Welcome To Leith Spark Notes

The 2015 reflective documentary, “Welcome to Leith” brings attention to the gun-trotting White Supremacist, Craig Cobb, and his attempt to assert his dominance and gain total jurisdiction over the city of Leith, North Dakota. Over a period of eight months, Michael Beach Nichols and his crew filmed the final weeks that lead up to infamous fascist influencer’s incarceration. With a whopping population of 24 people, mostly consisting of farmers and their families, Mr. Cobb relocated and purchased his first property in Leith for only five-hundred dollars in May of 2012. At first, his neighbours described him as being a quiet but estranged individual who kept to himself most of the time. Little did the townspeople know, Cobb had much bigger plans.
He slowly but surely started to build his empire by accumulating about thirteen separate

plots of land. Cobb envisioned turning the ghost town of Leith into a safe-haven for his fellow Neo-Nazis. Eventually, Cobb managed to successfully lure other White Supremacists to Leith, offering them low priced properties and encouraging them to join his “movement”.

By December 2013, Cobb’s determination to create a White Nationalist community grew and his actions became increasingly threatening. Incorporating numerous members of the National Socialist movement, Cobb’s family of Skin-Heads began to thrive. In their savage attempt to force the people of Leith out of their homes, they planted their flags, posted signs encouraging hate crime around town and spray painted neon colour swastikas on the trees. However, it did not take long for the townspeople of Leith to get fed up with Cobb’s avid racism. Refusing to be intimated by his psychotic tendencies, the people fought back. They gathered video evidence of Cobb and his allies patrolling the neighbourhood armed with loaded weapons. In the video, Cobb can be seen verbally abusing and threatening one of his neighbours while motioning towards him with what we later find out to be is a loaded gun. The video also features the aftermath of a Neo-Nazi’s vandalization to a local woman’s car. Three of her tires has been

slashed and “go home” had been spray painted in black along the side of her vehicle. Later, we are shown the man who was presumably responsible for vandalizing the woman’s car, parked out of side of her house. She repeated asks him to leave and reminds him that he is unwelcome but he does not move until she pulls out her phone and begins to film. Those are just a few examples of the harassment the townspeople faced everyday. About a year later, they were eventually able to rise up and the city council attempted to force Cobb out of his properties for lack of running water/sewage systems shortly before he was arrested. In January of 2014, he was tried for seven felony accounts of terrorism. Cobb was later released on four years of probation in April. To sum it all up, the movie focuses on a psychopath’s attempt to invade the spooky little city of Leith while addressing civil-rights issues regarding freedom of speech and illustrating how far is too far.