I have a sneaking suspicion “Return to the Land” is using reporters like a proxy microphone.
The group was on Sky News back in July, talking about preserving their “culture.”
Sky News is a British news outlet. In the 30-minute documentary, journalist Tom Cheshire, records himself hanging with the hate group. Though, they reject terms like “hate group.”
The Sky News video got hundreds of thousands of views, and the news coverage of the video got thousands of views, and the TikToks covering the coverage were widely circulated.
And maybe, that's the point.
Was Return to the Land happy to do an interview, because they want their message out? The group has said they want to grow, to recruit more people.
In vice signaling, no press is bad press.
Then, Return to the Land co-founder Peter Csere confirmed, yeah, something’s up with all this press coverage. In an online video he said:
“We did interviews with several mainstream media outlets that never published. I think the reason was that they realized they were going to create the Shiloh Hendrix effect.”
He's referencing Shiloh Hendrix, a white, Minnesota woman who gained more attention after calling a child a racial slur on video.
The Shiloh Hendrix effect is kind of like a Nazi’s Streisand effect — coverage means attention, amplification. And there is a history of it working.
In 1988, Oprah Winfrey had skinheads on her show who she later learned were using the broadcast to recruit followers.
“I saw them signaling each other,” she said years later on a morning talk show. “And I realized, that here I thought I was doing a good service by interviewing them, by showing their vitriol and all that. And I realized they were using me.”
Throughout the 1990s, other talk shows put Holocaust deniers next to historians, the aim being to “show both sides” of the “debate.” Though the Holocaust is perhaps the most well-documented atrocity in human history.
More recently, white nationalist Richard Spencer used media coverage to amplify the newly formed "Alt-Right.”
Here's him minutes before a 2016 interview with NPR:
“My philosophy,” he told The Atlantic. “is effectively that there is no such thing as bad publicity.”
But, the opposite has also happened.
It's possible more could have been done about the poisoned water in Flint, Mich., or the abuse of children in the Catholic Church, if news coverage of these events hit sooner.
Things that are too dangerous to cover, sometimes become too dangerous to ignore. And the more coverage Return to the Land gets, the more we’ve wondered if we had to talk about it on air.
“And we're still not covering them,” Little Rock Public Radio News Director Daniel Breen said. “We're still not reaching out to them for this story. We don't want to grant this group legitimacy, but I thought it was important to talk about the theory behind it.”
Attorney General Tim Griffin released a statement saying he plans to investigate the group, because “racism has no place in a free society.”
The question becomes: is this legal? An all-white compound in the outskirts of the small northeast Arkansas town of Ravenden. It's privately owned.
The AG said: “we have not seen anything that would indicate any state or federal laws have been broken.”
This may be a gray area, legally. But in practice, it's a clear example of saying one thing and being another.
Peter Simi is a sociologist specializing in extremist groups. He says a common technique these groups use is rebranding. Hate speech is reimagined into speech about love.
“A very clear characterization of inferiority and superiority," he said. “They cloak that in 'look, every race and ethnicity is allowed to feel proud of their heritage. There's nothing wrong with that. But for some reason white people aren't given that benefit, and that's not fair.’”
White supremacist groups like to speak in caveats, “what-about-isms” and sentences beginning with the word: “just.” When you push back, they like to say they were “just joking,” “just asking questions.”
In the Sky News piece, co-founder Csere hedges when asked about the Holocaust. He claims the Holodomor, a famine in 1930s Ukraine, was “worse.”
“That's my opinion. We're allowed to have opinions.”
In a post on X, Csere rewrote the conversation to say the genocide “didn’t happen.” Then he says he would “like to talk about how it should have.”
Return to the Land's internet presence isn't always so brazen. Much of it reads like a muffled scream. Sentences are both confessions and denials.
The group’s founder, Eric Orwoll, reposts things like the Fourteen Words, a white nationalist phrase coined by a domestic terrorist. He posts rants over videos of Black people congregating, or gay pride parades.
“You learn the truth about race, you learn your heritage," he says over loud music.
He repackages these ideas so they go down smoothly. In his words, they just want “ethical” or “voluntary segregation,” so they can build a “peaceful intentional community to preserve their heritage."
“I've been getting messages from Black Americans, Asian Americans, Muslims who just want to reach out and say ‘we like what you're doing, we support what you're doing.’”
But Return to the Land has a strict “no Jews” policy. Religious beliefs have to be "positive Aryan theologies.” Norse Paganism is fine, Islam not so much. The application to join the group asks if you support “transgenderism” and gay marriage.
A Q & A on their website responds to the question “are you a Nazi group?” with the line “draw your own conclusions.”
Since the growing media coverage, Return to the Land has become more defensive. Sky News has a high-ranking executive who happens to be Jewish. A Reddit post called them antisemitic. Public comments from the group indicate they think they may be under attack.
Return to the Land may be wading through 15 minutes of fame, but they do seem to be growing. Members say applications come in each week, as they spend their days building the homestead, a whites-only compound, one building at a time.
