That’s All, Volks!

In between job applications, I put in for a place on the Nazi commune they’re forming in Arkansas. Partially, it was a chance to investigate, infiltrate, and even possibly dismantle the actual on-the-ground praxis of a hate group—you know, like a real journalist. But if I’m being honest, it was mostly a chance to test my acting chops. I did high school theater, after all. I alt-tabbed between an application for Human Rights Watch and one for the neo-Nazi commune, trying to use the same basic cover letter for both. In fact, the founders would probably object to both Nazi and commune as terminology, finding the former descriptor too narrow in terms of its broad appeal to the far right, fash-trash, piece-of-shit set (they accept all kinds of white nationalists) and the latter too pinko.

But that’s how Return to the Land advertises itself: an independent separatist community of likeminded right-wingers who want to remove themselves from “failing modern society” and create their own idyllic, all-white homesteading community in the Ozarks. Their express goal is to build a community that bypasses the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by incorporating the neighborhood as an LLC. Shares in the land are then sold to members who agree to the specific ideological terms of the Return to the Land community. Recruitment is low-key but steady. The organization’s cofounder, Eric Orwoll, known online as Aarvoll, presented at arch-groyper Nick Fuentes’s fourth annual America First Political Action Conference last year, and now their Telegram group of prospective members boasts over a thousand members. Even though we’re only talking a few homes and trailers in the Arkansas wilderness, new inquiries roll in every day.

The process to join isn’t exactly rigorous. Their website advertises a simple eight-step process, all presented on a white-page form that looks similar to a janky job application page. Easy enough to game if you just pick the most right-wing option for everything. It didn’t even ask me to prove my ethnicity. I almost immediately received an offer for an interview. There seemed to be no suspicion that beneath my fake name, fake background, and the fake ideology cobbled together from Wikipedia pages about right-wing populists, I might be exactly the kind of lefty urbanite journalist they believe should get the rope. I set an interview with Carnic, the group’s de facto moderator, for Tuesday afternoon. By the end, it was easier to book an interview for a white nationalist sect than to land a job interview with a normal publication. Figures.

Return to the Land is far from the first attempt at a white nationalist separatist community in America, and it’s far from the first to shit the bed when it comes to recruitment. Their most direct historical forebear is Volksberg, a commune founded in Northern California that began as a white nationalist success story but turned into a cautionary tale. As befitting an experiment in combination hippie-Nazi mix-and-match, Volksberg was the brainchild of Joseph “Jost” Turner, a uniquely seventies concoction of yogi/pagan/Nazi/hippie who wrote and distributed pamphlets which split the difference between personal history, Nazi propaganda, and advice to enterprising white nationalists hoping to form their own utopia. As with many Americans, the Vietnam War had eroded Turner’s trust in the country’s way of life. In “Back to the Land,” an autobiographical essay that takes the form of a quasi-mythological founding document, Turner describes returning from “two years of isolation in the Asian jungles” to a California that he saw as an “alien world” polluted by materialism, sex, drugs, and racial strife. “Seeing no real alternative,” he wrote, “I packed up my family and headed back to the land,” joining a hippie commune in the mountains of California.        

Turner’s relationship with the counterculture was complicated. Even as his manifesto decries their degeneracy in one paragraph, he can’t help but begrudgingly respect his “hairy co-racialists” for their work building self-sufficient intentional communities. Turner’s language is eye-rollingly prelapsarian:

Our lives were simple, yet fuller than ever before . . . Like our pre-christian ancestors of old, they were not burdened by christian puritanism. They saw nothing evil or dirty about the human body, and they swam and sun-bathed quite naturally unadorned by swimsuits or cutoffs . . . The heirs of the movement can be seen here and there throughout the area—purposeless, undisciplined, drug-using youth. The end really came with the rise of marijuana cultivation.

In Turner’s mind, the forbidden fruit that doomed the garden to contamination was indeed cannabis. After a few years of typical homesteading, he split from regular hippiedom for good, bought eighty-eight acres of land in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and set to work building his own community, one which asked a question that still sits at the heart of the ethnonationalist separatist movement today: “Why not take up the old hippy slogan to ‘drop out’, and begin destroying this anti-white system by non-participation?”

“Aryan Destiny: Back to the Land,” a pamphlet Jost distributed through his organization, the National Socialist Kindred, ends with a saccharine optimism for the community’s future, envisioning its potential as a beacon for likeminded neo-Nazis. Just a few years later, this idealism would be replaced with a hard-edged realism regarding the problems facing a community founded on hate.

Not to imply there’s anyone here who had a point or anything, but if you’re a conspiratorial racist during the upheaval of the sixties and seventies—Vietnam, civil rights, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society—this era of social reorganization and liberal legislation might push you to believe you no longer have a place in the modern world. But more than fifty years on, the right has the White House, the legislature, and the richest people in the world on their side. Yet despite their ascendent power, this political wing’s desire to fight against the structures of civic society by dropping out and forming their own separatist communities has exploded in popularity.

In 2024, the venture capital group New Founding announced the Highland Rim Project, a real estate development startup focused on building explicitly “anti-DEI” rural right-wing communities in Kentucky and Tennessee by recruiting “business owners, pastors and other community leaders . . . to build thick communities.” They’re not talking about fat camp: New Founding is associated with the Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank that works to intellectually launder the more antidemocratic elements of the Trump movement. The instinct to quit mainstream society has wormed its way into the institutions of the capital class. They aren’t alone.

Pronomos Capital, an investment group associated with tech-right boogeyman and Palantir chairman Peter Thiel, has spent the better part of the last decade sponsoring several different “startup city” projects aimed at providing havens for tech-libertarians who believe that “innovation” is held back by government overregulation and would prefer city-states with corporate governance structures. Eccentric arms dealer/virtual reality pioneer Palmer Luckey suggested forming a similar breakaway city in Guantanamo Bay, which he would call Liberty City, in order to disintegrate the communist hold over Cuba by offering workers the chance to “drop out” of society.

None of these separatist movements are as explicitly white nationalist as Return to the Land or as full of self-conscious hippie freaksomeness as Volksberg. But each represent a desire across the spectrum of right-wingery, from tech-accelerationists to conspiracy-driven neo-crunchies, to build explicitly ideological communities dedicated to what they perceive as their own people—their Volk—whether defined by ethnicity, region, culture, or even just a shared belief in the unfettered progress of capitalism. But for now, despite billionaire backing, the separatist movement still struggles to meet their ambition with the challenges of building a new normal from the ground up.

One year since its announcement, Highland Rim is still in the acquisition process. Even the most successful tech-separatist community to date, Pronomos’s Prospera, a biohacking haven on a Honduran island, looks more like a construction site than a future society and only has a single apartment building finished. In Orwoll’s flagship promotional video, “What is ‘Return to the Land?’,” a few earnest, soft-spoken homesteaders express their appreciation for the community while offering looks into their sparse cabins, huge families, or construction sites. But in a segment that might be better off on the cutting room floor, Charles, a young, bearded construction worker describes life in the community with a hint of regret. “This is my camp,” he says, as the camera pans over a makeshift tipi. “Right now, it’s just kind of small. There’s just a tent and my fire and a pull-up bar.” With a degree of hope in his voice, Charles expresses his vision for the future of Return to the Land: “Eventually, everybody will have houses and not just be living in tents in the middle of nowhere.”

Making something new is hard. With the benefit of years of experience at Volksberg, Turner’s pamphlet “Folk Communities: The Lifeblood of Our Folkish Movement,” broke down some of the biggest challenges he faced while building an intentional community. His advice? Don’t homestead, don’t purchase land together, try to coexist with existing communities. In short, don’t do anything Return to the Land—or any of these modern separatist movements—is attempting.

Turner was speaking from experience. Just a few years into his own homestead, he deemed the whole process more trouble than it was worth. The basic necessities of community life required formal structure and organization, the exact “rules and regulations, each of which is bound to irritate someone” that Turner was trying to escape. In his mind, these folk communities were for idealists and true believers. As Return to the Land members have learned the hard way, even once you purchase and develop your lot, the organization collects a monthly fee for road maintenance, trash pickup, annual dues, property taxes, and overhead costs—and reserves the right to subject its members to “Mandatory Additional Contribution.” A now-deleted post on their Substack advised potential members to “think of it like an HOA fee but without the annoying Karens,” but it’s merely a feature of every single functioning community: taxation. In effect, exiting from society in any sort of semi-functional way means reconstructing your own municipal government from the same prefab parts as the existing, oppressive ones. So much for a new world.

Rather than start from scratch, Turner concludes that the best option is settling within an existing community, with each member purchasing their own private property, securing their own employment, and “using existing social services just like everyone else” while building their own parallel structures—ironically reminiscent of the cell structure of Black Panthers. Turner emerged from his Volksberg travails with the insight that it’s not just logistics where the commune risks fracture. Even if your goal is peaceful homogeneity, it turns out other people, each with their own deal, threaten to upend it with the anarchy of individualism. “Communal type Folk-communities will require careful screening, and each community will have to devise its own methods to suit its situation,” he warned.

“Careful screening” indeed. I waited for the interview to start, hands nervously clasped, like I was waiting for a regular job interview. When Carnic invited me into the meeting and introduced himself, his voice was thin and high, and, as he asked me about my background, career, and personal skills, it felt like a call from an HR professional. That is, until he shifted into questions about my ideology and when I had realized I couldn’t exist in a diverse society any longer. I had overestimated my improv skills. I scrambled to put together an explanation, an origin story for my awakening unto xenophobia, until the panic became too much. Instead, I bailed on the interview, turning off the wifi on my computer and letting the images onscreen stutter to a halt and boot me from the meeting. “Fuck me!” I yelled, “I am the fucking worst at being a Nazi!”

I was sure the jig was up, that they would research my alias and find a back door into my actual private life. Maybe even send hired goons. Instead, Carnic apologized for technical problems and sent me a thoughtful message to reschedule our meeting for later. Weren’t these people supposed to be paranoid?

Toward the end of “Folk Communities,” Turner remarks that “from our experience we can say that you won’t have to worry very much about hostile locals, the JDL, ADL infiltrators, or Federal agent provocateurs.” If my efforts are any indication as to the infiltration skills of the left, it seems he was right. However, while they don’t have to worry about left-wing infiltration (at least until I get my act together), Turner points to a deeper problem endemic to the mission of creating a right-wing separatist movement.

In his most colorful list of epithets so far, Turner admits that “the movement is full of people with big problems: mindless race-haters, hyper-sensitive egoists, women-haters, sociopaths, paranoiacs, semi-white want-to-be’s, and other sorts of whackos” whose presence within the white nationalist movement threatens to destroy their attempts at sustainable communities at the root. But if you’re aspiring to an ideological separatist community, you’re going to get some crazies in there. The demographic that pines to drop out of mainstream society shares a Venn diagram with social caitiffs incapable of getting along with others. The whole conceit of elevating a particular group—whatever Volk one chooses to put at the center of their world—is to attract those who believe their place within the “in-group” gives them natural dominion over others.

Volksberg disintegrated in the early 1990s after a wave of “Hollywood Nazis” (the kind of violent skinhead “whackos” Turner warned against) moved to the community, inciting violence against locals and members of the community alike. Turner retreated into yoga studies and passed away a few years later (apocryphally from a broken heart, but really due to an untreated congenital heart condition. Same difference). By the end of its founder’s life, Volksberg was a failure, a cautionary tale for those contemplating Shake ‘N Bake colonies that vend cheap misanthropy. Contemporary movements go out of their way to counter the rigamarole—creating ironclad legal documents, recruiting online instead of underground, making membership exclusive—but they miss the obstacle at the core. Creating societies that seek to eliminate the social contract will inevitably attract those who have the most to gain from the erosion of civil society, whether it’s techno-warlords, violent skinheads, or simply charismatic grifters. The sweeping forces that shuttered Volksberg are an inevitability, the central contradiction of attempting to build from scratch a society that believes itself inherently better than everyone else. If “Back to the Land” is an optimistic founding myth, “Folk Communities” reads like an ignored prophecy, the kind of unheeded warning that leaves your people wandering the desert (or at least the Arkansas wilderness) for generations.  

Maybe if I reach back out to Carnic and reschedule that interview, I could tell them how I really feel about the future of their society. Show them how they’re bound to lose, warn them about all the ways I think they’re wrong, dumb, and ridiculous. But if history is any indication, they’ll find out themselves soon enough. Besides, it’s not like they’d listen to me, anyway. Not unless I invest in some acting lessons.