While the economy in North Dakota has boomed in recent years due to the discovery of oil in the miles of shale beneath the state, business in Leith has been in decline for the better part of a century. So when officials in April 2012 noticed that one man was quickly buying up abandoned properties in what had become close to a ghost town high on the Great Plains, it was strange.
“I didn’t have a clue who the guy was until he showed up. All I know is he bought that house sight unseen, $5,000 cash, and had no idea what it looked like, where it was, other than he knew the directions to get to Leith,” Leith Mayor Ryan Schock, a farmer who has lived here all his life, told Hatewatch.
That strange man was Paul Craig Cobb, 61, a bearded neo-Nazi who moved into a ramshackle two-story house without running water, and quickly began buying properties around Leith, population 19. According to county tax records that were first obtained by Hatewatch, Cobb has since purchased more than a dozen lots for a few hundred dollars each, mostly from landowners who live elsewhere in the country.
Cobb’s endgame is clear. Last year, on the white supremacist online forum Vanguard News Network (VNN), he announced his intentions to build an all-white bastion of racists in North Dakota “post haste.” The grandiose plan ends with white supremacists and neo-Nazis taking over the county government, and he has even said he hopes to rename Leith “Cobbsville.”
Cobb’s plan in Leith is to build a Pioneer Little Europe –– an idea long favored on the racist right as a way to escape what is seen as a multiculturalist agenda at work in larger and more racially diverse cities. First proposed in a 2001 pamphlet by H. Michael Barrett, the vision is to consolidate white residents in existing cities and towns and create all-white enclaves. Northwestern states including Montana, Idaho, and now North Dakota, have historically been considered appealing places to start because of lack of racial diversity.
According to the most recent U.S. Census data, 90% of the population of North Dakota is white. That increases to 97% in Grant County, where Cobb has settled.
Already some of the most active white supremacists and neo-Nazi leaders in the country have come calling.
How cute, he's going to name it after himself. Why, was "Hitler's Asshole" already taken?
Color me confused, but if an area is already 97% white isn't that ALREADY an "all-white bastion?"
You know its people like this that make me regret my skin color.
Well at least now we know where to send Obama's atheist ACORN army next.
why hit on ND? do you think we are stupid here, or alaskans or what? Of course we notice. an alaskan hitting on ND? true, like alaska our politicians are crazy regressives, but why pick on the people?
ReplyDeleteChill. Don't take it personally if the shoe doesn't fit. I grew up in the Heart of Dixie, and still live close enough to drive down a few times each year, so I've heard more disparaging remarks just in the past week than you've heard in a lifetime about ND.
DeleteAfter all, it's not ME or YOU that others are referring to when they paint with such a broad brush in pointing out a particular behavior of some. In fact, you can be the reason that someone realizes that all of the folks from your area are not homogeneous in racism or cultural ignorance.
I used to be more defensive until I realized that the ignorance on someone else's part that they show by using anecdotal evidence to speak about an entire group is not something that is worth getting frazzled about.
Incidentally, one of my closest friends that we get together for a few days usually 3-4 times a year to play golf, hunt, go sailing or deep sea fishing, is a great guy that grew up and went to college in ND. He's a country boy at heart and has taken us pheasant hunting on his family's land up in ND. They're not a bunch of hick racists or anything like that. They're all educated but just as damn friendly as the people I grew up around. My friend, Mike, went on to grad school and has been in the defense sector (military, govt, private, and now quasi-) for over 25 years now, with security clearance at a higher level than I even know at this point, but he spends 6-8 days per month at the Pentagon briefing Generals and sometimes full-bird Colonels on things that we're not privy to most of the time until a few years later when they're declassified.
It's interesting that he never had a class with a black person until graduate school, and there were zero black kids in his graduating high school class. But he's never been racist that I've seen. He just said that everything outside ND was like a foreign land when he was growing up there playing 8-man football, and looking at a Time Magazine was about as close as they got to cultural diversity.
Incidentally, when we visited ND the first time, WE were shocked at the fact that no one there, including his family members still living in the area nor his neighbors nor the locals that we hunted with--no one-- bothered to lock the doors of their home or cars, and they often left the keys in the vehicles for convenience. That struck me as odd, but thinking about it later made me condider maybe wanting to live in that area one day. I guess I'm just getting older, huh?
Relax, ND's got a lot more good people than just those that no one wants to be associated with in any area of the country. Every area has its own bigots and kooks, and we needn't be defined by them.
Waiting for Sarah to denounce the Neo-Nazi's too. (No, I'm not holding my breath).
ReplyDeleteHe clearly hasn't been to Europe in a long, long time...
ReplyDeleteThere have been schemes in the very rural parts of Oregon, too. Everyone should check every ballot before voting. It is too easy to take over things like water districts, school boards, cemetery districts, etc. because no one is concerned about who is elected.
ReplyDeleteThe Convergence of Glenn Greenwald and Rand Paul’s “Southern Avenger”
ReplyDeleteMessengers are actually pretty important
In the middle of a pretty fascinating rant about Bruce Fein (who is acting as Lon Snowden’s lawyer, Lon being Edward’s father) on NSFW, I saw something that actually made me lose some more respect for Greenwald, which I didn’t think was possible. His associations with the racist Pauls is pretty bad, but they at least are part of an actual power structure and you can make a case for working with them on legislation.
But the article, rather casually, revealed that Glenn Greenwald had been a speaker on something fatuously named The Young American Liberty Tour “with three civil liberties experts,” titled “The War on Terrorism, Civil Liberties, and the Constitution’.”
That’s a lot of liberty.
The other two experts were that selfsame Bruce Fein, a weird perpetual GOP sleazeball, and Jacob Hornberger, who thinks the US was better off before the Civil War.
The real 5-alarm bell-ringer, though, was the moderator, Jack Hunter, the goddamn luchador of the losers, the Southern Avenger.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/42436_The_Convergence_of_Glenn_Greenwald_and_Rand_Pauls_Southern_Avenger
I guess you can do that, Mr. Cobb, but don’t ask the rest of us to help you. “You don’t get fruit cup.”
ReplyDeleteYet Another Misleading Guardian Report: NSA Guidelines “Not Updated for 30 Years”
ReplyDeleteThe difference between “all” and “some”
The headline for this new story from Guardian writer Dan Roberts is … I hope you’re sitting down … highly misleading:
US Surveillance Guidelines Not Updated for 30 Years, Privacy Board Finds.
The subheading continues the deceptive theme:
Privacy watchdog points out in letter to intelligence chiefs that rules designed to protect Americans are severely outdated
Wow, that sure sounds like the NSA’s whole rulebook is 30 years out of date. I can feel the outrage growing, growing… but then I remember I should probably read the whole article before I blow a gasket because it’s the Guardian, and sure enough, tossed off in the fifth paragraph, well below the fold, we find:
It said the board had “learned that key procedures that form the guidelines to protect ‘information concerning United States persons’ have not comprehensively been updated, in some cases in almost three decades, despite dramatic changes in information use and technology”.
That’s right, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was not complaining about the whole thing being three decades old — just “some cases.”
The Guardian somehow fails to let you in on this little detail, but the board was specifically criticizing the Reagan-era executive order 12333, which has never been superseded by newer legislation.
And it’s a valid complaint in some ways, but this one executive order is a long, long way from being the entirety of the NSA’s domestic surveillance guidelines as the Guardian clearly wants you to believe.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/42435_Yet_Another_Misleading_Guardian_Report-_NSA_Guidelines_Not_Updated_for_30_Years
Don't know why he's bothering. Once you leave Fargo you're in one of the most racist backward states in the union.
ReplyDelete"Hitler's Asshole" is already taken (Rush Limbaugh), but "Hitler's left testicle" might be up for grabs.
ReplyDeleteMSNBC
ReplyDeleteThe ED show nationalised this bigot today.
racism is all around us.
racism has to end.
White persons are becoming the minority in this country.
DIVERSITY IS THE ALL AMERICAN WAY.