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Feb. 4, 2025 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
50:31
Building Our Own Communities

Jared Taylor interviews Eric Orwoll, president of Return to the Land, an intentional community established to “promote strong families with common ancestry.” How does it work? What is its legal structure? What is its vision? Mr. Orwoll also discusses the upcoming Intentional Community Online Conference — a project to inspire our people.

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Radio Renaissance.
I'm your host, Jared Taylor.
And today is January 26th, Anno Domini 2025. And with me today is a guest, Eric Orwall.
He is president of Return to the Land.
And he will be explaining its purposes.
And he will be talking about what I think is an absolutely marvelous project.
of exactly the kind that we should be engaged in today.
So, Mr. Orwell, thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you for having me on.
It's a real pleasure to speak with you.
Yes.
Now, your undertaking is what some people call intentional community.
And it is an intentional community of racially conscious white people who want to build an environment that affirms their culture, their peoplehood, and their race.
Is that a correct characterization?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And really, I mean, above all, I was inspired to do this by my children and just thinking about the world that they're going to inhabit, you know, even in rural areas, in otherwise, you know, white parts of the country.
I'm seeing people of all skin tones, all gender identities.
This stuff spreads online, some of the toxic ideology that kids are exposed to nowadays.
So you really have to create spaces where you can safely raise your kids and preserve your identity.
Yes, that seems to me to be the number one goal of a community of this kind is to give children a healthy and affirming.
Positive community.
I remember once, oh, it must have been about 30 years ago, I was peripherally involved with a Mormon community out in California.
And I was struck that not only is it a church community, but it is a community in which most of the members seem to spend all their spare time and all their socializing with people who are part of the congregation.
And so it doesn't make any difference what house your children go to.
They're always surrounded by people who share values and who have the same basic outlook.
And that's not the case in the United States unless you have an intentional community.
And so it's my sense that...
Those of us who are adults, we could build a kind of barrier against the poisons that surround us.
We can even laugh at it.
But it's so much more difficult for children.
Would you not agree?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And they suffer the worst.
The sins, really, that aren't even ours.
They're our parents and grandparents.
And, you know, we let our country be controlled by people who aren't of our stock, who don't care about our identity.
And, you know, I was speaking with you, Stridem, the head of the Iranian movement, and he said something that's really stuck with me.
Identity is something that even if you don't take the effort to create it for yourself and claim it for yourself, other people will fight to claim your identity and define your identity for you.
And that's exactly what's happened.
Our adversaries have defined white American culture or the lack thereof, and many of us have just accepted it because we didn't positively, through our own work, set out to actively carve out white America as a distinct set out to actively carve out white America as a distinct cultural being in this It was a very wise insight from used.
Yes, yes.
I never quite Thought of it in those terms, but that's absolutely right.
If you just grow up breathing the air in the United States, the identity of a white person is going to be a negative one, and that's a terrible thing.
Conversations I've had, the way I've put it is, white children have the right to grow up in a country in which when they go to school, they are not taught that they and their ancestors are dirt, for heaven's sake.
That is absolutely unacceptable.
And so I would imagine that you must have...
A number of different goals in mind, but perhaps the number one would be to provide a community for children and for education.
So could you tell me about your current project?
I understand that it's in the Ozarks.
It is, yeah.
And that location was chosen partly because of affordability.
It's easy for people to move down here.
It's one of the cheaper parts of the country in terms of living costs, as well as the price of land itself.
Also, in terms of regulations, the building codes are extremely minimal statewide.
They're not enforced.
It's really just the national building codes that could, in principle, be enforced, but there's no local enforcement agency who comes out checking on things.
People live in all sorts of ad hoc kind of shelters here.
It's not the Northeast Puritan kind of aesthetic that I would maybe prefer, but it is workable to build from scratch and have a lot of freedom in different building methods.
There's no zoning laws either.
So it's really just a blank canvas for us to work with.
And yeah, I mean, this has taken off.
I was surprised by how quickly.
For about 10 years, I've been online advocating for intentional communities, not because I thought we had to run away or avoid national politics, but because it seemed clear to me that the demographic trends, regardless of how successful we become in nationalist advocacy in politics, regardless of how successful we become in nationalist advocacy in politics, are going to result in our children encountering minority
And so in light of that fact, we have to create these healthy, wholesome spaces for them because the government is not going to do it.
And, you know, I experienced that firsthand growing up in Southern California.
Oh, my gosh.
Yeah, right.
Like I saw my parents' high school yearbook pictures at one point, and I was just shocked by the fact that.
All of these people in their yearbook looked like me, whereas the people I grew up around looked very different, and I stuck out like a sore thumb.
Yes, well, I don't at all consider it running away.
I consider it not a negative thing at all.
I consider it a positive thing.
You're building something, and if to build something that's meaningful...
For us, you have to disengage with parts of the United States or attitudes or assumptions, then there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
That is like ridding the body of harmful drugs, it seems to me.
Sure.
But, well, at this point, can you tell me how many, I mean, you have this on this 160 acre Yeah, we do have electricity at the road.
There are several septic systems that have been installed, several cabins.
Primarily, people have been either camping or living in small cabins.
The first larger home has been constructed now.
I put up a 30 foot by 40 foot metal building.
And we're doing our best, but we only have limited numbers of workers.
We created a policy emulating actually one of the policies in Irania that we do all of our own work insofar as that's possible.
And it seemed like a good idea because that would be subsidizing our own development.
If you're paying your own workers and then they're in turn paying to develop their own lots, all that money stays in the community.
It's good for everyone.
But we only have so many workers, so only so much work can realistically get done.
And there are several families that are waiting to move down that the housing is simply not built there for them.
All of the lots are created and have been purchased.
So it's really just a matter of building these homes.
Well, yes, if I were to move there and you were to tell me, OK, put in this framing, roof this house, I wouldn't know how to do it.
And I would happily pay a neighbor to do that.
But I can understand that not everyone has that kind of skills.
And I imagine that for certain things, perhaps laying foundations or when it comes to that, you will have to hire outside people, but you can hire local people who are probably sympathetic to the project.
Yeah.
And we're considering making that policy a little bit looser and allowing that sort of thing.
We do have a licensed contractor among us, and several of the guys have construction.
We're also welcoming of especially younger guys who want to come down and camp as PMA members without necessarily buying in just to take advantage of the available construction work.
We pay very competitive rates for the area down here.
Young guys acquire skills, and I think it builds character.
Wow, great.
Now, you mentioned the term PMA. That stands for a private membership association.
And I gather that is part of the legal structure that you have put together to make this possible?
Right.
Yes.
PMAs are used for a variety of applications.
There are many PMAs that exist simply to allow for things that wouldn't otherwise be legal, which is sort of what we're doing.
Like raw milk PMAs exist where various people will form an association to own shares in a cow, and then they can distribute the milk without having to own the whole.
We have a PMA that is the kind of vetting umbrella group for...
Individual communities, which they're organized under companies, LLCs, or a variety of corporate structures could be considered for future communities.
Each community will have its own corporate structure, its own board of managers, and we try to shoot for best practices.
We have regular meetings, we have processes where people can be elected, and we post meeting minutes for our monthly meetings and stuff like that, so there is transparency.
The PMA, we really want that to be the national umbrella organization, inclusive of as many communities as possible.
And we are aware of several other projects like this, and they're popping up really quickly.
And I think that's a wonderful thing.
But I think it's a good idea to have one kind of national umbrella organization so that we can collectivize legal research and a legal defense fund.
Because sooner or later, one of these communities will come under fire.
And if they're standing on their own, it's going to be an uphill battle.
But if we share best practices, like we're hiring a very expensive lawyer specialized in real estate, we're going to move on to other specialized lawyers as we can afford it.
Well, that's great.
It sounds as though you're doing a great public service here.
By hiring, going to the expense and trouble yourself of getting these bulletproof documents or as bulletproof as a high-priced lawyer can make them, and then make them available to any other group that's trying to do the same thing.
Exactly.
And you all have a website, do you not?
I believe it's returntotheland.org, if anyone wishes to have a kind of overview of what you're up to.
That's a publicly facing website, correct?
Correct, yes.
And if you would like to join the PMA, I would go to the website, returntotheland.org, fill out a questionnaire, and then there's an interview process.
The board for the PMA would vote on admittance or not admittance.
And then after that, the PMA is not the real hard organization to get into.
We try to make that very open-ended.
But the individual communities have much stricter guidelines for allowing people to come in.
We require in-person visits.
We require background checks.
So we do know what we're getting into with those associations that are going to be in-person.
But the PMA hosts large events twice a year, generally in April and October.
So far, we'll have one this April.
So if you'd like to come down and visit the land and meet the people that are doing this and exchange ideas, then definitely consider joining the PMA and visiting us in April.
I see.
That's very interesting.
So this PMA would make you a member.
Theoretically, or at least at some level, of a number of different communities.
And then those different communities would have all their own limited liability corporations that actually own the land, and that they would be the ones who would judge whether you are a fit person to be a part owner.
Is that a correct understanding?
Correct.
Yeah.
Joining the PMA would make you eligible in principle for all of the different communities under that umbrella.
I see.
I see.
So to join the PMA does not involve buying a land or buying shares.
That is not a monetary transaction at all.
That's just simply a membership undertaking.
Correct.
There is an application fee, and we're considering having some kind of monthly fee as an option to raise funds for legal defense.
I think if we had a growing fund...
And in case there is ever a lawsuit, it would be a very valuable thing.
So we're considering that for individual PMA members as well as the communities that use our PMA framework paying in a certain amount of their budget annually into that fund.
Well, so then if I wanted to buy a lot, then I would go through the process of joining the PMA. And then I would go through the serious vetting program and a determination would be made as to whether or not I were an appropriate part owner.
And then I could buy a share in the particular community that you have or the particular communities that are available under that PMA. And can you give me a rough idea of what the entry cost would be or does that depend on a lot of different things?
Well, for the first community, it was very affordable.
We bought the land at around $1,500 per acre, and we have a minimum of three-acre lots.
And that's for a variety of reasons, primarily to do with septic system laws.
And that's also one of the reasons we're in Arkansas.
Those sorts of laws are easier to deal with in this state.
I see.
The development budget, like roads, some money earmarked for the community center, which is not completed yet, but work has begun on it.
So the next land buy that we organize and other communities are self-organizing their own buys under intending to do that under our PMA framework as well.
But what we personally organize, probably we won't be able to hit those numbers just because land is not as affordable as it was even a year and a half ago when we made the purchase.
And also, of course, now we're going to have to restrict the area that we're looking at.
We would like to have multiple communities very close by so that we can get together, share a community center, and also have a bigger impact in local politics, be a positive influence in the local culture.
That's another thing.
It's not running away or just looking after your own.
There are parts of this country that have truly good people, really good-hearted people that just are under the most kind of flat and, I don't know what to call it, but shallow culture.
We can introduce a deeper kind of cultural appreciation of our history, because that's something we all have in common.
We're all readers.
I think we've probably raised the average IQ of the town that we settled in by almost a standard deviation.
So I think these communities can really revitalize a lot of areas of this country that need the help.
Well, that would be wonderful.
And if you were to have a school as part of the property, I imagine that's very much a part of the plan.
Would you conceive of letting people who are not LLC owners or PMA members attend?
Or have you worked out details of that kind yet?
There would have to be PMA members.
I see, yes.
We can't have public-facing events.
We can't have many things that are explicitly for the general public due to the legal structure that we're operating under.
I see, I see.
Yes, I can understand that.
In other words, if you are throwing open your events to the general public or your facilities to the general public, then there are different requirements that you have to meet.
Right.
Then they would challenge our status as a private association.
I see.
I see.
Yes, yes, yes, of course.
Right.
If I were to become a PMA member, and if I were to make an investment, and it sounds as though, certainly in this Ozark community, the price of admission is certainly not very steep.
And then it turned out that I was a nasty guy.
I was not the least bit flippable.
I violated the rules.
I assume that you have ways to eject troublemakers.
Well, I don't believe that would happen in your case, but we do have policies in place, yes, and we have means whereby the LLC or a combination of members would buy out their share, and not just at the original price.
Say they built a home and were several tens of thousands of dollars invested, we wouldn't just kick them out and take their property.
We would hire an assessor.
Bring them in, get a fair market value established, and then pay them fair market value.
But there is a mechanism to eject people whom you turn out to have misjudged for one reason or another.
Yes.
And Peter Seery, who was the chief architect of our whole framework, was very insistent on that.
He lived for 10 years in South America in a vegetarian community, actually a fruititarian community.
They only ate fruit, apparently.
So but he lived in community and learned a lot of those sorts of lessons that someone may look like a great candidate up front.
And then it turns out that there is a conflict of values or maybe they just don't know how to keep to their own business.
And they they're very, you know, busy in other people's affairs and things like that.
So he had a lot of foresight because of his experience in South America.
Well, I understand you just visited Orania.
That's the community in South Africa that everyone has heard about, the growing great guns.
It's got a long waiting list, I understand.
And I understand from Justus Tridham, who is the public affairs guy and a very fine fellow in my experience, I understand from him that they have a mechanism for ejecting undesirables and that from time to time they have had to resort to it.
Yeah, they have.
Right.
I think they don't technically have to compensate people for all of the property or all of the improvements made to their lots like we do, but they do anyway because they're good, upstanding white people, Afrikaners, highly, highly moral.
These are people with integrity from my experience.
And so, in other words, at Orania, there's under no obligation to compensate for improvements.
But in the case of the communities that you're involved with, there would be an obligation on the part of the others who buy the miscreant out to compensate for improvements.
Right.
Yeah, there's a legal obligation.
Like I said, Orania has always, though, as far as we were told, compensated for that sort of thing.
But we've taken several policies from them, the own work policy, their processes for evicting members.
I'd like to take more from them.
Like they have a financial institution that allows people to finance shares.
They're a share block company in a similar way that we are.
So when people buy a share in a corporation, a typical bank doesn't have collateral that they could make a mortgage on.
So you need a unique kind of financial institution that can find its collateral in other ways.
ways.
And so they have their bank there that does that.
And we'd like to set something similar up.
They also have a development company that kind of centrally organizes expanding the town area of Irania.
They put in the sewer lines, water, electric, size the lots, do the surveying and such.
And a lot of that has been kind of laissez-faire private sector in the way that we've developed so far.
But I think a centralized development company is a really good idea.
And as more of these communities spring up, it might even be a good thing if one or two preeminent kind of development companies for hire became established.
That way, if you want to open one of these communities in your neck of the woods, you know the experts in our circles that you can go to and, you know, get on the proper footing.
No.
it seems to me that...
It's essential that we be able to share insights, share experience, share expertise.
I think that is clearly, clearly a good thing to do.
Can you tell me a little bit more about your experience at Orania?
I've been wanting to go for years.
I understand that just about anybody, if he just drives down the road from the surrounding area, just about anybody can visit Orania.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
I think it's remarkable what they've done given the limitations.
Of their resources, given the limitations of where they are physically, it's out in the Karoo, which is a desert.
And as we were approaching it, my heart began to sink.
I was like, oh, I didn't realize the land out here was so rough.
But then we came to Orania, and it was like an oasis in the desert.
It is really amazing.
It's green.
There's really sophisticated irrigation that's done.
There's all sorts of agriculture.
Large farms nearby have affiliated themselves with Arania.
And that's a testament to their character because that's a big sacrifice economically.
To be a part of Arania, you have to take on the own work policy.
We have to do our own work.
And the cheap black labor is hard to get off of.
Many people are addicted to it.
it.
I even spoke with one man who was in Irania who said that he would prefer if they continued pursuing autonomy and they would like their own, you know, Volkstadt or sovereign area at some point in the future.
They may have to vie for that sometime soon in light of recent legislative changes in South Africa, allowing land expropriation across the board, potentially.
It's a real mess and a precarious situation.
But yeah, he said that they would like He would like to have a sovereign state and yet also allow the cheap black labor just because economically they're addicted to it.
I think there's a lesson to be learned there.
It's like America's demographics in a certain way were shot from the beginning because we were addicted to slave labor.
And that was built into our culture in a way that I think to this day has negative effects on southern white culture.
I think many of them not only feel a certain guilt from that era, appropriately or inappropriately, but, you know, the Puritans did their own work for the most part, almost exclusively.
And that work ethic is unsurpassed in the areas of the country settled by Puritans are all orderly, clean, beautiful.
And in the South, there was a dependence on this cheap black labor or free black labor in some cases.
And you just saw a different sort of culture emerge.
And yeah.
Well, Robert E. Lee famously said that he objected to slavery for a number of reasons.
But the number one reason was that it degrades the white man.
It degrades the master.
It degrades the white people.
And yes, he had a very crucial insight there.
Well, gosh, it sounds all quite exciting to me.
And is part of your plan, when you lay out a plot or a set of plots to buy, the idea that there can be room to expand?
It would be a pity if you have 160 acres.
If it's three acres per lot, that's only a little over 50 households.
And that seems like a relatively small community.
It's certainly enough people to have a sense of belonging, but to have a community center and a school, and perhaps you might have a church.
It seems like a small number, and you'd want to be able to expand, would you not?
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, and we've spoken with neighbors and looked at nearby parcels, and we do intend on expanding contiguously as much as is possible.
You know, whenever a neighbor has their land for sale, we'll be the first to make an offer, I'm sure.
But also, we'll be looking nearby at larger parcels as well.
There are many more people interested now than in the past.
Our lots have been sold out or the shares in the company.
You know, there hasn't been a lot available.
So we're organizing the next land by currently.
And the first time there were about a dozen guys who came down.
I was looking to build a classical philosophy school on my own land in southern Missouri.
So a dozen guys came down to help me just personally out of goodwill.
You know, they had seen my YouTube content and things like that.
And when they came down here and saw the area and, you know, felt a spirit kind of running through all of us together, and when they saw also the land prices, the idea was kicked around that we should go and look at real estate.
And very quickly, we all got on board.
forward.
And so it was almost unplanned.
It was very kind of providential.
Things just came together at the right moment.
So we were only able to get the amount of land that we did because of the number of people that were involved up front.
But now we have hundreds of people in the PMA and people are applying every day looking for land with us.
So I think the next land buy will probably be on a much larger scale.
And yeah, that'll be exciting.
Well, I suppose since there are no zoning laws to contend with, if you wanted to have row houses or if you wanted to have apartment buildings, you could do that.
You could do anything you like so long as there was a demand for it and it was feasible from a sewerage and plumbing point of view.
You can really do anything you like.
Exactly.
It's a blank canvas.
And we've gone for what is most achievable for people without a huge amount of experience in developing raw land.
Peter Siri, who I mentioned before, had the most experience because he lived in a community like this.
But yeah, I mean, after visiting Arania and seeing their mixed use areas, they have apartment buildings, they have shops on the ground floor, apartment buildings on top, office spaces.
It's something that I definitely want to emulate.
I think it's something that will build a sense of common identity.
A lot of, I think, our self-concept is derived from the public spaces that we inhabit.
So we really want to create those high-quality...
Clean, orderly, beautiful public spaces.
It's always been an ideal of ours, but we are starting with raw land, so first thing comes first.
So gravel roads and that sort of thing is sort of the priority still.
Yes.
Well, it certainly sounds as though someone, probably you and some of your colleagues, looked at a number of different possibilities for location.
And you found Arkansas for some of the reasons you described.
And I imagine you looked very, very carefully at who your neighbors were likely to be, what kind of reception you could hope for.
And so this is the result of a considerable amount of sifting through various possibilities before you ended up where you are.
Right.
Yeah, I had narrowed down this location as the prime candidate for myself, just moving my family.
When COVID started, I immediately bought seven acres in this part of the country, in Arkansas, sight unseen, just because I had to get out of New York State in light of what they were doing up there.
But I had lived down here, I guess, 10 years prior to that, before I had my kids looking for land as well.
I've traveled all around the country.
I've always had in mind to do something with land development.
You know, growing up in the suburbs in California, I felt very alienated from nature.
And so the idea of returning to the land, getting back to the land, and being connected to nature has always appealed to me.
It's always seemed romantic, you know.
But also I had to think of what is economically feasible, what's sustainable, and what allows for the greatest freedom to develop.
I do want that blank canvas.
Peter Seary also narrowed down Northern Arkansas as his ideal location, independently of me.
He's a very systematic thinker and has gone through all the numbers.
I like the area also because, interestingly, it's...
A part of the country that was able to sustain the largest Native American populations.
One of the few civilized cultures or agrarian cultures was the Mississippian culture.
And that's in our neck of the woods here.
Hundreds of thousands of people in those settlements.
So a much larger population than, say, the Northeast or the Pacific Northwest.
Do you have a lot of wildlife?
Oh, yeah.
No, deer hunting is very popular here.
There are turkeys.
We also have, you know, farm livestock.
I have about 16 goats.
I see.
They're milk goats, and some people have chickens.
We have some geese.
And, yeah, the ideal is agricultural for that first community.
I think subsequent communities will...
Be geared in different directions.
I mean, we need to create spaces for all types and we need farmers.
We also need office workers and tech workers and things like that.
We do have a lot of tech workers already, a lot of people who are able to work remotely.
This sort of thing is very appealing to them.
Wow.
Well, this sounds very exciting.
Very, very exciting.
And, you know, I've seen the photographs on your website.
It looks like a beautiful forested area.
And I was thinking about all the deer you must have there.
I just moved to a more urban area.
I lived in northern Virginia where there are lots of deer for 25 years.
I remember the most deer I had in my backyard at one time was 11. And I miss that.
It's really quite nice to be sharing your land with fellow mammals.
And I imagine if there's hunting going on, they don't gather in such large numbers right outside your house the way they do in an area where they're protected.
But the idea of having nature right out your back door is very, very appealing to me and I'm sure it is to a lot of the other people who are part of your community.
Oh, definitely.
I think it's great for the kids.
I think nature is the greatest teacher there is for children.
I think they learn more from being out in nature, and certainly the kids who are living there take advantage of it on a daily basis.
They love exploring, learning about local plants.
There's local passion fruit and things like that they find and eat.
Wow, wow.
Well, now tell me, maybe it's early days yet, and even the local community is not that aware of who you are, but so far, what kind of reception have you had, if you're at Liberty, to talk about that?
Well, it's been mixed.
I mean, there will always be...
Antisocial people, wherever you go.
We have one neighbor who's had some issues with us.
You know, some of our livestock wandered onto his grass and ate some grass, and he was very upset about that.
Yeah, but, you know, we haven't had time to get all of the fencing up, and redundant systems in place and such.
So we are trying our best to be good neighbors.
Well, that sounds like the kind of thing that could be a problem wherever you were.
But I was thinking in terms of folks who said, gosh, we don't want people like this in our neighborhood.
In other words, it's not a matter of whether your cattle were eating their grass, but the kind of people you are.
Have you had any resistance of that kind?
I do think that some of the local townspeople may have misconceptions.
Many of them are aware that we're up there, and they're curious.
But we haven't had a public press conference with the local people to let them know exactly what we stand for.
Some people have found us online.
Another neighbor has a trucking company, and he's a great guy, and he understands what we're doing.
Totally fine with it.
And I think most people in this part of the country will either be in support positively or they're libertarian enough that they're good with anyone going their own way.
Well, that's great.
That's all part of wisely choosing your location, I'm sure.
Now, I understand that you are in the process of organizing a...
Oh, a kind of an online seminar that will be in February, I understand, that will have participation from a number of European countries as well as Iranian in terms of this idea of building intentional communities.
Can you tell our listeners about that?
Sure, yeah.
We're having the Intentional Community Online Conference February 9th.
At 1 p.m.
Central Time, and it'll go for many hours.
People can come and go as they please, but we'll have speakers representing several different projects in the U.S., some anonymously representing their projects, some openly, and then we have European projects being represented as well.
I think we need to be sharing our experience, sharing best practices, and also there will be people with legal backgrounds in attendance that can give that kind of legal perspective that we very badly need.
Can you repeat the date and the time of And is there a website that people can already go for this?
Yes.
So February 9th, it begins at 1 p.m.
It'll go for many hours.
intentionalcommunity.live and the tickets are $30. That is so that only serious people are in attendance. We don't want this to be a totally open public spectacle. We want this to be a productive brainstorming session.
Anyone in attendance can ask questions via text, or they can join the call and ask live with the people attending.
We'll encourage crosstalk between the leaders of various projects.
There will be public figures present who aren't necessarily part of physical, intentional communities currently, but who are supportive of the idea.
They'll give their thoughts as well.
We'll be announcing speakers in the near future.
But yeah, I think it'll be a good event.
Some of the proceeds will be donated to Orania, especially, again, in light of this recent law that was passed by the president there.
They need the help very badly.
Now, what countries will be represented?
I gather it would be just freedom.
He himself will be taking part, representing Orania.
And what other different countries?
There's the Woodlander.
Woodlander, I see, yes.
Yeah, he has a YouTube channel you can check out.
I have not completely confirmed, but one project that I know has begun working on intentional communities in Sweden, and then also one project in Germany.
I see.
So it's going to be interesting to learn, in the European context, what's possible.
Obviously, the laws are very different over there, but I think...
You know, my motivation here was largely from a place of desperation in a certain sense in that I see the demographics are changing.
I need a safe place for my children.
But also, it is a way of consolidating our power and organizing and fixing our culture and fixing our habits and just taking control of our lives and not succumbing to the greater culture, keeping our money in our own circles and just living more intentionally and consciously.
And so in Europe, even if they do have the ability to repatriate or remigrate all of the recent arrivals in their countries, and I believe they can in many cases.
I hope they do.
But even so, I think these intentional communities are the right step to get back to traditional values and just to learn how to live in the way that our ancestors did.
You know, like what you described before, having all the different households you could go to in the community, share values where it doesn't you wouldn't have to worry about, you know, who your child is hanging out with.
That was America in general past, you know, the last 70 years going back to founding the country.
That's just traditional society, how it should be.
You should know everyone in your village and we should create our own villages again so that we can, you know, live the way that our ancestors did.
And I think they created the marvelous civilization that we've inherited because of that.
And what's a pity in a way is they didn't even do it intentionally.
It just happened organically because that was the kind of people they were.
That was the way they lived.
They had so much in common.
They had so much trust in common.
And so these communities grew up naturally.
It's a terrible pity that we have to build them intentionally in the face of so much opposition and sometimes even hatred.
But I'm very pleased to hear that there are similar attempts in Germany and England and Sweden.
I wasn't aware of them.
And I think I better pony up my admission fee and listen in because it sounds like it's something that I'd certainly be able to learn a lot from.
Yeah, we hope that people get a lot out of it, both in terms of exchanging ideas and also learning about the projects that are out there.
You know, there are.
Projects that I wasn't aware of before I started speaking with people as potential speakers here.
Well, I did mean to ask you, is there any kind of ideological or religious litmus test for this community that you're trying to build?
Well, in a sense, yes, but it's very, very minimal.
I mean, we don't support LGBTQ values.
Of course, anyone who does is, well, that would be a criteria that would...
Yes.
are made on a case-by-case basis, of course. - Yes, yes. - But yeah, that sort of thing is not looked upon favorably.
You know, you have to value European heritage, you have to want virtue in some sense.
You also have to believe in a higher power, like atheists are not really welcome.
Agnostics, if you're not sure and you genuinely just don't know, I think there's a place for people like that.
But a militant atheist would not necessarily be very welcome in our community.
No, no.
You don't want scoffers or people who are trying to drag down believers.
You certainly wouldn't want that.
No.
Yeah.
But we do accept Christians as well as pagans.
You know, for my part, I'm a Christian, but I have very unorthodox Christian views.
You know, I'm into classical philosophy and Plato.
And in a lot of ways, you know, I'm closer to the pagan Neoplatonists in my worldview than to the Christians.
But I also, because of my, you know, having one foot in both camps in a certain sense, see a lot of commonalities.
And they're really not as different as people imagine.
You know, the late pagan Neoplatonic schools actually turned into the early medieval Christian Neoplatonic schools.
So it's the same philosophical concepts, the same theological concepts, really.
And Christian church fathers admitted that openly.
openly that Plato was a kind of proto-evangelion giving Christian theology before Christ.
So, so I don't think these traditions are so opposed.
The pagans that tend to join will be ones that aren't openly hostile to Christians, and the Christians that join won't be openly hostile to pagans.
And I think that's the kind of people you really want.
Well, it's always been my view that the one thing that binds us, the central criterion, is an understanding and appreciation of our racial family.
And pretty much all the other differences that we might have, we can work out, so long as we agree on that.
That is the basic thing, our people, our heritage, our future.
So it sounds as though you have a kind of general direction that you want to go in, but it doesn't sound as though it's too hard-edged.
No, not at all.
And at a certain level, these communities can simply be used by people as neighborhoods.
Everyone nowadays lives in neighborhoods with those who have different religious views, who in many cases are far more different from each other than our neighborhoods would be.
So I'd rather have white neighbors that I know are good people because, well, they've been vetted.
They've gone through a background check.
And, yeah, they're not bringing in bad habits from the general culture through their children.
We don't allow public school attendance for our kids.
Very good.
Very good.
Don't bring in those poisons.
Exactly.
Yeah.
We're just about to begin Tuesday, actually, our homeschool co-op.
It's going to function like a one-room schoolhouse.
All the kids of various ages will be brought together, and older kids will help younger kids.
Different parents will kind of alternate helping out on different subjects and things like that.
I think it's going to be a great environment.
And I'm looking forward to myself to, you know, teaching some Greek myth and things like that.
Oh, that sounds quite wonderful, actually.
Our ancestors learned marvelously.
Those McGuffey readers, the things they learned, often in one-room schoolhouses with older students helping the younger, I think that's a wonderful model.
I have every confidence it'll be very successful.
Is there any other aspect of your community or what your plans are that we haven't covered that you'd like to share?
I find this fascinating and I can't say often enough.
I salute and admire you for what you're doing, but is there anything else that you'd like our listeners to know about?
I appreciate that, Mr. Taylor.
And it was very, you know, pleasantly surprising when you started coming out very positive towards intentional community in general and just, you know, white communities breaking away from larger society.
Not that we should give up on influencing national politics, but we have to start looking after our own and really living up to that on a daily basis.
As far as, you know, the larger project that we're aiming for here, we do want it to be.
A national organization that offers benefits beyond just communities for people to live in.
We also want it to be a way that our people across the country, when they're traveling, have places to stop in, use our facilities, stay with us, visit with us, host events.
I think it'll offer real benefit to those who join that kind of network.
On a personal level, you'll have contacts and allies wherever you go.
And at a political level, this is how we organize a truly effective grassroots movement.
A lot of change in this country is actually driven from, you know, county seats.
It's driven in at that local level.
And to break into that local level in many cases is extremely difficult because it's an old club in many cases of established families.
And if you're not part of it, well, it's not necessarily going to be easy.
But if you move into a low population area as a community, well, then suddenly you become half the vote overnight and you can make a real impact, make a real difference.
Well, I've always had a kind of a fantasy of moving into a community of that kind.
And if you get enough motivated people, then even if there is a public school, if our people were running it, if our people were in city government, if our people were the police chief.
All of that could really restore the kind of community that people of my age grew up with.
And it seems to me there are many, many ways to go about this.
But at least for now, it seems like this private membership organization or association, I mean, LLC approach is an extremely effective one.
And again, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about this.
I wish you every success.
And I think this is really one of the most important, exciting movements or aspects of our movement that I've heard in a long time.
And I wish you every possible success.
Well, thank you very much again for having me on.
It's been an honor being with you, and it means a lot to all of us to hear your words of support, your real kind of heroic, legendary figure in our circles, of course.
Oh, gosh.
You are the people who are going to be legendary and heroic.
All I do is japper.
You all are actually doing things, building things, and I have the greatest admiration for that.
So thanks once again.
It's been a real pleasure.
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