(Dobbs) “You want a white nation? Build a white town.”

Donald Trump is doing nothing to stop it.

“You want a white nation? Build a white town.”

That’s the solution for white nationalist Eric Orwoll, the co-founder of a whites-only community in the Arkansas Ozarks. “It can be done,” he said in an interview this past week. “We’re doing it.”

But the solution for what? For protecting his European identity, to hear Orwoll tell it. For protecting his culture from diversity. For protecting his race by keeping it separate so that white men aren’t “forced” to live with other races who have, thanks to a discredited racist view of genetics, “cognitive differences.”

Yes, this is real. It’s not 1965, it’s not 1865. It’s now.

Orwoll and others with his bigoted, antisemitic, homophobic mindset began two years ago building an off-the-grid settlement on about 160 acres that they call “Return to the Land.” They posted on X, "We started a Whites only community."

They speak with survivalist overtones. They don’t want blacks as their neighbors, they don’t want Jews, they don’t want gays. Not that anyone in their right minds from those groups would want to join their “private membership association” anyway. Not when Orwoll opines about issues like Nazism, claiming that judgements about Adolf Hitler are “one-sided” and inspired by “propaganda” from World War II. He says the second coming of Hitler won’t arrive unless people "do the work.”

“The work,” is separating the races.

In my lifetime, Orwoll and his ilk are far from the first Americans trying to take society back to the good old days of “separate but unequal” and “No Jews need apply.”

When the civil rights movement was going strong, I did stories in southern strongholds like Alabama and Mississippi about white families struggling to resist segregation by building their own swimming pools, their own community centers, their own non-public schools— they called them “private academies”— with “Whites Only” all but printed on their shingles.

But we can’t lay it all on the South.

I covered the beginning of busing to achieve racial integration and equal education in public schools in three cities: New Orleans, Louisville, and Boston. The demonstrations by whites in the two southern cities weren’t pretty, but the ugliest of all were the screaming protests in the northern city of Boston. It was 1974, and white kids were being bused by court order from their white neighborhood called South Boston to a black neighborhood called Roxbury, while black kids were being bused out of their ghetto and delivered to what had been an all white South Boston High School, best known as “Southie.”

Day after day when the busses pulled up, there were fights, there was a stabbing, rocks were thrown at the invading minorities, and the n-word flew through the air like hail. Eric Orwoll and his “Return to the Land” might have appealed to these racists.

I also did stories in the 1970s from western Washington State and the Idaho Panhandle, where The Order and The Aryan Nations and other hate groups set up shop to start their own white supremacist revolutions which would lead to an all white homeland. Some of their leaders wore coats and ties but the n-word for blacks and the k-word for Jews was a common part of their vocabulary. Orwoll’s settlement would have been right up their alley.

For about half a dozen years between my careers with two television networks, I even filled a time slot at the 50,000 watt Denver radio station KOA that had been the domain of Alan Berg, an ultra-liberal talk show host who was murdered by members of The Order in 1984.

What the killers wanted was a white nation, one where whites and minorities wouldn’t mix. Just like the people today at “Return to the Land.”

But by and large, while overt racism never disappeared, at least in the public eye it diminished. There have continued to be awful incidents, like the murders of nine black worshippers in 2015 at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, the oldest black church in the South. That’s the one where then-President Obama flew to Charleston afterward and sang Amazing Grace.

But in the bigger picture, blacks and whites— and Jews and gays and others from minorities once treated like dirt— have peacefully lived and worked and dined and played together for decades. The haters were relegated to the darkness.

Then along came Donald Trump.

It would be wrong to lay a resurgence of hate all on Trump. But I think he has played a role in normalizing hateful behavior and even legitimizing hateful Americans.

Remember after his first term when the president had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with antisemitic white nationalist Nick Fuentes? The man’s views about white supremacy were no secret. He once told a convention, “I love Hitler.”

Or Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017? That’s when a man rammed his car into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators protesting a so-called “Unite the Right” rally of white supremacists, killing a young woman named Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others. Asked at a news conference for his initial reaction, the president acted as if there was some kind of moral equivalence between the supremacists and the protesters, proclaiming that there “were very fine people, on both sides.”

By the way, his dinner guest Nick Fuentes was one of those “fine people” at the rally, on the side of the supremacists.

Or state legislatures across the country? That’s where the president is teaming up with right wing political forces to reverse the gains of the civil rights movement and make it harder again for minorities to vote. And where this year alone, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, almost 600 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced, which eclipses any other year on record. And it’s still only late July.

Or the president’s persistent drumbeat against diversity? Diversity has been a building block for this nation, but since his first day in the Oval Office when he signed an executive order banishing DEI in the military, he has done his best to make diversity, along with inclusion and equity, dirty words.

Or even the recently deceased wrestler Hulk Hogan? In a lewd sex tape involving Hogan, leaked by Gawker back in 2012, he told someone in the room that he was “a racist, to a point,” and punctuated it with the n-word. This is the man to whom Trump gave a prime time slot just before his own speech at the Republican National Convention last year. At the convention, after Hogan had anointed Trump as “a real American hero,” he ripped off his shirt to reveal a tank top emblazoned with "Trump Vance 2024.”

You’re known by the company you keep.

Eric Orwoll, the co-founder who speaks for “Return to the Land,” told an interviewer from the British newspaper The Independent that he might feel more comfortable in the America of the 17th Century “because I’m white and that’s the way this country was when my ancestors came there.” (In its article, The Independent did point out that he had forgotten to mention the Native Americans who were here long before his ancestors were.) Is it unlikely that the haters with whom Donald Trump rubs elbows, that maybe even Donald Trump himself, might say the very same thing?

Orwoll insists, “Americans have the right to freely associate and form intentional communities on whatever basis they choose.”

He says his lawyers tell him his settlement is exempt from such legislation as the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act, which prohibit discrimination based on race, color, religion, and a few other things. However, others have questions about his “private member association”— questions about its constitutional legality.

But the bigger question is, are we beginning to go backwards? When Americans who praise Adolf Hitler are invited to dine with the president, when the president himself echoes words and phrases as he has from the architect of Nazi Germany, when the president of the United States overtly places protected classes of American citizens into a kind of second class status, will there be more new communities like “Return to the Land” where, if “you want a white nation,” you will be welcomed with open arms?

It seems a natural outcome of where we are in America today. At the very least, Donald Trump is doing nothing to stop it.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net