Previously All-Talk White-Supremacist “League of the South” Now Forming Paramilitary Unit

Photo from the S.P.L.C.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), an Alabama-based non-profit organization which monitors hate groups, announced this week that it has learned that the League of the South is forming a paramilitary unit to be called “the Indomitables.”

The League of the South, whose name is inspired by Italy’s similarly right-wing, anti-immigrant, separatist Northern League (Lega Nord), is the most prominent organization in the United States working toward the secession of the Southern states as what it in particular would call Confederation of Southern States (C.S.S.).  (The original secessionist South, during the Civil War, was officially the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.).  The League wants the C.S.S. to be the eleven core C.S.A. states, without Texas and with Kentucky and Oklahoma added.  Texas, of course, has its own separatist movement.)  Though it claims to be mainly interested in “preserving Southern culture,” its rhetoric is shot through with intolerant, often white-supremacist, ideas, and its membership overlaps heavily with groups like the Ku Klux Klan and various neo-Nazi parties.  For a while, the League sponsored registered state political parties, primarily in Georgia and the Carolinas, called the Southern Party (S.P.).

Michael Hill, president of the League, has described the group’s aims this way: “We are for the survival, well-being, and independence of the Southern people.  And when we say ‘the Southern people,’ we mean white Southerners.  We are an ethno-nationalist movement and we want a free and independent South for our people, as our homeland.  That’s pretty much what we are fighting for.”

Michael Hill, president of the League of the South

Information on a novel paramilitary turn for what had until now been mainly a group that makes lots of noise comes from leaked internal documents and anonymous sources within the group, according to the S.P.L.C. article on the subject.  One of the internal documents outlining the plans is by President Hill himself, who writes, “We desire that our women and children be warm and snug while the world outside rages.  And as our due for that we must face the world.”

“The Indomitables were conceptualized at the LOS national meeting earlier this year,” according to the S.P.L.C. article by Ryan Lenz, “and appear to be coming online quickly, with Floyd Eric Meadows, 43, of Rome, Ga., who also goes by Eric Thorvaldsson online, in charge of ‘training,’ according to sources within the group and internal documents.”  The article also releases confidentially acquired images from Thorvaldsson’s Facebook presence, which is full of pagan iconography and white-supremacist “dogwhistle” references like “‘earning’ his red bootlaces––awarded in skinhead culture for drawing blood for ‘the movement.’”

The Indomitables’ head trainer, Floyd Meadows, posted this on Facebook
recently using his pseudonym.

Hill responded to the S.P.L.C. revelations by stating defiantly, on his blog, “Even if we are––and you really have no idea on earth if we are or not––setting up a Southern militia or some other form of paramilitary organization, we are doing nothing that free men have not done for centuries.  Deal with it and stop your whining.”

Nazi-style insignia used in confidential
League of the South documents leaked to S.P.L.C.

“The primary targets,” Hill went on, “will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite without whom the engines of tyranny don’t run.”

The League has been in the news lately because one of its members, Michael Anthony Peroutka, is running for a council seat in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.  Peroutka, who ran for U.S. president on the Constitution Party ticket in 2004, says he deplores racism in all forms but refuses to distance himself from the League.  His own Republican Party, however, has distanced itself from him from the beginning of his county council candidacy.

Michael Peroutka, posing with a fellow secessionist, whose former job he once applied for.

Not long ago, Hill told an interviewer, regarding the upcoming September 18th referendum on independence in Scotland, “We think it’s a great thing that the Scottish people actually get to go to the polls and decide their future with a vote.  That’s something that I hope that we can do one day.”  But, unlike the League, the Scottish National Party (S.N.P.) is not backing up its political efforts with an armed terrorist squadron.  Despite constant references to the South’s unique “Anglo-Celtic” culture, the League of the South is starting to sound less like Scotland’s separatists and more like those in northern Nigeria or southeastern Ukraine.

Due to the “Anglo-Celtic” connection, St. Andrew’s crosses and similar insignia recur in League of the South heraldry.
See an article from this blog for more detail on Confederate–Russian–Ukrainian-Scottish separatist vexillological affinities.

Thanks to Jan Pierce for first alerting me to this story.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, will be on shelves and available on Amazon in February 2015.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Texan “Pissed Off at America” Declares “Republic of Doug-E-Stan” during Dallas Suburb Armed Siege

Texas has long been known as the most secession-minded part of the United States, but that reputation, along with Texans’ reputation (earned or not) for being heavily armed and mentally not all there, was given yet another boost this week.  A sixty-year-old man named Doug Leguin, nicknamed “Dougie-Doug,” held police and firefighters at bay in a multimillion-dollar home in a Dallas suburb on August 11th while declaring that the home was now “my little republic I just started” called “the Republic of Doug-E-Stan.”  (That’s the spelling he gave a police dispatcher, including the dashes; I am merely assuming that the E is capital.)

(No relationship, apparently, to the similarly named Republic of Dagestan, a sometimes-secessionist multi-ethnic civil-war zone in Russia’s Muslim-insurgency-wracked North Caucasus region, home to breakdancing suicide-bombers and the most dangerous football club in Europe.)

Though details are murky, it seems that Leguin’s wife notified police that her husband had gone missing from their home in nearby Corinth and that he had in his possession an AK-47 assault rifle, several rounds of ammunition, and some propane tanks from his garage.  Meanwhile, firefighters were called to the large home Leguin was holed up in to put out a grass fire, and when they arrived he began firing at them, which drew the police.  An eight-year-old girl and what Leguin described to a 911 dispatcher he telephoned as a non-English-speaking Mexican maid seem to have been able to escape the home unharmed.  It is not clear what relationship Leguin had to the owners or inhabitants of the house; he appeared not to know the address when he spoke to the dispatcher.

The complete transcript of Leguin’s conversation with the police reveals deep mental instability.  Leguin told police, “I’m pissed off at America.  America’s broke, it’s got a sorry government, and the people won’t vote.”  He also told the dispatcher he was “pissed off at” a particular program by the Dallas Police Department; when the dispatcher asked which program that was, Leguin said, “Shootin’ the mentally handicapped.”  He added, “I’ve got a clear mind and a full heart.  And I’m serious about this.  America’s gotta change.”

Though the Republic of Doug-E-Stan was declared in a suburban part of
Dallas County, its founder hails from Corinth, in nearby Denton County.

Eventually, a special weapons and tactics (SWAT) team was called in and he was easily arrested, despite his personal arsenal which he at one point said consisted of twenty-seven weapons.   One neighbor, Tosha Bryce, told reporters that Leguin was, “you know, the person that we know, that we spend time with, that we see outside, that waves at everybody, that's really friendly, someone who we spend time with our kids.  You know, what in the world could have set him off?”

What indeed?  Well, in an interview three days later in his Dallas County Jail cell, Leguin gave a television interviewer some context for the siege.  He said that he was partly motivated by patterns of injustice exemplified by a recent Texan scandal over the light sentence given a wealthy Tarrant County, Texas, resident who killed four people while driving drunk.  In fact, Leguin bucked the usual stereotype of the crazed Texan gunman by revealing significantly left-of-center views.  He expressed concern for the plight of unaccompanied refugee children from Central America arriving in the U.S.—a development that has stoked racist anger at the other end of the spectrum—and he denounced those who scapegoat President Barack Obama. “If you stub your toe, it’s Obama’s fault,” Leguin said, “and that’s just stupid.  That’s part of the racism that has to be talked about in America.”  His comments came as Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, continued to spiral out of control in street confrontations and demonstrations over the killing of an unarmed African-American teenager.

Doug-E-Doug’s rage reached a boiling point just as racial tensions in Ferguson, Missouri, exploded.

But mostly Leguin said he just wanted people to “get out the vote,” and the Republic of Doug-E-Stan and the rest of it were all an elaborate publicity stunt to get people to change the power structure in America by exercising their franchise.  As he put it, “This is a get out the vote campaign.  You have to do something big to get attention in this country.  I know what I did was crazy, but I’m going to pay for that.  I just got to do something to wake up America, man.  I got to do something to get people out there voting.  We got the perfect tool to change the government.  We can completely overhaul the government.  But everybody has to vote.”

A Twitter user shared a photo of an upside-down flag flying at Leguin’s home.
In anti-government circles, this is used to mean, “The republic is in distress.”

Disappointingly, no Doug-E-Stani flag design has yet been reported.  But I, for one, will be voting this November.

What’s left of Doug-E-Stan

[You can read about other manifestations of Texan lunacy, as well as the real Republic of Dagestan and sovereignty and independence movements both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Related articles from this blog:

“State of Texas Nonexistent, Claims ‘Child of God,’ in Court for Driving with ‘Republic of Texas’ Plates” (March 2013)
“Let a Thousand Secession Petitions Bloom: The U.S. Balkanized, but Perhaps Only on the White House Website, Nowhere Else—but Most Importantly: What Does All This Have to Do with Topless Car Washes and the State of Jefferson?” (Nov. 2012)
“Hispanics and African-Americans ‘Remember the Alamo’ Differently—at Least Some of Them Do” (Nov. 2012)
“Yee-Haw (Again)! Texas Patriots Ready to Defend Their State against O.S.C.E. Election Observers” (Oct. 2012)
“Yee-Haw! Texas Judge Vows to Defend Lubbock County from Obama and the United Nations” (Aug. 2012)

Many thanks to Jan Pierce for alerting me to this news story.

Cliven Bundy Standoff May Be Harbinger of the Next Far-Right “Silly Season” (or Civil War?)

Bundy-ranch hangers-on pause to salute Old Glory

Far-right extremist political views and movements have lately come in the form of a series of what in United States politics are called “silly seasons.”  After President Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012 came, on the White House’s “We the People” petition web page, a wave of declarations of intent to secede from the Union—from all fifty states (plus the State of Jefferson) but mostly in the states of the Old Confederacy, Texas most notably.  Then, last year saw a series of movements in rural, conservative portions of “blue” (Democratic-dominated) or “swing” states, to create new states that would be mostly Republican.  The most notable were Colorado’s “North Colorado” or “New Colorado” movement, the Appalachian panhandle region of “Western Maryland,” and a “State of Jefferson” movement in northern California which is even now being prepared for voters in next month’s ballot in several rural counties.  Those have been, and are, mostly harmless and quixotic publicity stunts; they vent real grievances but have no hope of success given the U.S. Congress’s role as gatekeeper for admission to the union and the lack of any mechanism or successful precedent for full secession.

An impromptu lecture from Cliven Bundy

This year’s silly season may turn out to be a bit less silly.  And a lot of it has to do with Cliven Bundy, the rancher in southern Nevada who in March and April attracted an armed posse to help him “defend” “his” cattle from confiscation in the end game of a long-standing legal and financial dispute between his ranch and the federal Bureau of Land Management (B.L.M.).

Ground zero of the latest Tea Party uprising, the Bundy standoff

More than three-quarters of Nevada is public land administered by either the B.L.M. or the U.S. Forest Service, both of which lease out their land for private use for fees.  Bundy was of the opinion that he didn’t have to pay his. As he put it, “My forefathers have been up and down the Virgin Valley here ever since 1877.  All these rights that I claim have been created through pre-emptive rights and beneficial use of the forage and the water and the access and range improvements.”  Quite apart from the fact that this played fast and loose with the facts and that the Bundys have only been ranching there since 1954, the Bundy standoff—which the ranchers won, with the B.L.M. deciding not to come under fire by moving in and trying to confiscate Bundy’s cattle—represents a new wrinkle in the anti-government ideology that has been ramping up since the Clinton-era “state militias” of the 1990s and exploded after the election of the first Black president in 2008.

... plus lots and lots and lots of guns (and no “Negroes,” apparently)

Bundy’s opposition to the existence of public land and to the federal government in general is rather standard far-right-wing thinking.  But instead of merely wishing that public lands could all be sold off somehow, as is standard in Libertarian Party circles, Bundy takes the step of asserting that use equals ownership.  Though such an idea is rooted in the Enlightenment utilitarian philosophers whose thinking laid the groundwork for the American Revolution in the first place, it has other odd resonances as well. It uses some of the same arguments as radical socialist land-reform movements in Latin America, which argue that land should be distributed from its wealthy owners to the peasants that work it.  The Bundy standoff also seems dissonant with the standard far-right disdain for “welfare bums,” since that is a pretty good description of ranchers like Bundy throughout the West who are preferentially allowed to use public lands for scandalously low fees.

The Bureau of Land Management administers most of Nevada, and much of the West

Bundy also uses some of the precisely identical arguments as many American Indian activists and attorneys, to say nothing of indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world.  As Jacqueline Keeler (who is Dineh (Navajo) and Yankton Dakota Sioux) wrote recently in Indian Country Today and the Nation, “Bundy’s hullabaloo is particularly ironic considering that the Western Shoshone Nation’s claim to the land predates his own.  He has declared he will only recognize the original sovereignty of the state of Nevada, despite the fact that Nevada did not achieve statehood until 1864 and as such has no pre-existing claims to sovereign status.  Only the thirteen original colonies possessed sovereignty prior to the creation of the United States” (though one could argue for the formerly independent Texas, Hawaii, Vermont, and possibly California belonging to the club as well).  Quite notably, as Keeler points out, the Western Shoshone have never signed away their land, which they call Newe Sogobia, in a treaty and have refused all cash compensation for it.  Their territory includes most of Nevada, pieces of Idaho and Utah, and a generous swath of Southern California’s high deserts.  If any court anywhere were to rule dispassionately on the status of Western Shoshone lands, they would cease to be (or would cease to pretend being) part of the United States at all.  More precisely, the land Bundy ranches, which is in a rural eastern part of Clark County (county seat: Las Vegas), is the traditional territory of the Southern Paiute—who also, incidentally, were “pacified” without a proper treaty ceding territory.

Most of the U.S.’s nuclear weapons testing has been on the
unceded territory of the Western Shoshone nation.

This seems to signal a new phase in the emerging “sovereign citizen” and allied movements which declare the very illegitimacy of the federal government.  Further, the impulse is to halt the supposed distribution of wealth from white citizens, via the federal government, to nonwhites—hence the demonization of the word “entitlement.”  And, as though to prove the dictum that if you scratch a Tea Partier you find a racist, Bundy torpedoed his own popularity among the Fox News–watching public by a rambling statement before reporters in which he said, “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” and described a housing project in Las Vegas, saying, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids—and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch—they didn’t have nothing to do.  They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do.  They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.  And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?  They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton.  And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?  They didn’t get no more freedom.  They got less freedom.”  Suddenly Ron Paul and other Republicans were backpedalling like crazy to distance themselves from this new folk hero who apparently hadn’t gotten the memo that you don’t say stuff like that out loud.

Michigan’s separatist Hutaree Militia is one of hundreds such
right-wing armed extremist groups in the U.S.

There is no formal Nevada independence movement, but there is a rising movement of radical individualists who peddle a cocktail of capitalist, anarchist, and back-to-the-land ideas and feel that they have the right to take up arms against the federal government for any and all real or imagined abuses.  Many openly hope for “another Ruby Ridge,” referring to a 1992 federal standoff in Montana which galvanized the “militia” movement.  The far right may have thrown Bundy under the bus for public-relations reasons, but they have not given up their fight.  Some groups, such as local militias and a nonprofit called Oath Keepers who favor defying the federal government to protect the Constitution, have set up a near permanent encampment at the Bundy ranch—a sort of “Occupy” tent city for the Duck Dynasty crowd.  And they are always, always armed.

One possible emerging folk hero is one Ernie Wayne terTelgte, as he is legally known, who also goes by the monniker “Natural Man” or “Living Natural Man.”  Dressed in breeches and a three-cornered hat and armed with a musket, this self-described Montana mountain man has been making a personal crusade out of fishing without a license and doing other things to provoke arrest so that he can deliver impassioned Ayn Rand–style soliloquies in court, channeling Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, and Robert Nozick.  As he told one judge in a fishing case, “I was searching for something to put in my stomach as I am recognized to be allowed to do by universal law.  I am the living man and I have the right to forage for food when I am hungry.”  (Again, never mind the prior ownership by Native American tribes.)

Grizzly Adams meets John Quincy Adams:
“Living Natural Man” prepares for his perp walk.

Not only does Natural Man do things like getting jailed for contempt for not recognizing the authority of state courts, but he has also been involved in organizing “citizen grand juries” (spiffed-up vigilante mobs, really) which report only to county sheriffs, bypassing the entire judicial branch (so much for that part of the Constitution).  This takes a page from the Posse Comitatus, a white-supremacist-oriented militia movement of the 1970s and ’80s which refused to recognize any governmental authority above the county level.  Many “patriot militia” groups are hoping that terTelgte will provide the spark for the coming “civil war” in which “the people” will restore freedom and the Constitution.

... but at least his legal arguments are rock solid.
(Is there a tinfoil lining under that three-cornered hat?)

But this trend has gone beyond unhinged white mountain men quoting dead white philosophers.  In this blog I recently reported on the death last month of Verdiacee Washington-Turner Goston El-Bey, “Empress” of something called the “Washitaw Nation,” which melded the occultic Moorish Temple philosophy of the 1930s Black-nationalist movement with the tax-revolt tactics of the “sovereign citizens” movement.  Ostensibly African-American, Empress Verdiacee (her claimed “empire” was the entire Louisiana Purchase) subscribed to a strain of Afro-nationalist crackpot anthropology called the “Paleo-Negroid” hypothesis, which claims that an ancient migration of sub-Saharan Africans to the Americas makes African-Americans indigenous people as well—not subject to the Constitution or taxation.  Ever generous, she lifted the flaps of her big tent to admit any tax-hating Tea-Partier who could claim a drop or two of Cherokee blood.

An Afro-Amerind spin on the “sovereign citizen” movement:
the late Empress Verdiacee of the Washitaw Nation

Actual enrolled American Indians are catching the bug as well.  In a remote central Alaska Indian village, two law-enforcement officers who had appeared on the National Geographic reality-television show Alaska State Troopers were shot and killed in an apparent ambush May 1st as they were investigating a inter-family dispute over a couch.  The two men arrested in the killing, Nathaniel “Satch” Kangas and William Walsh, both of the Indian community of Tanana (pop.: 275), turn out to be members of a militia-style group called Athabascan Nation which does not recognize the authority of the State of Alaska and believes in taking up arms to make that point.  (The Dene, or Athabaskan, peoples are actually a broad linguistic grouping that includes most indigenous peoples of the Alaskan and western Canadian interior as well as far-flung groups such as the Navajo and Apache.)  They are on pretty good legal ground in questioning whether the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971 really did have the authority to nullify millennia-old land-tenure systems, in many cases still operational ones. “We haven’t ever been conquered,” said Gary Albert, another Tanana member of the group, “and we ain’t going to feel like we’re conquered” But the arguments Athabascan Nation uses seem straight out of the playbook of the radical fringe of the Tea Party movement: Oath Keepers (see above), “nullification” advocates and “Tenthers” (those who read the 10th amendment to the Constitution as forbidding most of the federal government’s current functions), “organic constitutionalists” (who believe that everything since the Bill of Rights is an illegitimate modification of the federal structure), etc.  Calling them “brainwashed” “troublemakers,” the Tanana Tribal Council a week later formally banished Walsh, Kangas, and Kangas’s father, a ringleader of the group, from the community.

Taking away the dead troopers from Tanana:
this is not the way to win sympathy for the cause of indigenous sovereignty.

Dead-end petitions for independence or statehood are one thing.  But this new right-wing extremist “silly season” seems like it’s just waiting for the excuse to get serious.

[You can read more about separatist and new-nation movements both famous and obscure in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Thanks to Tanya Ignacio and Jason Rosenbaum for alerting me to some of the information used for this article.

Anti-Immigrant Publicity Stunt Lands Italian Xenophobe Separatists in the Drink

Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Northern League (Lega Nord) political party often likes to point out that Lombards like himself and the League’s founder, Umberto Bossi, are not really Mediterranean people but Anglo-Saxon—Nordic, even.  That may be, but last week Salvini proved to the world that he’s no Thor Heyerdahl.

According to Maltese media, seven League members, including Salvini, who is the party secretary, had to be rescued from the Mediterranean by the tiny Republic of Malta’s navy.  They were in the midst of a publicity stunt to prove how easy it was for undocumented “boat people” from Tunisia to illegally emigrate to Italy.  But their small rubber dinghy’s engine caught fire.  After the fire was put out, one of the crew fired a distress flare but held the flare gun the wrong way around and fired it into the boat instead.  The craft capsized and all seven had to be rescued by a Maltese military vessel.

Matteo Salvini, Northern League secretary, with a Padanian flag

The Northern League was founded in Lombardy in the 1980s and now has party branches throughout the northern third of Italy, pushing for greater autonomy for the regions and eventually independence from the south as a Federal Republic of Padania.  The League was an unlikely junior partner in Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling coalition, but when Berlusconi was swept out of office in 2011 in the wake of the European currency crisis, the League found itself fighting for its political life.  As a consequence, it chose to amplify the nascent xenophobia that runs through the movement.  One Northern League senator from Lombardy, Roberto Calderoli, last year infamously compared Italy’s minister for integration, Cécile Kyenge—an immigrant who was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—to “an orangutan.”  And Bossi has been known to refer to Africans as “bingo-bongos.”

Umberto Bossi, founder of Lega Nord

“Instead of covering themselves with glory,” a Maltese newspaper said, “they only succeeded in covering themselves with ridicule.  And they actually proved that it is easy for sea trips of this sort to end in tragedy—and in Malta, where neither they nor asylum seekers want to land.”

Perhaps the adventure will teach Salvetti and his colleagues a little more sympathy for those who risk life and limb to provide for their families by emigrating to Italy.  But probably not.

The Viking seafaring genes must have skipped the Lombards.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in mid 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

North Dakota Neo-Nazi Separatist, Outed as 14% Black, Now on Hunger Strike

Let’s check in, shall we, on Paul Craig Cobb—he goes by Craig Cobb—the 62-year-old neo-Nazi white separatist from Canada who was eventually hounded by criminal charges to the minuscule hamlet of Leith, North Dakota, where, as reported in this blog a couple months ago, he intended to establish a racially pure enclave.  His idea was to make Leith into an autonomous whites-only town, and perhaps eventually to make all of North Dakota into a “white bastion” of the sort that has been dreamed of by white supremacists in places like the Pacific Northwest.  As Dr. Phil would say: how’s that been working out for you?  Not so well, as it turns out.

Craig Cobb (right)

First, Cobb made the mistake of assuming that Leith’s 24 residents were as bigoted as he was.  When he called Sherrill Harper, the wife of the town’s one African-American resident, Bobby Harper, “a filthy race-mixing white woman” and tried to intimidate Bobby into moving out, the community closed ranks against Cobb.  (The Harpers are both on the town council.)  Leith residents told Bobby Harper they “have his back” and formed a united front against Cobb, letting him know he was not welcome there.  Although Leith is isolated and in one of the most socially and politically conservative and demographically whitest parts of the country, its citizens have managed to make their town a byword for tolerance.

Location of Leith, in Grant County, North Dakota

Last year, when Cobb first moved to Leith, in southwestern North Dakota, it was via Montana from Canada, where he is wanted on charges of promoting racial hatred.  Cobb is a member of the Church of the Creator, which the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), an Alabama-based organization which monitors hate groups, classifies as neo-Nazi.  But it is not a typical white-supremacist organization.  Drawing on paganism and on the occult, Theosophy-based “Ariosophy” doctrines to which Adolf Hitler and his inner circle subscribed, Creativity, as the church’s ideology is known, also uses the jargon of American self-help and New Age movements and is more interested in home-grown American notions of a coming black-vs.-white “race war” than in traditional bugaboos of the Nazis such as Jews.

A sign on Cobb’s property refers to one of the 73 “credos” (chapters)
of the Church of the Creator’s 1981 holy text, The White Man’s Bible.

He bought a dilapidated off-grid house (no running water) for a song and also started buying up 13 other houses in a town so full of ancient derelict properties that some tourist guides put it on a list of “ghost towns.”  But Muriel Ulrich, Grant County’s property-tax assessor, thought something was fishy when he started selling the properties at a loss.  He sold houses for a dollar each to Tom Metzger, head of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), and to Alex Linder, a neo-Nazi who runs the white-supremacist Vanguard News Network (V.N.N.) website.  Cobb outright gave the cemetery next to his house to Jeff Schoep, who heads the fascist National Socialist Movement (N.S.M.).  Leith’s list of landowners was turning into a Who’s Who of modern American neo-Nazism.

Then the white-supremacist settlers started arriving, including April Gaede, a fellow “Creator” (as followers of the Church of Creator, oddly enough, call themselves) and Holocaust-denier who used to bring her pre-teen twin daughters Lynx and Lamb Gaede around to White Power rallies and music fests as a white-nationalist pop singing duo called Prussian Blue.  Gaede and her husband are vocal proponents of setting up an archipelago of all-white communes across the country under the name “Little Europe,” which quickly became a tentative name for the proposed racially-purified Leith.  (She is also a former B-movie actress who appeared in the 2003 straight-to-video horror flick Darkwalker.  Lynx and Lamb had cameos in that one, too, and are listed in the cast as playing “Creepy Twin” nos. 1 and 2.  This is where I need to interject that I am not making any of this up.  But keep reading.  It doesn’t even let up.)

Patience and Prudence they ain’t:
Lynx and Lamb Gaede of the white-supremacist pop due Prussian Blue

Leith banded together to find some way to eject him.  He was cited for the dereliction of his properties. He was fired from his construction job.  Things came to a head in mid-September when 350 people from North Dakota, Minnesota, and elsewhere held a rally in Leith to urge him to go.  Prominent among the organizers were American Indians from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.  Cobb and members of the N.S.M., including Schoep himself, held a counter-protest.  Cobb taunted one of the Sioux activists, James Testemary, saying, “You’re stumbling, and obviously drunk.  Have you been drinking?” and adding, “You have your sovereign land and your own nation.  Why is it wrong for us to have our sovereign land?”  A not incorrect, but irrelevant point, to be sure, but his logic broke down even further as he riffed, “How come we go all over the world with B-52s and B-1s in the name of democracy and call it world-building?  I’m doing village-building, except I’m not using violence.  Here’s this white guy trying to get 17 people together in a democracy who think like he does and they just go bananas, while there’s 50 million Mexicans running around.”  But I will spare you more of his ranting; you get the idea.

American Indians came out in force to stand up for tolerance in Leith.

Even apart from being a racist asshole, Cobb made some tactical public-relations errors.  He groundlessly accused one Leith resident of murdering his daughter; the young woman had actually been killed by her abusive husband.  That is hardly a way to make friends in a tight-knit community.  But Cobb’s biggest error was agreeing to appear on The Trisha Show, an N.B.C. talk show hosted by Trisha Goddard, a British T.V. personality of Caribbean ancestry who was raised in Tanzania.  The Harpers were brought onto the stage to confront Cobb, who referred to Bobby Harper as “her pet”; he also calls African Americans “orks” and, mysteriously, “strolling biological early warning devices.”  As part of the show’s “Race in America” segment, Cobb underwent genetic testing that revealed that he was only 86% “European” and 14% “sub-Saharan African.”  When Goddard moved in for a fist bump, saying, “You got a little black in you, bro,” he recoiled—either in fear of her cooties or because he believed Fox News (which he surely watches), which called Barack and Michelle Obama’s use of the gesture at a campaign stop in 2008 a “terrorist fist jab.”

Cobb called the test results “statistical noise” and “short science” (sic)—and is probably not likely to be convinced of it anyway, since understanding the data might involve accepting evolution ... plus the idea that all human beings are 100% African insofar as that is where humanity emerged.  Etc. etc.  But he seems to have taken the genomic results rather hard.  Though there are no legal grounds for forcing someone out of a town just because of his personal views (and nor should there be, to be sure), he and his fellow “Little Europeans” (which I’m sure is not what members of the Leith commune call themselves) were more and more isolated and more and more reviled.  On November 16th, Cobb sort of snapped.  He sent text messages to the local newspaper warning, “Because of the many violences [sic] and harassments against we [sic] and the children, we have commenced armed patrols of Leith”—and then he and a fellow white supremacist approached the home of another town councilman with rifles cocked.  911 was dialed, and the “patrolmen” were arrested and slapped with three counts, including terrorism.

This “neighborhood patrol” eventually segued into a perp walk.

The 62-year-old Cobb is now sitting in a jail cell in Stanton, in nearby Mercer County, awaiting trial on charges that could give him up to 35 years in prison.  At last report, he was refusing food.  By telephone, Cobb told an Associated Press reporter that, in A.P.’s words, “he is not on a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment—though he does feel he is wrongly accused—but is instead practicing mahasamadhi, a form of spiritual enlightenment in which the physical body is permanently left behind.  Cobb said that will happen for him at yuletide, another term for Christmas.”  The reporter may have mangled this; Creativity, which is anti-Christian, does not recognize Christmas in any form and instead celebrates “Festum Album” (not to be confused with “Festivus,” presumably), a week-long celebration of White Pride which begins December 26th.  Having stopped taking food on November 21st, he may not make it even until his preliminary hearing scheduled for December 9th.  As even Cobb’s own court-appointed attorney said, “To a certain degree, if he wants to starve himself, he can.”  I’m sure none of Leith’s long-standing residents will argue with that.

In happier times: Cobb, posing with some Estonian skinhead friends,
with the Church of the Creator flag

[You can read more about Cobbsville and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]