No love in Leith.

*The following news article from The Daily Beast should give my friends in the republican party some reason for concern, and it should make them very leery of who they invite into their tent. (This is true for you dems as well.)

My fellow Negroes, I hope that Leith, North Dakota is not on your bucketlist of places to visit before you die. If it is, this might be a good time to take it off.

"When hate first arrived in rural Leith, North Dakota, late in the summer of 2012, denizens of the sleepy farming hamlet (pop. 24) barely took notice.

“At first I thought he was a quiet, keep-to-himself kind of guy,” recalls the town’s cowboy-mayor Ryan Schock in the documentary Welcome to Leith, an unsettling case study of one quintessentially democratic American conflict.

Bobby Harper, Leith’s sole African-American resident, remembers a stranger in a long coat coming around the neighborhood asking about land for sale.

Even Schock’s wife, Michelle, strolled over with a welcoming hello when that newcomer, a loner with glasses and wild silver hair, took up residency in Leith and started buying up plots of property around town.

It wasn’t until the ugliness of the outside world started to invade Leith’s city limits that locals realized who their new neighbor really was: Craig Cobb, the notorious white supremacist leader who’d been kicked out of Estonia and Canada and now had designs on turning Leith into his own personal Aryan utopia.

Cobb’s documented history of incendiary missives and advocacy of hate crimes against minorities had already landed him on the radar of concerned watchdog groups. When he put his plan in motion to bring fellow white supremacists to live in Leith in order to take over the town’s electoral vote and slowly establish a home base for white nationalism in the heart of North Dakota, critics and national media descended en masse to protest and bear witness.

The people of Leith, however, were hardly equipped to deal with their new problem neighbor. After all, folks move to Leith for the privacy—the antithesis of big-city living with its own endemic urban crowds and cultural conflicts. At first, Cobb justified his presence by invoking the American principle that would become the linchpin of his war with the townsfolk: Everyone has a right to live in peace. Even racists. Right?

With his constitutional rights protecting him under the law and several high-powered supremacist leaders and organizations behind him, Cobb mounted his Leith campaign by utilizing increasingly loud and antagonistic tactics against the townsfolk who opposed him, taunting and even doxxing his detractors." [More here]

Now, to be sure, Leith is not as large as the republican party. But I suspect that there are a lot more folks like Craig Cobb in that party right now.

It might be time for their leadership to start paying attention before, like the people of Leith, they wake up one day not knowing what hit them. Or, more appropriately, who infiltrated them.  

*Pic from Sundance  Film Festival.