A Home Where The White Supremacists Roam

Larry Kurtz, the gadfly of the South Dakota blogosphere, frequently ends his posts or comments with "Rewild the West." Leith, North Dakota is discovering the downside to "rewilding." Paul Craig Cobb, a white supremacist has been buying up land in Leith in an effort to create a white supremacist enclave. The community has fewer that thirty residents including one African-American

According the New York Times, Cobb has given the abandoned creamery that he purchased to the National Socialist Movement. Cobb claims that four other white supremacists have purchased land in the town. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that April Gaede, who had promulgated a similar plan for Kalispell Montana, owns property in the community.

Talking Points Memo reports that Cobb has transferred property to Tom Metzger, former Grand Wizard of Klu Klux Klan and founder of the White Aryan Resistance. Metzger observes that plans like Cobb's don't work and indicates Cobb is taking the wrong approach:

That doesn’t mean he’s any closer to enacting his plan. Metzger said he likes Cobb but that declared plans for white enclaves never work and that he will not be joining Cobb in Leith.

“I think it’s better just to have people move in quietly, have a job, operate a regular daily life and get along with their neighbors,” he said. “I wouldn’t go into a town pushing my weight around.”

The New York Times reports Cobb may not expect his plan to succeed:

It is difficult to tell whether Mr. Cobb wants or expects his vision for Leith to succeed.

Although he said that four fellow white nationalists have bought or acquired some of his plots, he said he did not know if or when they would be moving to the town, nor would he push the issue on them.

The Times report also shows Cobb to be something of a raconteur:

In rapid-fire speech, Mr. Cobb cuts through a vast trove of facts and thoughts in his head, inevitably veering toward racial slurs. But he maintained a soft, calm tone, and was friendly when chatting with a black reporter who knocked on his door this week. He said he admired Louis Farrakhan because “he organizes people and they’re for themselves.”

But in that interview he also said that he hoped his plans in Leith would “excite” white people and “give them confidence because we’re being deracinated in our own country. We’ve been very, very tolerant about these major sociological changes.”

His beliefs began developing at an early age, he said — he read Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” when he was 11. To hear him tell it, he has had a colorful, nomadic life that has brought him face to face with James (Whitey) Bulger (the mob boss piloted the tugboat he rode to boarding school in Boston) and Barack Obama (he claims to have driven the future president in his taxi in Hawaii in the early 1980s). 

It's also entirely likely that Cobb has a perverse sense of humor and hopes to change the name of the town to Hitler so that people traveling from the west will see the road sign for Heil, North Dakota and a few miles later see one for Hitler.

When Kurtz refers to "rewilding," he is of course advocating a form of the buffalo commons. Even if such rewilding is the best option, there will be a return to the Wild West before the West is "rewilded." That period opens the door to people like Cobb. Even if Cobb doesn't succeed, others will certainly try. Both Dakotas have dozens of towns with cheap property that an enterprising white supremacist, drug dealer, or cultist can purchase. They may be successful because they will have patients and not love publicity as Cobb seems to.

A Minor Musing: Small Town Roots Edition

I've put off reading Rod Dreher's biography of his late sister, The Little Way of Ruthie Lemming for two reasons. First, I have a low threshold for sentimentality, and I find it difficult to believe that a book about a woman who taken by cancer can avoid being overly sentimental. Second, it's about Dreher's return to the South. Something bothers me that nearly every cultural treatment of small towns seems to involve the South. When's the last time a film, TV series, or country song was set in rural Montana?

Still his discussion how smaller communities can provide roots applies to most rural communities. His admissions about the need to be rooted in community and his difficulty setting down roots resonate.

And because I can, let's add some John Mellancamp to get the morning started.

Dreher video via Andrew Sullivan

A Minor Musing About Community, Politics, Literature, And Darn Near Everything

Politics, literature, and small town life sometimes intersect

Writing a book review of the life and death of a small town cancer victim, Yuval Levin channels Thornton Wilder

. . . beyond our petty vanities and momentary worries, beyond arguments and ambitions, beyond even principles and ideals, there is a kind of gentle, caring warmth that is really what makes life worth living. It is expressed through the words and acts of people who rise above themselves, but it seems to come from somewhere deeper. Maybe it’s divine, maybe it isn’t, but it’s real, and it effortlessly makes a mockery of a lot of what goes by the name of moral and political philosophy, and especially of the radical individualism that is so much a part of both the right and the left today. And it’s responsible for almost everything that is very good in our very good world. If I had to define what conservatism ultimately means for me, it would be the preservation and reinforcement of the preconditions for the emergence of that goodness in a society of highly imperfect human beings. But politics is of course only one very crude way to strengthen and protect those preconditions

Wilder, author of the play Our Town, one of the great depictions of simple life in a small town, has the Stage Manager say,

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.

Reviewing the same book as Levin, Nebraska native Josh Green admits to a bit of cognitive dissonance that many probably share

I don't like my hometown. But I do love it, because it - in its own infuriating way - taught me the most important lesson in life: you haven't grown up until you care about someone else more than yourself.

Heidi Marttila-Losure's seems to have undertaken the same sort introspection; she shares her desire to enjoy simple pleasures:

I absolutely chose to live here. Why? Because I appreciate the beauty here, the amazing "sky theater." And because of the sense of community and belonging I feel here. Part of that is nostalgia--I love the stories about the festivals, dances and common work that happened here years ago. But I also feel a calling to do as much as I can to shore up that community spirit and pride of place.

None of the above writers, however, successfully get to the crux of the matter: how can the crude instrument of politics best be used to keep young people make a living in the small towns so that they will be able to preserve the "goodness," love," "caring," and "festivals, dances and common work"?