That Whites Only Community

It's not the time to cloister yourself off and put all your efforts into sequestering yourself off from society and just building a community for some niche group that won't likely survive that long. You need to be putting your efforts into making sure the balance is not permanently tipped for the country that your grandparents have passed down to you.

The Purpose of the Episode and the Arkansas Community Debate

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, and today is another Trail Talk, which means we're only going to tackle one subject and we're going to do it in a short timeframe.

And that subject is intentional, privately sponsored, segregated racial communities in the United States in 2025. How's that for a mouthful? The reason I want to talk about this is because of a little bit of pushback I got for some commentary I provided on the podcast last week, in which I talked about an intentional community, or at least the attempt to create an intentional community in rural Arkansas.

And I said, you know, this whole thing seems like a grift. It's in rural Arkansas. It's already predominantly European ancestry. You're probably more likely to segregate yourself off, to cloister yourself off from other white people than you are from anyone else.

That's effectively what you're doing when you put the community there. My suspicions were somewhat vindicated when it was found out, yeah, this guy in the recent past had been a pornographic actor and his ex-wife is still either producing pornography or at least has pornography up on a website.

And some of it breaks the very standards for this community, including LGBTQ type stuff. And the messaging of it, it's back to the land. We're building log cabins in the wilderness. It's going to appeal to people who want to reassert some kind of a European greatness, but who probably just, they're probably just deracinated a lot of them.

They're looking for something to belong to, a project where they can have something that they call their own, but they're not going to be from the surrounding region there. I already commented on that, but there were some people that thought, you know, John, you're right.

This guy's, he's grifty. You're right to call that out. But what about his idea? I have some objections to it, but I think that most people, when they even start to hear an objection to a white-only anything, or an attempt to, in their minds, just defend white people, they immediately hear liberalism.

No matter what I say, or no matter what a conservative actually says, they hear liberalism. They think any objection must conform to what they've been conditioned to hearing, which is that because of egalitarian standards and the idea that disparities anywhere they're found are wrong, we should just eliminate them.

And part of eliminating them is mixing races as much as possible. And that's what you think you're going to hear, and I think some people, that's what they hear. But my objections to this are actually, on a conservative scale, an American conservative scale, they are to the right of even the guy who's behind this community.

Because my objections are based on, number one, preference, which is maybe the least compelling. But number two, particular circumstance, threat level, what the conditions are in the United States now, does this make sense?

And then prudence. And so I want to share those with you and make some separations that I think ought to be made when considering a topic like this, because I don't think this is going to be the last time you'll hear a scheme like this.

And it may not even be just, quote unquote, white people. You may hear this kind of thing coming from other groups. I want to start by just focusing our minds outside the United States for a moment. I just read about the situation in Gaza this morning.

It is really complicated. I read one article from an Israeli news source that's pro-Israeli, and then two others that were anti-Israel. And all of them present a very complicated situation. You have hostages, the fact that Israel doesn't want any of this to get into the hands of Hamas.

So any of the aid going in, they want only two drop-off points that they can essentially control, two ports of entry. Then you have the United Nations. There's some reports that they're not actually willing to work with Israel to deliver them.

Israel itself wants to separate Hamas from the people who live in Gaza. These are two groups of people who are very different. And here's what I want to suggest. I want to just take our minds outside of America to hopefully a place that we can be a little more objective about it.

What if someone were to come in and say, you know what? All this inequality, people are starving. In Israel, it seems like they're fine. Why don't we, and Hamas, Hamas seems to be fed, so why don't we do this?

How about we bring in a mechanism called democracy, and we just take down the border. There should be no separation between Israel and Hamas, or sorry, Israel and Gaza, or Hamas, all of them. They should all just be together.

And we'll be one big happy family if we just eliminate all the disparities there. Because clearly these identities are creating in-group preferences that are then serving to formulate tribalism. And that tribalism is then making it so that some tribes are less well-off than other tribes.

And there's war. I mean, we don't want conflict. Let's just bring in democracy, this great mechanism, and use that mechanism for promoting equality. And I mean, that's sort of the essence of liberalism, is liberalism sees any kind of representative government as just a mechanism for their end goal, which is equality, social equality.

Well, that makes no sense, because that would be a giant bloodbath, and we all know it. And if we look back in history, for Christians listening, like let's go back to the Samaritans, right? The Samaritans were a different group than the Jews.

And that's why there's in the gospels, there's these stories about Samaritans and Jews, and the interaction that Jesus has with the woman at the well, and the good Samaritan. And there's this background you need to understand that there was a difference between those two groups.

And if you understand that, then you get the morals of these particular stories. Now, the Samaritans sided with the Romans, and that was one of the issues that arose between these two groups and created animosity.

Now, I think you could say the same thing. Wouldn't have made sense to just go into Samaria and say, you know what? I mean, at the time, I guess they were both under Roman rule, but you're just going to be under the same exact governing structure that Israel is under.

Even little kids, you don't want them with other kids sometimes because of the way those kids behave. I think that some of the appeal of an intentional community, especially like a whites-only one, is guys who were told and bludgeoned and vilified because they were white and because, well, that's what's contributing to social inequality, your white privilege, they realized that wasn't true.

And now there's all these competing explanations for what actually does make sense of these disparities. Why is there more crime in certain populations and more poverty and et cetera, et cetera? And if it's not privilege, if it's not that white people are bad, then what is it?

White people have been the foremost in opening their doors, even to immigrants from Muslim countries and refugees from Muslim countries where Muslim countries won't always step it up as much as European countries.

So, should we just be, as Europeans, broad we here, should we just be the doormat for the rest of the world? I mean, these are the kinds of questions that are going through the minds of, I think, some young men in particular who have been extra vilified during their life.

And so there's other explanations. It's religion. That's why there's disparities. It's genetics. That's why there's disparities. It's insert A, B, or C. And I think it's a complicated matrix. Different people are falling under different explanations.

And especially the more genetic you get, the more you're going to see the need for, I just got to be among people who share my genetics. And that's going to meet the threat. What we saw in Arkansas, even if the guy wasn't a grifter, I don't think that actually is the wise way to go.

I myself have a preference for the kind of community I want to live in and want my kids to grow up in and all that kind of thing, right? I want people to be able to communicate, to engage in commerce.

I want people to have similar social values. And obviously religion plays into this. And I want people to be invested in the ground underneath their feet so that they want to pass it on to their kids in the same way that they found it.

So that produces a tradition. I see shared experience as the main thing. And so in my preference, in my scheme, there is room for people who don't necessarily share genetics to be part of that. Now over time, naturally people in a region are going to be more similar.

So I look at modernity as a threat to the kind of community I want, the high trust, socially aligned community. And so this is one of the reasons you've heard me say on my show, like if you're living in an area and you feel like it's changed underneath your feet and you got to do the pioneer thing, maybe like you, you got to step out and for the good of your family, you know, maybe take a, take a look at what Ridge Runner is doing because their whole thing is integrate into this community over here.

It's not cloister off from the surrounding community. It's, we already have a high trust community that has some of the things you're looking for come and integrate into it. Hopefully at a, a scale that won't change that community, but we'll actually reinforce it.

That's to do it responsibly. That's the whole mindset. And I see that as actually a very responsible and conservative way of approaching that kind of a problem. You don't have Christian values around you anymore, and you used to, and they're pushing LGBT and well find a place that is securing itself against those things.

And then lend a hand. I don't believe that I have to do a genetics test through the door as people are entering necessarily, right? It's actually much more holistic and complicated and organic than that.

Another preference that I have is because white people have been so attacked as a, as a group, a very broad group. I do think in, ideally speaking, there needs to be a response to that. It's going to be some kind of political response, and it is going to mean that white people themselves have to see the threats and then sort of coalesce a shield against that threat.

That though is different than using whiteness as a central organizing principle for a community to be based on in a broad American context. Those are two different things. A lot of this is from my own experience, traveling and living different places.

There is vast differences between different groups of white people in the country. And to just put them in one bucket and say white would, I mean, there was differences at the foundation of this country and how much more now?

And so I'm a regionalist, I'm a localist, and my regionalism and localism conflicts with a flattening of whiteness to just sort of run roughshod over all these differences to just mean, well, similar genetics or similar European experiences.

I mean, Europe had two world wars the last century. There's a history here of them not, those countries not necessarily getting along. And so I'm much more likely to talk about Anglo-Protestantism. It's been a good bearing for us, a good anchor for us for most of our history.

And it's more specific than just white. But of course there is at a certain scale, a low scale, but there is a scale at which other people can be integrated into that if they can contribute to and value the arrangement that they are actually integrating into.

There's a scale at which it doesn't work though. And we have passed that scale in our immigration policy a long time ago. And that's one of the major problems. It's one of the, why immigration is such a big deal to me.

I've seen it change the area I live in, in vastly negative ways. I want to take you to South Africa for a moment. South Africa has a very small white population. And in South Africa, you have Boers and English.

There have been attempts at high trust communities. And there's one in particular that's actually very famous. It's basically a white zone community and it has lower crime and all the rest. And so people will use that as an example of say, well, that's what we want in the United States.

Their history is much different. Their context is much different. When they talk about white people in that context, they're talking about two groups who have grown out together that are much small. The scale is much more easy to integrate.

And they're not even all integrated. I mean, there's still a Boer specific party in South Africa that sees the unique things that our Boers have as, even in contrast to the English, as worthy of preservation.

On a scale in which you would think it would work better because it's so much smaller and they have a shared threat. There's still even differences there. But I think that that's much different than the United States, broadly speaking.

I actually had someone, I kid you not, someone from another country say that they were American because they were white, basically. And I'm like, no, you're not. That doesn't just get you to be an American.

What are you talking about? It's like, well, look at your first immigration act. I mean, look, white persons of good character. That's talking about the immigrants who are coming here at that time from a very specific part of the world in much lower numbers.

And obviously the United States changed. It was an external identifier back then. It's also an external identifier today. But the circumstances under which that was in force are not the same as the circumstances today.

So people bring up these historical examples. They'll bring up examples from other countries. But I think that you have to compare apples with apples. You have to look at the circumstances that exist in this country.

And in this country, the United States, there's vast territories out there where it's Swiss, German. You could even find enclaves of Ukrainians and Finnish and Italians and the descendants of Cavaliers and the descendants of the Scott Irish and the Appalachians and the descendants of the Puritans in the Northeast.

I mean, you have lots of areas you can go to and just be around white people. If that's what you're interested in, it hasn't gone away. It's still there. Prudence, I think, would dictate don't go cloister yourself off.

Don't go segment yourself off from all the other people, including white people. That's what this thing as Arkansas is doing. You're just going to get the ire of the people around you. And while I don't think Arkansas should do anything about this, they're not planning violence as so far as I know against other people.

I would just leave it alone. But you are risking bad relationships with the other quote unquote white people that you live around. So this is a prudence thing. You want to give your children, I believe, opportunities to succeed in the society in which they live, to integrate into that society, to be a part of it.

As Christians, especially, you want to be in the world, but not of the world. So you have to be in it. You have to actually be participating. And I think the prudence thing is that kind of a society just prevents you from doing that more.

There's a few communes I know of actually with different groups of people, not far from me. And that's exactly what happens. It creates a dynamic where there's not a lot of accountability. And you kind of stunt the growth of the children who end up growing up in it.

Yes, there's places that have changed. Yes, it's really hard when under your feet sometimes things have changed. Yes, you want to sort of stave that off somehow. But the best way you can stave that off is by participating in local politics, by getting involved as much as you can in the communities in which you live, and then seeing if it'll even take you nationally.

Put your efforts towards that. When you disqualify yourself at early stages, that makes it more difficult. If you're going to represent your people, and you love your people, and your people are Americans, or your people are New Yorkers, or your people are, to get more specific, part of this county, or your people, maybe you think of your people as it's people who share this genetic trait.

Even if that's what you think, then you have to go to your people. If you're in an urban setting, okay, what's happened is in these urban environments, the people who are high achievers, and oftentimes that also goes along with integrity.

People have more integrity too. It's not always the case, but oftentimes people who are more virtuous and also high achievers economically, once they are able to get out of that environment, they leave.

You have people, maybe from predominantly black areas in urban contexts, who when they get to a certain point, they leave because they're able to, and they'll go live among people who primarily or probably don't share the same genetic makeup that they do, but it's a safer environment, and it's where they want to live.

What this does, it creates basically a brain drain. It creates, it makes sure that those conditions just continue on in those urban environments. If you want the good of your people as a whole, if you want to pursue the best for your people, broadly speaking, whoever those people are, you have to try the best of your ability to be involved while protecting your family, but you have to be involved with your people.

I hope that makes sense. In the United States today, there's still segregation, and there will always be segregation in every human environment as long as humans are here on this earth. There's going to be differences between people.

That's just the human condition. People, even if the government doesn't impose it, people just choose to be with those who are like them because that's how people are, and that's a natural instinct that governments have to recognize.

The worst kind of thing has been to throw the door wide open to a country so that anyone can possibly come in. You are forced to make them a guest, so to speak, in your home environment with the resources that you've produced and your parents before you and your grandparents, and now you have to share that with people that haven't put any kind of stock in that.

That's because it's equality, because it's fairness. I get the kickback against that. I just don't see that a small kind of fringe community like the one in Arkansas is the solution to that at all. All these government Twitter accounts are pushing the idea that young people need to apply to work at ICE.

If you're someone who's got a stake in this country, and your family goes back, and you're proud of this country, it's not the time to cloister yourself off and put all your efforts into sequestering yourself off from society and just building a community for some niche group that won't likely survive that long.

You need to be putting your efforts into making sure the balance is not permanently tipped for the country that your grandparents have passed down to you. We have our work cut out for us in the communities in which we live.