Inside the whites-only settlement in Arkansas: The group building a ‘Fortress for the White Race’

A fortress for the white race. It’s my last day at RTTL and Orwoll is giving a flute recital.

“It’s a German flute. It was a very popular instrument in colonial America,” he says.

Orwoll studied music at university and he plays well. His is one act in a concert put on for our entertainment, the theme, once again, colonial. Peter Csere plays the piano. Caitlin sings a song about the Virginia settlers.

Orwoll would prefer those times, would prefer the US to be an entirely white country. “I would probably feel more comfortable there because I’m white and that’s the way this country was when my ancestors came there.”

That ignores the indigenous Native Americans who were there before the Europeans, or the slaves brought over in bondage from Africa.

For all Orwoll’s talk of different cultures or moralities, skin colour is what matters to him.

I’m white. And when I ask whether I would be accepted into RTTL on that basis, Orwoll says I probably would.

I point out that I don’t know anything about “White American Culture”, but that he’d rather have me than say, an American from a mixed heritage background. The problem, he says, is their children.

“Even if an individual has all the same values that I have, if they have an ethnic identity that other people share and care about, their children will also have that identity and their children might not necessarily have all the same beliefs that they have.”

Orwoll believes in the far-right conspiracy theory of “white genocide”, that white people are being destroyed, deliberately, by mass immigration and cultural indoctrination. RTTL is his response to this.

“When I was a kid, I suppose I interpreted racism to be judging someone solely on the basis of their race. And is that a good or bad thing?” he says.

“I think the basic moral consensus treats it as automatically a bad thing without a lot of reflection.”

Orwoll believes social media makes his movement “far more possible”.

He has a network, a legal framework, and a settlement. “I would like to have more communities so that people in all parts of the US have this as an option if they want. I would also like us to network and branch out internationally.”

If this is the first “fortress for the white race”, Orwoll would like there to be many more to come.