Make It Make Sense: The Bizarre Lawsuit Filed by 'Whites-Only' Advocates
Return to the Land founders express hope a lawsuit against Britain's Sky News will be the first of a "scorched-earth" strategy against "anti-White" media and other detractors.
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Last fall, Eric Orwoll traveled to Tennessee’s Montgomery Bell State Park to speak to a group of white nationalists, touting his vision for Whites-only communities in America.
And there seemed to be little doubt about that vision.
After all, American Renaissance Conference organizer Jared Taylor introduced Orwoll as someone who “has been promoting the idea of building explicit White communities for more than 10 years.”
Likewise, when Orwoll took the stage, he openly talked of developing a “Return to the Land” (RTTL) community in rural Arkansas and others like it where White children “will be raised in a pro-White environment.”
“The purpose of White identitarianism is White community,” the Return to the Land founder told a group that, my investigation for Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 revealed, included Patriot Front leaders, neo-Nazis and other white nationalists.
He continued, “It is to secure our ability to have White communities. We like White people. Where do White people come from? They come from breeding populations. That means you have White communities.”
Watch that excerpt from Orwoll’s American Renaissance speech below:
Now, in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, Orwoll, his associate Peter Csere and a third man who lives with them in the Ozarks have sued Britain’s Sky News for defamation, civil conspiracy and other related claims for a 2025 documentary, “Inside 'Return to the Land': The group making a whites-only community in Arkansas.”
The complaint, which also names parent company Comcast and journalist Tom Cheshire, accuses the team of producing “a hit piece containing fabricated evidence” that was used to “trigger government investigations,” causing the plaintiffs to face “hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, severe reputational harm, and ongoing emotional distress.”
Oddly, the lawsuit faults the journalists for—get this—creating the “false impression that Plaintiff Orwoll affirmed the community was ‘whites only.’”
And if the allegations don’t quite make sense to you, you’re not alone.
This attack on the media is coming from a man who has openly aligned himself with Patriot Front, a group that wants to turn America into a White ethnostate.
As you will see later, Orwoll and Csere say this is all part of a “scorched-earth” strategy they have to go after critics whom they view as being “anti-White”—at the same time that they are boasting about having duped the media into falsely reporting about their ambitions to spread across the country.
Meanwhile, as the conference video shows, they are telling their allies that they do indeed have plans to expand.
*** Even with that, you still need to read to the bottom of this post to truly comprehend, from my perspective, how bizarre this story is! ***
Here are the allegations
First, let me lay out the lawsuit’s five basic allegations against the documentarians—and why the lawsuit appears to have virtually no chance of accomplishing anything beyond harassment of the journalists.
As part of the production process, Sky News created an illustration—used for online promotion and as a title slate in the video—showing a “WHITES ONLY” sign that appears to have been painted on a tree in a rural area.
“The Doctored Photo was designed to create the false and defamatory impression that Plaintiffs maintain ‘Whites Only’ signage on their land—evoking the segregation-era signs that are universally understood as symbols of illegal racial discrimination,” the complaint argues.
In fact, the documentary notes—as did my own reporting—that Orwoll and his associates believe they might have found a loophole where, if they band together as a “private membership association,” their discrimination would be legal.
The lawsuit does NOT allege that non-Whites are welcome to join the community, only that there are no “Whites Only” signs painted on trees.
The Sky News documentary showed a Return to the Land post on X that read: “We started a Whites only community.”
So, exactly how is it unfair to quote Return to the Land in its own words?
Strangely, the complaint tries to distance that post from Orwoll and his two RTTL associates, as well as a sister company—Wisdom Woods LLC—that Orwoll has described as being part of the effort to make their discrimination legal.
“The X post was obviously intended as a tongue-in-cheek response to prior media defamation and an exercise of protected free speech,” the complaint claims.
“It was not intended to accurately describe legal practices of any specific organization or community, and no reasonable person familiar with the context would interpret it as a literal policy statement of Wisdom Woods LLC.”
Again, the lawsuit does NOT allege the tweet was fake, only that it was “tongue-in-cheek” and that the Return to the Land post cannot be directly linked to the people who operate and speak on behalf of Return to the Land.
So, what about this post?
Was it “tongue-in-cheek,” too?
The lawsuit accuses Sky News of “misleading editing” of its interview with Eric Orwoll “in a manner that creates the false impression that Plaintiff Orwoll affirmed the community was ‘whites only.’”
I am posting that section of the complaint below just to make it absolutely clear that I am accurately reporting what seems to me to be completely inexplicable.
What about Orwoll’s own words in the video linked at the top of this essay? Or, the RTTL tweet that I highlighted above?
Or the post below, in response to another person, on Orwoll’s own X account?
I have never seen any post where Orwoll claims he’s been misunderstood about his desire for Whites-only communities across the country.
According to the complaint, the documentary’s title and promotional material describe the community as a “fortress for the white race.”
In fact, it is not clear to me where Sky News got the quote that its website attributes to Orwoll.
Still, given his many other statements, I question whether there are any circumstances under which the quote could be considered defamatory.
The lawsuit also accuses the Sky News reporter of contacting the Arkansas attorney general for comment on the legality of the Arkansas project “for the purpose of triggering a government investigation.”
“Multiple additional state and federal investigations have since been opened, further compounding the harm caused by Defendants’ conduct,” it continues.
In some ways, I’m not sure this allegation needs much comment.
When exploring issues of law, journalists routinely reach out to law enforcement officials to inquire about whether certain practices are legal. That’s what we do.
Here’s where this tale takes an even more bizarre twist.
You can watch my original report on Orwoll below:
‘We want our enemies to seethe’
In a podcast video posted around the time the complaint was filed, Orwoll and Csere—sitting on an old sofa somewhere on their Arkansas land—hinted there would be more lawsuits against people whom they consider to be “anti-White.”
But, for those efforts to continue, Csere said their allies will need to keep opening their wallets to contribute to their “legal fund.”
“We want our enemies to seethe and be, like, obsessively checking PACER every day to see who we have filed a lawsuit against,” Csere said, referring to the online system used to track federal lawsuits.
“Hopefully, this is the first of many lawsuits that RTTL is going to file against people who are anti-White. But we, you know, we obviously, we need more donations to the legal fund to, to, to keep all this going.”
Watch podcast excerpt below:
Orwoll agreed that they planned to “go on the offensive.”
“We have a lot of enemies who have made themselves now targets unwittingly of reprisal from us,” Orwoll said. “And we have our Jewish lawyer, so we’re gonna get very litigious and go scorched earth.”
That attorney, rabbi-turned-lawyer Jonathan Gross of Baltimore, faced controversy over his representation of violent January 6th defendants and his comparison of their prosecution to the Holocaust.
Even more strangely, Orwoll and Csere claimed journalists sometimes get their stories wrong—because the RTTL activists intentionally deceive them.
“Part of it occasionally we have messed with journalists,” Orwoll said.
Csere agreed, “It’s fun to mess with journalists. Again, saying stuff is not illegal.”
Watch podcast excerpt below:
As one example, they pointed to news reports based on the group’s own claims to be considering a Whites-only community near Springfield, Missouri.
“We had absolutely no plans whatsoever to do anything in Springfield,” Csere said.
“We just thought, ‘Okay, well, this is really funny. The media is really stupid and incompetent. Let's make a webpage that says there's a whole bunch of Return to the Land communities around the country and see how long it takes them to figure out that none of them exist.’”
Watch podcast excerpt below:
To top it off, Orwoll, Csere and the third man are asking the courts for $2.7 million in damages for a “cascade of harm” as a result of the Sky News report.
But, again, there’s a twist!
Go back to the video from that conference and, in it, Orwoll expresses a much different view of the Sky News documentary and other media coverage of their efforts to develop a case to test their interpretation of federal housing laws.
“Actually, it’s been a huge benefit to us,” he said, claiming his private membership association had more than tripled its ranks.
“So, there are definite benefits in standing up for what we believe.”
Watch excerpt from Orwoll’s American Renaissance speech below:
Between boasting about deceiving the media and claiming severe reputational damage for the media’s reporting, the legal strategy appears less about merit and more about just sticking it to their perceived enemies.
So, what do you make of all this?
You can review the complaint here and decide for yourself. Paid supporters can comment below.
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Great summation of this idiocy. Discovery will be interesting.