by Blair Luain

The entire world is currently obsessed with a 160-acre spit of land located in the backwoods of Arkansas. Sky News, Comcast, CNN, the Irish, Reddit, and X. Love it or hate it, the world can’t seem to stop talking about Return to the Land and the people who call those 160 acres home. But why?

It was puzzling, to be sure, so I had to find out for myself: Is there really an enclave of neo-Nazis hiding out in the woods of northeast Arkansas? Or is there more to the story?

This is Eric Orwoll

Eric Orwoll runs a worldwide organisation called Return to the Land. In his own words, it’s a “nonprofit social welfare organisation dedicated to the preservation of European heritage and traditional families.” They “believe that strong communities are built on shared ancestry, common values, and a commitment to future generations.”

To the untrained ear, that may sound extreme, but the reality is that his group is just one of many in a long line of ethnic and religious communities across the U.S., such as Freedom Georgia, a Black-centered intentional community in Georgia; EPIC City/The Meadow, a proposed Muslim-centered community in Texas; Kiryas Joel, a predominantly Satmar Hasidic Jewish village in New York; Pinesdale, a fundamentalist Mormon community in Montana; New Vrindaban, a Hare Krishna/Hindu religious community in West Virginia; and Maharishi Vedic City, a Vedic/Transcendental Meditation-based incorporated city in Iowa, just to name a few.

To my knowledge, none of those communities has received as much scrutiny and vitriol as RTTL is currently being subjected to. On the contrary, while certain separatist developments have been applauded, father of four Eric Orwoll has been the recipient of death threats, lawfare, international hit pieces, and Reddit-moderator-fueled harassment campaigns.

So I sat down with Eric on his comfortably worn couch inside his tiny home turned podcast studio and library, to find out why.

Unfortunately, I had somewhat misjudged the dress code. I’d shown up in a chinoiserie nap dress and sapphire tennis bracelet, hoping to make a good impression, while Eric had been out getting a tyre changed. I realised at once that I had overdone it. And this caught him off guard because, just before we sat down, he disappeared to change.

This was perfectly fine with me, however, because it gave me the opportunity to snoop around his studio.

It was covered, floor to ceiling, in books. There were books on metaphysics, Buddhism and the rise and fall of Rome. The Quran, the Bible, and I didn’t see the Bhagavad Gita, but I expect one was present. There were storybooks, historical texts, westerns, novels, and board games such as Risk, Catan, and War Chest. It was very cozy, if not a little austere, and very quiet.

The content of his library and games was of no surprise to me (I’ve observed enough men to understand their interests), but the vastness of his collection was. There were hundreds upon hundreds of books. And none of them was dusty.

I could hear Eric’s shoes on the gravel outside as he came back, so I collected myself and turned my snooping to the conversation at hand.

“All right, Eric,” I addressed him, “we already know who the mainstream media says you are: a white supremacist, a Nazi, and a racist. I’d like to start by giving you the opportunity to tell people who you actually are.”

“Thank you,” said Eric. “Well, I’m someone who cares about my people. I want to preserve the culture that I’ve inherited and the kind of people that I grew up with. But really mostly, it’s about the kids. I have four. They’re here in the community with us; we’re homeschooling them, and they play with the other kids in the community. If I was out in the world, I wouldn’t know who my kids were associating with. If they were in public school, I wouldn’t know what they were being taught. So I’m trying to look after my family is really what I’m doing.”

“You could call me, I guess, a nationalist in a loose sense. It’s not my political ideology in that I want the United States to be a white supremacist society or only run by white people. What we want is to peacefully associate freely in our own communities and take care of our own needs.”

“Is that what inspired the founding of Return to the Land?” I ask. “I’m sure that’s part of it, but tell me more. What were you trying to create that you felt didn’t already exist?”

“So when I was a kid,” Eric shifts on the couch, “I was told by my biology teachers that there wouldn’t be people like me, with blonde hair and blue eyes, in a hundred, two hundred years. And that felt really sad, but I accepted and internalised it anyway.”

“Then when I went through college, I went to school for classical music and started reading classical European philosophy. I looked at my life, and I saw that so much of what I enjoyed and what I cared about comes from our heritage.”

“At that point, the prospect that the U.S. would be minority white by the end of the century was again very sad, but I wasn’t accepting it that time. I was starting to think: What actually can be done? And the only thing that I think is viable in the short term is creating our own communities and effectively having a parallel society.”

“People have been doing that for a long time actually in a disorganised way. They flee the city to go to the suburbs, and then the suburbs transform demographically. They become less safe. And so people move to gated communities. Essentially, white people have been fleeing one community to another over the last several decades. And I don’t want to have to do that.”

“Americans, by and large, don’t know their neighbours. That sense of local community is gone. And I think it’s very important. It’s an important part of life to have your tribe around you and to actually see them on a daily basis. And short of moving together into an intentional community, given the modern lifestyle, I just don’t think it’s very realistic to have that unless you do what we’ve done.”

I think about my own children, how sad it would be if their eyes, hair colours, unique noses, smiles, and chins no longer existed in the world.

The real estate debate

But I want to see if I can tease out why Eric’s critics are so angry with him, so I ask him to tell me about some of their current suits.

“One of our more serious ones is due to Michelle Walker, an ethnically Jewish woman from St. Louis. She’s a wealthy real estate broker, and she applied to our association. We rejected her because neither she nor her husband is of European heritage, and she had no good faith intention of joining us. She also never directly interacted with this community.”

“She applied to our international association, which is just a social club. And any social club can turn away anyone they like for any reason. So the discrimination that she was subject to is perfectly legal. But she’s arguing that because we have this physical community here and because all of us are members of the social club, that she was trying to apply to our physical community even though there is no way for someone from the general public to apply to become a member of the physical community we have here in Arkansas.”

“So she sent us her complaint letter and has the NAACP, the Legal Aid Fund of Arkansas, and a dozen lawyers behind her. And we’ve responded with a motion to dismiss for the company that owns the land here because she never interacted with that in any capacity whatsoever. The goal is to get that suit thrown out because, honestly, it really should be.”

I find it intriguing that so many people seem to be suddenly falling over themselves just to own a small parcel of land within the boondocks community Eric founded. Especially considering the fact that there are other parcels within the exact same area that you don’t have to be a member of a social club to buy.

There’s also an Islamic-owned development down in Little Rock, Arkansas, that currently has several vacant lots. Why didn’t they get a three-day international documentary? Why not invest there?

So I decided to look into it, and I found something interesting. In order to buy one of those lots, the proposed buyer has to sign a Bill of Assurance which contains the following religious-purpose clause: “Definition of plan development Buyer(s) and sellers are aware that this development, including the sale of lots and etc. is for the purpose of creating a wholly owned residential Al-Islamic community conforming to the social guidelines given in the Quran and modelled in the life of Prophet Muhammed Ibn Abdullah and all parties agree to this purpose.”

Not only that, but later, in Section 22 of the bill, it references a separate document: “and as set forth in the New Africa Homeowners Association Declaration, dated 07/05/2007, which said Home Association Declaration is hereby incorporated into and made a part of this Bill of Assurance.”

What this means is that there is a separate document, namely, the New Africa Homeowners Association Declaration dated July 5, 2007, that has been incorporated into and made part of the Bill of Assurance.

However, I looked, and the referenced Declaration is not included in the recorded 10-page copy of Document No. 2007058199 provided by the Pulaski County deed-records system. The document proceeds from Section 23 to the signature and acknowledgment pages without attaching the July 5, 2007 Declaration.

So, while the publicly available Bill of Assurance establishes that buyers and sellers agree to the stated purpose of creating an Al-Islamic residential community conforming to Quranic social guidelines, the contents of the separately referenced July 5, 2007 New Africa Homeowners Association Declaration are not publicly available and therefore unknown.

This fact is vitally important because, according to the Arkansas Supreme Court, when one contract refers to another writing and makes its terms part of the contract, the documents are treated as one agreement and construed together. As such, the Bill of Assurance is extremely vague. It states the buyer must agree to conform to “Quranic social guidelines,” but what does that even mean? Even among themselves, Muslims disagree.

The language also creates a particular problem for a serious practising Christian, as one who understands the faith cannot sincerely assent to furthering another religion as a religious project. Helping to establish an explicitly Muslim community ordered according to the Quran and the example of Muhammad would be exactly that.

While the document does not explicitly state “Christians need not apply,” it conditions participation upon assent to a purpose incompatible with the Christian religion.

I decided to ask Eric about his thoughts on this.

“You’ve pointed to examples such as the proposed New Africa development in Arkansas receiving governmental land use approval. Why do you believe a project like that is treated differently from Return to the Land?” I asked.

“So,” Eric began, “the Black community is a thing. The Latino community is a thing. And the Jewish community is a thing. And that’s all well and good and protected, but it’s not applied consistently across the board.”

“White people have internalised the self-hatred we’ve been conditioned to accept through propaganda and the media. And our identity has been delegitimised because whiteness itself, European identity, has been uniquely deconstructed due to the fact that ours is the culture that became the background culture of international capitalism.”

“So, many white people don’t think race is even a rational thing to gather around. It’s the most frequent criticism that I get online: ‘But how do you know who’s white?’ And that’s because whiteness itself is so culturally pervasive.”

Eric continues, “And I think there’s also an ethos of care that comes with egalitarian political ideologies, which is a more feminine way of thinking, where effectively they’re similar to a mom who’s concerned about their younger kid and making sure that they’re also treated well and they’re safe. Whereas a more masculine ethos is celebrating those who do well, celebrating success, achievement, and meritocracy.”

“The feminine ethos that Western civilisation has been leaning towards over the last decades is concerned about those who are not doing so well, namely, the minority communities, and any other community willing to play the victim.”

“And so we’ve kind of adopted that framing, and we accept when these races want to preserve their heritage, but we don’t apply it to ourselves. But that kind of brainwashing is wearing off. And I think a project like Return to the Land, especially, is making that double standard much more transparent so that people are encouraged to rationally think about this problem for once.”

All the attention RTTL has received certainly is causing people to think. The Walker case may very well provide them with the judicial transparency and clarity they are after, but the social waters are still murky. So I decided to ask directly.

Anti-white Americans

“Some organisations that have received considerable national attention have made serious allegations about Return to the Land,” I started. “From your perspective, what have they gotten wrong and why do they attack and dehumanise your community?”

“Because they don’t like white people,” Eric stated matter-of-factly, and shrugged before continuing.

“There is a lot of anti-white animus in this country. A lot of white people even have it. They internalise all of these tropes that are anti-white, like white men can’t jump, or white people can’t dance and things like that.”

“Which are not true, but people still make these self-deprecatory jokes about their race that they’re also taught to not even identify with. And they’re taught that race is a social construct, except when white people are blamed for things historically, and then all of a sudden it’s real and you owe reparations because of your racial identity.”

“It’s in our educational curricula in public schools. It’s taught in universities by Marxist professors, in many cases, and radical egalitarians who don’t believe in any kind of hierarchy, let alone distinct biological identities.”

“And it’s in the culture, it’s in commercials, and it’s all propaganda. And the issue is that people don’t generally think for themselves from scratch. They don’t come up with their own worldview. Instead, they repeat the things that they’ve heard repeated around them.”

“Most people get their views by averaging out what they hear most often from people in their peer group and also what people in high-status positions are saying. And a lot of those people are themselves globalists and liberal egalitarians, so they end up undermining their own racial identity.”

“As far as the particular allegations, I mean, they’ll take anything. Pro-white activists are routinely targeted with lawfare, and harassed, and doxxed, and swatted, and that’s just the enemy trying to take us down. We are unashamedly pro-white, and so we get the flak.”

His answer raised another question.

“Do you think fear of social or professional consequences plays a role?” I asked. “If people repeatedly see others lose jobs, friends, or reputation for expressing pride in their race, does that affect what they’re willing to say?”

Eric nodded. “Yeah, I think so. And the fear isn’t so much that they consciously think about the consequences. It’s like a dog that’s been beaten. They just flinch at the thought of standing up for their racial identity.”

“Some people, I think, do make a conscious choice. I’ve talked to liberal Democrats that I knew through family that were in high-status positions. And we’ll be talking about some of these historical issues or cultural issues, and I get the feeling that they get it. So I ask, ‘Why don’t you take it all the way?’ And one of them was very direct with me, and he said, ‘Well, I want to keep my job.’”

“He contracts for the government and in the social circle he has to navigate, he has to express certain views.”

“So it’s a combination of people who consciously compromise and then people who have just kind of internalised the self-hatred and fear.”

“But people are waking up. Social media is making a difference on the ideological side and helping shift the Overton window.”

“There’s still a long way to go. I’m one of those people who thinks that if we’re outspoken and proud of our heritage, then that’s going to be normalised eventually. This is not the time anymore to hide your views and fly under the radar and do what that family friend I was just talking about did consciously, and compromise.”

But what did the consequences of standing up for your own people actually look like?

During the “Mostly Peaceful Protests” of 2020, protests associated with BLM descended into rioting, arson, looting, and violence. Eric’s response to perceived racism, by contrast, is premised on withdrawal, community building, and peace.

But at what cost? “What does your legal situation currently look like?” I asked. “We talked about Michelle Walker, but what else? What exactly is being challenged and where do your cases stand today?”

Eric sighed.

“It’s hard to keep track of because it’s really ballooned and there’s a lot going on, but we thought initially that our big move would be to get sued, win, set an important legal and cultural precedent stating that it’s okay for white people to embrace their own identity and live among their own kind.”

“But now our intention is to set that precedent much more directly by suing the federal government itself.”

In August 2026, RTTL filed suit against the Department of Justice, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Arkansas Securities Department, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, and a number of officials connected to those agencies. The suit seeks declaratory and other relief over investigations that RTTL alleges are unconstitutional and retaliatory.

This is important because in August 2025, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin told Wired, “from a legal perspective, we have not seen anything that would indicate any state or federal laws have been broken.” Yet here, one year later, the investigation has not been closed.

“We’re not seeking monetary damages,” Eric explained. “We’re suing them to get them to actually make a decision about what we’re doing, because currently we’re under investigation by those agencies.”

“We’ve already been investigated by the Arkansas Fair Housing Commission. They closed their investigation and didn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing. Attorney General Tim Griffin didn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing either.”

“The issue is that the DOJ, HUD, Attorney General Tim Griffin, and then the Securities Department won’t close their investigations. They’re just leaving them open-ended where they can always request documents. And because of that, we basically have to keep a lawyer on retainer in order to respond to their requests.”

“We know the law. And from the beginning, we understood the laws that would be twisted and used against us. But these investigations cost a lot of money. They’re intentionally dragging us through this process because the process is the punishment. And so that’s why we’re suing them.”

“They need to make a decision, and hopefully they will be forced to shut down the investigations and not reopen them.”

“If that happens, I think people will feel emboldened to do similar things and also to join Return to the Land itself. And we’re going to see a lot more communities like this, which I think is a great thing.”

“It’s good for the people joining, good for the country, and good for freedom. Because the government shouldn’t be used as a weapon to punish people who activists and politicians disagree with.”

RTTL is also fighting on another front.

“We’re also suing Sky News, the first major media outlet that covered us,” Eric continued. “They came here, we were very nice to them for three days, invited them into our homes, fed them, and then immediately after they left here, they went down to Little Rock and complained about us to the Governor and Attorney General.”

“They’ve caused real damage. They fabricated a sign to make it look like we had spray-painted ‘whites only’ onto a tree here, which no one ever did. That doesn’t exist. But they made it photorealistic, and that’s a pretty blatant instance of defamation.”

“So we actually expect them to have some kind of offer to settle. It won’t be a huge amount of money, but people should be held accountable for lies like that.”

“And then also, it’s so insulting that they came here, were nice to our faces, and then turn around and report us to the government. It’s crazy.”

The lawsuit exists. Whether the challenged image and other elements of Sky’s reporting legally constitute defamation is now a question for the courts.

I did, however, go back and watch the Sky News documentary for myself. It was easy to find because there, as its cover image, was the fabricated “Whites Only” sign, seemingly spray-painted onto a tree.

The documentary is unmistakably hostile and aggressive, and doesn’t bother to hide its beliefs as they pertain to the movement or the members involved. While watching, it feels as if you, the viewer, are being held by the throat in an attempt to shake you into submission.

But the footage itself is more nuanced.

The residents cook for the crew, feed them, invite cameras into their homes, share personal stories, hold a concert, play with their children, and gather around a bonfire. Caught on film are mundane, awkward, vulnerable, kind, and tender human moments, right alongside political beliefs that some viewers may find objectionable.

A journalist doesn’t owe his subjects approval or sympathy. But there’s something revealing about watching people offer genuine hospitality to someone who is simultaneously constructing a case against them.

The stronger documentary, in my opinion, would have trusted the viewer, or at least allowed them to form their own opinions in an honest way. It would have been interesting to see the community’s beliefs communicated clearly, to see the people clearly, and then allow the viewer to settle any tension that arose themselves.

Instead, Sky News flattened their own project by presenting a caricature and allowed their personal feelings to become part of the story through derision and open mockery.

But Eric had more lawsuits to discuss.

“And then we have other plans, offensive measures against other journalists and things like that. But it just depends on what resources we have, because all of this takes time. All of it takes a lot of lawyers and their time, which is expensive.”

“So we’ll see how much we can do. But the big thing has already been filed.”

Something from his podcast the night before came flooding back to me.

“Oh,” I said. “I wanted to ask you something else pertaining to that. You mentioned last night that HUD treated Return to the Land differently than EPIC City in Texas? What specifically are you basing that on?”

“Well, HUD accidentally sent us a letter that was intended for the EPIC community,” he said.

According to Eric, the tone of the communications revealed a dramatic difference in how the two cases were being approached.

“The letter they sent us was about three pages long, and it basically contained thinly veiled threats. They treated us as presumptively guilty, and the tone was just really, really harsh and hostile.”

“The letter that EPIC City got was about a page long. It was apologetic, and the tone was very mild.”

Here, the bureaucratic history becomes complicated. The Justice Department previously investigated EPIC and closed that investigation after developers agreed to comply with fair-housing law. HUD subsequently opened a separate investigation into the project in February 2026. Eric interprets the agencies’ correspondence as evidence of disparate treatment, an allegation which is now part of RTTL’s broader dispute with the federal government.

“With us, the threats began immediately,” he continued, “before they even saw our documents, before they demonstrated any comprehension of our legal framework, or the difference between our various legal entities.”

“But despite that, we indicated that we’d be open to some kind of conciliatory settlement. So instead of getting fined, we’ll say, ‘We’re willing to work with you. We’ll change some things. What do you want?’”

“And the letter they sent back, outlining what they were after, was not a true conciliatory effort. It was extortion. It was threatening us with many thousands of dollars in fines and penalties.”

“And that was after they lost our documents. And when they wrote that letter to us, they didn’t even have a lot of our other documents. So they obviously didn’t care about the findings of the investigation.”

“I guess somehow their judgment is so good that they can evaluate the legality of our framework without even having our documents. And they can know exactly how much money we’re going to owe to our alleged victims of discrimination.”

“So yeah, very, very disparate treatment by the government.”

“The irony is that Harmeet Dhillon, the director at HUD, promised to make up for this kind of weaponised justice system that existed under the Biden administration.”

“And yet,” Eric continued, “the treatment is still happening. It’s egregious.”

“HUD, especially among government agencies, has a reputation for being sloppy like this, and I don’t have a lot of faith that the people at HUD are ever going to make the right decision, so they have to be held accountable from outside. That’s what we hope to do.”

“Honestly, we think a lot of this has just been the government trusting biased, deceitful journalists and even anonymous bloggers.”

That caught my attention. “Really?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Eric replies. “They’re taking the word of people just writing random articles online, and that’s the basis for a lot of their investigations. That’s probably how these investigations got launched.”

He pointed specifically to a Reddit campaign in which a user named Previous_Twist9337 (now banned) posted about RTTL in r/jewish, encouraging readers to contact the government and the media. The user then posted the material across several other subreddits.

I read through the Reddit comments myself, and interestingly, Twist invokes the Sky News cover image of “WHITES ONLY,” attributing it to RTTL. Other users campaign to get the residents fired from their jobs. And Twist encourages them all to contact “Investigator McGee” by posting his contact information.

Eric claims the posts were successful. “That’s actually what got this kicked off,” he said.

“So you’re saying there’s a discernible timeline,” I asked, moving my hands through the air as if laying the events out between us, “where the online campaign begins, complaints follow, and then the government scrutiny intensifies?”

“Yes.”

The possibility was unsettling, to say the least. The mental image of Reddit trolls yanking the government around by a leash was disturbing.

Eric said it changed the way he interacted with local law enforcement too.

“I actually went to visit with the sheriff in our county to let him know, like, ‘Hey, you’re gonna get false reports about us. People are gonna try to swat us.’”

“He appreciated the heads up, and we have gotten false complaints, and the sheriff has had to come out here and follow up on things. And of course there was nothing.”

“So now the next time the sheriff has to come out, he’s thinking, ‘Ohh, this again.’”

“That’s why, ultimately, the attacks against us have benefited us more than they’ve harmed us in the sense that we’ve gotten a lot of new members. People have really been thinking about freedom of association and about the rights that we care about.”

“We’ve opened up that conversation, and it’s really pushed the discourse in the right direction. So if they do attack us, I think probably it’ll just be more of the same. Ultimately, it’ll just benefit our cause.”

It was time for my final question, and I wanted to pick Eric’s brain a little bit.

“In what ways,” I asked, “do you think we’ve departed most dramatically from America’s original conception of itself, and what would actually be required to correct the course?”

“The biggest thing is that it was founded by white people for white people,” Eric said. “It was conceived as an extension of European civilisation, and that being dropped is kind of a core element of who we were and what our self-concept was.”

“And now we’re deracinated, and the American civic identity isn’t intrinsically tied to Europe in any official capacity.”

“So, what is an American? It means basically nothing other than you have access to our markets, our real estate, and our jobs. You’re in the same bureaucratic system as the rest of us.”

“And at that point, it’s just vacuous. It’s like anyone could be an American. And so if anyone can be an American, it means nothing.”

He compared this development to Rome’s gradual expansion of citizenship: how once citizenship was decoupled from heredity and ethnicity and became universalistic in nature, it was the beginning of the end for the empire.

“America was a nation of yeoman farmers,” Eric continued his thoughts. “It was landowning men who had the right to vote. Not just men, but men with property, men with some kind of stake in the country.”

“We were also a nation forged by our frontier, by going out and settling new lands. And most Americans are very separated from that lifestyle. Most Americans don’t own land, and they’re not homesteading. They’re not exploring a frontier.”

“So part of Return to the Land is getting back to our roots as Americans as well. Let’s actually go back onto our own kind of frontier.”

“Obviously the Ozarks were already settled before we got here, but we are trying to create our own distinctive way of life and be relatively independent of the surrounding system.”

“I think more Americans, white Americans especially, should buy land, own land, develop land, farm the land, and build their own houses. It’s not only tradition, but it’s also just pragmatic and practical.”

That part of his answer interested me for reasons that went beyond politics.

“When you separate yourself from the land,” I said, “I feel you’re separating yourself from what it means to be human, that is, the cycle of life and death.”

“You are divorcing yourself from reality and in that way, I believe a sort of metaphysical death occurs. You aren’t grounded in anything anymore; you begin to experience reality through abstractions, fuzzy ideas of things, not their actual substance, and it’s very dangerous. Reality becomes negotiable at that point.”

“Yes,” Eric said. “Exactly, you aren’t grounded in anything. It’s what we see with Liberalism. There’s a nebulous, ‘I’m not by body, I’m a spirit being who can be anything I choose, male or female. And race is a construct, except when it’s not. And there is no objective truth except the ones I believe when it’s convenient.’ There’s no rootedness.”

“They’re not tethered to anything,” I replied. “There is something almost Gnostic about parts of modern culture. It’s like they hate the body. I feel that we see this with the body positivity movement, the trans movement, and the overall dysgenic appearance many of them willfully choose.”

“You see variations of it everywhere,” Eric added. “The belief that material limits can simply be transcended if we adopt the right language or attitude towards them.”

“It reminds me,” I said, “in a strange way, of the Cathars in southern France.”

Eric laughed. “Yes,” he said, “except I’d prefer the Cathars.”

Do white people deserve freedom of association?

Under U.S. law, narrow statutory exemptions permit certain forms of religious preference that would be impermissible if based on race. Culturally, too, religious separation is often easier to defend. You can choose your religion, but you can’t choose your race. Perhaps the emotion that distinction conjures is at the heart of the criticism of RTTL.

If so, Kiryas Joel makes for an illuminating comparison. The 1.5-square-mile Satmar Hasidic community in New York was founded in 1977 with boundaries the Supreme Court later described as intentionally drawn to “exclude all but Satmars.”

Despite decades of legal trouble due to housing discrimination, favouritism, sexism, voting access, and zoning allegations, the large community has managed to remain overwhelmingly Hasidic.

The two groups, Return to the Land and Kiryas Joel, are not legally identical, but the disparity in how their separatism is morally framed is difficult to ignore.

To me, the strangest thing about the campaign against Return to the Land and Eric Orwoll is how effectively his opponents have made his argument for him.

If you believe men like Orwoll are wrong, then belittling them, caricaturizing their beliefs, dismissing their accounts, minimising their lived experiences, and deliberately misinterpreting everything they say in the most sinister way possible is an extraordinarily poor method of proving it.

Their beliefs are predicated on your unbelief.

And if you disagree with Orwoll when he says whites are permitted less latitude to organise as a people, so you respond by stigmatising white identity, mocking the race’s cultural value, denouncing its historical contributions, and villainising the pride afforded to every single other race, you aren’t arguing against Eric’s case.

You are making it for him.

Originally published on Evie Magazine.