Why are far-right white nationalists on the rise in the US?

0:00Best thing that's ever happened to you financially. Go. Easy. Sold my car on Carvana. Amazing offer. Really? I hit 200 on a scratcher. Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check? No. How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on Carvana.com once. Okay, that's fair. It's like the lottery, except you always win. Not like the lottery at all, actually. Exactly! Inexplicably good. Offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. Coming up on the Sky News Daily with Menil Patterson. Return to the Land exists to provide legal pathways for white Americans to establish communities for our own people.

0:42A whites-only community in Arkansas and the United States wants to expand. Will they be allowed to? And why are these groups on the rise? That's next.

0:59No gays, no Jews and definitely no non-whites messaging that reminds us of a segregated United States a time that we all thought ended back in 1965. But a community in Arkansas wants to hold on to the idea that anyone who isn't like them simply isn't allowed in. Do you think it's racist or not, do you reject that term? Do you embrace it? I don't know about that term. People use it in a lot of different ways. I'm sure there's a lot of people on the internet who would call me racist. I don't really know or care whether that term applies to me or not. Maybe. Well, this far-right whites-only group are building their own town.

1:38Cabins, infrastructure, internet accessibility. And that's important to spread the message and raise the funds so that they can keep on expanding. Later, I'll be speaking to an expert on white nationalism and the far right about the legalities of such a community and why this sort of movement is becoming so popular in the United States. Ultimately, that is pure white supremacist rhetoric. This idea that white people are being wiped out. They have to protect themselves. They have to breed children and separate from society or they're no longer going to exist. You hear this from all kinds of white supremacist groups.

2:15First, though, I'm joined by Tom Cheshire, our data and forensics correspondent. Tom, a lot of your work in the past has dealt with conspiracy theories, the far right. And that took you to Arkansas and to a place known as the Ozarks. The Ozarks is all this sort of beautiful wood. So you've got these valleys, these trees, this huge, wide sky. This is really the middle of nowhere. You drive out of the nearest big town and it just gets smaller and smaller. It is sort of classic rural America. There's sort of ranches, lots of them festooned with Trump flags. It's the South. People have that lovely sort of friendly way.

2:53I mean, it does sound wonderful, but you weren't there to admire the landscape. You went there to meet a group called Return to the Land, RTTL. Tell me about them. This is a group that basically they dress it up in some language, an intentional community around shared ancestry, but they've also posted things on X, which makes it a lot simpler. we started a whites-only community. Their founder, Eric Orwell, he said, if you want a white nation, build a white town. It's possible we're doing it. That is the basic premise here, that this is a place for white people only, where they can build a settlement free from the modern world, from leftist culture as they would see it.

3:31They can educate their children away from that and create a whites-only community as the path to creating more whites-only communities as a path to a white nation. Just in terms of this, what would you call it, a camp, a site, describe it to me. How big is it? The ambition here is big. It's 160 acres. Then when you get up there, it's scratchy living. You've got cabins. Some of them are connected to power. There's a well. It's really hot out there. There's loads of ticks and mosquitoes. It is not a comfortable place to live. And that's exactly what they're going for. They really idolise sort of pioneer times, the English settlers who came to America, and they see that as sort of the purest version of America, despite the fact that there are people already living there and despite the fact that enslaved people were brought over at the same time.

4:18That's what they're really, really trying to recreate. So you have these small camions, but then also we saw a two-storey house being finished. That's going to have air conditioning. It's rudimentary. I think it's fair to say that. This isn't a whole town yet, but they do want it to be town. They've cleared this forest. They've got bulldozers. They are working hard at it. So what is the underpinning? I suppose you would say ideology what needs to happen for someone to live at the return to the land camp what they say is this is an intentional community which is basically another word for commune based around shared ancestry so everyone who has the same characteristics and traditional values now shared ancestry is basically code for white people only and they're very open about this it's not the only thing that rules someone out if you go there and you're white but you're gay you're not allowed to be part of that community because that doesn't align with what they call traditional European values.

5:09Other things like politics as well. Even if you're white and straight and you have sort of left-wing politics, you're not going to be part of it. But you will not get in if you're not white. So it does come down to ethnicity at the end of the day. They don't talk about it in terms of we hate other races. And they say, you know, other races can do the same thing. You can be pro-black, you can be pro-Asian in terms of that American context. But we're not allowed to be pro-white. This is all we're doing. We're being pro-white. We're not keeping anyone else down. We just want a place that is reserved for white people only.

5:40And these guys aren't from Arkansas, mostly. This is a group that sort of organized online, but they chose Arkansas as their place to live. Tell me more then about what day-to-day life is like for the members of this community. I mean, I think a lot of the time it's quite boring. It's like life for the rest of us. They have jobs. They actually have really fast internet there of all the things that do work there. They want to recruit and they're soliciting donations. They raise tens of thousands of dollars. When it comes to when they're on site, when we were there, it's the weekend. And that is when people, you know, they're not doing their jobs.

6:10So we saw them hammering fences. It's to keep livestock in. They work the land. There's a bulldozer. They go, they're planting trees as well. They're trying to beautify it. They go down to the creek, which is sort of a bit run in. And they put pipes in for the drainage there. They've got lots for sale, sort of barbecues. When we were there, we had a colonial stew, a themed evening. So the sort of things that, again, the pioneers would be having back in the day. swimming in the creek. They go down and it's really, again, a delict setting. They'll jump in after a hot day's work. And then other slightly more things I wasn't expecting.

6:44They put on a concert for us, a recital, sort of 1600 songs about the settlers, Queen Elizabeth sending them out. Eric, the leader, you know, he's sort of a fit guy. He's in good shape, very sort of discursive and philosophical, but he's also studied music and he played the flute. It was a German flute or a Baroque flute. So, you know, a tougher sort of flute. And then there was a ballet by the kids because the kids are living there full time as well. So they're not sitting around all day discussing the finer points of Mein Kampf or ethno-nationalism. I think there's a bit of that. Oh, really?

7:20Especially when it comes to the digital. So I think, you know, we're there. We're invited in. So we do sort of obviously have an effect on what people are talking about. And people were fairly guarded. One of the things that kept coming up is like, oh, you're going to make us look racist. We're not trying to make anyone look anything. We want just to be there to observe. When it comes to the online group, again, on Telegram, the messaging app, there's a lot of talk about Nazis on there. Mein Kampf is discussed. You get whenever it's Hitler's birthday, that gets celebrated or people make this reference to 1488, which is a white supremacist code.

7:56basically 14 refers to a white supremacist slogan which is 14 words long 88 well eight is the eighth letter of the alphabet which is um h so 88 means hh which means heil hitler it's not just sort of straightforward neo-nazism and i don't think it is that either they talk about these things these them as reference points they celebrate hitler's birthday it's in a very internety sort of way kind of trolling but that's not to say there isn't you know substance to those beliefs the fact that people bring them in, especially when it comes to talking about Jewish people and other races. When you ask them, why have you chosen to come here?

8:34What's the rationale? Well, a lot of it is, I think, quite mainstream rationale now, especially in terms of how the debate is chosen. So, you know, they would say that mass immigration has changed the nature of Western societies. The Western societies are in danger of losing their character as a result. We try to really boil it down to the fundamentals because we don't want to misrepresent them. We want to understand what they believe. Prejudice against someone based on their skin colour, I think, is the most sort of irreducible form of it. And that's what we were talking about. Even then, they didn't want to sort of say, and there was no saying we hate other races.

9:07It's just more we want to do pro-white identity politics. This is white identitarianism. So we have to organise ourselves. Otherwise, we face a white genocide. That is a far right conspiracy theory. The idea that white people as a population in America are being deliberately destroyed. They're actively trying to increase their numbers. There are a couple of ways through recruitment, of course, just get people there. But also women kind of have to crop up in this for the biological imperative. Yeah, and this is something that's actually really crucial to the mission. I don't feel any pressure to like have a big family.

9:42I think there's a kind of expectation here that you do want to as part of helping grow this thing that you're going to have kids, but, you know, there's certainly no expectation that you have to have 19 children. And they have, each of your 19 children have to have five more children on top of that. Everything they say, it's about strong families. When they're talking about it, they talk about their kids, their kids' kids. They see that as the fundamental unit of this, you know, white families, white town, white nation. As a result of that, they have fundraisers for people who have kids at Return to the Land.

10:17If you have a kid, you get money from this pot. One family had their sixth child and they got$1 ,000. It was struck by when we went there, the women who we met there who were, you know, very engaging. A lot of them want to homestead and sort of live that frontier life that we were talking about. A lot of them are very ideological. They came to it through YouTube videos, through posts on X. A lot of them found their partners at Return to the Land. They got engaged. They got married. They're going to have kids. There is this real pronatalist thing to it. The other side of the growth is they have three other sites underway.

10:47ways. So the idea of what they've done here with the legal framework is to try and make something that can be used by other people. So it's kind of a franchise model. They want lots of these communities throughout the US. I am really struggling to see why what is happening in the Ozark Hills is not segregation. Yeah, and this is where we went in Arkansas is the land of segregation. But when it comes to that legal side, so they have constitutional protections because of the First Amendment to free speech and free associations. They do think what they're doing is legal because it is a private members association so when the civil rights act was passed a whole you know swathe of legislation along with the fair housing act which means you can't deny someone the ability to buy a house or land because of the color of their skin now these guys they solicit donations from members of the public they would say membership is closed it's not open to everyone but it is quite easy to find it to apply to it they are pretty confident it will survive contact with the legal system.

11:46They've got a big fund, like tens of thousands of dollars. So they're willing to test it. But again, they would say this isn't a loophole. We have a constitutional right to free association and that's what we're doing. Ultimately, isn't this just a group of racists dressing up their racist ideology? Scratch the surface and you see what they are like at their core. Take your conversation with a man called Peter. But the Holocaust, you know, stands as a unique crime in the history of humanity. Well, that's your opinion. I think the Holodomor was much worse than the Holocaust. That's my opinion. I mean, we're allowed to have opinions.

12:22Yeah, I mean, we can say they're both bad. The Holocaust was bad. Peter, speaking to him, you know, we were talking about the sort of comments that were made in the online group around Hitler, around the Holocaust. and, you know, I was saying that the Holocaust stands as a unique crime in history, and at which his point, straight back as well, that's your opinion, but, you know, I think the Holodomor, which is the sort of deliberate famine caused in Ukraine, was worse. So my response is, well, you know, they can both be bad. And we're talking with the very bare minimum here. I'm not trying to minimize the Holocaust.

12:57Like, just to ask, is the Holocaust bad? It was this back and forth that took, I would say, you know, close to five minutes of saying like all i'm trying to ask is do you think the holocaust was a bad thing yeah i think most people would agree the holocaust was a bad thing right but you're not willing to agree with that well do you want to talk about the whole i mean it's it seems like an interesting subject but it is interesting but i also think that was a bad thing but i think the holocaust was a bad thing too right yeah well are you asking well yeah i'm asking do you think the Holocaust was bad.

13:30Yeah. You know, speaking to Eric Orwell as well, the leader, you know, in his videos, he said, like, if you want a second Hitler to arise, you're going to have to do the work. That's a direct quotation from him. And I'm asking about that. He's saying, look, I'm not calling for a Holocaust. I'm just saying, if you want a charismatic figure like Hitler, you're going to have to do the work. I'm just talking in terms of someone who's going to stand up for their people. I think some of that is they spend a lot of time online and these sorts of arguments. This is the echo chamber, right? and then when you suddenly talk about it, it sounds pretty shocking.

13:59They would like to say, I don't have an issue with other races. I think it's clear from the telegram. I just don't want to live next. Yeah, I don't want to live. Not only that, I don't want to give any possibility of someone who's non-white living next to me. Arkansas is 97 % white. You can do that quite easily in Arkansas without having to interact with it. To go and create this structure, possibly risk legal action, to live a very tough existence up in the hills. That is a huge effort to go to. And I think you have to be very, very motivated by your pro-white identity. And that's the nicest way of putting it, really.

14:34So we have heard Tom's experience meeting with Return to the Land and his conversations with the group. So let's speak now to an expert on the American and European far right. Dr Heidi Byrick is an expert on white supremacism, anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant, anti-government and other extremist ideologies. She's written extensively on far-right movements and joins us to try and unpick the ideology behind groups like Return to the Land. Heidi, can we start with Return to the Land? I mean, they say this is all about essentially being part of a private membership association. How would you describe them as an organisation?

15:13Well, I mean, they may have created a legal structure that makes them appear to be a private membership organisation. But this is just the last of a series of whites only communities that white supremacists have tried to create in the United States. A Fair Housing Act from the 1960s bans segregation in housing. So I just kind of don't buy the idea that these are poor victims that need to create a whites only area. Otherwise, they won't be able to survive. And ultimately, that is pure white supremacist rhetoric. this idea that white people are being wiped out, they have to protect themselves, they have to breed children and separate from society or they're no longer going to exist.

15:56You hear this from all kinds of white supremacist groups. Their justification appears to be, look, they hold their hands up, we are separating ourselves from the rest of society, but we're doing so because of our deeply held beliefs and our separation from the rest of society doesn't inflict damage on those that we are separate from. I mean, does that in and of itself, does that make them extremist? Absolutely, it makes them extremist. These are white supremacists. There's no question, they're flat out white supremacists. Look, they're anti-Semitic. They're also against other religious faiths.

16:30They are identitarians. That's what they call themselves. And identitarianism is a white supremacist movement that came out of Europe that claims that white people are being replaced in some sort of secret plot, sometimes at the hands of Jews, all across the Western world, and that they need to reclaim their homelands, those are their words, for white people, so that they can survive. This is sort of a mini-identitarianism. It's not reclaiming the entire homeland, but it's attempting to take a chunk of Northwest Arkansas and make it a whites-only area. Is this white ethno-nationalism, is it a growth industry in the United States at the moment?

17:08Yes. The number of these groups, and if you were trying to count them online, sort of individuals involved in white supremacists, say, telegram channels, has been on the rise for a couple decades now. There are more of these folks than there ever were. I mean, I lay that largely at the hands of social media because, you know, in the 1990s, if you wanted to get involved with, say, a Klan chapter or this group Return to the Land, you're not going to find them in the phone book. You don't have the Internet. It was very hard to connect with these organizations. And that was completely transformed first by the rise of the Web.

17:45In fact, the first hate site ever was put up in 1995 called Stormfront. They're early adopters of technology because they want to get their message out. So we have a lot more people who believe these ideas today than we did, say, 25 years ago. You know, the other thing in the United States is I worked at the Southern Poverty Law Center for a long time tracking hate groups. And we immediately saw in the wake of a 2000 statement or report issued by the Census Bureau that the group started to rise. And what that report said was that at that time in 2042, the United States will no longer have a white majority.

18:26In other words, there'll be a lot of minority groups in the United States. and we immediately started to see a rise in hate groups. This instilled fear in them, right? And at the heart of the identitarian thinking, which is what these Return to the Land people say they're about, is this idea that there's a plot to replace them in their homeland. So it spawned conspiracy theories and organizing. So I would say that demographic change is really the big boy in the background of why we're seeing more and more white supremacist groups, this white anxiety over demographic shifts. I mean, you look at return to the land themselves.

19:02We're talking tens of people living on a few hundred square acres of land out in the Ozark Hills. I mean, whilst they're kept there, is there much to be worried about from them? I don't think at this point, other than the evils of their propaganda and the demeaningness of all of it, that there appears to be any kind of threat of violence. But I will say for most organizations, once a calm count gets in place, it can attract very unsavory characters. And I'm sure there are many, many people in northwest Arkansas who wish this wasn't happened because the region has been roiled by racial extremism for decades.

19:40Return to the land. At the core of what they do, they say is the idea that they're doing nothing wrong, that other races have set up their own communities in this fashion and that therefore whites should be allowed to do the same. Do you see any validity in that? I don't. The Fair Housing Act is very clear that you can't play this game. And discrimination in housing in this country has mostly been targeting people of color, right? You can't do this. You can't segregate in housing. It doesn't matter if the property owner is white, black or something else. So I'm not sure what it is they're referring to.

20:20It sounds like a pretty weak defense for a racist commune. immune. It also sounds like a test case needs to be brought and brought pretty quickly. Yeah, it is. What is interesting here is this attempt to get around the Fair Housing Act by creating an LLC and then selling memberships. You know, the legal scholars I've read in the press seem to say that this is not going to fly, that this isn't going to work. I wish that Arkansas would investigate this. Somebody needs to take a look at this because we can't have people violating an important federal statute that helped desegregate this country. And you can watch Tom's documentary on his visit to Arkansas on the Sky News website and YouTube channel now.

21:04The Sky News Daily is back tomorrow.