Halfway between Memphis and Little Rock, to reach Eric Orwoll’s experiment in race-based living, you must drive for several hours through deeply conservative Arkansas. Past steak restaurants where men wear khaki even when they’re not hunting. Past diners where the waffles come with thick dollops of blueberry jelly. Past Pentecostal and Baptist churches where the car parks are filled with pick-up trucks for Sunday service. “Have you been washed in blood?” asks one billboard.

When it feels like you cannot venture any deeper into the Bible belt, you turn off down a two-mile dirt track that leads to Return to the Land, where you will find Orwoll, a classical musician from Los Angeles with a fondness for quoting Plato, who is becoming increasingly famous in far-right circles. The all-white community in the Ozark mountains is home to 40 white Americans. Membership is limited to heterosexual Christians and pagans of European descent. Black people, gays and Jews are not allowed to live here.

“The United States was founded as a country for white people,” Orwoll, 35, says. “The Naturalization Act of 1790 said a person could be a citizen here if they were ‘a free white person of good character’. The founders were white nationalists.”

-snip-

The only reason Orwoll has agreed to meet me, he says, is that he has just three years to sell his vision. He believes a Democrat will enter the White House in 2028, at which point Washington will try to close down his community and he will no longer be able to convert people to segregationism. “It’s a necessary evil,” he says of his engagement with the press.

-snip-