This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
In October 2023, a group calling itself Return to the Land established its first “Whites only community” in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. They followed that with a second enclave nearby in 2025.
The group, which describes itself as a “private membership association” that helps groups form “European heritage communities,” plans to build four more sites, including another location in the Ozarks and two in Appalachia.
Return to the Land believes that by calling themselves a private membership association they can create a white ethnostate – a type of state in which residence is limited to white people – and legally exclude people based on race, religion and sexual orientation.
If you read the words of Eric Orwoll, the group’s co-founder, its mission is clear: “You want a white nation? Build a white town … it can be done. We’re doing it.”
As a scholar of right-wing extremism, I have examined several groups calling for a white homeland in America. The creation of a white ethnostate is often seen as an ultimate goal of such white nationalism, which argues that white people form part of a genetically and culturally superior race deserving of protection and preservation. While Return to the Land doesn’t identify as white nationalists, their statements often align with the ideology.
White ethnostates, big and small
One of the best-known plans for a white ethnostate is the Northwest Imperative, popularized by white nationalists during the 1970s and ’80s. The plan involved certain citizens taking 10% of the United States – the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana – and excluding all nonwhite people from living there.Proponents of the plan argued that these states were already majority white and contained large tracts of undeveloped land, making the territory ideal for white-only settlement. High-profile extremists of the time such as Richard Butler, Robert Mathews and David Lane supported the plan.
Still today, groups such as the Northwest Front, a white nationalist group founded in 2009 and located in the Pacific Northwest, continue to promote variations of this idea.
While the Pacific Northwest has a long history with right-wing extremist organizing, the proponents of whites-only communities have also targeted areas of the Northeast as possible locations for a white ethnostate.
In 2018, for example, Tom Kawczynski, town manager of Jackman, Maine, was fired when his views came to light, including views that have been characterized as “pro-white.”More recently, in 2023, the People’s Initiative of New England, a splinter group of the neo-Nazi organization National Socialist Club-131, introduced themselves on the online platform Substack. There, the group laid out its goal of establishing the six states of New England – Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont – as white-only.
The goal of gaining control of multiple states is unrealistic, of course, at least peacefully. Therefore, a popular alternative, along the lines of Return to the Land’s actions, is to establish smaller all-white communities.
In 2013, media outlets reported that neo-Nazi Craig Cobb was buying land in the small town of Leith, North Dakota, to build a white nationalist community. The town rallied to oppose this attempt.
Later that year, Cobb was charged with seven felonies related to confronting residents with a gun. He was sentenced to probation for four years and deeded the property back to the town in 2014.
And in 2021, leaked Telegram chats revealed that Christopher Pohlhaus, a former U.S. Marine and founder of the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, wanted to establish a whites-only community in Springfield, Maine. Pohlhaus was developing a military training facility as part of these efforts when media coverage led him to sell the property and move out of state.
The danger of a white ethnostate
These various attempts to develop a white ethnostate are not simply individual, isolated cases. They form part of a larger movement toward achieving white nationalism.
A major part of white nationalism today is focused on anti-immigrant hatred. That has spurred major acts of extreme violence such as the 2019 murders of 23 people in El Paso, Texas, the majority of whom were Hispanic.
The “great replacement theory,” a conspiracy theory popular among white nationalists, argues that various policies are leading to the destruction of the white race. This theory inspired the 2022 mass killing of 10 Black Americans in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
The shooter selected the supermarket because of its location in a predominantly Black neighborhood and left behind a white supremacy manifesto.
Communities across the U.S. have successfully resisted the establishment of white ethnostates.
The residents of Leith, North Dakota, did this by creating a website informing people about what was happening in their community. Public outcry also met Pohlhaus in Maine.
As for Return to the Land, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said in July 2025 that his office is reviewing the group’s actions and whether they violate the law.
“Racism has no place in a free society,” he said, “but from a legal perspective, we have not seen anything that would indicate any state or federal laws have been broken.”
