‘White Only’ Enclaves Are Hospice For White Supremacy

Let them go!

Let them flee into their “whites-only” compounds, into the hills and mountains, into the slow rot of their own irrelevance.  Let them churn butter and raise their children on paranoia and incest. Let them name their sons Obadiah, Ezekiel, and White Jesus Jr., and their daughters after herbs and dead empires. Let them try to outbreed reality.  Let them hold revival meetings in the woods where they chant birth rates like scripture and try to pray their way out of extinction anxiety. Let them live off-grid if it means staying out of our schools, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, and our faces.

Because what those white bigots in Arkansas are running from isn’t us. It’s modernity, diversity, and accountability. And what they’re building isn’t a future. It’s a tomb.

Over the past weeks, multiple outlets have reported on “Return to the Land,” a self-described homesteading utopia founded in 2023 for white people looking to escape multicultural society.  The enclave is currently based in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas, near the Missouri border. Roughly 40 people now live in the settlement, which explicitly vets applicants based on European ancestry and rejects LGBTQ+ people, Jews, and people of color.

Founded by Paul Craig and supporters of so-called “ancestral living,” the group claims it isn’t racist. They’re just committed to tradition, family, and values. A real return to ancestry would mean boarding a ship back to the Old World. But their “ancestral” vibes are giving more ethno-nationalist Little House on the Prairie than back-to-the-land innocence. The group has signaled plans to expand into southern Missouri, specifically Wright County.

They’re branding this as a movement, framing it as a lifestyle, and cloaking it in legal loopholes like Private Membership Associations so they can dodge fair housing laws. And somehow, after public scrutiny and pressure, Arkansas officials just announced that their initial review found nothing illegal about it, according to a report from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Nothing illegal, despite the group’s explicit racial and ideological exclusions. That green light sends a clear message: even in 2025, white separatism can still cloak itself in legality and pioneer chic and face little resistance from the state.

But if you really think about it, they’re just formalizing racial segregation that already exists. Because most of America’s white communities are already de facto segregated, rooted in policies like redlining, exclusionary zoning, property taxes, and under-investment, combined with school district gerrymandering, property tax–driven educational disparities, and an unspoken “there goes the neighborhood” culture.

This isn’t new. It’s just more brazen. They’re building infrastructure. Marketing ideology. Grooming public sentiment. They’ve got websites, hashtags, and newsletters. They’re not retreating. They’re recruiting. They’re spreading.

And that’s exactly what has civil rights advocates sounding the alarm.

While it’s true that racial segregation is already entrenched in communities across the United States, what “Return to the Land” is doing represents a dangerous escalation. They’re not hiding it. They’re defending it legally. They’re branding it, expanding it, and testing the structural integrity of civil rights protections in real time. And that normalization and the shift from whispered bias to proudly posted “whites only” rhetoric is what has activists, legal scholars, and watchdog groups deeply alarmed.

Civil rights organizations have already warned that this kind of project “revives discredited and reprehensible forms of segregation” and should be explicitly prohibited under both state and federal law. They fear that if this is allowed to stand, it could erode civic norms, gut fair housing protections, and embolden wealthier communities to replicate the model on a much larger scale. 

The group’s use of a Private Membership Association to skirt fair housing law is being watched closely because if it holds up, the floodgates could open. Hospitals, businesses, even schools could adopt similar frameworks to legally exclude whomever they please under the guise of private association.

So, this isn’t just a whites-only compound. It’s a test case.

And what they’re really testing is whether America still has the will, or even the legal framework, to say no to white separatism dressed up as “values-based living” and white supremacy rebranded as a lifestyle choice.

And here’s what makes this even more unsettling: it’s not just legal. It’s not just political. It’s primal.

What we’re witnessing in “Return to the Land” isn’t merely a backwoods retreat or a cosplay of settler innocence. It’s a biosocial reflex,  a nervous system-level panic, a somatic defense mechanism, not a principled stand. It’s the embodiment of a deeply conditioned fear: that whiteness is losing its grip. That the center cannot hold. And that proximity to difference means the death of dominance.

At its core, this is about survival anxiety. Not actual survival, but perceived racial survival. White Americans, particularly those invested in whiteness as identity, are watching the demographic clock tick down. Census reports show the country getting browner. Birth rates are dropping. Interracial marriage rates are rising. And at the somatic level, down in the gut, in the cortisol spikes, in the tightened jaw, many interpret this not as social change, but as an existential threat.

And when the body perceives a threat, it does what bodies have always done: it retreats, it fortifies, it others. That’s what these communities are. They’re immune responses. The body politic is trying to wall itself off from infection. From dilution. From difference. It’s fight-or-flight in architectural form.

These racists have inherited the terror of loss of dominance, which stems from a legacy of colonizers whose survival depended on being the majority, being the master, and being in control. For centuries, white power was secured by maintaining physical, legal, and reproductive separation from nonwhite people. That legacy didn’t just live in laws, it lived in the blood. It trained generations to view integration, miscegenation, and multiculturalism as contaminations.

Epigenetic science shows us that trauma and fear can alter gene expression, particularly in areas of the brain that regulate threat perception, identity, and in-group bias. If generations of white Americans passed down the terror of slave rebellions, racial “replacement,” and cultural erosion, then today’s settler fantasias aren’t simply ideological; they’re biologically conditioned attempts to reclaim control over space, reproduction, and narrative.

Demographic anxiety is reproductive anxiety. And epigenetically, whiteness has long been policed through reproduction: who gets to have babies, raise them, and shape the next generation. What we’re witnessing is the panicked response of a dominant group losing control of the cradle. White-only communities become wombs for racial purity, where the goal isn’t just survival, it’s regeneration. To birth the future they’re afraid they’re losing.

This is also about restoring what they believe is the biologically ordained hierarchy. The return to land, to traditional gender roles, heteronormativity, hard labor, and homesteading aren’t random aesthetics. They’re deeply coded attempts to recreate a time when whiteness was dominant, God was on their side, and the lines between people were clear, sanctioned, and “natural.” They’re not just building homesteads. They’re building a biosocial bunker against modernity.

This is what happens when centuries of entitlement collide with demographic data and start to metabolize as trauma. It’s a racial survival response—cellular, inherited, and epigenetically reinforced over generations. These people aren’t just rejecting integration. They’re trying to quarantine their whiteness like it’s an endangered species. Their bodies are reacting before their minds can explain it. What they call “ancestral living” is really a fight-or-flight survival response. 

And yes, I hear the concerns of civil rights groups. They’re right to be alarmed. This is a legal gray zone with the potential to fracture civic norms and unravel what’s left of anti-discrimination enforcement. But what makes this even more urgent, and chilling, is what the science tells us: these people aren’t just dangerous because of what they believe.  They’re dangerous because of what they’ve been biologically primed to become.

We are not just dealing with policy or ideology here. We are dealing with generations of racial trauma metabolized into a biological survival instinct. This is the nervous system of white supremacy responding to demographic fear, to cultural irrelevance, to the imagined loss of control. And that kind of panic doesn’t just show up in land deeds and homestead websites. It shows up in front yards, in threats, in acts of violence.

Like a racist white couple in Florida who threatened to hang a Black male sales representative.  They threatened to lynch him. Loudly, proudly, and on video. This isn’t fringe anymore. This is MAGA-era mainstream.

And that’s why, for all the legal horror and cultural disgust this Arkansas compound evokes, there’s an unexpected upside to their retreat. 

Let them go!

Let them group together. Let them wall themselves off from the world they can no longer dominate. Let them raise their inbred heirs to white supremacy out in the woods, miles from the rest of us who are trying to live, raise families, and move the culture forward. Because when they isolate, they also contain. They concentrate their harm, their entitlement, their pathology. And that makes them easier to track, monitor, and marginalize.  

This isn’t segregation, it’s subtraction.

No one wants to share space with these people anyway. Not in our schools, our cities, our churches, our co-ops, our classrooms. These are the same white folks calling the cops when we barbecue, the same ones blocking DEI programs and screaming “reverse racism” at school board meetings. If they want to go reenact a 19th-century fever dream in the Ozarks, good. Let them. Because the rest of us deserve to breathe.

So, while we should never stop fighting the legal normalization of segregation, let’s also call this moment what it truly is: a desperate quarantine of white supremacy in its death throes. This isn’t a community, it’s a bunker. It’s not resilience, it’s retreat, and what they’re calling “ancestral living” is really just hospice care for a rotting ideology.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

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