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Old August 24th, 2013 #76
varg
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http://bismarcktribune.com/news/stat...a4bcf887a.html

White supremacist said he's staying

7 minutes ago • By Lauren Donovan

LEITH , N.D. — Craig Cobb lives in a house with no running water and whatever he needs to protect himself, short of someone throwing a Molotov cocktail through the picture window facing the dirt street he lives on in Leith. [Is that a veiled threat? Why did they feel the need to say that? Wow. Right in the first sentence too. ]

The visual of someone throwing a firebomb in to his house seems to pass through his mind [or maybe you're the one trying to implant that message and visual into the readers head, unless we're to believe this wasn't intentionally placed, and that you simply just knew what was `passing through his mind` — as a mindreader] as he watches a few vehicles — some turning around for a second and third pass — drive past his house with its overgrown, grasshopper-infested lawn and dead trees threatening to tumble on his property. [Yeah that choice of descriptive writing, must just be a coincidence.. cause everyone would use those words to describe cars circling his house and leading to "dead trees threatening to tumble on his property." This is one sick bitch. Why is she even going to great lengths and adding unnecessary sentences to talk about him being killed or having his property destroyed? Obviously it's intentionally placed. It's an article about Cobb not leaving and the psycho-bitch brings up firebombing twice]

He knows he's not wanted in Leith, farming town of 19 people in Grant County.

In the past week, people have learned that this thin, gray-haired man who uses a cane, partly for effect, is an internationally known white supremacist who's been buying property in town to create his own white enclave, where Nazi flags fly proudly and like-minded people could take over the community.

Cobb, 61, owns 12 other lots and has transferred ownership to four other extreme white supremacists, including Tom Metzger, a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon and founder of White Aryan Resistance.

The Tribune broke the story of Cobb's plans for Leith Wednesday night. By Thursday, after nearly 100,000 people looked at the story on the paper's website and other media picked it up, his job supervisor pulled him aside.

Cobb had been driving pilot car and flagging on a N.D. Highway 22 road construction crew south of Killdeer.

He said he slept in his car, a small Ford Festiva, during the week and drove home when he had a few days off.

Cobb was standing out on the hot asphalt when his boss pulled up to have a word. He fired him on the spot.

"The supposed reason was that my notoriety put the crew in danger," Cobb said Saturday.

He left, but not before saying that laws protect people from being fired for religious and political associations outside the purview of his job.

"I wasn't angry. I’ve experienced this before, but it was a little shocking. This is the best job I’ve ever had, nobody bothered me and I was alone with my thoughts," he said.

He said he was fired by Border States Paving, of Fargo. The Tribune was unable to contact Border States on Saturday and left a voice mail with company president Dan Thompson to confirm Cobb's story.

He said one of his co-workers hugged him when he learned about Cobb's white supremacist views. He said many workers in the oil patch feel the same way, "that whites are being dispossessed in our own country. Oil workers are all racists; they prefer their own race. They all want to be witnesses on my job. They're sympathetic to my message," he said.

In fact, he said, North Dakotans "are pretty darned racist, they just don't talk about it."

In conversation, those views pour forth in a verbal stream, laced with profanity, f-bombs, words like the n word, "retard," "Jew" and putdowns of women, who he said lack intelligence and are only good four days a month. Most young people are "dysfunctional retards that have been raised by single mothers," he said.

Cobb wanted to stroll around the block from his house, where the old Leith jail still stands under cottonwood trees, a small concrete structure with no door and two cells in the rear with bars and metals doors.

He said he'd love to use the building to jail leftists, or Bolsheviks, in a day when he and others like him control Leith.

It would only take 17 people, he figures.

He avoided jail in Canada by fleeing in 2010 after being arrested on hate crime charges by the Canadian government. He said he fled Canada and lived in a dugout in Montana, eventually making his way to the oil patch, looking for work.

At the same time, people who live in Leith were reeling from the discovery of Cobb's intentions for their town, they woke last Sunday to find that two men from Wisconsin had set up a tent and were clearing the growth from around a dilapidated house on one of Cobb's properties.

The two men, Michael Bencz and Tim Westergard, denied any association with Cobb, other than finding a cheap property he was selling through Craig's List. The pair cleaned the property, fastened a blue tarp over the roof and were gone by Friday.

Cobb backed their story.

"He's (Bencz) not a white nationalist at all. He thought the property was pretty cheap, but he doesn't have any association with me," Cobb said.

He didn't like that the Grant County Sheriff asked the men for identification and ran their identity through police data bases after getting calls from Leith.

"For people to descend on them like locusts was not right. If a (expletive) homosexual came in, they're not going to descend on him, are they?" he said.

Jobless for now, Cobb is home in Leith. He said a Leith resident came over to his house Saturday afternoon, upset after reading about Cobb's white nationalist plans for town.

"He asked me if I want to sell. I'm not even doing that. I'm not going to other people's houses and asking if they want to sell their property to me. That's inherently rude. I wouldn't even do that to Bobby (Harper, a neighbor who's a black American)," he said.

Cobb said he reported the man to the Grant County Sheriff.

Bobby Harper and his wife Sherrill Harper have lived in Leith for years, most recently caring for Sherrill Harper's mother, who died in the midst of all last week's turmoil.

Bobby Harper said the Cobb situation was unsettling, but he was willing to talk about it because he wanted people outside Leith to be aware of what's going on in their small town.

"The more people who know, the better," he said. He said he'd welcome people who come to improve the town, but that Cobb and the like bring hate, instead.

Cobb said the publicity has been good for his cause and that since the Tribune's initial story, more than a dozen people have expressed interest in joining him in Leith. Land values might go up, he said

He ended up in Leith by happenstance, searching for cheap housing while working as truck driver in Watford City. He said he was fired from that job for confronting a co-worker's son about his work habits.

He said Leith is lovely and pastoral and it made sense to buy lots there, rather than start his own community.

"It has a history and it's been lived in. The electricity is subsidized by the federal government," he said.

The white nationalist movement has made attempts before to create all-white enclaves, in Oregon and Montana. Mark Potok, a hate crimes expert and editor of the Alabama-based Intelligence Report magazine and Hatewatch website, said Cobb's property acquisition in Leith is serious and represents the most successful attempt to build an all-white enclave so far.

"This is much further advanced than anything we've seen," Potok said. He also labeled Cobb, "One of the most vicious, neo-Nazi activists around."

Cobb said Potok uses that kind of rhetoric to raise money for his cause from rich, elderly Jewish women.

He said Leith has nothing to fear from him and that he's the one who should be most worried. He extends a hand with a heavy silver ring.

"This is a 'Totenkopf' and it means I'm willing to die for my people. I'm not anxious for it, but if it is, it is," he said. "I'm not a violent person. If they use weaponry against me, I'd be like, 'All right, let's go.' If I lose, I'm a martyr," he said. He denies being paranoid.

Cobb's discourse ends back in front of his house with its flaking paint and where he bathes in water he buys by the jug. It is a long way from the Boston Nob Hill home he says he was raised in by a father who has since disinherited him for fear he'd do a "Timothy McVeigh" with the money. In 1995, McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City., Okla., killing 168 people.

"It looks pathetic, but my expenses are low and my assets are high," he said. He said he's not planning to leave Leith and he has no doubts about his vision for an all-white community with music festivals and a news service for Aryan whites.

"Things take time. It's going to happen," he said.

Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 701-220-5511 or [email protected].

Last edited by varg; August 25th, 2013 at 12:07 AM. Reason: ..