Hundreds of protesters gathered in a North Dakota town on Sunday to speak out against plans by an American Nazi group to buy up property and take over the local government in an effort to build a bastion against diversity.
About 300 protesters, including some 200 Native Americans from nearby reservations, gathered outside the Leith City Hall where Jeff Schoep, leader of the National Socialist Movement presented his plans for turning the tiny North Dakota town – population 24 – into a segregated place where whites can live among themselves.
According to Schoep, however, the plan for a single-race town in
Leith is part of a much broader plan.
"We have to start
somewhere," he told Reuters. "So if we start in small towns and spread
out from there, it's sort of a test ground in that sense, where
if we're able to get off the ground here, then we're able to get
off the ground in other places."
Members of the Grant County Sheriff's Department, together with
deputies from several nearby counties, were on hand. The North
Dakota Highway Patrol also appeared on the scene in riot gear,
but no violence was reported, officials said.
However, the demonstrators, some of whom had traveled miles to be
in Leith, were vocal in their condemnation of the plan.
Scott Garman of Fargo hollered with the aid of a loudspeaker,
“This is not a one-time,
one-day thing. We will be here again and again until you are
gone. This is where we stop them,” Garman said, according
to an article in the Bismarck Tribune.
A veteran took the megaphone to yell, “Creepy Nazis, Ku Kluxers, get the hell out
of here!”
Schoep, however, dismissed the accusations, saying he’s not a
white supremacist, but a supporter of “white civil rights,” the paper
reported.
Meanwhile, town officials are scrambling to offset plans by the
Nationalist Socialist Movement, America's largest neo-Nazi
organization, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center
(SPLC), a nonprofit civil rights organization that their website
says is “dedicated to fighting
hate and bigotry.”
Leith Mayor, Ryan Schock, said local officials were considering
the possibility of unincorporating the town and turning it back
over to the county in order to thwart the group's plans.
"This is a small, quiet
town," Schock said. "Families live around here, and it's a very
close-knit community. I really wish it hadn't gotten to this
point."
‘Pioneer Little Europe’
Dreams of a whites-only town in America, where the percentage of
European ethnic whites are on a sharp decline, is the brainchild
of Craig Cobb, a white supremacist activist who has grandiose
plans for Leith.
For more than a year, Cobb, 61, has been purchasing properties in
Leith and inviting like-minded supremacists to move in and lay
the groundwork for what has been dubbed "Pioneer Little Europe."
In a recent interview with KXMB-TV, Cobb said he had received
numerous offers to buy up land from people who believe that white
people have a right to live among themselves. However, the move
towards cultures embracing diversity and multiculturalism has
made such an idea highly controversial, he admitted.
"It's fine for all these other
minorities, but not us," he said in the interview.
"If you merely speak
about [civil rights for
whites], you're going to be defamed in this country."
Cobb's plans were revealed in August after the SPLC published a
report revealing his land purchases in Leith, which is located in
a county that is 97 percent white.
According to the report, other leading supremacists are also
moving to buy property in Leith, including Tom Metzger, leader of
the White Aryan Resistance, and Alex Linder, who manages the
Vanguard News Network (VNN), an online forum.
Cobb moved into a “ramshackle
two-story house without running water, and quickly began buying
properties around Leith,” according to the SPLC report.
According to county tax records that were first obtained by
Hatewatch, the bespectacled neo-Nazi has succeeded in buying up
more than a dozen lots – some for as little as a few hundred
dollars each from landowners sympathetic to his cause.
Last year, Cobb announced on VNN his plans to build an all-white
settlement in North Dakota “post haste.”
“Been waiting quite a few
months to spring this. Now is the time,” Cobb wrote then,
while touting the advantages of living in Leith.
“There is water, electricity, satellite internet via Hughes at $50 per month, satellite TV from at least three companies, trailers, fifth wheels, campers legal, car [insurance] as little as $141 for six months and most importantly – a surfeit of very good paying jobs in two different cities within normal commutable distances.”
SPLC summarized the motivation behind Cobb’s initiative: “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… 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 US Census data, 90 percent of the
population of North Dakota is white. That figure jumps to 97
percent in Grant County, where Leith is located.
Cobb has tried in the past to build a homeland for whites. In
2006, he moved to the Baltic State of Estonia and started
Podblanc, a video-sharing service. The US political system was on
a road to ruin, he warned then.
“I believe that the Democrat[ic] and Republican criminal syndicates that run the US with international jewry’s [sic] criminal syndicate cannot now be stopped,” he wrote. “Media barrages too much control the minds of White Americans.”