FIELD NOTES #4: BLUT UND BODEN 

Memphis, TN - Nov 5, 2025, 9:47 PM

I'm in the back of an Uber in Memphis with a Bass Pro Shops hat in my lap, heading to meet my buddy Cole at some dive bar because that's what you do after spending a full day embedded with some of the most hateful people you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to share oxygen with. I'll get to that in a bit. First, let's talk about Memphis. 

As a lifelong fan of Three Six, Evil Pimp, Tommy Wright III, Lil Wyte and Lord Infamous, I expected M-Town to be a hotbed of culture when I started kicking it there around 2018 - which it really isn't. Well, it kinda is if you're tapped in with the Black community that composes 63% of the city. I just happen to not be, and it's hard to make an introduction due to the extremely segregated nature of Memphis. This has continuously left me in the milquetoast company of caucasian young professionals from other parts of the mid-South, which would be ok if I wasn't psychically preparing to smoke ghetty green with Project Pat. 

Cole is cool, though. Before the pandemic, there was a punk bar called Lamplighter Lounge on Madison Avenue that we used to go to. It was decent, usually packed to the brim with tattooed train-hoppers headed to-and-from New Orleans. Woke street kids aren't as fun as juggalos as far as voluntary poverty is concerned, but I'll take folk punks over Patagonia robots any day. Apparently though, everything went downhill at the Lamplighter after the bar’s resident coke dealer got canceled. A similar thing happened with a great bar called CC Club in Minneapolis. So it goes - and they say Americans have no culture!

Cole said the new spot was called Louis Conneley’s, so that's where my Uber is headed to. I can't wait to see my dawg. I've spent the last 24 hours on a White supremacist compound in the literal middle-of-fucking-nowhere Arkansas, listening to lipless zoomers physically sword-fight each other while chanting about the pending “based groyper takeover” of the United States. 

I could get into the crunchy specifics of what else they said on-camera and how much it infuriates me to see the word 'based' so crudely stolen from our prophet Lil B, who was a messianic figure of positivity to the multicultural, non-P.C., antiracist, crime-positive urban Americans of a pre-gentrified reality. However, I didn't start releasing these notes as a way to spoil future Channel 5 videos. The goal behind these continuous entries is to give readers a glimpse into the wild, off-camera world of this Gonzo shit in a way that improves their lives. In that vein, I think that every Field Notes dispatch should have a lesson…

And my biggest lesson from this entire experience has been simple: the best stories are the hardest ones to get.

The more skittish an interviewee is about sitting down with you, the more off-camera bonding rituals you need to engage in before they permit you to press record, the further you must travel off the beaten path to physically locate your man; the better your piece of journalism will be. No one in the history of mankind who is truly safeguarding some juicy news material has ever taped a lavaliere mic to their chest and sat down for a three-camera interview on their own accord. Those who have, such as the Navy SEAL who claims to have killed Osama bin Laden, are either attention-obsessed freaks or product salesmen of some form. Usually, they’re both. 

But the real heavy hitters need to be courted. Push too hard, they'll smell desperation and ghost you. Act too aloof, they'll feel disrespected and move on or just retreat entirely. It's a delicate balance, and honestly, it sucks. But you can make it suck less by learning to take rejection on the chin and not letting this cold world turn you bitter. Keep it player. Hatch new plots. Stay in motion.

Things may fall through, but you’ve still got free will in this world. I’ve had elite interviewees back out twenty minutes before showtime and truly wanted to give up. Yet after a two-hour, aimless walk on the side of the highway that same night, a higher power seemed to shoot inspiration back into my veins. The next morning, I was back in motion. It’s about the long game. Even the most brutal losses fade from memory over time if you keep your foot on the gas. Chug espresso, listen to King Von and wake up at the crack of dawn every single day. Through sheer hustle, you’ll haunt the dreams of your enemies and gift your mother with an early retirement. Just learn to love pain and expect nothing. Alright, I think I’m going overboard here. Nobody asked for my unsolicited advice on love and war! This is about journalism, here.

The hard-to-score interview I’m talking about was conducted with Eric Orwoll, a Christian Neopagan who runs a whites-only commune in Arkansas that “welcomes only people with traditional views and European ancestry.”

***

Let me back up.

A few months back during the summer, we traveled to the small town of Hardy, Arkansas for a prime interview with Orwoll. He wasn't ready to let us near his community—he had to sus us out. He'd already been burned by the press. Sky News UK sent some reporter named Tom Cheshire out there, and the Brit got Orwoll on camera saying he was building a "fortress for the White race." The whole thing went viral and blew up internationally, drawing ire and condemnation from various civil rights groups. After that, Orwoll got paranoid about media and wouldn't let anyone visit the actual community aside from Nazi content creators like this kid named Hermes who harasses black women in Fort Lauderdale. Orwoll said he'd only meet us in Hardy, Arkansas in a dirt field behind the post office, which was over thirty minutes from his compound. 

Our first interview was a bit awkward. I had to extract decent soundbites while simultaneously remaining amicable enough to gain future access. I knew that an interview with Eric on it's own wouldn't constitute a solid Channel 5 video, so I was careful to avoid touchy subjects like "Jim Crow" as I nodded through his tangents about Roman architecture and the genetic impossibility of Plato emerging from subsaharan Africa.

For the first half of the interview, Eric's guard was up, even as I tried my best to relate to his struggle with his own White identity.

"Growing up, I was told I was English, German, Polish, Scottish," Orwoll said. "But I never knew what any of the really meant."

"Same here dude. That's why I'm going to Ireland soon, it would be cool to know where my family came from."

I then brought up my endangered languages series and mentioned our documentation of Texas German, Cajun French, all other dying European dialects —to show I understood what he meant by cultural preservation. Still, it wasn't striking the right chord with Eric. To him, this wasn't some campy matter that could be solved through a Guinness-and-potato field trip to the old country or a revamped linguistics program.

"Listen man, the White American race is on the verge of extinction and we must do something about it before it's too late."

"Yeah, I hear you brother."

Boom. Those five words worked like magic. Orwoll instantly opened up. He told me about going to Eastman School of Music in New York after attending up in a mostly-Mexican high school in La Mirada, California. He explained that he began dabbling in "right-wing identitarian circles" after college and became radicalized by his own followers after Elon's purchase of Twitter. "My own comment section in many ways persuaded me that this stuff is more important than I was giving credit to," he said.

He went on about World War II history being "Allied propaganda" and how "the victor writes the history." He explained that slavery wasn't that bad in context—"everybody practiced slavery," European civilization put an end to it, in fact. 

At some point I asked him for his top five Black people. Without hesitation: "Tommy Sotomayor, Louis Farrakhan, the Hodge Twins, and Jesse Lee Peterson." This is apparently what passes for racial tolerance in Orwoll's world—a list of Black conservatives and a separatist leader who also thinks the races shouldn't mix.

He explained the screening process that prospective residents must go through. Apparently, one guy recently submitted a "perfect application" but was found to have a Colombian wife, leading to instant disqualification. "That kind of thing is contrary to our values as an association." The goal is fifty families. Big families. All white.

At the end of our interview, I shook his hand, looked him in the eye and gave an all-star closer.

"Well dude, I got to say, I'm convinced. This sounds like a great thing overall."

"Thanks." he replied. "Come back this Fall and I'll show you around."

Bingo! Liam set the date shortly after.

For more context, this "great thing" Orwoll runs is technically an LLC called Return to the Land—RTTL for short. "We exist to facilitate communities for people of European heritage who want to preserve that heritage," he explained.

The barely-developed, 160-acre plot that he's bought for the RTTL community isn't technically a residential development. It's a commercially zoned plot of land wherein each resident is entitled to a set of acreage that correspondents to their share in the company. For example, if you pay Eric for a 6% share in RTTL, he will entitle you to a 26-acre allotment for homesteading purposes. Critics say this is designed to circumvent the Fair Housing Act, but Orwoll claims it's just freedom of association. "No one has found an issue legally speaking with what we're doing because we've been very careful to obey the law," he said. You buy a share in the company, which gives you an allotment of land. Then you're on your own—trailer, cabin, plumbing, electricity, whatever.

He likes to call it an "intentional community," but the talk of returning to the land reminds me of a course I took in college about the rise of the Third Reich. I can't hear Orwoll advocate for a "return to the land" without thinking of a German phrase: Blut und Boden. Blood and Soil.

The Nazi Minister of Food and Agriculture, Richard Walther Darré, wrote a 1930 manifesto called Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (A New Nobility of Blood and Soil). He argued that racial purity came from hereditary peasant stock. Cities corrupted people, the soil kept bloodlines pure. Heinrich Himmler, who went to college for agriculture, loved this philosophy so much that he made it SS policy.

I don't know if Orwoll has read Darré. It would be really bizarre if someone so well read hadn’t. Either way, what he's doing is textbook Nazi shit, regardless of how he wants to frame it.

***

A few months after our first encounter with Eric, we found ourselves back in the Ozarks, barreling through the crisp night air in rental car—me, Liam, Vader, and Ethan.

It only took us a few minutes to get pulled over. L.A. driving has permanently changed my perception of speed and reality. The sheriff who walks up is pure Arkansas: bald, silver goatee, head with that vascular quality you see in men who've spent decades enforcing speed limits and nursing quiet rage.

"Hey man," he says, leaning into the window. "You know you're going a little bit fast."

Somehow, we talk our way out of the ticket. But then his eyes drift to the back seat. Tripods jutting out. Camera bags everywhere.

"What's up with all that camera stuff?"

"We're documentary filmmakers," Ethan says.

"Oh yeah? What are y'all filming around Hardy?"

The car goes quiet. That special kind of silence that only police questioning can elicit from a group. They're all looking at me now. Do we blow our cover?

I tell him. "We're going to cover the all-white community. We’re going to interview Eric Orwoll, the leader of it."

The sheriff pauses. "Oh man, for real? I've never met that individual in person, but you know, I've heard a lot about him."

Then he says: "Thank y'all for really putting a spotlight on it. Keep putting a spotlight on it."

We spend the next thirty minutes in the car debating what the fuck that meant. Was it a warning? Endorsement? Does he want us to expose them so they leave? Publicize them so they grow? 

I still don't know.

***

The visit itself—I'll spare you most of the details because the footage will speak for itself. But I'll say this: these were some of the most lame groyper fucking incel wannabe alpha males I've ever met in my entire life. Just guys oozing with hatred. A truly sorry collection of genetic material masquerading as the master race.

They've got about forty members, mostly Gen Z and millennials. They're homesteading, building cabins, talking about expansion into Missouri. There's this whole mythology they've built around themselves—pioneers, protectors, the vanguard of the white race. What Darré would have called the "new nobility".

It's pathetic and sad. Everyone deserves community, but this was one built entirely on negativity and the fear of a Black planet.

After Eric left, we ended up side-barring with a 25-year-old kid named Johnathan who I actually kind of liked. We were able to connect through our mutual disgust of performative white liberalism. And then he says it.

"I think people who have mixed-race babies are worse than gay people. They should be jailed. And those who refuse to be jailed should choose between the death penalty or deportation to Africa.” 

I had to leave after that. There's a limit to what I can stomach, and that was it.

Which is how I found myself in this Uber in Memphis, still disgusted. Not just by what he said, but by the fact I had to spend months of my life building trust with this dude to pull off the story. The last time I felt like I needed a post-game shower was after my interview with Tranq Brothers in Kensington. This felt even worse.

And I keep coming back to the sheriff's words: "Keep putting a spotlight on it."

When I asked Orwoll about the Sky News coverage, I remember he said it had been "relatively positive"— and that "they're effectively advertising for us." The international outrage was only a recruitment tool. So what was the sheriff asking me to do?

Maybe it doesn't matter. I take solace in the fact that I can almost guarantee his community will fail. At least, I hope.

Cole just texted. He's at the bar. I'm almost there.

AC