Monday brunch: when intentional communities go White supremacist

Plus other links from around the web

I’m going to talk about the overlap between intentional communities and white supremacist groups. This is a controversial topic, so I want to say up front what barely needs saying - the vast majority of intentional communities are not white supremacist! And the fact that 0.01% of them are should not be taken to tar the vast and diverse intentional community ecosystem. Intentional communities are communal experiments in living where people come together around a shared set of values. Those values can be all kinds of things - religious, spiritual, political, anarchist, ecological, polyamorous, ayahuasca-based, transhumanist, you name it. And, very occasionally, you also get far-right racist intentional communities - that’s been the case in history, as we’ll see, and it’s the case today.

In the last few weeks, a white-only intentional community in Arkansas, called Return to the Land, has been widely covered in the mainstream media - Sky News had a 25-minute feature on them, they also featured in The Independent, the Daily Mail, NBC, The Hill, Fox, MSNBC, The Times of Israel, the Times of India…

What have they done to merit this media blitzkreig - a Nazi rally? A bombing? A shoot-out with local cops? No, I think what caught the world media’s attention is this is quite a gentrified white supremacist community, run by a middle-class YouTube philosopher, so the Sky News journalist could visit it and ask questions without getting shot at, as he probably would had he been visiting a white supremacist enclave like Elohim City in Oklahoma.

Return To The Land co-founder is Eric Orwoll. Until recently, he was a YouTube philosopher who made videos about Plato, Pythagoras and Plotinus, including a couple with ‘meaning crisis’ academic John Vervaeke. It’s not clear what happened to Orwoll but he clearly got red pilled and is now very focused on race and insistent that white Americans need to build white-only communities and then, eventually, white-only states and a white-only nation.

The overlap between far-right politics, ancient philosophy and New Age spirituality is, again, not huge but it does exist, in large part thanks to an early 20th-century movement called Traditionalism. This movement argued that western civilization had lost its transcendent foundation and become over-secularized and materialist, and it needed to return to the perennial philosophy of ancient spiritual wisdom (Plato, Taoism, the Bhagavad Gita etc). A range of thinkers believed this, from Huston Smith to Aldous Huxley to Stanislav Grof, and a few of them, like Julius Evola, were authoritarian, elitist, anti-liberal, and even fascist.

Traditionalism, Evola and fascist occultism often swirl around in far-right circles, particularly among far-right intellectuals who read books and watch YouTube philosophy (this makes you an intellectual among far-right skinheads). Steve Bannon is a fan of Traditionalism, as you can find out in this interesting book. Orwoll wrote occasional posts for Arktos, a far-right Traditionalist publisher. Like another Arktos-connected thinker called Jason Reza Jorjani, Orwoll occasionally goes down some far-out racial-occultist cul-de-sacs - Orwoll thinks certain bloodlines have ruled humanity for millennia and it’s all somehow connected to Atlantis. Jorjani is also obsessed with Atlantis, as was Himmler.

Orwoll recently ran a conference on intentional communities and he wants to encourage other white supremacists to begin them, in a sort of far-right version of Balaji Srinivasan’s vision for ‘start-up societies’. A far-right group called The Woodlander Initiative just bought some land in Powys, Wales, to begin a white-only community. Orwoll tells journalists they just want to live in communities surrounded by people like them who share their values. He points out that there are Jewish-only communities (like Kiryas Joel, a village in upstate New York that is entirely Hassidic Jewish), Amish-only communities, women-only intentional communities, black-only intentional communities, LGBTQ-only intentional communities, and so on, why not white-only communities?

However, most of these communities don’t explicitly forbid other religions, races or genders, they just implicitly do. That was often the way in American country clubs, as one Jewish writer complained in the Atlantic in 1924 - they were run by Wasps, and in practice they excluded Jews and Catholics from membership, but they never explicitly said they did. It’s the explicit white rejection of other races in 2025 that has garnered Return To The Land some media attention. It’s legal, apparently, because they have structured themselves as a Private Members Association, like a country club, so they’re not selling lots (it would be illegal for a company to only sell lots to white people).

The history of far-right eco-communes

The history of intentional communities (or communes) is long and interesting, and goes all the way back to groups like the Pythagoreans or the Epicureans in ancient Greece or ashrams of ancient India. Hundreds of communes were established in Germany from the 1890s to the 1930s, as part of a back-to-the-land nature-worship movement called Life Reform. Some of these utopian eco-communes were left-wing, others were far-right and Volkisch (they celebrated the German volk or folk, German geist or soul, and German eugenics or pure-blood families, and they rejected modernity, materialism, free market capitalism and Jews).

One example of this sort of far-right eco-commune was the Artaman League, founded in 1923. Its founder, August Georg Kenstler, published an obscure magazine called Blut und Boden, or ‘Blood and Soil’, preaching the spiritual-biological unity of the German people and their fields. A later leader of the movement, Willibald Hentschel, published Mittgart (1904), a pamphlet which called for 100 strong Aryan men and 1000 Aryan women to found a polygamous agrarian colony that would till the land and breed Aryan ubermenschen.

The membership of the Artaman League included two young agricultural students, R. Walter Darré and Heinrich Himmler, who would become senior Nazis in the years to come - Darré became Nazi minister of Agriculture, Himmler became head of the SS - and both helped shape the Nazi vision of the murderous racist eugenic state. Darré was interested in Anthroposophy while Himmler was a Traditionalist - he carried around a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, and sent off SS troops to look for survivors of Atlantis in Tibet. He was also very into Nordic runes, and would no doubt have approved of the rune logo of Return To The Land.

There were similar eco-fascist groups in the UK in the 1930s, like English Mistery and the Kinship of Husbandry. These organisations were the closest thing Britain had to blood-and-soil societies like the Artaman League. They attracted agrarian revivalists like Rolf Gardiner, RG Stapledon, Jorian Jenks and Gerard Wallop, the Earl of Sandwich, who shared a passion for organic farming, folk culture, eugenics, and anti-Semitic fascism. But they remained fringe figures in British politics, unlike in Germany.

There is nothing essentially fascist or wrong with back-to-the-land Romanticism, or with wanting to be surrounded with people who share the same values as you. But such communities can occasionally become petri dishes for extremist and anti-democratic ideas, and even launching pads for assaults on democratic or multicultural society.

After the paywall, more on eco-fascist communities and Nazi hippies, plus other links on psychedelics, New Age spirituality, and culture, including the best novel I’ve read for a while, and a new documentary on the UK ketamine epidemic.