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Hundreds Protest Neo-Nazi Plan for ‘Whites Only’ Town in North Dakota

Alex Constantine - October 10, 2013

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.”

http://rt.com/usa/racism-usa-nazi-dakota-234/