Welcome to Leith (Again)

Rural property is up for grabs, to the detriment of everyone.

On a day trip to do some geocaching and check out camping spots at Lake Tschida, we stopped in Leith, North Dakota.

If you saw the 2015 documentary “Welcome to Leith” which showed how white supremacists attempted to take over the tiny town, starting with Craig Cobb, you might be familiar with this tiny pinprick on the map.

The town of Leith hit national headlines in August 2013 when the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Bismarck Tribune broke the story about what Cobb was up to. Cobb had given some property to Alex Linder and Tom Metzger, who was a grand wizard in the Ku Klux Klan.

He’d purchased nearly a dozen properties in Leith over a period of two years, and encouraged other white supremacists to join him there. They intended to turn a town of 16 people into a much larger, much paler, place. I’m sure the nearby town of Elgin wasn’t too excited when they realized what was going on.

Jeff Schoep, commander of the national Socialist Movement, posted a letter on his group’s website informing the world that he and some other leaders were going to go visit Leith for a fact-finding mission.¹

This inspired protests by a variety of people in the region, including whites, Native Americans, and other minorities. As you see in the documentary, the plan was thwarted, but at a significant cost to the people of Leith.