Outrage Over ‘Disgusting’ Plans to Build Whites-Only Enclave Near Tiny Arkansas Town as Critics Call for Trump to Intervene

Outrage is intensifying over a whites-only community being built in Arkansas as organizers claim they have found a way to skirt fair housing laws.

Construction has already started on ‘Community1’ which bars people of color, Muslims, Jews and anyone else organizers deemed to be LGBTQ-leaning or a militant atheist.

Professor Florence Wagman Roisman, an expert on housing rights at Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law, called the group’s insistence on segregation ‘disgusting’.

‘In virtually any other administration, I would expect the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to investigate …and take swift action against it,’ she told Daily Mail.

But under President Donald Trump, she said, such a move is unlikely.

The group building Community1 – also known as ‘The Settlement’ – is called Return to the Land. Its right-wing YouTuber president, Eric Orwoll, claims the 160-acre development is legal because it is a private, members-only club, and so can limit who may join.

‘It’s important to our members to raise their children around whites – people they feel comfortable around,’ Orwoll, who is working to help a string of similar developments sprout up nationally, told Daily Mail.

‘It’s an important battle that needs to happen, he added. ‘We need to decide as Americans whether we have a right to go our own way or be forced by a model of community decided by the government.’

The homes are going up outside tiny Ravenden, Arkansas, a town with a population of just 423 near the Missouri border and 140 miles north of Little Rock, the state capital.

Public documents filed for Return to the Land’s limited liability corporation show the group has eight unidentified founders who each pitched in between $10,000 and $90,000 in startup funds. By doing so, they become eligible for membership units or shares that entitle them to live on the property.

Based on applications and interviews, the group grants new memberships only to people who can verify their white, European ‘ancestral heritage’. It expressly bans Muslims and Jews, even those who are ethnically European, and accepts only Christian and pagan applicants.

Orwoll, 35, asserts that the group can legally exclude certain kinds of members because it’s selling membership not land.

‘We’ve been to several lawyers,’ he said. ‘We have it all worked out.’

But legal experts disagree.

University of Minnesota law professor Myron Orfield admitted he finds the group’s members-only approach novel – ‘an interesting wrinkle’ that could be likened to private country clubs legally excluding certain kinds of members.

But Orfield, who directs the school’s Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, notes that state and federal laws protect people’s land and housing rights far more than their right to play golf.

If residents of Community1 tap public utilities, drive on public roads to get home, benefit from publicly funded programs, use the US Postal Service, or send even one child to a public school, Orfield contends the group is squarely subject to anti-discrimination laws.

‘Will this place stand up in court – even with today’s Supreme Court? My guess is absolutely not,’ he said.

Orwoll, who is blond and blue-eyed YouTuber, says he embraces ‘identitarianism,’ a right-wing movement centered on the preservation of white European identity.

He expects and said he even relishes the prospect of legal challenges to his ‘ethno-culturally homogeneous’ community free from what he sees as dominant ‘woke’ ideas.

Sympathizers of his cause claim whites are under threat from immigration, multiculturalism and globalization.

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Roismon and fellow legal experts say Return to the Land’s plans fall foul of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 1968 Fair Housing Act and more current laws protecting people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.

She cites one court case after another ruling against organizations that have banned protected groups not just from owning land, but also from dwelling on it.

‘There is absolutely no doubt’ that its segregationist rules won’t stand up,’ she said.

‘Legally, it won’t fly.’

But Return to the Land is confident that the development is legally sound and members’ own First Amendment rights to associate and assemble freely are protected.

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Peter Csere, Return to the Land’s other co-founder, and his family live in a cabin he built two years ago.

‘The idea of living with people who share your views and want to raise families in similar ways, that’s very appealing to a lot of families, and very appealing to me, as well,’ he said.

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