not a lot of fucking business leaders and professors and doctors in that group. You want to see a real motley crew of unfuckables. Just look up some pictures of those clowns. Not exactly screaming the cream of the master race. Even imagining success raises bigger problems. How would such a state function? Economically, it would be far weaker than the U.S., internationally, a white ethno state, probably going to be pretty isolated, not going to be recognized.

by a lot of important trading groups. It's going to be a weird little Gilead facing opposition from both the U.S. and much of the global community, we hope. There's also an internal contradiction. Movements built on exclusion tend to keep redefining who belongs, right? It's fucking chaos. And chaos eventually and inevitably twists and turns in on itself. Look no further than recent MAGA infighting.

See how that works, right? People eventually start bickering about what the movement is supposed to mean, how it's been going, who's a real member, who's a fake member, who's a fake member, who's changed, who needs to change, bickering leads to attacking, attacking eventually leads to collapse. Historically, when it comes to groups based around being this vague notion of white, when they start bickering and fighting over what it means to be white, who is the whitest, who is a real white, who is a fake white, not white enough, et cetera, it fucking collapses. Groups once considered not white enough in the U.S. have included Irish, Italians, Greeks,

and others. The Irish not being considered white enough fucking kills me. Is there literally a whiter group based solely on complexion in the world than Irish people? I mean, maybe Scandinavians, but maybe it's a tie. Because at a certain point, you know, you've got about as much pigment on your skin as a can of fucking white paint. When you look like you could sunburn from walking past an open window, even on a cloudy day, I think you've maxed out on white. If you're just accepting, for instance, the so-called most pure form of white, people with Nordic ancestry, say, that really reduces the amount of people who can enter your community. And that's the amount of people who can, you know, fight and or work for you.

And so unsurprisingly, most of the people who have tried since the Northwest Front have been unsuccessful. But what if there was a different way to do it? After all, we started this episode with the discussion of communities that, for whatever reason, tend to self-select, live close to each other, whether that's members of a particular religious group, snowbirds, people with young kids. What if a group tried to achieve the same white nationalist end, not through secession, not through war, but through creating an intentionally homogenous community that operates with a group. the bounds of the United States laws. Could they really balance that legal restraint

with the kind of inflammatory, mobilizing rhetoric these movements rely on to grow? Well, a young man named Eric Orwell believes that you, or more accurately, he, can in fact do this. And I hate to say it, but Eric is not unattractive. God damn, I would say he firmly rests in the above average range of attractiveness. He's fit, he's got an athletic build,

good vocabulary, strong jawline, all his teeth, good hair, God, he's ruining my theory. At first glance, he doesn't seem like a likely candidate for this kind of thinking. Now, 35 or 36, Eric grew up in La Marada, California, where he had plenty of friends of all kinds and colors, at least according to him. Two close friends were allegedly black, also had acquaintances from Orange County's Filipino community, said they were always nice to him, never felt a sense of personal prejudice against them, according to Eric again at least. But as he got older, he said he started to feel like the contributions of other cultures, always getting celebrated. But white people's contributions? Fucking never. Thinking back on it, I was

bullied, he said in an interview. For instance, in history class, we were learning about Chinese inventions and all the things these other civilizations have done. They gave the impression white Western people had done nothing. They were essentially teasing me about it. Were they? Also, does that count as bullying? And that never happened. That never fucking happened. No fucking way he didn't also learn about the historical contributions of the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Allies in World War II, about a ton of white, American, British, German, et cetera, inventors and inventions. Ah, this is some real selective memory, cognitive dissonance bullshit going on.

Guessing Eric also firmly believes that America's public schools are still full of child-sized litter boxes for furries to take dumps in, which they actually never were. After high school, Orwell moved to Rochester, New York to attend the prestigious Eastman School of Music, where he studied French horn. Okay, so not exactly in the cool. cool kids crowd. Nothing against French horn players. But if you're a French horn player, you're,

there's not a nice way to say this. You're probably a social outcast, right? Come on, you know it. You fucking know you are. Hopefully you're an introvert and it's just the way you want it. But I don't think there's a lot of, like, on a Venn diagram between like French horn players and prom royalty. I don't think there's a lot of crossover.

I don't. He stayed French horn there. He met fellow French horn player, Caitlin Smith, who would also become his wife. After graduation, these two fucking French horners got hired to play in the Shen Yun Orchestra, aka the dance troupe of our old friends Phelangong. So random.

In a video on YouTube is most popular, actually, he gave a 20-minute history of his life in Falun Gong describing how he lost faith in his shufu or master, Lee, whom he described as a brilliant extemporaneous speaker. While Orwal did consider this group a cult, he would say, 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.

Okay, so we got the idea for a compound there. Around this time, he's reading a lot, mostly content from a contingent of thinkers known as the new atheists. Guys like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens. Despite never studying it formally, he had always felt drawn to Greek philosophy, eventually started uploading homemade videos to his YouTube channel, with titles like Collective Consciousness Explained and the European Origins. of behavioral modernity. The European origins of behavioral modernity. Modernity.

Fuck. Yeah. Okay, I'll give him better pronunciation than I have. He's also sadly, you know, clearly not an idiot, which does bum me out comedically. He was actually courting a couple different types of fame before he got into white nationalism. Around this period, he began streaming sex videos with Caitlin on a porn site called Chatterbate. I've maybe heard of it. on the page

his now ex-wife on their chatter bait page is now ex-wife listed having a sexual preference for men, women, couples, and trans people. So, he hasn't always been

super exclusive, not even close. What happened? Did the wrong threesome bounce him into white nationalism? Did he watch his wife get fucked by just one too many

bigger non-white dicks? Did he worry that his growing trans lust would completely consume him and he feared he would end up with a claust clostomy back, you know,

following too many not properly animalistic three dicks and one butthole coke-fueled power bottom endurance tests. Just guessing. Just making possible if not reasonable guesses. YouTube was where his following would really take off. And before I share how, time for today's second and two mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks to listen to these sponsors. Now let's return to Eric Orwell's YouTube transformation from very open-minded sex fiend

into white supremacist. His new subscribers included some comments. who responded with arguments about demographic shifts in the United States. They repeated ideas from what's known as the Great Replacement Theory. This conspiracy theory that non-white populations will replace white people through birth rates and mass migration and racist pseudoscience about human intelligence and its linked to genetics. And it seems those comments begin to convince him that white people in America were being persecuted and that the fabric of the U.S. was frayed as its non-white populations grew.

Or did he just desperately want to be famous for something for anything he has no real integrity or moral center, so he doubled down on what the most vocal people following him wanted to hear from him. Is his whole schick less about racial separation and more about being a fame horn? As Eric put it, I got red-pilled. If we never had mass immigration, if we were still a homogenous nation, we would not feel as much of a need to form communities like this. Dude, if we'd never had mass immigration,

if we would have never been a major player in the transatlantic slave trade, we might not have ever become the global power with the high GDP we still have today. Plantation slavery was responsible for roughly 20% of Americans per capita economic growth between 1839 and 1859, enslaved people specifically provided the labor force that produced major export commodities, specifically cotton, which then went on to fuel northern industrialization, built southern wealth, and created a financial banking and shipping infrastructure that positioned the U.S. as a global economic power.

Again, these motherfuckers are all. Always, and I do mean always, without exception, in any single case, extremely selective in what they look at historically. So many pundits still do this shit today. So many mainstream influencers. They cite all the stats that directly support their argument and completely ignore all the other stats directly intertwined with the stats that they are citing. That do not support their argument. To quote the incomparable Peter Griffin, that shit really grinds my gears. Between his recorded musings on Plato, Eric now began to weave in video.

about elites in the U.S. and theories on how the genetics for blonde hair and blue eyes spread across the globe throughout history. In other words, he became a neo-Nazi. In a post on X just last year, Orwal wrote that, quote, what really matters isn't which biological race you belong to or what your ethnic background is. What matters is what proportion of a mixture you have from the ancient and spiritually superior root races. Oh shit. Root races. dude started pulling from theosophy. And as we have covered before on various episodes in some way or another, the Nazis loved a lot of that theosophical Aryan root race word salad gibberish.

In a follow-up post, Eric said that anyone who disagreed with the statement needed some Anerba teaching. And what the fuck is that? Onanerba was a pseudo-scientific organization created by Heinrich Himmler, the highest-ranking Nazi in the SS. The group consisted of scientists and academics charged with the task of proving that Germans descended from an Aryan race that was responsible for most of the world's greatest achievements, everything from advances in agriculture to the best pieces of art and literature.

I have debunked this before, truly a bunch of nonsense. There is not even an Aryan race. Truly, it is a made-up concept. Some 19th century philologist initially used Aryan to describe language groups, and then Theosophy under that fucking idiot Helena Blavatsky largely rebranded it as the fifth root race. this big cosmic evolutionary super race, and other dipshits have pointed to this, you know, since. It's all made up. But Eric fully agrees with this line of thinking, although he has tried to talk around it a little bit.

He's also said in the past that he's awaiting a, quote, second Hitler. But then later has walked, you know, these statements back saying that the Nazi party leader was a very controversial historical figure. That's an understatement of the century. What do I think about Hitler? You know, I'll say that he was controversial. I'll give him that. Whenever somebody even hints at being a Nazi apologist, I can just no longer take them seriously

as a human being. It is the equivalent to me of being like a Jim Jones or a Ted Bundy apologist. I mean, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you just look at the murders, he's a bad guy, you know, Bundy, but what does those women do to incur his wrath? Right? Can we look at that angle?

Why is it always the serial killer's fault? Orwell told Sky News, I'm not saying you're going to have to wait for a new person to start a new Holocaust. I'm saying you're going to have to wait for a charismatic leader who is going to advocate for your interests, because that's how a lot of people see Healer. It's pretty dark take. Hiller rose to power because he manipulated, exploited, and fueled a group of downtroddened and desperate people's most base, primal, least enlightened impulses and desires, right? scapegoating fear and anger, not just because he was, you know, advocating for, like, certain interests.

I mean, that's technically true. That's a fucked up way to phrase it. So anyway, this was the kind of content he was putting out now. And this is the content that caught the eye of one Peter Chera. And this guy, Peter, he does support my argument of white supremacist, not being in any cool kids club. As far as even like, you know, even like genetics. He has, to me, he has, I mean, maybe women, there may there's women out there or dudes,

I don't know, who'd be interested in him. But he puts out the sexual charisma of a fucking Harry Potter goblin. He also looks like not only could he not punch his way out of a wet paper bag, but like the wet paper bag would just beat the shit out of him, 10 out of 10 times in a fight. Born in Connecticut, Peter Chera, also in his mid-30s now, started his professional life as a jazz penis. What's up with all these musicians?

He was kind of a jazz penis. He wasn't good. He didn't find the lifestyle fulfilling or maybe no one to hire him. And so he began searching for something new that would give him meaning or a free ride or some kind of popularity. And he became a vegan and formed an eco-village down in Ecuador. The village called Fruit Haven would later publicly accuse Chera of fraud and theft on its website. In a statement, it accused him of absconding in July of 2023 with thousands of

misappropriated dollars, also said he once stabbed in Ecuadorian minor, leaving him with a collapsed lung and was arrested on a potential charge of attempted murder in Ecuador. How did he fucking do that? He must have snuck up on that guy. There's no way it was a fair fight. He'd actually claimed that the stabbing was an act of self-defense during an altercation, and he denied O.A. in the community any money at all. After meeting Eric, Peter was more than happy to add his own beliefs to the mix. These included ideas like the concept that there was a genetic component, IQ, and quote, it's one of those things that people like to pretend doesn't exist because it's politically inconvenient,

Cheris said, in an interview with the New York Times. Quote, you have cultures that invented the wheel thousands of years ago, and then you have cultures that never invented the wheel until it was given to them by somebody else. Oh, dude. he doesn't seem to understand how important geographic location was to the industrial development of any particular culture. I'm sure most of you are smarter than Eric and also are familiar with the concept of necessity being the mother of all invention. That simple phrase goes a long way when it comes to explaining why some cultures advance technologically much faster than others. You know, if you lived in a cold, rugged area full of a lot of different warring tribes and not a lot of easily gathered food resources, right?

you had to work a lot harder to survive than if you lived in a warm beachy area full of pools of tasty fish, edible vegetation, very few warring tribes. You didn't need a fucking wheel. Why invent a wheel when you could just kick back on the beach? Fucking island haughty,

drink some mango juice, eat some tasty, flaky fish? Right, why invent a sword when your neighbors don't fuck with you very much because they got their own awesome beaches, mangoes and fish? And when they do fuck with you, they only have arrows

and no one has horses and so you don't really need to develop technologically the same way, right? Competition for limited resources is what spurs a lot of innovation more than genetics. Just look to the business world for that. It's why antitrust laws get passed. If you only had one airline, for example, to buy tickets from, they're going to charge you way more, give you way shittier service than if you have 10 airlines because they know they have, you know, you have nowhere else to go.

And I can go on and on. I've watched some of Peter's videos. He is not very intelligent. He is not nearly as intelligent as he seems to think he is. arrogant dork check compelling intellectual no peter has also repeatedly referred in social media posts in social media posts to nazis as quote based aka as authentic confident and unapologetically true themselves regardless of outside judgment although he has later claimed that he was only trolling leftists when he wrote that when asked what his real view of nazis is chera said the nazis

made a lot of politically conservative reforms that were popular among the German people. However, their method of dealing with foreign influence in German politics and society ended up backfiring. Oh, that's why they went down because of just an effective method of dealing with foreign influence in German politics. That's an interesting way to look at the Holocaust and trying to fucking take over most of the world. Speaking of which, in July 2025, he denied the Holocaust ever happened and then asked, but would you like to talk about why it should have. Jesus Christ. Chera had another interest to that he was more than happy to share a couple years ago. Orania, a town for white people in South Africa, established at the end of the apartheid era that is

restricted to Afrikaners, aka South Africans of primarily Dutch, German, or Huguenot descent that has been largely ignored by the South African government. He's a big fan. He's a big fan of this place. Established in 1991, the town has around 2,000 people, but to describe it as like a whites only town to view it through just that lens is quite reductionary. It's an Afrikaner town. To live there, you have to be Afrikaner ethnically. You have to demonstrate fluency in Afrikaans in that language. You have to possess a clean criminal record. That's probably the biggest thing. Tide for the biggest thing, I guess. And you have to share these communities, you know, written values and goals. So still separatist, very much so, but

based on more than just like a vague version of white. Still Eric Orwell, Peter, Chair they wondered, could something like that place be possible to establish in the U.S.? At first glance, no. The Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act, legally prevents housing discrimination based on race or religion, at least on paper. But Chera found something interesting, a workaround, he believed, was perfectly legal, a line in the Fair Housing Act that allows an exemption to private associations and religious groups. It's a rule designed to allow groups like churches to offer a house for clergy on their property

and not have to rent that house to anybody else. But Cheddar had a new idea about how to use it to form a whites-only community. So these two men, along with two other super cool dudes, Gavin Baker and Scott Hollywood, decided to go ahead with this idea. They founded an LLC, a limited liability company in September of 2023 called Wisdom Woods. Yes, so much wisdom in their woods. If I had to pick one word to describe all of this, it would be wisdom. Just under two weeks later, they bought a 160 acre parcel of land just outside of Ravenden, Arkansas, for $237,000, according to property records.

Ravenden is a town of about 400 people. That was already over 98% white. This is hilarious to me. As of 2020, the town's ethnic diversity consisted of literally two black residents, so probably a couple, and four Hispanic residents. Probably one family. I feel fucking terrible for those people. Closed the city of any size seems to be Memphis, Tennessee, 150 miles away. But, you know, like, why would you go to Memphis, though, if you lived in Raven Den?

Why would you leave Raven Den? You've got so much there. You've got a dollar general. You've got Allen's used cars. You have Rock and Y feeds where you can get all your feed needs met. You got H3 poultry services for all your poultry needs that are not already covered. covered by Rock and Y. You got the J&P Flash Market, right?

And gas station where you can grab soda and candy while you fuel up. There's a big statue of a Raven in town you can look at whenever you want. There's Dale's Body Shop and Wrecker Services. Dale spelled D-A-I-L. You know, you can take your lemon there if Alan sold you one. Spring River LP gas. Well, you get all your propane there. Propane there.

The Raven Den Church of Christ has all your Christ needs covered. There was Grandma Country cooking. and Charlie's place, a couple of restaurants until recently, but both are permanently closed. But who fucking cares? Because you still have Mr. Bill's and Mr. Excuse me, Mr. Bill's and Mrs. Amy's kettle corn. They work together.

Mr. Bill, Mrs. Amy, fucking both crushing that kettle corn. And if you can't live on kettle corn and gas station fare, do you even deserve to live? Obviously, Raven's Den is pretty cosmopolitan. They even have a Masonic lodge where you can go grab a drink with other locals who are also probably thinking about kill. and themselves, just to avoid another day of the dreary monotony that his life and Ravens did. Anyway, the wisdom guys chose this location because Orwal had already lived nearby. He was living

nearby because his life wasn't going well. Also, the property relatively cheap, building regulations, very lenient. I bet. I imagine the mayor and city council, pretty accommodating for the white reasons. The entire county, over 90% white, also a deciding factor. And so now what were they going to do with this new land? Well, make a whites-only compound, of course, but it wouldn't be a white's-only compound like the ones we've talked about at the top of the episode. Those compounds were owned by a single-group leader, therefore had the legal right to choose who was welcome on their private land. Instead, return to the land would be a segregationist community model where families and individuals could essentially lease undeveloped land, collectively determine

who could be a member of the community. As such, return to the land's legal structure would have two levels, that limited liability corporation, Wisdom Woods, which owns the land, then there would be a private membership organization, not unlike a country club. Those who are approved to join the PMA, the property management agreement, can then buy shares of the LLC for about $6,600 each, and for each share, they get three acres in the compound, or community. Quote, LLC statutes allow for share transfer restrictions, making transfers private and beyond the reach of federal housing laws, Orwal and Chera wrote in an article announcing their project in the white nationalist publication American Renaissance.

Quote, the PMA further restricts membership ensuring a cohesive community as a result were able to exercise our right to free association privately and securely. So how does one join this private association? Well, to start with, by paying a one-time $25 membership fee and earning acceptance after sharing info online about your ethnic background. As Orwell has described it, you fill out a questionnaire that will give us an initial idea of where you're coming from, your values, who you are, your background, and then there's a phone interview, and we make admissions, decisions on a case-by-case basis. So no genetic testing, no blood samples? How do they really know, you know, that they're getting the white people?

The application form for return to the land merely asked potential members to outline their ancestry and also respond to a range of questions about their social and cultural. viewpoints, including whether or not they support foreign immigration, transgenderism, COVID-19 vaccines, Jesus Christ, and segregation. Also ask questions like, how often do you think about the Roman Empire? With answers ranging from every day, at least once, to a few times a week, probably, and also never. And that is fucking so nerdy. These guys really are dorks.

Also, would my 0.4 Sudanese and 0.4% and 0.2% and 0.2% North African ancestry get me banned? I used to be 0.8% African, I thought. But apparently some nefarious powers that 23 and me are fucking trying to strip me in my heritage. They added, though, me being 0.4% Spanish and Portuguese. Is that still white? Am I too mixed? This initial process only gets people approved to access private group chats on telegram. for those who decide they want to move to Arkansas and become part of the community, the vetting is thorough, apparently, allegedly, although Orwell has not told reporters exactly what the vetting process looks like. Maybe that's where a blood test comes in.

That's where my family would get exposed for being race traders. Some people evidently have passed it. Dozens, dozens of fucking superior folks have made the journey to Ravens Den, driving several hours past, you know, broken down diners, Pentecostal and Baptist churches with parking lots full of pickup trucks and billboards to say things like have you been washed in the blood. They've turned down a two-mile dirt track and arrived at return to the land,

which is not much. You know that one house where the grass is always dead and the yard's full of weeds and there's a bunch of old cars in various states that's repair parked on the lawn? A house is falling apart. Maybe a couple fucking four-wheelers floating around. Also an RV, a mobile home that's been dumped in front of the house

where the people actually live, people who keep talking about fixing up the real house behind the fucking RV, never do, a return to the land is basically a bunch of that. Literally nothing about it looks good. It's truly a sad fucking shithole. Situated the top of the hill above a creek prone to flash flooding, the village is very much a work in progress or a work not in progress. It's a collection of rudimentary houses in various stages of completion with portable toilets and place indoor plumbing, poorly maintained connecting dirt roads. There's a community center kind of, it's still in progress,

that Orwell hopes will one day host dinners and events down past the creek when one journalist visited recently there was a pen of milk goats both mothers and babies guarded by Lucia white great Pyrenees got to have a white dog on a long chain

can't have a black dog not in this fucking compound, God damn it often the rest of the compound is off limits to reporters although they have advertised that some members have already installed solar panels they've dug septic and water systems maybe installed generators for their resists residences. You can catch a glimpse of the community on the group's social media accounts,

which show a bucolic setting with animals and children running around while members of the community build timber frame, homes, churches, and other facilities. So who are these people? Well, Orwell, for one, he and his now ex-wife, Caitlin, along with her four children, ranging in age from two to eight, are members of the community. Kaelin is already married to another member of the community, guy named David, and they're already expecting a kid together. Life's moving fucking fast there. She is apparently all four of the communities exist in. She said, I figure there's nothing else like this in the country.

It should at least exist. Do people really think we should never be able to choose our neighbors? David added, it wouldn't be controversial for any other group to do the same thing. Oh, that's not true. I made fun of black supremacists for doing the same shit, like those new Wobian nation of Moors dipshits who built their own town in Putnam County, Georgia. Right? Same kind of stupid, just different color.

People were outraged at them. David also seems to imply in a video by Sky News that the community is a protective measure against violence targeted at white people. He said, quote, if anyone of any race can come and be your neighbor and they're watching the news, which is telling you that white people are the cause of all your problems

and all the ills of society. Is that what the news has been saying? Tonight on the news, white people continue to ruin everything. I don't remember tuning into that news broadcast. He says, then your children are much less safe because there's a lot of anti-white violence happening to white people and white children. But is there? Is there a lot of anti-white violence happening?

According to FBI statistics, last year, there were 16,379 anti-black or African-American hate crimes in the U.S. compared to 4,854 anti-white crimes. It's not nothing. But, you know, let's look at those numbers a little more thoroughly. There are approximately five times as many total whites as blacks in America. so if the populations were even and the rate of the hate crimes stay the same, there would be 81,895 anti-black crimes compared to 4,854 anti-white crimes. I'm not like the best at math, but seems like one of those numbers is a lot bigger than the other,

and that there are way, way, way more blacks being targeted than whites when it comes to racially motivated crimes. Now, ideally there wouldn't be anybody targeted, you know, for just fucking stupid reasons like this. Orwal, meanwhile, also already married. to another woman on the compound, kind of. I'll explain that in a second. Despite being the face of the development, he doesn't live in the return to the land community. He has explained,

I've not developed my homestead sufficiently to allow my four children to live safely there full time. So I have a house 15 minutes away, but I'm working towards moving in the community. That's pretty pathetic. So things aren't exactly going, you know, gangbusters over there. He does, however, have an office on site in a prefabricated building.

It looks kind of like a cheap shipping container. from the outside. Inside, though, it's nice. Looks like a library, right, with its old-fashioned furniture, antique desk, Orwell's cameras, microphone lights for YouTube streaming. The bookshelves are stocked with copies of Plato, Aristotle, others as well as a replica of a Trojan helmet and the board game risk. Right? I just got to make it look cool for YouTube. You've got to manipulate reality for clicks. There's no fucking working plumbing anywhere near it, but, you know, there's some cool books and also some not cool books. According to a New York Times report on the group. Orwell hastily hit a copy of Mind Kampf, just as it was

about to be photographed. Another book argued that the pyramids of Giza were not built by ancient Egyptians, but rather by the citizens of Atlantis, which Orwal believes, or a race of blue-eyed superhumans. Thank you again, Madam Blavatsky for that bullshit. He has said, quote, if the Atlanteans were there on the Azores, they came from somewhere. But they fucking weren't on the azores, you fucking idiot. He says, we can trace which actual population made it. My opinion, I've done that. I found the genetic cluster.

They would have had darker skin than us, darker hair, darker skin tone, probably blue eyes. Also, he's a biological anthropologist now. No degree needed. That's cool. He just figured it out. Back to the wider group. In total, the compound is home to about 40 people. One of them is Scott Thomas, 38, his wife, Jennifer, 33, who apparently were recently

rankled when a French journalist tried to enter their home, despite the fact that journalists have been invited to enter their homes. Originally from Missouri, Scott and Jennifer have six kids, all of whom are, of course, homeschooled, and I'm going to guess, dirty most of the time. Can't let those woke teachers groom them, tell them that their parents should fucking shower more. At the time of one article's reporting in December of 2025, the field next to their house was still barren, though they planned to eventually grow wheat there.

There were also still not any curtains in their house, their house that was not completely built. instead they had nailed some black fabric over the windows, which is not super fucking creepy. At this stage, one of the things return to the land offers is an ability to participate in coming up with what the community will be, at some point possibly, right? Shape it with your own ideas.

Scott, for his part, he came up with the idea to reward return to the land families with a thousand dollar bonus for every kid born into the community. Yeah, of course, right? He's got a lot of fucking kids. He needs some money. He's got more kids than curtains. Scott said that he definitely wanted to have

more kids, but when a reporter asked Jennifer Scott's wife, if she planned to grow the family, she grimaced and said, if it happens, it happens. Cool, so her life is shit. Another person who lives on the compound is Patrick Shrub, 37, who regularly wears a homemade linen shirt like some kind of medieval guild worker and keeps a large knife strapped to his belt, which is important. You never know when the non-whites are going to come to attack and try and take all their shit, right? Try and take their fucking porta-potties. You got to stay vigilant. Originally from Detroit, he left due to concerns about crime, but also because he wanted to find a like-minded wife to start a family with. But that hasn't happened.

The community tends to attract a lot more single dudes than it does single women. Oh, crazy. Who would have ever guessed that the return to the land's dating pool is extremely shallow? Another young single member is John. Unlike the other, John doesn't own land on the compound. He works on building Scott's house over the weekend. And in return for his labor, he gets cheap rent. He dropped out of college, held a series of,

of odd jobs as he drifted around the country before joining up with a compound, right? That tracks. Interestingly enough, John's primary motivation for joining the group, not based on any ideology, it's just economic. He said, the main thing to me is cheap land. Everything else is a bonus. As for excluding people, I don't see it that way. We're trying to embrace our country and our heritage.

Okay? In the RTTL world, this is exactly the kind of person they want to join the group. Somebody who does not necessarily have strong opinions, but allows themselves to be molded by the group's opinions when presented with an economic opportunity that seems too good to pass up. The hope is that more young people will join, meet at the compound, start families. There are about a dozen children on the compound now, all of them homeschooled, and if you're wondering, are any of them also being sexually abused? Yes, I'm also wondering that.

No allegations yet, but my gut says they are coming with these types. By the time they're 18, if the community lasts that long, RTTL will be all these kids have known, and the outside world will, I'm sure, appear fucking terrifying, chaotic, unstable, so many violent non-whites. Will the community continue? Will the legal framework hold? Eric believes that they have just three years to make this community a real thing. Orwal believes a dirty Democrat will enter the White House in 2028, at which point Washington will try to close RTT down. Oh, 100%.

Oh, yeah, you fucking dorks are going to be a huge priority for the next administration, whoever they are. Fixing the economy, that can wait. you've got to get these three dozen losers sorted out first. To prepare for the radical left or somebody else coming for them, the community has been raising money. To date, they have raised approximately $330,000 from land sales, according to a financial analysis conducted by the ADL's Center on Extremism. Yeah, I doubt they've saved a lot of that money.

They're also run five separate crowdfunding campaigns on GiveSENGo, a Christian-focused crowdfunding platform. These campaigns have raised over $185,000. and donations. I bet they've blown most of that already. Much of it allegedly for their legal framework research, which the group says will include hiring an attorney who specializes in discrimination law.

Quote, to ensure we are complying with FHA and other civil rights legislation and creating new LLCs and a nonprofit related to further expand the project. In some ways, the group wants to be legally challenged, hoping that if they win, that'll set a precedent of legal protection for other communities like theirs.

But for the moment, those legal challenges don't seem to be coming. at least not yet. Unsurprisingly, multiple civil rights organizations have condemned returned to the lands project and called on local and federal lawmakers and officials to shut down the project, but Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin told the magazine wired

that his office has found nothing illegal about the community. He said racism has no place in a free society, but from a legal perspective, we have not seen anything that would indicate any state or federal laws have been broken. And a spokesperson for Shannon Smith, assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Arkansas declined to comment on whether her office is investigating the situation or not.

Her office has referred the matter to the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, which is probably better equipped to handle cases like these, but maybe not. I don't have a lot of faith in the Department of Justice right now. One place where it's perfectly legal and infuriating for Orwell to make money is on the far-right conference circuit. In 2024, Orwal was a VIP guest at the America First Political Action Conference, an annual white nationalist gathering run by super awesome, very wholesome, totally rational, fun guy, Nick Fuentes. I've always considered you a brilliant and dedicated advocate for our cause. Fuentes wrote on X in response to a post from Orwal.

When asked if Fuentes would be allowed to live within the compound, given his Mexican heritage, Orwal said that it would depend on a vote. So I feel like that's a nice way of him saying no, right? That was a polite way of him saying no. I wonder if they would make an exception for self-hating Kansas. Owens, though, right? Candace Owens? Maybe, I mean, she's rich, she's hot. Maybe those two qualities would somehow outrank her skin color, and she could be the real-life equivalent of the Dave Chappelle Show, right? The Chappelle Show, uh, fucking character, Clayton Bigsby. That conference

money and any converts, Orwell wins from speaking to crowds of like-minded people flows right back into the community, which has plans to expand according to RTTL's own website and promotional materials. They are planning multiple communities in the Ozarks region. This makes strategic sense, right? Like Arkansas, southern Missouri, overwhelmingly white rural and conservative, the history of white supremacists organized in the region runs deep. In the 1970s, the Christian extremist group, the covenant, the sword in the arm of the Lord, operated a 224 acre compound in Arkansas near the Missouri border, where they offered end-time overcomer survival training school and stockpiled weapons. Those guys sound cool. FBI shut them down in 1985 after discovering a massive

cash of cyanide that they had planned to use to poison the water supply of major U.S. cities like Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C. RTT is explicit about why they're choosing places like Missouri. As Orwal told a podcaster, they chose Arkansas because, quote, it's 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. But are you? Maybe not. The idea of a segregated community coming to southwest Missouri was greeted with scorn by both Democratic and Republican legislative leaders. racism in any form is evil and reprehensible, said House Majority Leader Alex Riley, a Springfield Republican. Groups engaging in racist conduct are not welcome in Springfield.

The Springfield City Council and city manager David Cameron issued a joint statement declaring that there is no place in Springfield or anywhere for such divisive and discriminatory vision. RTTL, so that's cool. RTTL also appears to be exploring a compound in Pennsylvania, maybe even two, and in interviews Orwell has mentioned expanding to the Pacific Northwest. as also said, he wants to branch out internationally. Easy, buddy. You don't even have your own fucking house built. Let's slow down. You don't even have a bathroom yet.

While the community is still in its infancy and may soon face legal challenges, the trajectory, you know, is obviously somewhat concerning at least. Every day that RTTL exists is another opportunity to draw on someone like 26-year-old John, somebody who may not arrive with an ethno-nationalist worldview, but instead with more immediate needs like work, stability, a sense of belonging in a place that is not prohibitively expensive. If there's enough, Johns, if the community grows large enough with children raised in it, that outlook can extend outward into other regions, where people are facing their own forms of stress. Bit by bit, the communities could grow, connect and spread, not through force, but through participation

that steadily normalizes the idea that racial segregation is needed to live a wholesome lifestyle. Or, as Eric Orwell put it in a video, you want a white nation, build a white town. It can be done. or doing it. But I don't think it's going to work out. I think return to the land is going to go the same way as, like, Elaheim City, Oklahoma. Founded on 400 acres,

1973 is a white Christian separatist group. Only 45 people live there today. About 30 of them are dudes, and only 24 of them are white. It's no longer some Aryan dream. It's a fucking shithole in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma, full of a bunch of horny, frustrated dudes. Also, there was the case of Leith, North Dakota, current population 28, also in the middle of nowhere.

In 2011, a white supremacist named Craig Cobb began buying land and Leith, owning at least 12 plots of land by September of 2013. Cobb wanted to move in other white supremacists so he could gain an electoral majority, take over the city government, and transform Leith into a neo-Nazi stronghold. A stronghold, come on, it's got 20 people. People protested, shit got heated, Cobb confronted a resident with a shotgun, got a gun, got a arrested, then accepted a plea bargain that included him being banned from Leith. Good on you, Leith. He then sold off all his properties, has been in and out of the country and in and out of jail ever since. And in 2017, I love this. Cobb purchased a church in Nome, North Dakota, population 51. He wanted to transform it into a chapel for the white nationalist creativity movement, wanted to also name it after

Donald Trump. The church was destroyed, though, in an arson attack the same day a local newspaper it ran a story covering Kov's plants. So luckily, this shit is still very French. But it is still worth talking about to help keep it that way. Right? I understand wanting to live in an intentional community. I do. But why not base it around shared character traits or interests or values

instead of something as murky and meaningless as racial makeup? I mean, seriously, what even is white culture? I haven't been invited to any meetings. What even is black culture? I think that notion is virtually meaningless today. Black people come from a lot of different African countries, right? A lot of different tribes, a lot of different cultures. There are all kinds of different personalities, interests, right?

Gamers, stock traders, doctors, artists, liberals, conservative, cool people, dorks, tolerant people, racist people, et cetera. Same for white people. A lot of different cultures, a lot of different ethnic groups, a lot of different personalities, wants and desires. You know, for someone like me, I think most people in America now are racial makeup has been so jumbled up, right? It's been jumbled for a long time. The most of any country's ancestry I have, according to 23 of me right now, is Scottish at 27.8%, followed by English at 21.2%, followed by Swedish at 15.9%. Do I feel a special kinship with any of these cultures? Not really.

I notice people in these places that, you know, look like me sometimes. You know, similar. I've been to Scotland and England, liked both areas a lot. Never been to Sweden, but Norway was super cool. I bet I would like Sweden. but I also thought Greece was awesome and I have zero Greek ancestry. You know, I thought fucking Peru was awesome.

I have no Peruvian ancestry. Wanting to hold on to your culture in such an extreme way in such a territorial way. It is so futile and foolish, at least to me. One of the few constants in life is change and change is stressful, almost any kind of changes. So I get the resistance to it on some level, but also it's inevitable.

So maybe instead of trying to force the world around you to look the way you want it to in some kind of rigid and nonsensical way. Adapt with the times, motherfucker. The clock ain't turning back. Interracial relationships will only increase. We'll only get more ethnically mixed and watered down and more of the rest of you will look like mutts like me.

We'll settle into a new normal. And then that will inevitably change again. And change again and change again and change again forever. And that's it for this edition of Time Suck, Short Sucks. If you enjoyed this story, check out the rest of the bad magic catalog bigger episodes of time sook every Monday at noon Pacific time new episodes

of the now long-running paranormal podcast scared to death Tuesdays at midnight two episodes of nightmare fuel fictional horror thrown into the mix each month big thanks to Sophie Evans for the initial research on this one and thanks again to Logan Keith polishing up the sound of today's episode

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