Welcome To Leith

Complete Version

Besides capturing beautiful location shots, this documentary provides more insight and even some balance to the heretofore mainstream media portrayal of Craig Cobb’s gambit to start a White preserve in tiny Leith, North Dakota. The bit of balance is surprising given that the production is coming from a perspective which is highly unsympathetic to Cobb and the White separatist cause.

1) The documentary does allow for Cobb to sneak-in the fundamentally legitimate argument that Whites should be able to establish separatism in order to preserve themselves.

2) However, it takes advantage of a wrong turn that Cobb takes in separatist advocacy, and one that the demographic preponderance of American WN can be susceptible to, which is to associate White separatism with Nazism and its corollary of pursuing an antagonistic, literally supremacist, even “exterminationist” agenda. This willing association of WN with “NS” Germany stems from a false either/or regarding WWII, an either/or which maintains that there was simply a wrong and simply a right side - Jewish Sovietism or Nazism - in that conflict.

3) Stemming from a myopic reaction to Jewish sponsored liberalism in America and the frustration for unpopularity that will result of the “NS Germany simply right” response not being accepted (not even by many Whites who would be sympathetic to White separatism), the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) has a rather easy task to demonstrate that Cobb is not just trying to build a separatist White community that can amenably coordinate with others.
 
                       

a) He invited-into Leith some of the most salient and provocative White advocates, purchasing property in Leith for Alex Linder, the NSM (“neo-Nazis”) and Tom Metzger.

Linder of course couldn’t be more brazen in his rhetoric, calling for the elimination of Jews and so on; the NSM couldn’t be more flamboyant in their display, as they literally came into town bedecked in Nazi regalia, posting the like flags around Cobb’s house in Leith, and unabashedly proclaiming their unanimity with “NS” ideology.

Metzger doesn’t approve of such flamboyant and anachronistic tactics, but he has taken a position contrary to the PTB (powers that be) over the years, a position that the SPLC has tried to associate with senseless violence - despite his clear advice against that.

b) Along with the negative media reputation of these White exponents as embellished by the heretofore mainstream media and the SPLC, the SPLC begins to build a case to trace Cobb’s associations with these figures, as they have been following them over the years in an effort to connect them to a history of violence with further implications.

- as in the case the SPLC brought and won against then California resident Metzger, who was found “vicariously responsible” through a tenuous association with a skinhead who killed a black in a spontaneous street fight in Oregon.

- Matt Hale, fellow in Cobb’s religion -“Creativity” - was effectively set-up (by a wired-FBI informant who coaxed Hale to almost say that he approved of killing a judge) on charges of plotting to kill the judge who ruled against him in a patent case regarding the church logo and was sent to jail for 40 years. In connection with that bogus case, Cobb had published the address of the judge. Heidi Beirich (SPLC) admits that it is unknown whether that information aided and abetted the subsequent murder of two family members of that judge.

- VNN (Linder) associate and Cobb supporter, Frazier Glenn Miller, came unhinged one day and shot three people involved with the production of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” This was after the Leith Fiasco was over and Cobb was driven out of town not to return; but with that, the SPLC et al. were able to argue more persuasively that there was a danger when he was in town; and with some Leith property still in the hands of White advocates that the danger loomed of these types coming to Leith again and coming unhinged.

It is already well known to the world that Cobb’s case was not helped by his gun toting stroll with Kynan Dutton, a display compounded with verbal taunting of a neighbor. They were arrested for that and brought-up on charges of making terrorist threats.

                                 

Further threatening gestures alleged to Cobb that the documentary makes known to people who’d not been riveted to the event’s details, are that Cobb was apparently publishing the address, names and other information about family members of his neighbors -  the Christian couple whom he antagonized in the gun stroll. While people of our sophistication might understand Christians are a part of a hostile world view, Cobb was not exercising necessary discretion with regard to their skill level - nor for their emotional latitude given that the man he was verbally antagonizing on line and in the end, in his gun toting walk, had a 17 year old daughter murdered in Washington prior to coming to Leith, North Dakota. But to make Cobb’s indelicacy hardest to ignore, this man read online where Cobb was encouraging ex-convicts to come to Leith and telling them that, “now is the time to draw your sword.”

Of course the context of Cobb’s words and actions must be taken into account - these things will be given hostile framing by the SPLC in advice to the movie makers and this couple along with the other liberal town folk. But still, anyone who would tout Cobb as having aced as a fine PR man for WN is sorely mistaken.

...and there were people whom he could have won over - the documentary shows one Leith townsman who does not seem hostile to Cobb, saying that “people can believe what they want, I guess.”

Additional new information, adding some balance and mitigating circumstance sympathetic to Cobb’s perspective is noted in the film. Prior to the stroll, Cobb and Dutton’s property had been vandalized; Dutton’s car tires were slashed and the car was spray-painted with the words, “go home.” Dutton’s partner is also seen being confronted by a neighbor who drives up to her, apparently to intimidate her. Hence, there was some provocation from the other end and reason to perceive the need to defend themselves against their neighbors prior to their ill-fated stroll. And there are other indications that Cobb and Dutton were up against threats.

               
There is an irony in the suggestion that Cobb has a home.

These factors were in addition to all of the media hoopla and antagonism that had preceded, the “anti-racist” rallies and SPLC attention that was brought to bear against Cobb’s initiatives in the town.

Another irony came about when the SPLC summoned go-to victim group coalitions to harangue the White separatist - WN circles note that the American Indian groups who were among those brought-into Leith to protest Cobb’s effort to build a separate and sovereign territory based on his people’s genetic kind had been bused there from reservations which are their exclusionary racial preserves.

In addition to showing the counter-intimidation and vandalism by Cobb’s neighbors, there was another bit of balance provided in the film, significantly against the case that Cobb was “terrorizing” people to where they felt in immanent danger.

A photographer named Gregory Bruce came on a moral high-horse from another North Dakota town to intervene in Leith. He not only made a special effort to thwart and document the thwarting of Cobb’s plans, but he also boldly announced that neither he nor anybody else in town was afraid or threatened by Cobb. This bravado that Bruce horned-in with undermined the case for Cobb’s threateningness and opened the way for Cobb to be granted a plea bargain.

Another mitigating factor to the charge of “terrorist threats” and the idea that the people of Leith considered themselves to be in immanent danger was that Cobb was never threatening to the interracial couple in Leith (Bobby and Cheryl Harper) nor to Bobby by himself. The documentary tried to make hay out of the DNA test given by the talk show (The Trishia Goddard Show that Cobb appeared-on with the interracial couple), “showing” that Cobb was 14 % black, but Cobb dismissed it graciously despite being publicly hoisted by the petard of his objectivism (Cobb is not 14% black by any reasonable metric).

While Cobb was imprisoned for his gun toting walk and threats, had a felony put on his record, can no longer legally posses fire arms and underwent significant costs, he did manage to mitigate his sentence by admitting his mistake and was freed; finally, the documentary showed some balance again, by interviewing legal counsel advising the audience that justice was served - and in terms of the relative circumstances of the Leith fiasco, it was a fairly just result.

Justice to the eminently legitimate and noble cause of White separatism, however, was not served; but that is largely due to Cobb’s association with Nazism as it cut him off from broad support for what should be his absolutely legitimate goal of White sovereignty and survival; but with his “public relations” effort, he gave legitimacy instead to the worst antagonists to the cause of White survival and the separatism that is necessary to that end.