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Aug. 17, 2025 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
54:42
Radio Show Hour 1 – 2025/08/16

Eric Orwoll, co-founder of Return to the Land, makes his debut appearance on TPC. Jared Taylor joins the conversation this hour.

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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the political cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to tonight's live broadcast of TPC.
It's Saturday evening, August the 16th.
I'm your host, James Edwards, along with Keith Alexander, who we will bring in shortly, bringing you a very special three-hour broadcast of the program tonight, featuring for the entirety, from start to finish, Eric Orwal, the co-founder of the Return to the Land community.
This is his debut appearance, and what a debut it will be.
He is in studio with us, sitting here as I speak.
Before we speak with Eric, we're going to first bring on our mutual friend and my longtime colleague, Mr. Jared Taylor, the founder and editor of American Renaissance.
And there is a reason for that, but let's first let Jared say hello to this audience that he knows so well.
Jared, good evening tonight.
Well, a very good evening to you.
Thank you so much for inviting me on.
It's always a pleasure and an honor to share the airwaves with none other than James Edwards.
You know, I appreciate you saying that.
And we have done some of these three-hour live broadcasts together in the same place.
I think the last time you and I did that, we were in Alabama a couple of years ago.
Tell Eric what he is in store for tonight.
Well, you will be in the presence of one of the great talents of our movement, Mr. Orwell.
I think that if James Edwards had not decided to follow his duty rather than his pocketbook, he would have been making millions in some kind of broadcast career and be known across the land.
But no, he has done what he thought was best, and his wonderful talents are dedicated to us.
So you'll have a great time.
And if you ever are considering being a public speaker or engaging the public of some way, just pay attention to James.
He is a past master.
Jared, you read that script exactly how I wrote it.
Now, is that $500 payable to you or to Amrien?
Thank you for that.
Yes.
All too true.
Thank you.
It's all too true.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I marinated with the likes of you and so many others for all these years.
How could I, you know, at least I'm somewhat functional.
But anyway, listen, it is great to have you back on tonight.
That being said, I wanted to have you on with Eric because you have been someone, you have mentioned, and I told him, I said, you know, I have heard now twice from Jared Taylor, who is sort of, you know, singing the praises of this project.
And then I looked back in preparing for the interview after everything sort of really blew up with Return to the Land.
I mean, I'm saying that in a media way, you know, in a good way, with the Sky News and everything else last month, and started researching.
And you had been promoting them on American Renaissance.
I think Eric himself had written a piece for Amrin even as early as last year.
So tell the audience why you are so high on this man and this project.
Well, as a matter of fact, I did a little internet research myself to find what it was that I first started writing about the necessity to establish intentional white community.
And my first article on this subject, it was under a pen name, John Hunt Morgan.
That's a name that may be familiar to you, Mr. Edwards.
But John Hunt Morgan, who was my alter ego at the time, wrote an article called Building White Communities.
And this was in 2004, 21 years ago.
I've been thinking about the importance of this because building white communities is the only way I believe that we can build strong, proud, white children, at least in any kind of consistent and guaranteed way.
As adults, we can send off all of the horrors and the poisons that the mainstream media and institutions and even the churches try to send our way.
But children are susceptible.
Children want to fit in.
Children are susceptible to simple-minded propaganda because they have simple minds.
And you cannot always count on them to do what their parents tell you.
And homeschooling is one thing, but I had always argued, and I started arguing this back 21 years ago in 2004.
We really need a place where we have communities, ideally that have their own schools, their own institutions, where everyone, everyone agrees with us on this basic issue.
And so that is why, although I myself have never moved a muscle other than jabbering to talk about the importance of white communities, that's why I am so pleased and so happy to see people out there actually doing it.
Now, Eric Orwell is the one who is the most prominent at this moment, but there are others who are doing the same thing.
And I am in awe and admiration of all of these efforts.
Eric, with that having been said, we'll continue the conversation now with you being a part of it.
Welcome to the Political Cess Pool.
Welcome to our studio.
Welcome to Memphis.
I apologize for that last part.
But it's great to have you here tonight and here with Jared.
Jared will be with us for the first half hour to get things started.
Would you like to respond to any of that?
Yeah, of course.
Very glad to be with both of you legends.
Thank you for welcoming me into your home as well.
Excellent dinner here I had tonight.
But yeah, I feel the same way.
I've been advocating, I think, since 2012, that we need these white intentional communities.
And so I guess I'm eight years behind Jared Taylor on that.
Jared Taylor, from back in those days, I first got into white identity and just the significance of our heritage around that time.
And he was one of those voices that was just so lucid, so calm, so poignant, cogent.
And I try to emulate him as often as I can.
And then I'll take your advice, Jared, and I will take diligent notes on James here.
So, yeah.
Hey, listen, Jared, I'm sure you have noticed as I have, Mr. Orwal is a very smooth operator, and he has been making the rounds.
Keith will get this one.
Keith's not mic'd up right now.
But Eric is the, I guess, the movement equivalent of the Beatles in 1964, and everybody else is Neil Sadaka.
Although, you know, we like Neil Sadaka.
We're doo-woppers here.
But no, he has been making the rounds big time, Jared.
And I was watching him just earlier today with Greg Johnson on Countercurrents.
And as soon as that ended at about 2 o'clock Central time, Eric hopped in the car and drove down to Memphis.
So he is all over the place, and I have been very impressed with his ability to articulate his vision, his message, and his oration skills as well.
So we're all mutual friends and fans, I guess you could say, in that regard.
But let's talk about then, Jared, the prospects for this.
And we talked about it a couple of weeks ago.
I'm very well of all of the reasons why this may not work.
And I can't discount any of those things.
However, on the other hand, and I was talking with Eric about this about an hour before showtime tonight, as you wrote to me in an email just, I guess, yesterday, you write, and I'll selectively read from this: we have to work every angle.
Until we have men in positions of power, it's pure hot air.
And this is a separate issue, but I think we should include this as well.
Look at everything Trump has accomplished, for heaven's sake.
Yes, he's in the pocket of some particular interest, but what he has done with the board and the DEI is everything we could have asked for.
So with regards to what's going to work and what's not, if you base your output, if you base your efforts on what the worst case scenario may be, no one's ever going to do anything or try anything.
I am for, as you say, working every angle.
Yes, build our own institutions.
Yes, build our own media.
I know something about that.
Yes, build communities.
Engage in politics.
Do it all.
See what sticks, but don't do it.
Living in some sort of concern or fear about, well, you know, it's hopeless.
Well, yes.
We'll see.
Yes.
Maybe it's not.
I'm sure Mr. Orr will get into this in considerable detail.
But it seems to me that the very first legal challenge to their organization took place when the Attorney General of the state of Arkansas was pestered, pestered by all these people who hate the idea of white people actually preferring their own company and living together.
They hate the idea then.
They said, this is illegal.
And the AG took a look and he says, nope, nothing illegal I can find.
And that, of course, has been the objection that so many people have had.
I believe we had a conversation with Sam Dixon about this.
And he seemed to think that there was just no way that you could pass legal muster.
But thanks to the brains of lawyers who have been on our side and the hard work of people like Brother Orwell, it looks to me as though they have passed this first legal test in flying colors.
Now, my original idea for a white community didn't even think in those terms.
I thought that we could just coalesce in a very promising place that was already white.
And if it was conservative, it was overwhelmingly Republican, largely white, probably in the South, then with enough of us showing up, enough of us converting the locals, we could take over the school board, take over the city government, and take over an existing community without any kind of innovative legal structure.
But as I'm sure Mr. Orr will get into in detail, they're poaching this in a different way, sort of a greenfield community.
And that's fine.
That's fine.
I think every option, every option should be on the table.
So I agree 100% with you.
We should make institutions of our own.
And you, of course, you are Mr. Alternative Media.
I'm trying to be Mr. Alternative Media.
And at the same time, and at the same time, we should be involved in real politics to the extent that we can.
I am dismayed that there are not more nicely packaged, well-put together white advocate candidates who are going about it in a sensible, reasonable, non-threatening way.
I think the time is ripe for that.
And you and I have talked about this before, but I think that is definitely a possibility, and it's going to happen sooner rather than later.
You know, it's interesting, Jared, is that I agree with everything you're saying.
And you mentioned our friend and brother, Sam, and the interview we did with him two or three weeks ago about this project.
And I don't disagree with him either.
And it's okay to be able to see both sides of an argument and still maintain hope for the best.
Because, again, I mean, this goes back to what, you know, the Gretzky cliché.
You miss all the shots you don't take.
Eric, continue to comment and continue the conversation with Jared.
Right.
Yeah.
There's actually been an update on that, which is an interesting intersection of the real political engagement that we need and these communities.
So Wired just released that they learned from the Arkansas Attorney General's office that the case has basically been taken up by the Department of Justice, specifically under the Civil Rights Division.
So it's now a federal matter, and what gets decided at that level obviously is hugely consequential.
So if they decide in our favor, that gives us the green light to go ahead and build more of these communities.
And I'll be very happy.
If they tell us it is not legal, then that closes certain doors.
And I think it will radicalize a lot of people.
Because as you've seen in the reactions to the hit pieces on us, the general public is essentially on our side.
I've seen many reaction videos from black and Asian and Mexican content creators to those reports.
And even they are saying, why shouldn't they be allowed to have their own neighborhood?
So if we get told very explicitly that no, you can't even have a white neighborhood, then what other options are they really leaving us?
I think it's actually rhetorically very good for us as a whole.
It will be good for the movement because then we can unambiguously argue that we are clearly the victim of political persecution and the public is already on our side for that.
So in your opinion, then Eric, and we talked about this a little bit earlier too, and Jared, I really want you to weigh in on this also.
But I think what you're saying, or just to paraphrase, is obviously if this thing and I don't think you're going to have a problem with Trump's DOJ.
I'm just going to go ahead and put that out there.
Now, what happens in 2028?
You know, we'll find out.
I mean, nobody knows what's going to happen three years from now, 10 years from now, 30 years from now.
But I think it's, you know, it looks like the state AG, Tim Griffin in Arkansas, has kicked the ball over to Pam Bondi, and they're going to look into it.
Maybe, maybe not.
We'll find out.
But as you say, either way, it's going to be something that is useful to our people.
A quick comment on that and then back to Jared.
Yeah, we're at a fork in the road, but either way, it's progress.
We are moving ahead.
So I'd rather remove this ambiguity and force them to be very direct that, yeah, you're not even allowed to exist as white people.
Well, boy, well, it seems like you are prepared to look on the bright side either way.
I very much hope that the U.S. Justice Department takes the same position that the State Justice Department did, the state AG took.
And I very much hope that you'll get the green light on this because I think that would just be a tremendous boost to people.
It is very well to have the line drawn in the sand and to be told, look, you as white people, you don't have this right.
It is very clear.
There's a certain usefulness in getting that out loud and clear.
On the other hand, people would be discouraged by that.
Some people would be furious about that.
We'll be thinking about other alternatives.
But I, for one, am absolutely on the side of Pam Biden deciding that what you're doing is okay.
Now, I also suspect that with all the things that the U.S. Department of Justice is doing, looking into a community in Arkansas is not high on their priority.
Yes, yes.
Well, Jared, I was about to say something about that.
What I think happened, and you set yourself up for failure to go out on a limb and make a prediction, but I don't know if they're necessarily going to come out and make a statement sanctioning all of this.
I just don't think they're going to do anything about it at all.
Yes, that's entirely possible, it seems to me.
What business of it is theirs?
It's something, I don't know.
Are there really federal laws involved?
It's true that the Fair Housing Act of 1965, I guess it was, that is a federal law, yes.
But does that really apply?
And I'm sure Mr. Orr will later get into the, I think, very intelligent way that you all have arranged this legally.
So it should absolutely pass mustard.
But if that fails, again, my view on it has always been that there's nothing wrong with taking over or trying to bolster a municipality that already exists.
And if you don't have a special legal structure, then yes, you would have to abide by the Fair Housing Act.
But as soon as any municipality gets a reputation of being the whole of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, none of the other folks are going to want to buy.
Nobody is going to come on to buy the home next door to people that absolutely terrify the bejabbers out of it.
They think we're all knuckle-dragging, violent, gun-coating hoodlums.
They're not going to want to come live with us.
So I think it could be done even without a clever legal structure.
And, you know, I've often made this argument.
There are at least three all-Orthodox Jewish towns in upstate New York.
And two of them, as I recall, no, one of them was an already existing town, and they just started buying up houses and then made sure and bought up more, and now they won't sell them to anybody else.
And on the other hand, they have taken actual greenfield policies, just like it's happening with the Turn of the Land.
They've started that way, and all they ever did was sell to each other.
And now you've got communities of 44,000, 50,000 people.
It's remarkable what they've done.
And all of that, of course, they are not going to have all of the legal opprobrium come crashing down on them.
The media are not going to say, oh, these horrible Jewish supremacists, that's not going to happen.
But I think that we could weather even that kind of assault so long as we just stuck to our guns.
But let's hope by the way.
Yes.
Well, I was just going to, while you're talking about this, I want to draw attention to your video, Jared, that you posted at Amran.com, which I set on and reposted just yesterday at thepoliticalsessible.org.
So this is on Friday.
This is the day before tonight's show.
All white community gets green light in this.
It's very short, very punchy, very fact-filled, and it's very recent.
It's about a seven or eight-minute long video, and you talk about some of these other communities, and it's an interesting thing to supplement your, Mr. and Mrs. Listener, supplement what you're hearing tonight.
But Eric, you'd probably want to respond to some of the things Jared said.
Right.
I am absolutely in favor of people voluntarily relocating and trying to convert areas that are already majority white or already conservative, and it's been tried before.
There are other groups actually in Arkansas doing that, and I'm all for it.
There are some members of Return to the Land who have elected to buy houses nearby as opposed to buying shares in our company and living in the intentional community with us.
I think we have to pursue all legal available routes, like you said.
And in this case, because we're doing it in a way that kind of forces their hand, we were demonstrating that we've done all the due diligence we possibly could.
We've hired lawyers.
We wrote many agreements and contracts, and we're trying to do what is permissible under the law to have an explicitly white neighborhood.
Doing it implicitly, of course, everyone should be doing.
All right.
You know, why not move to a whiter area and try to bolster conservative strongholds?
But by being explicit as far as the law will allow, we are really forcing them into this position where either they'll say, you can't, no matter how hard you try, you've taken all necessary precautions.
We will not allow it to happen.
And that's just a bold stand they'll have to take, or they say nothing or they permit it explicitly.
And if they say nothing, well, then that's almost as good as a green light and we can move ahead.
Well, and again, I appreciate that the way you're looking at that, Eric, that you will not be cowed and you will find a path forward come what may.
But I really don't think that's going to be an issue until at least 2028.
Because again, I mean, Jared, you're looking at the Trump DOJ.
I just don't see them going.
It would be very out of character of this DOJ that we have seen in operations since January to go after or to take a negative point of view on this project.
I mean, you go back and we can qualify that by looking at the Doge employee who had said the word that you're not supposed to say.
And JD Vance basically just said, we're not going to ruin people's lives for saying things that we don't agree with or whatever.
And then Trump, of course, addressing genocide in South Africa.
It would just be very out of, I would be very, very surprised to see them come after this community in a way that's anything other than that.
I would be surprised as well.
Of course, Republicans may not always be in office.
But now, Mr. Oral will be able to explain probably, well, no doubt, in great detail.
But even if, even if an attorney general said, okay, you cannot have a racial restriction on the membership in your organization.
And you said, okay, we're not going to have a racial restriction.
I bet no non-white's going to apply.
Who is going to want to wreck his life?
Well, we talked about.
Well, I mean, yes, Jared, of course, I mean, we talked about that a couple of weeks ago with Sam.
None of them would want to live there.
Not because it's not a wonderful experience.
They wouldn't want to live there, but that's not going to stop them from earning it for people who do.
So they will say they want to live there if, you know, in fact, that's the way it plays out, just to facilitate a suit.
But I want to ask you this, because I know we only got you for 30 minutes and we got a minute or two left.
We're going to get into all of these details in much greater detail with Eric, but I wanted to talk to you about a couple of things.
You were really the one who sort of lit a fire under me to reach out to Eric, and I thought it would be just fun to have you on.
It's always good to have you on.
You've been on almost 100 times in the last 20 years.
So any excuse works for me.
But tonight, I wanted to have you on.
Hey, listen, you know, Jared, as a man who has been through a lot of attacks in the media, as you have, I think you can really judge a man by the way he points himself under fire.
And if that is a test of character and, you know, a crucible, this is a man who is this man to my left, just physically, not rhetorically or ideologically, as we're in the studio.
He has certainly passed all these tests with flying colors in the last few months.
Oh, I agree 100%.
Held firm no matter what the challenges.
And that's what we have to do.
We are right.
And that's a tremendous advantage.
We're right and they're wrong.
And if we just stick to our guns, then, as Mr. Orwell was explaining, you have all of these non-white people that are saying, look, what's wrong with that if white people want their own communities?
I suspect that if you polled the entire United States and broke out the answers by race, there would probably be more black, Hispanic, and Asian people saying, hey, this return to the land thing is great.
More of them than white people.
White people have been so browbeaten and denatured and terrorized.
They're the ones who most likely say, ooh, that's no good.
But so this is a way forward.
And Mr. Orwell, you are a pioneer.
And pioneers are always the ones who take the incoming fire.
And I have the greatest respect for what you're doing.
Well, Jared, let me ask you this before we fly, before you fly, rather.
We are just getting started with Eric for the next two and a half hours.
It'll be a one-on-one, Keith included.
But we're really going to talk intimately with Eric about just every angle of this thing and try to ask all the questions you want to have answered, ladies and gentlemen.
But Jared, you've got a big announcement coming up in November.
If people want to ask questions of Eric Orwald themselves and shake his hand themselves, you're going to give them an opportunity to do that.
That is correct.
He is one of the feature speakers at the American Renaissance Conference.
That'll be between November 14 and 16 in our usual beautiful location at Montgomery Bell State Park, not far outside of Nashville, Tennessee, in the very state you're in now.
So, yes, that'll be an opportunity to not only meet Eric Orwell, but a whole lot of really top flight speakers.
Well, James, thank you so much.
Thank you so much for having me on.
Thank you, Jared.
We'll talk again very soon, and I'll see you soon.
Amrienn.com to sign up today for that conference.
We'll be right back with Eric Orwell.
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All right.
All right.
James Edwards back.
We want to thank again Jared Taylor for being with us the first half hour.
Keith Alexander is moments away.
And for the remainder of the show, the man you've already heard from and we'll continue to hear from Eric Orwald, co-founder of Return to the Land.
We're really going to dig deep into this tonight.
But I think, Eric, you had something you wanted to respond to.
And before you do that, I just want to remind everyone again, we'll plug it one more time, amrin.com, amrin.com.
You scroll down about halfway on the right-hand side, you'll see the link to register for their annual conference in November, and Eric will be one of the big speakers there, and you'll have a chance to find out more for yourself.
So be sure to sign up.
Emran, always a good time.
Emrin.com.
Eric.
Yeah, I agree with you, James, that it is the most likely outcome if the current situation persists that the DOJ will simply refuse to comment.
Just leave it alone.
It's the safest thing for them.
And we're bearing that in mind.
Now, I don't want to see a new administration come in and then for our architecture to come under fire.
So that's one of the reasons why aggressively we are pushing to create new communities right now.
So we're doing something in Missouri.
We're doing something in the Pacific Northwest.
We are doing multiple things in Appalachia at various degrees of progress down that path.
And I think we are going to create a national conversation whether they want to have it or not.
All right.
Now, I will give you just a heads up that in the next issue of American Free Press, there will be a QA with Eric Orwal that pretty much covers the who, what, where, when, and why.
We're going to do that again.
I don't think I would be surprised if there's many people in this particular audience who aren't at least somewhat familiar with the project.
But if you're tuning in for the first time or you missed the show a couple of weeks ago and you haven't seen it anywhere else, unlikely, as I say.
But we will cover it all and then we're going to bring Keith in and we're going to have a good time the rest of the evening tonight.
Really digging deep.
But this is just sort of, I guess, the cursory basic foundational questions.
Explain to the listeners what this project is, Return to the Land, its vision, mission, and goals.
Yeah, absolutely.
So we are a private association for people of European heritage who desire to preserve that heritage through peaceful, intentional communities.
So our PMA is nationwide.
People can join from all over the country, even non-Americans.
You know, there's an Irish member we have.
He has come out to events and we love that guy.
But yeah, it's for people of European heritage who want to build intentional communities.
The association exists to facilitate the construction of these communities.
Right now, we have one physical community in the Ozarks in northeast Arkansas, and it's about on 160 acres of land.
There are a few dozen people living there, and it's at a fairly rudimentary level of development.
Of course, we bought that land totally undeveloped.
It was half wooded.
Half of it had been logged.
We actually bought it from a logging company, and it was a mess.
There were stumps everywhere, big ruts from their heavy equipment.
So it's been a lot of work over the last two years just getting it to the point where we currently are.
But yeah, so there's the two levels: the nationwide association where we do legal research.
We have developed this framework.
We are recruiting a large base of members.
And then wherever you happen to be in the country, you can, by joining the association, develop affiliate chapters, affiliate communities where you can benefit from our legal research.
You can benefit from our document preparation.
And of course, you can benefit by tapping into this large group of existing members who all have an enthusiastic interest in creating intentional communities for our people.
This is a website that you'll want to bookmark, returntotheland.org.
It couldn't be easier to remember, returntotheland.org.
There, you will not get lost navigating the different texts and information provided.
It is pretty succinct and straightforward.
Returntotheland.org, but we will cover it verbally because this is a radio program.
How did this endeavor begin?
The initial concept, how did that get developed?
Well, I've been advocating, like I said earlier when Jared was on with us for intentional communities for our people for more than a decade.
So back in 2012, I was already, I was actually living in a housing co-op at the time and had really always had an interest in intentional community for its own sake.
I felt even as a kid that people are too isolated.
They are too individualistic and it's just not traditional.
You know, I imagined living in a town where everyone knew each other's last names.
People had reputations.
You know, it creates a certain level of trust when you have these stable communities through the generations.
So I really wanted that from when I was a child.
And when I became racially aware, everything sort of aligned.
And I realized that in light of the demographic change, the only way to really protect our children and grandchildren is to take direct control over the environment in which they will be raised.
Just like Jared was saying earlier, I think it's a common sense position.
It's either you leave it to chance, you leave it to the wider culture, or you take control.
And part of that is homeschooling.
But children, unfortunately, don't only listen to their parents.
They also listen to the wider community.
So that was a big motivating factor for me is thinking about what the country is going to look like for my children.
I was advocating for years.
I didn't have the specific legal framework in mind.
You know, I had my own kind of ideas around education and how communities could be structured.
There are some old videos on my YouTube channel you can still find where I was talking about alternative models, but they were a little bit pie in the sky.
Our secretary, Peter Siri, he had actually run intentional communities in South America, and those were based around a vegan diet, specifically a fruititarian diet.
So he only ate fruit.
They ate fruit down there.
But Peter did a lot of practical work for them.
Eventually, of course, he did start eating meat and became conservative, probably as a result.
But he had all of these skills ready to go when it came time that the group of people who were actually willing and interested in relocating and creating intentional community came together.
So we had all of the right skills, the right resources, the right people in 2023.
And then we found the perfect property.
Like I mentioned, it wasn't ideal, but we all saw the promise in it.
And it was pretty much unanimous.
We had to have it.
We had to give it a shot.
Well, I certainly think that the founding fathers would be appreciative of your vision.
After all, without intentional communities, there would have never been a United States as we know it.
Without intentional communities, the founding stock settler people would have never been able to survive.
It was intentional communities.
And then, of course, after we became a nation and had a government of our own here on this continent, the franchise was restricted to the people living, to the men, frankly, living in those intentional communities.
So this is something that is certainly, and I think this is, you know, maybe common sense for a lot of people that are regular listeners to programs in our circles, but it is something that should be, I think, transmitted more often to the general public, is that you're very much on par with what it actually means to be an American at all.
Yeah, of course.
Jamestown was an intentional community, and they were seeking freedom from an oppressive government that was not allowing them to worship and live how they wanted.
And that's exactly our situation.
So we want freedom from a government that has oppressed our right to celebrate our own heritage.
And then, of course, racially as well.
I mean, racially as well.
I mean, they understood that they had to be a part, and there were reasons for that.
There were reasons for that in the 1600s on this continent.
There are certainly reasons for that now, perhaps even more so.
But this is certainly something that is not at odds with the founding vision for this nation that, again, restricted citizenship to free white men of good standing.
Right.
Much less voting.
In the colonial days, it almost didn't even have to be said, really.
It was just assumed.
Of course.
Of course.
Anyway, indeed.
So, well, this would be another obvious question, but we'll put it out there for the record since this is going to be sort of like this program's on the record interview with you.
The benefits for individuals and families who would choose to live in such parallel societies, whether it's one under your umbrella or ones that they are building organically in other parts of America.
The benefits for living in a parallel or intentional community.
Yeah, generally speaking, just moving to an area with other like-minded folks, of course, you have fellowship with people who are aligned with you.
I think societies work better, go figure, when they are homogenous and when people feel the same way about the same things.
So that's really the principal benefit is fellowship with your people.
With these intentional communities, as opposed to just moving to one location, you really have control over who your neighbors are.
And that's one thing.
Moving to a white area doesn't necessarily mean you're moving to an area where people have traditional values.
And even in the wider culture, if you move to a conservative area, there's no guarantee that the children of the people that you meet will remain conservative because they're online too.
They're taking in the public school indoctrination, and they're also being exposed to a lot of bad messaging on online platforms.
Some of us in the community have had experience with this, and we've had to limit our children's internet access.
Of course, not all parents are going to do that.
So we can do a lot more vetting ideologically and also in terms of criminal background.
So we do background checks.
We're not letting in pedophiles and things like that into our community.
Okay.
You know what?
Let's skip this break, Liz.
We will take the breaks in the second and third hours.
I told you we wouldn't skip any other breaks, but I want to get Keith in this as soon as possible and sort of let him take over for a little bit.
But I wanted to skip that break with Jared as well.
We'll take the breaks in the second, third hour.
I want to make haste here and work through some of these basic questions.
So in the second and third hour, we could have a much more in-depth discussion about what life is like there, the vision.
We'll talk about contemporary issues that affect us all above and beyond Eric's work here on this community.
And we'll have a lot of fun doing so.
Got a lot of questions that will come in from listeners, and we'll try to work through some of those as well.
But again, so going back to this, your first settlement, so this is the one that is getting all the attention right now is the one in Arkansas.
Now, you are in Memphis tonight joining us in the studio because we are so relatively close.
And this is an area that I know well, having traveled with my wife through Raven, on over into Hardy, Arkansas, to canoe the Spring River.
Anybody who knows that part of the Ozarks knows the Spring River.
And so I've driven through there many times.
It's only about two hours, two and a half hours away.
So this first settlement, if we can call it that, located on 160 acres in this rural northern Arkansas County is already home.
How many people are calling it home right now?
A few dozen.
A few dozen.
So how did you decide on this particular location?
And what was the approval process for those who are already there?
I know you say you've got hundreds of people that are waiting to be vetted, waiting on a wait list.
For the people who have already moved there, what was the process of them being approved?
But before we go to that, how did you settle on this particular 160 acres?
Well, I did my own research.
I actually lived in the Ozarks back in 2014 for a year because I had done a lot of extensive research from more of a homesteading and prepper perspective.
And it's a very popular location for that reason.
Land is affordable here, and it's actually possible to develop.
You don't have to go through an unending series of government offices to get permits and zoning clearance and so forth.
So, because it was affordable, because there's already a culture of homesteading and is a very conservative area, it was appealing to me.
Peter Siri, independently, while living in Ecuador in South America, our secretary, he also had done research and wanted to move to specifically this area.
So, when he found my material online, he aligned for that reason.
If for no other reason, there are, of course, other reasons.
We have very, very much aligned.
And then, one of our other co-founders was already nearby in southern Missouri.
It's beautiful country up there.
And again, I can speak from having traveled through there many times that stopped there, not at this particular 160 acres, but I know the area.
And you're right.
Let's just look at it.
This is something Arkansas is a state that doesn't have a lot of regulations with regards to building, with regards to homeschooling.
Yes, not California.
That's for sure.
And it is a gunslinger state.
It's a conservative state legislature.
And the property values, you know, when we were having dinner with my wife earlier tonight, there's a plot of land around the corner from us, five acres undeveloped, and it's $120,000 for five acres of undeveloped land.
It's, you know, good enough.
It's nice.
It's, you know, doesn't have a river.
It doesn't have water.
But anyway, 160 acres for 100,000, excuse me, 160 acres you've got.
This was five acres for $120,000.
You were buying the original acres there for what?
$1,500?
Yeah, it was about $1,500 per acre when we bought it.
Of course, we also set an initial budget, so all of us contributed more so that we could have roads.
And, you know, our ambition was to have a community center.
That community center is still under construction, and the roads ended up costing significantly more than anticipated because it is a very rough country.
Okay, so, but it is a beautiful country.
I mean, rural Arkansas is exactly that.
It's rural.
There's not a lot of infrastructure.
And we'll get into all of the.
Well, let me just go ahead and ask this.
This comes in from our friend Brad Griffin at Occidental Descent, who's tuned in, listening live right now.
How are people, and we mentioned this earlier, you mentioned this, how are people who move to Raven or move to this community supposed to support themselves financially?
Or how are they doing it?
How should they do it?
How can it be done?
Sure.
Well, I mean, it's not for everyone.
If you can't afford to relocate and you don't work in a line of work where you can easily find a new job, then, you know, there will be other return to the land communities closer to major economic zones.
Myself, I was able to find a job, no problem, because of the industry I've worked in nearby.
Other members have done the same.
And of course, remote work is becoming increasingly relevant.
A large percentage of return to the land members work in tech, and many of them can work remotely.
And from our inception, it was immediately attractive to people who did work remotely.
This is an affordable part of the country.
If you're not tied down to your workplace, then why wouldn't you move where it's affordable?
So, but there's also work in the community itself.
A lot of people are paying to have homes built, and there's work just in developing our common infrastructure.
So, we have never run out of work for the young men who decide to come down and stay either permanently or for a time, just looking for manual labor and things like that.
And we talked about, you know, remote employment has become certainly much more of a fad since COVID in the last five years.
And some people are just independently wealthy.
I mean, as you say, it's not for everybody.
Not everybody could do it, but there are certainly enough people who can do it to make it a viable option for certain people.
Now, you got 160 acres.
What is the estimated maximum population carrying capacity for this land?
Right.
So one share in our company equates to the right to homestead three acres.
So approximately 50 independent homesteads can operate there.
And if one day there were 50 families living on that land, I would be very happy with that.
Each share is, what, three acres?
Is that right?
It equates to three acres, right.
All right.
And so, well, this is something that I asked you for the American Free Press.
And by the way, if you're a subscriber to AFP, you'll be getting this in your next issue, AmericanFreePress.net, the website, if you're not.
But what's a typical day?
You drove from there to get down here just today.
What's a typical day like on the property for the people who are there now?
Well, some people keep livestock, so you'll wake up and feed your goats or bring out feed your chickens, let your chickens out.
It really depends on the person living there.
Some of us are tending gardens.
Some of us are more on-grid.
Some of us are more off-grid.
But the big theme lately and from the beginning has been building.
I built a few structures out there myself, and I still have to build a kind of permanent home for my family.
I already ordered a kit from a local company, just a metal building kit.
Very affordable.
And most of the structures are kind of on the lower end of affordability because we can't traditionally finance construction.
But we are looking into alternatives there.
Another big part, at least for the board members, is constantly attending to the online community and being engaged on, primarily we use Telegram, but keeping up with applications.
There have been hundreds of applicants in the last weeks, and there are more than 100 people waiting right now to be interviewed.
So we have a large team of people working all week just taking interviews.
But that's a little bit exceptional.
Well, I mean, but that just goes to show, and that actually leads me to my next question.
Certainly not all of those people, even if they are approved, there's not enough room for them to all live in this particular community.
So that brings the question of growth.
What is the growth plan if all goes according to plan and to your vision?
Yeah, well, we're a member-driven organization.
So wherever the members want to form community, we want to help them form community.
And right now, the big hotspots are Appalachia, the Pacific Northwest, and also still here in the Ozarks.
So we're looking very nearby in Arkansas.
There's already a list of people and a company formed for the second land purchase very close to the first community.
There are a couple groups that have progressed quite a bit in Appalachia, in northern Georgia, in Tennessee.
There's interest in West Virginia.
So we're not exactly sure how all of that will shake out yet.
Well, I will tell you.
I mean, you certainly, I think, I couldn't think of any others that really just jump off the map to me where you're at, certainly.
East Tennessee, absolutely.
And then, of course, you know, up in the Pacific Northwest, Idaho's got a great and growing community of like-minded people.
And well, yeah, they're in the Ozark.
So those are the, you'd say those are the big three in terms of prospects.
Yeah, that's right.
Regions, regional prospects.
I have my own drive also to go beyond residential intentional community to facilitate the creation of community centers, recreational lands, and campgrounds.
Also, event centers, potentially convention centers.
So I'm pushing right now this initiative to get something like that founded about an hour from St. Louis because it's in the middle of the country.
People can fly there from anywhere, and land is also affordable in Missouri in that region.
So right now there's an email list.
If you're interested in that, you can email me at Missouri Community Project at Proton.me.
And we have a long list of people who want to get involved in some capacity there.
Well, this begs a question.
And I don't know how many people know this, but it's certainly not a secret.
Now, having lived in Memphis, I know about East Tennessee, and I know about the Ozarks because, you know, it's sort of equidistance going in either direction.
And because I'm involved in this circle of politics, I know about what's going on in the Pacific Northwest.
But you're from California originally, and you went to school in New York.
So how did you become wise to these hot spots for like-minded people and community-driven development?
Well, for obvious reasons, California was never really an option for me.
So I moved to New York for educational opportunity and then to kind of get my career started.
And New York, you know, a lot of New York State is beautiful.
People are conservative.
Actually, outside of the major cities, they're just as into hunting and fishing and same as Oregon outside of Portland.
Americans are Americans everywhere.
So I really loved a lot of the people I met in New York.
Even some of the people downstate, you know, with the accent and the attitude.
And it's fun.
You know, it is.
But where I was living for a few years up there, I had a house and Amazon put in a delivery center or distribution center rather.
And immediately, overnight, the demographics of that town were transformed forever.
You know, it had always been a 95 plus percent white community, very peaceful, very quiet.
And then within less than a year, you had the people working in the convenience stores were totally unfamiliar, not white.
People walking down the street, not white, not well-behaved, not, it just totally, I saw that transformation.
That was right at the beginning of COVID.
And I knew that I had to get out and get somewhere safe.
Now, I had already experimented moving out to Arkansas looking for land just from a purely kind of financial and environmental standpoint.
So when I was essentially forced to move, this is where I turned.
And of course, being in these circles online for the last 10 years, I was aware and live to the racial question and wanted to be around my people.
Well, that's a great answer because again, you know, if I had been born in California, spent time as a young adult in New York, I wouldn't have known anything about the Ozarks or East Tennessee.
But you did some due diligence and you certainly found the ones that having been down here from the South that, you know, you're certainly people are looking at in terms of the best places to live in the country for a lot of different reasons, not just the racial dynamics, although that's big.
I mean, this is Sharp County where this community is at that we're talking about right now, 90, over 90% white.
But then it's also everything else.
It's the cost of living.
It's lax regulation, governmental regulation and oversight.
In 2014, when I came out here the first time, I actually drove all over the state.
So I drove for like three days all around the state and chose Sharp County specifically because we liked it.
Huh, very good.
And it's close to a river.
And well, listen, we're glad that this happened.
When I called you, when we first got in touch a week, I guess a week or two ago, I said, you know, yeah, we just do everything.
You know, it's a radio show.
We can do it over the phone.
You suggested coming to Memphis.
And I said, wow, you don't need to drive all the way down here and all the way back.
We can just do it over the phone.
You sort of insisted on it.
And I'm glad because an hour has certainly only scratched the surface.
We have so many more things I want to get into and questions and comments from the audience.
Keith Alexander is going to get saddled up.
Pete's going to take over at the top of the next segment.
We have much more to come, much more to hear, and much more to learn from Eric OrwaldReturntoTheLand.org.
He's with us for the full three hours of the special broadcast tonight.
We're going to take a quick break.
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