For almost 30 years Billy Joe Roper Jr. has been a voice of militant white nationalism. Once a rabble-rousing street activist, his latest venture is focused on attracting white families to an isolated region of Arkansas. Part of what he calls the Ozarkia project, Roper is building a network of National Socialist supporters he hopes will weather a coming cataclysmic war between the races.
His journey in the white nationalist movement, by his own telling, included a youth spent as a racist skinhead, leading to a quick but stalled rise inside one of the country’s largest and most influential neo-Nazi groups of the late 20th century, National Alliance.
After a failed takeover bid, Roper left to form his own group, White Revolution, while eventually converting to the militant and antisemitic religion of Christian Identity, which views Jews as literally the spawn of the devil. Roper’s current group, the Shieldwall Network (SWN), was founded to assist in the building of Roper’s segregationist, whites-only community in Middle America. SWN’s Lambda symbol and black uniforms were once a frequent sight at far-right protests in Arkansas before the pandemic, though their public appearances have mostly waned since.
Roper often defends his words and actions by saying they are lawful, yet he has repeatedly claimed over the years that all non-white races across the globe should be wiped out, and views carving out a whites-only country as the first step in that process.
“Ultimately, I’m a non-white extinctionist,” Roper said on a live stream in May 2021 with Christopher Alan Pohlhaus, a former US marine who runs the neo-Nazi organization Blood Tribe.
Screen capture of a live stream featuring Christopher Alan Pohlhaus (left) and Billy Roper (right), May 2021. (Source: Bitchute)
“Every non-White on the planet has to become extinct,” Roper said in an interview with Blood and Honour Radio in 2005. “We need to remove these minor-league amateur races out of the game, and refine the playoff brackets a bit, if you get my meaning. The whole world is ours, and the only part of the earth that non-Whites should inherit is however much it requires to cover them.”
Convinced that the the U.S. is heading for a total collapse, Roper, who has been a neo-Nazi for decades, has turned his sights on building an all-white community in the Ozarks.
Shieldwall & Ozarkia
Ozarkia is an informal term used to describe a region encompassing north-central Arkansas and parts of Southern Missouri. Roper cites the secluded nature of the area and the region’s large European-descent demographics as what drove him to the area. He has repeatedly boasted that the region is located far from major highways, large urban areas, and coastal regions, while being overwhelmingly white, conservative, and connected by contiguous borders.
Roper’s belief is that the United States is destined for “balkanization,” where the country will break into factionalized splinter states as the economy collapses and social cohesion breaks down. Roper’s view is that the split will occur along racial lines without the liberalizing force of the United States government. This will have a domino effect throughout Europe as well, as far-right political parties are destined to gain power. He has written about the breaking up of the United States in great detail, including in a book of collected essays called “The Balk” in March 2017.
A screen capture of Billy Roper taken from a video on the Ozarkia Project’s website. (Source: Ozarkia.org)
The text, which doubles as a pitch for his Ozarkia project, describes how Roper feels “hopeful” about the eventual collapse as the only way to prevent the “extinction” of white people.
“Blame the manipulative Jews who use their ownership of the news and entertainment media to promote white genocide,” the book reads. “Blame every White man you know who won’t speak up for his people. They’re the reason your legs are cramping and your lungs are burning. Let it turn. Let it fuel you. Let it drive you. Let it bring you home to Ozarkia. You’re on your way to New America.”
His aims for the region fit into Roper’s eschatological vision of the future, one marked and influenced by his Christian Identity (C.I.) beliefs, that forecasts an unavoidable violent battle between the races. Christian in name only, C.I. is a radical religion founded on concepts of divine white supremacy that emerged in the U.S. at the start of the last century. At the height of its popularity in the 1980s and 90s, followers had built compounds and closed communities typically organized around a local C.I. church or pastor.
Ozarkia is organized differently than its C.I. predecessors, which often included multiple houses or dwellings on a single property. Ozarkia’s community is a network of privately owned properties that have voluntarily joined into Roper’s scheme.
The project is organized under the Shieldwall Network (SWN), which Roper started in 2017 with the goal of laying the foundation of a white ethnostate. Its first years of operation were primarily spent on the protest scene near Roper’s home in Arkansas.
Roper and his crew would organize protests and antagonize their opponents and counter protesters. In one instance, the SWN attended a 2019 ceremony for Holocaust remembrance in Arkansas, chanting “six million more,” a reference to the number of Jewish people killed during the Shoah. The SWN website was also used to target Roper’s perceived enemies, as in 2018 when it released the names and employers of people Roper claimed belonged to the “Central Arkansas Democratic Socialists of America.”
Members and associates of SWN have been connected to acts of violence. In 2019, three SWN members assaulted a gay man they had lured to their Atkins, Arkansas, home over a dating application. One of the men, Julian Calfy, had been convicted of planning a school shooting when still a teenager. In 2017, another SWN member, Jacob Scott Goodwin, was arrested and charged in the beating of a Black man, DeAndre Harris, during the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The rally saw clashes between massive crowds of neo-Nazi protesters and counter protesters. One anti-racist protester, Heather Heyer, was killed by a white supremacist who ran his vehicle into the crowd.
On the day of Goodwin’s guilty verdict in May 2018, Roper wrote on his blog that “Jacob Goodwin was found guilty of malicious wounding last night by a majority nonWhite [sic] female jury in a mock trial in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was, after all, May Day, the date on which Communists celebrate.”
A Change in Tactics
Roper has said that SWN no longer holds regular protests nor performs activism like mass postering or flyering, as to not upset the local population.
“Our job isn’t to red pill normies,” Roper said during a February 2025 speaking appearance on 1488 Radio, a frequent conference call between white nationalist organizers and influencers hosted on X, formerly known as Twitter. It is to “get white nationalists to move here.”
The size of Roper’s collective is not known and he is deliberately vague about its membership. The full vetting process is obscured, but qualifications include being heterosexual and of all white ancestry, not having any non-white dependents, and with no felonies involving women and children.
Several individuals purporting to belong to the SWN and to be taking part in the Ozarkia Project maintain social media accounts on X, though there are few insights into the total number of participating families and properties. One picture posted to Roper’s X account on April 21, 2025, the day after Adolf Hitler’s birthday, shows more than 20 people, including some that appear to be children, standing in front of a burning swastika. In a comment on the post on X, Roper said the group had “grown so big that we can’t fit everyone into a single picture.” In a description of the post on Instagram, Roper adds “this picture does not show everyone, and all the kids who attended.” On other occasions he’s claimed the “tribe” has dinners that include “50 to 60 people.”
An image posted to Billy Roper’s X account on April 2025. (Source: X).
Roper has also claimed that they store enough food to last for six months. Other times reporting to be carrying out militia training to prepare for the coming conflict. SWN has also, according to Roper, organized their own “Active Club” which practices combat sports and strength training. The Active Club was developed by violent white nationalist Robert Rundo, who created a movement of independent far-right training clubs that share a similar structure and aesthetic, organizing locally to train mostly radicalized young men how to fight and produce propaganda that is shared over a network of social media accounts on platforms such as Instagram, Telegram, and X. Rundo has stated that the Active Clubs are akin to the “minutemen in the early stages of the revolutionary war,” and are bound together by a “leaderless resistance.”
To promote his racist homesteading project, Roper appears on a variety of alternative media, particularly live streamers where he uses his extensive connections built over more than 20 years of neo-Nazi activism, rubbing shoulders with some of the most violent American white supremacists of the last decades. This includes a correspondence with David Lane, the co-founder of the neo-Nazi terrorist group The Order; Richard Butler, a C.I. pastor who led America’s “first truly nationwide terrorist network” Aryan Nations; and a rogue’s gallery of other names of significance from late American 20th century white supremacy that Roper claims as his bona fides.
A screen capture of a video and image posted by Billy Roper on the social media platform X while at the a shooting range on April 28 (left) and 29 (right), 2025. (Source: X)
Roper stopped releasing podcasts and making posts to social media for most of 2021 and 2022. Since returning to public life in 2023, he’s racked up an impressive number of live stream appearances with modern neo-Nazi influencers. This has included individuals like Christopher Alan Pohlhaus, leader of the neo-Nazi Blood Tribe, and Jon Minadeo II, the founder of the racist and antisemitic Goyim Defense League. Minadeo relocated to Arkansas in 2024, and he and Roper have acknowledged having had contact. The relationship has reportedly soured as Minadeo has become more overtly anti-Christian (he was previously a follower of C.I.) and was never a part of the Ozarkia Project or SWN.
Beliefs that Animate Roper’s Worldview
The inevitable balkanization of the United States of America is an essential piece of Roper’s worldview. It motivates his need to create what he sees as the foundational colony of a future ethnostate in Arkansas, and prepare for civil war. In a 2024 video titled Civil War is Coming, where are you going?, Roper stands in a cemetery dedicated to soldiers who died in the American Civil War. “The next one is going to be much worse. Millions, 10s of millions will die,” he implores.
Roper has made repeated references to being an “accelerationist.” This mindset, also referred to as “militant accelerationism,” is the belief that the inevitable collapse of modern civilization and liberal democracy can be hastened through the increasing of pressure on societies social divisions. This can be accomplished, in part, through acts of terrorism and violence.
Following this philosophical worldview, Roper encouraged people living inside of “multi-ethnic” areas to spread narratives about fraudulent voting in the 2020 election, no matter who won, in order to provoke increased division, seeing radicalization from any side of the political spectrum as being beneficial for moving toward a collapse.
“We’re trying to speed this up so it can happen now,” Roper said about societal collapse on his since discontinued live stream, “The Roper Report,” in 2020. “We’re not a bunch of [civic nationalist] Boomers hoping to die peacefully in bed before anything actually happens while they’re using up their kid’s inheritance. We’re wanting it to happen on our watch.”
“I don’t want to miss all the fun, to be honest with you.”
In the same episode, Roper predicted the COVID-19 lockdowns would increase social divisions, and generally promote distrust in the government. (He also likened vaccines to the “mark of the beast.”)
Another significant factor in this perspective is Roper’s adherence to the Christian Identity (C.I.) philosophy, which he was converted to by way of his ex-wife, Stacey, around 2010. While Roper stresses that there are a variety of different religions involved in Ozarkia and that there is a ban on “religious infighting,” prospective members are told they cannot be “anti-Christian.”
C.I. adherents believe that only white people are the descendants of the biblical first man, Adam. Jews are part of a separate lineage where Eve was seduced by the serpent in the Garden of Eden, a representation of Satan. Therefore Abel’s father is Adam and Cain’s is Satan. A core of C.I. belief is the divine parentage of the white race, and the white race only, and Satan is the father of the Jews.
Through the distortion and selective interpretation of Christian doctrine, C.I. preachers have constructed biblical justification for an anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ+, and antisemitic worldview. When the Second Coming of Christ occurs on an unknown divine timeline as a war between good and evil, C.I. maintains the apocalypse will bring about direct militant conflict between the races. Some C.I. congregations view the end times as having already started and believe they must take an active role as members of God’s army.
To this end, some C.I. followers and affiliates have committed a range of criminal activity.
Of the three SWN members arrested for assault in 2019, one is reported to have a tattoo of the symbol of the “Phineas Priesthood,” an ideology written by a C.I. follower encouraging “Phineas action,” which can refer to killing those deemed in violation of God’s law, including Jews, non-whites, and multiculturalists. A group of four men in the 1990s who also used the name Phineas Priesthood carried out a series of robberies and bombings in the Pacific Northwest.
Billy the Kid
When talking about his history in the white power movement, Roper often jokingly quotes musician Lady Gaga, telling people he was “born this way.” He has claimed that his father, Billy Joe Roper Sr., and grandfather were both Klansmen. By Roper’s telling he grew up in Conway County, Arkansas, as part of a household that actively taught its children about a need to keep races segregated, but often laments that his early life was not antisemitic enough.
“As a teenager, I did have a challenge because even the Klan was not woke on the [Jewish Question],” he told 1488 Radio in February 2025.
Roper tells the story of his early life placing him on an inevitable trajectory towards being a movement leader, claiming to be running a small band of racist skinheads while still a teenager. He also often alludes to an attempt at a normal life, working as a high school teacher and obtaining a masters degree in history. A prolific author of fiction and non-fiction, Roper’s first book, PaleoAmerican Ethnic Diversity: Ancient Europeans in North America, is alleged to be a published version of his masters thesis. In the book, he argues that white people originally populated North America until being supplanted by Indigenous people.
“It is even probable that current evidence,” Roper wrote in the book, “if considered in context, almost certainly reveals a pre-’Indian’ Caucasoid population which may have experienced gradual genocide and dispossession at the hands of Asiatic Mongoloid invaders who then subsumed the remaining Caucasoid population into their own.”
While still attending Arkansas Tech University, Roper joined the National Alliance, an American white supremacist organization founded by William Luther Pierce, a former physicist who built a following as a hate leader. For decades, Pierce remained one of the most influential white nationalists in the United States. His book, The Turner Diaries, detailing a successful violent resistance against a tyrannical government controlled by the Jews, had a profound impact on violent extremism in the U.S., inspiring the guerrilla style bombings and robberies of groups like The Order and the deadly terrorist attack by Timothy McVeigh against the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Pierce’s books attracted Roper to National Alliance (NA) and he became a dues paying member in 1994.
With an early interest in online networking, Roper was brought to the NA’s West Virginia compound as a “deputy membership coordinator” in 2000, although he only reported to Pierce. He was on the front end of weaponizing the internet by using early internet news groups on platforms like Yahoo to reach a wider audience of like-minded racists. While he had some success organizing protests in Washington DC and the surrounding area for the group, Pierce’s death in 2002 saw Roper stage a failed takeover of National Alliance. He was removed from the group and moved to his home state of Arkansas to found an organization of his own, “White Revolution.” The purpose of the group was to unite disparate and sometimes opposed neo-Nazi factions together into a more cohesive and powerful movement. He spent 10 years never really achieving this goal and receiving more attention for the spectacle of the protests he hosted, rather than ideas he espoused.
Ever an optimist, Roper has staged several political campaigns, running for Governor of Arkansas in 2010 and U.S. President in 2012. After disbanding White Revolution in 2011, he joined Christian Identity Pastor Thom Robb’s Knights Party, a Ku Klux Klan group based in Arkansas. When this relationship ended, Roper started his own C.I. congregation, Divine Truth Ministries (DTM) in 2016 and then the “Shieldwall Network” in 2017. Roper served primarily as a propagandist and organizer, penning articles for the ministry’s website. No archives of the DTM’s website exist past 2017. N.
Roper continued his organizing under the banner of SWN. He appeared at protests against removing monuments to the Confederacy during this period, though did not attend the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” Charlottesville, Virginia, protests.
Burning Swastikas and Folk Music
Much of the image Roper paints of Ozarkia is of a bastion of land untouched by modern global forces and where his National Socialist beliefs are tolerated by the locals. The Ozarkia Roper presents on social media shows off regional events, festivals, and the incredible scenery of the landscape. He casts the community as the alternative to multicultural urban areas and his organization as a vanguard in preparing for an inevitable societal collapse.
A screen capture of image shared by Billy Roper on the social media platform X. (Source: X)
“Trump’s election has not unified the country,” Roper wrote on X in January 2025. “It has only deepened and widened the fault lines.”
Roper views President Trump as a conduit for hastening the fall of American society, where proper organizing and preparation will place him as a leader in an emergent white paradise. Roper justifies his leadership role partly through his long history with various far-right groups. Additionally, SWN’s stewardship of the Ozarkia project is described on its website as creating “the region’s largest, most experienced, and most successful seedbed ethno-state project.”
His Ozarkia Project did, however, recently gain some local competition.
Return to the Land (RTTL), a communal whites only enclave based a little over an hour from Roper in Ravenden, Arkansas, has been gaining popularity since it began in 2023. Set up as a limited liability corporation, individuals who pass admission requirements (no non-European religions, no LGBTQ+ people, and whites only), are invited to purchase shares in a private members association. These shares translate to lots where housing is built.
RTTL has received a large amount of traditional media coverage, something Roper supposedly now shies away from. It has drawn approximately 40 residents to its 150 acre parcel and claims to be planning an expansion into Missouri.
Roper has acknowledged RTTL when being interviewed by friendly live streamers, mainly disagreeing with the shared nature of the land, and occasionally picking arguments with its leaders on X, but overall is supportive of the project and other attempts to build segregationist communities elsewhere in the country.
Despite the bigoted and often ludicrous concepts Roper espouses, he has found a niche in the modern white supremacist movement as a link to more successful figures of the past. His message that ultimately non-whites will and should face extinction is inherently violent, and Roper has found a home for it among a variety of far-right networks and groups willing to listen. Roper may never lead the ethnostate he seeks to build, but he is getting his views into the ears of the next generation of potential race warriors.
