Did Cobb or his strange little friend actually violate anyone's rights ?
Did Cobb or his little butt-buddy and the scary girlfriend there actually violate anybody's rights in Leith? If they did, this film didn't really show it. At one point, right before their arrest, they're seen walking down a driveway with their shotguns, after some people drive onto their property and call them names and are slow to leave when asked to. The movie seems to indicate that Cobb and whatshisname didn't trespass. And as a result of walking around with their shotguns, on their own property after this incident, they are arrested for "terrorizing."
I would be horrified to find my neighbors were white nationalist types, but my reaction would be to simply let them know that as I found their thinking repugnant, I would prefer to have no contact with them and then to DISCRETELY - not provocatively, keep an eye on them. See, this is America, and if someone wants to believe something weird, ugly and horrible, as long as they just want to sit quietly home and believe it, we have to let them. And if they want to post it online, as long as they're not trying to incite a specific crime, we can't stop that either. They can even come to town meetings and be obnoxious within certain parameters - and within those same parameters, everyone else can show them how unpopular they are.
The film makes it appear as though the neighbors, and the busybody from the nearby town of New Leipzig (really? - lol), taking it upon themselves to provoke the white nationalists, get them arrested and exploit a legal system that would be biased against them (the white nationalists) - they were the real aggressors. Certainly their(the neighbors and the busybody) own words in the interviews they gave on camera make them seem that way. The prosecutor even comes to the realization that the New Leipzig guy is getting ready to lie on the witness stand.
Cobb's idea of turning the town into a neo-nazi utopia was never anything more than a pathetic pipe dream anyway. Look who showed up: the poor kid with the desperation girl friend who probably just needed a place to stay more than he adhered to any ideology. And no one else, apparently. The political ruse of requiring all residences to have running water that the town enacted would have been a sufficient scuttlebutt to the plan.
It's easy to despise Cobb and Co. for their beliefs, and think that they got what they deserved, but the film really made it seem that the legal logic being used against them in this case is "they are committing a crime against me because their self-proclaimed views give me reason to fear what they might do to me when I bother them." Do we want to go down that road? In today's America?