WEBVTT - (Maybe Don't) Read Siege 0:00:01.680 --> 0:00:04.920 Colson Media. 0:00:05.120 --> 0:00:07.600 Hello, and welcome back to it could happen here. I 0:00:07.600 --> 0:00:08.200 am once. 0:00:08.039 --> 0:00:10.639 Again your occasional host, Molly Conker, and I am joined 0:00:10.640 --> 0:00:14.200 today by Spencer Sunshine, the author of Neo Nazi Terrorism 0:00:14.240 --> 0:00:19.560 and Countercultural Fascism, The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege. 0:00:20.400 --> 0:00:23.880 It's available now in paperback. I have my paperback copy 0:00:23.960 --> 0:00:27.560 from Routledge Press. So, Spencer, I guess let's get right 0:00:27.600 --> 0:00:30.639 into it. What is Siege and why should we still 0:00:30.640 --> 0:00:31.400 be talking about it? 0:00:31.960 --> 0:00:34.160 Well, unfortunately, we should still be talking about it because 0:00:34.159 --> 0:00:37.960 it's still influential. It was a book originally published in 0:00:38.000 --> 0:00:40.920 nineteen ninety three, but that is an edited version of 0:00:41.000 --> 0:00:44.760 newsletters published in the eighties by a fellow named James Mason, 0:00:44.960 --> 0:00:48.240 who is a lifelong neo Nazi. He joined the American 0:00:48.320 --> 0:00:51.400 Nazi Party at age fourteen in nineteen sixty six. He 0:00:51.520 --> 0:00:56.720 is still an active ideological believer in national socialism. It's 0:00:56.760 --> 0:00:59.840 a book that in it he makes the argument that 0:01:00.120 --> 0:01:05.040 any kind of normal legal political activity was pointless for 0:01:05.120 --> 0:01:09.720 Neo Nazis to engage in and like forming organizations, holding marches, 0:01:10.000 --> 0:01:13.240 making the traditional propaganda, trying to build up parties even 0:01:13.280 --> 0:01:15.560 guerrilla warfare. At the end of it, he becomes very 0:01:15.600 --> 0:01:20.360 cynical about and he says, through what are essentially dramatic 0:01:21.000 --> 0:01:24.400 random acts of violence, of terrorism or murder. He even 0:01:24.440 --> 0:01:28.679 goes into praising serial killers like Joseph Paul Franklin, we 0:01:28.760 --> 0:01:33.120 can destabilize the government and society and after this neo 0:01:33.200 --> 0:01:36.880 Nazis can come to power. This has become a very 0:01:36.920 --> 0:01:40.000 influential idea. More recently he was rediscovered. It was a 0:01:40.000 --> 0:01:43.119 pretty obscure The newsletters were very unpopular that he never 0:01:43.160 --> 0:01:46.399 made more than one hundred copies. The original book had 0:01:46.440 --> 0:01:49.280 a print run of one thousand, so it was a 0:01:49.400 --> 0:01:53.480 sort of obscure text. It was known amongst neo Nazi 0:01:53.560 --> 0:01:57.000 circles for some unusual reasons. It became mixed up with 0:01:57.040 --> 0:01:59.960 some countercultural figures and that was actually what made up 0:02:00.080 --> 0:02:03.000 more well known. But it was revived in twenty fifteen. 0:02:03.040 --> 0:02:06.600 It was found by these younger aspiring terrorists, let's say 0:02:06.640 --> 0:02:09.480 at the time, around a message board called Iron March. 0:02:10.040 --> 0:02:13.600 It became the bible of the adamoff And Division, this 0:02:13.880 --> 0:02:17.080 new Nazi group that its members and associates killed five 0:02:17.120 --> 0:02:20.320 people and out of that everyone in the Adam offf 0:02:20.360 --> 0:02:23.480 and Division had to read siege, which became the hashtag, 0:02:24.000 --> 0:02:26.959 and out of that grew this whole sort of network, 0:02:27.080 --> 0:02:31.400 first of groups and now really totally decentralized, like propaganda 0:02:31.480 --> 0:02:35.720 channels on telegram to Terogram promoting these same ideas, and 0:02:35.800 --> 0:02:38.800 so it's become very influential today. It gets named in 0:02:38.919 --> 0:02:43.200 like terrorist manifestos. The school shooter I think it was 0:02:43.200 --> 0:02:48.080 in Nashville, Tennessee that just happened. He makes a reference 0:02:48.120 --> 0:02:51.960 to people who are into siege in his writings, and 0:02:52.000 --> 0:02:54.720 more and more I've documented before him at least twelve 0:02:54.800 --> 0:02:57.639 murders that are either by the Adam Waffin Division, by 0:02:57.680 --> 0:03:00.679 people inspired by siege culture, or by people directly linked 0:03:00.720 --> 0:03:03.600 to Terogram. So if we want to look at the 0:03:03.639 --> 0:03:07.000 main text animating neo Nazi terrorism today, which has now 0:03:07.000 --> 0:03:09.040 spread around the globe, of this groups in Latin America, 0:03:09.080 --> 0:03:11.880 there's groups in eastern Western Europe. It's even influencing groups 0:03:11.880 --> 0:03:13.799 in the Middle East or people in the Middle East. 0:03:14.320 --> 0:03:18.480 They're called accelerationists. They want to accelerate the collapse of things. 0:03:18.639 --> 0:03:21.480 And if there's a single ideological text today that's influential 0:03:21.520 --> 0:03:24.600 on this scene, it is by easily James Mason Siege. 0:03:25.160 --> 0:03:27.840 And what I particularly am enjoying about the book I 0:03:27.919 --> 0:03:29.120 just told you before we started recording. 0:03:29.120 --> 0:03:30.120 I haven't finished it yet. 0:03:30.560 --> 0:03:32.840 What I'm enjoying about this book is so you know, 0:03:32.880 --> 0:03:36.040 you were saying that James Mason started writing this in 0:03:36.080 --> 0:03:39.200 the eighties, right, but nobody was reading it. It was 0:03:39.320 --> 0:03:41.520 very sort of niche. It wasn't popular, even within its 0:03:41.520 --> 0:03:44.000 own niche. He was not a popular man. He had 0:03:44.400 --> 0:03:46.040 a lot of beefs with other leaders in the movement. 0:03:46.400 --> 0:03:49.400 It's rediscovered in the twenty tens. It's big on Iron March. 0:03:49.440 --> 0:03:51.840 It's the animating force behind Adam Waffin, and so all 0:03:51.880 --> 0:03:54.880 of a sudden in the last ten years, people like us, 0:03:54.960 --> 0:03:57.440 you know, researchers of the far right, mainstream journalists, people 0:03:57.440 --> 0:04:01.600 are talking about Siege, they're talking about me. But this, 0:04:02.240 --> 0:04:04.520 I think, correct me if I'm wrong, is the only 0:04:04.680 --> 0:04:08.200 book sort of tracing it back to its root. James 0:04:08.200 --> 0:04:11.200 Mason did not come into existence in twenty fifteen on 0:04:11.240 --> 0:04:13.840 the pages of Iron March, right, they sort of dug 0:04:13.920 --> 0:04:17.120 back up this writing that was at that point thirty 0:04:17.200 --> 0:04:19.520 years old. But this book, I mean, it's an incredible 0:04:19.520 --> 0:04:22.400 work of research. But it's also sort of a picuresque, right. 0:04:23.040 --> 0:04:27.839 It follows James Mason through decades of Nazi history. 0:04:27.920 --> 0:04:28.040 Right. 0:04:28.080 --> 0:04:30.159 He wasn't just a guy who wrote a newsletter. He 0:04:30.240 --> 0:04:32.040 was a guy who was in a lot of rooms. 0:04:32.520 --> 0:04:34.520 He knew a lot of people. So through the lens 0:04:34.560 --> 0:04:38.800 of James Mason's life, you can follow the origins of 0:04:38.839 --> 0:04:41.320 the modern neo Nazi movement back to the sort of 0:04:41.360 --> 0:04:46.080 splinters and sects and rival personalities of the seventies. Right 0:04:46.120 --> 0:04:50.560 that you can't understand modern neo Nazi organizing if you 0:04:50.760 --> 0:04:52.880 don't know the history that goes back to the sixties 0:04:52.880 --> 0:04:53.440 and seventies. 0:04:53.960 --> 0:04:56.400 Well, thank you for getting that. I had someone write 0:04:56.440 --> 0:04:58.120 a review and it was an interesting view from the 0:04:58.240 --> 0:05:00.400 viewpoint of literary criticism. And he's like, well, this is 0:05:00.400 --> 0:05:02.480 one of these books about a book it's not. And 0:05:02.480 --> 0:05:05.159 I'm like, yeah, it kind of is, but it's really 0:05:05.200 --> 0:05:07.440 and I started after I started writing this which has 0:05:07.520 --> 0:05:10.960 an unusual origin, or just maybe it is a usual origin. 0:05:11.120 --> 0:05:13.720 Like the first half is about neo Nazism in the 0:05:13.800 --> 0:05:17.839 nineteen seventies, which is incredibly undocumented. There's a huge problem 0:05:17.880 --> 0:05:20.799 with a documentation about the far right in general before 0:05:20.839 --> 0:05:23.960 twenty fifteen. Probably more books have come out in the 0:05:24.000 --> 0:05:26.239 last ten years about the far right in the US 0:05:26.440 --> 0:05:30.080 before twenty fifteen than came out before, and certainly about 0:05:30.120 --> 0:05:33.599 neo Nazis, who are almost always when they are written 0:05:33.600 --> 0:05:36.920 about American Neo Nazis, it's usually in a history of 0:05:36.960 --> 0:05:40.960 the white supremacist movement, and there's no differentiation made between them, 0:05:41.000 --> 0:05:43.560 and I would say the National Socialists are quite different 0:05:43.560 --> 0:05:47.120 from other white supremacists for a variety of different reasons. 0:05:47.400 --> 0:05:49.840 So there is no book about neo Nazism in the 0:05:49.920 --> 0:05:52.680 nineteen seventies in the US at all. There are only 0:05:52.720 --> 0:05:55.440 two documents I can really name, and they're both written 0:05:55.560 --> 0:05:59.560 by National Socialists actually when in Australia and one the 0:05:59.600 --> 0:06:01.640 head of the New Order which used to be the 0:06:01.680 --> 0:06:04.040 American Nazi Party. It's actually not bad. It's an eight 0:06:04.040 --> 0:06:06.599 part series by Martin Kirk. So the first half is 0:06:06.640 --> 0:06:10.000 really reconstructing what happened in the nineteen seventies, because this 0:06:10.120 --> 0:06:12.520 is what siege is coming out of. This siege is 0:06:12.560 --> 0:06:15.800 an answer to the questions that faced neo Nazis in 0:06:15.800 --> 0:06:18.040 the nineteen seventies. And then the second half of the 0:06:18.080 --> 0:06:20.160 book is even I would say less about Mason. It's 0:06:20.160 --> 0:06:24.760 about these four countercultural figures who discover Mason, helped published him, 0:06:24.760 --> 0:06:29.040 and eventually published and disseminated Siege itself. And part of 0:06:29.040 --> 0:06:31.719 that is I was just around the scene these people 0:06:31.720 --> 0:06:33.960 were part of in the nineteen nineties. Like I saw 0:06:34.040 --> 0:06:37.039 one of them, boyd Rice play. I had many mutual 0:06:37.080 --> 0:06:40.159 friends with another, the publisher Adam Parfrey of Farrell House. 0:06:40.240 --> 0:06:43.200 So like, I was like right around what these people 0:06:43.200 --> 0:06:45.960 were doing as part of the nineties counterculture. So I 0:06:46.000 --> 0:06:48.600 became very interested in that because these people always denied 0:06:48.640 --> 0:06:52.440 their background, you know, or left it off or something. 0:06:52.480 --> 0:06:54.960 And I found just so many smoking guns in this. 0:06:55.160 --> 0:06:58.200 And so I will say how this started is right 0:06:58.240 --> 0:07:02.200 after Charlottesville. The Right rally at Charlottesville. Always you say 0:07:02.240 --> 0:07:04.719 these things and just you give the name of the thing, 0:07:04.760 --> 0:07:06.279 and people are like, wait a minute, that's like where 0:07:06.320 --> 0:07:09.480 I live. You know, we're more than that, you know, 0:07:09.520 --> 0:07:10.880 I was in Seattle. I was like, oh, I was 0:07:10.920 --> 0:07:13.920 at Seattle, referring to this nineteen ninety nine demonstration, and 0:07:13.960 --> 0:07:17.120 I'm like, people are here weren't even necessarily born then, 0:07:17.200 --> 0:07:20.960 and just saying at Seattle doesn't mean anything. So after 0:07:21.120 --> 0:07:23.520 younit the right, there was a spike in popularity in 0:07:23.600 --> 0:07:26.520 Siege and the hashtag read siege because it looked like 0:07:26.600 --> 0:07:29.680 the rally followed what he said, and he said, no 0:07:29.720 --> 0:07:33.000 one in an American society will allow neo Nazis to succeed. 0:07:33.640 --> 0:07:35.240 And a lot of people don't know this, but what 0:07:35.360 --> 0:07:38.800 happened at the initial rally is that it wasn't the 0:07:38.920 --> 0:07:41.960 street fighting people might be familiar with, even that's fading 0:07:41.960 --> 0:07:44.640 from memory. Was before it was supposed to start, And 0:07:44.680 --> 0:07:46.480 when it was supposed to start at noon, the police, 0:07:46.480 --> 0:07:49.200 who had been standing a block away and letting everything unfold, 0:07:49.440 --> 0:07:53.000 marched in and forced everyone out, Meaning the rally never happened. 0:07:53.000 --> 0:07:54.080 Nobody ever gave a speech. 0:07:54.960 --> 0:07:57.320 Nobody gave a speech. As as we know, the car 0:07:57.360 --> 0:07:59.760 attack happened like an hour or two later. I got 0:07:59.800 --> 0:08:03.880 a lot, got a timeline. That's all like garbled now right, Yeah, 0:08:03.960 --> 0:08:06.960 that sounds right. And the book is co dedicated to 0:08:06.960 --> 0:08:09.800 Heather Hair I just want to point out, so it 0:08:09.880 --> 0:08:12.320 seemed to coincide with what Mason said. He's like, you 0:08:12.360 --> 0:08:15.120 can't do legal work, you have to do a terrorism right, 0:08:15.400 --> 0:08:17.560 And so there was a spike and interest in it, 0:08:17.720 --> 0:08:20.280 and Adam often had been doing more and more. Adam 0:08:20.320 --> 0:08:23.880 often people are committing murders, strange murders. They're all very 0:08:23.880 --> 0:08:26.320 strange murders, which I think speaks to a lot of 0:08:26.320 --> 0:08:30.000 the personalities who are involved in this and other forms 0:08:30.040 --> 0:08:33.560 of violence, and even in more structured political movements, I 0:08:33.559 --> 0:08:36.400 think it does attract tends to attract fringe people, except 0:08:36.400 --> 0:08:38.640 at certain times where people are intentionally using it as 0:08:38.640 --> 0:08:40.840 a strategy as part of a bigger mass movement. Anyway, 0:08:40.840 --> 0:08:43.680 these are questions for terrorism studies, and so there was 0:08:43.679 --> 0:08:45.160 a spike of interest in it. So I was going 0:08:45.240 --> 0:08:47.920 to write a short article for a think tank I 0:08:48.000 --> 0:08:50.280 used to be associated with, which I will not name 0:08:50.280 --> 0:08:52.680 because I had such a bad experience with them, and 0:08:52.720 --> 0:08:54.240 it was going to be an article. I couldn't get 0:08:54.240 --> 0:08:57.160 the facts to line up. As I said, there's terrible 0:08:57.320 --> 0:09:01.680 scholarship about this period, and so I used this very 0:09:01.880 --> 0:09:06.400 sophisticated research tool called Google, and through that I found 0:09:06.400 --> 0:09:09.040 that Mason's papers. There was a huge collection of Mason's 0:09:09.040 --> 0:09:11.800 papers at the University of Kansas and Lawrence, Kansas. So 0:09:11.880 --> 0:09:14.120 I decided I'd go there. I thought I'd just straightened 0:09:14.160 --> 0:09:16.640 these things out there were some documents I needed, some 0:09:16.840 --> 0:09:19.400 very obscure fanzines and stuff. That'd be the end of 0:09:19.440 --> 0:09:21.839 the day. I got through. Well, first I discovered it's 0:09:21.880 --> 0:09:23.680 not easy to get to Lawrence, Kansas. You have to 0:09:23.679 --> 0:09:25.360 fly into an airport, and then I think I took 0:09:25.400 --> 0:09:27.960 an uber for like an hour. There was like one 0:09:28.000 --> 0:09:31.240 bus a day or something. Anyway, I got there and 0:09:31.400 --> 0:09:34.080 started poking at the papers. It was sixty boxes of 0:09:34.080 --> 0:09:37.880 his correspondence. He had letters incoming and outgoing since the 0:09:37.920 --> 0:09:40.439 early nineteen sixties. As you mentioned, he was an insider 0:09:40.480 --> 0:09:42.320 to the neo Nazi movement, so it was with all 0:09:42.360 --> 0:09:45.640 these people he had kept carbon copies of his outgoing letters. 0:09:45.840 --> 0:09:48.280 It was a unique slice of national socialist life in 0:09:48.280 --> 0:09:50.959 the United States. Never seen an archive like it. People 0:09:51.160 --> 0:09:53.680 didn't keep their papers because they were doing illegal activities. 0:09:53.760 --> 0:09:55.800 The government sees them and has them in a warehouse 0:09:55.840 --> 0:09:59.040 somewhere or whatever. This is even in the pre Internet. 0:09:59.040 --> 0:10:00.800 I can only do this because it was pre Internet 0:10:00.840 --> 0:10:03.679 and there were paper copies of stuff, and of the 0:10:03.720 --> 0:10:06.520 age where I grew up doing all research on paper 0:10:06.960 --> 0:10:10.440 and in archives. And I quickly found out what I had. 0:10:10.480 --> 0:10:12.400 And there were two things. One, as I said was 0:10:12.400 --> 0:10:15.800 that there was this whole story of American neo Nazism, 0:10:15.920 --> 0:10:18.679 of when the American Nazi Party splinters then called the 0:10:18.760 --> 0:10:22.240 National Socialistory People's Party in the nineteen seventies, and all 0:10:22.280 --> 0:10:24.040 these groups come out of it, many of which we 0:10:24.200 --> 0:10:27.000 know parts of, like William Peers who wrote the Turner 0:10:27.080 --> 0:10:29.720 Diaries and the Skoky Incident which is parodied, and the 0:10:29.720 --> 0:10:32.400 Blues Brothers. Some people don't know this just so Paul 0:10:32.400 --> 0:10:35.800 Franklin shooting and paralyzing US publisher Larry Flint, and some 0:10:35.960 --> 0:10:38.040 other things. And I was like, Oh, these are all 0:10:38.080 --> 0:10:40.559 people who came out of one thing, a splintering of 0:10:40.640 --> 0:10:43.160 the party. And I realized that there basically was a 0:10:43.280 --> 0:10:46.400 terrorist wing that came out of the splintering. And people 0:10:46.480 --> 0:10:49.120 knew Mason and people knew Pierce, but there was like 0:10:49.200 --> 0:10:52.240 a couple other groups or people, but people didn't put 0:10:52.240 --> 0:10:55.400 it together that they were all like the most radical 0:10:55.440 --> 0:10:58.000 wing of these splinter groups. So there was that story. 0:10:58.040 --> 0:10:59.680 And then, as I mentioned, there was a second story 0:10:59.679 --> 0:11:03.040 about the these countercultural people who had always denied that 0:11:03.080 --> 0:11:05.839 they were involved in national socialism or the level of it. 0:11:05.880 --> 0:11:07.960 It was just a joke. All these things that we 0:11:07.960 --> 0:11:10.400 hear today almost word for word. And so I found 0:11:10.400 --> 0:11:12.880 all their letters to James Mason, and they're adorned with 0:11:12.920 --> 0:11:16.520 swastikas and eight eights and they're helping him. Had they 0:11:16.559 --> 0:11:19.240 reveal the extent that they helped him? And the funny 0:11:19.240 --> 0:11:21.920 thing is a lot of this stuff was actually available 0:11:21.920 --> 0:11:23.760 and out in the open. It was published books, but 0:11:23.800 --> 0:11:26.720 it was like little pieces of flakes of gold scattered 0:11:26.760 --> 0:11:29.440 around everything. And I started picking them up because I 0:11:29.480 --> 0:11:32.320 realized you could put them together. And so one article 0:11:32.440 --> 0:11:34.280 turned out was supposed to be one article, and then 0:11:34.320 --> 0:11:36.560 it turns two articles. And I sat down to write 0:11:36.600 --> 0:11:38.720 it and turned into a book. And then five years 0:11:38.800 --> 0:11:41.640 later I finally had the manuscript done, then took another 0:11:41.679 --> 0:11:44.480 year at the publishers, and then it came out last year. 0:11:44.920 --> 0:11:48.080 So it's been seven years of work, and I've been 0:11:48.080 --> 0:11:51.120 going around doing talks. I did seventeen talks and support 0:11:51.120 --> 0:11:53.199 of the book and as many podcasts and stuff. So 0:11:53.240 --> 0:11:55.760 I'm still the book is still part of my life, 0:11:55.800 --> 0:11:58.000 as much as I would like to sort of put 0:11:58.040 --> 0:12:00.200 it down. But thank you Remedy on the podcast this 0:12:00.280 --> 0:12:02.199 is not It's great they have me on the podcast 0:12:02.280 --> 0:12:05.760 Not Against No diss against you. No shade, no shade no. 0:12:05.840 --> 0:12:08.640 And I'm so I'm so jealous of your trip to 0:12:08.720 --> 0:12:10.120 Kansas to see the archives. 0:12:10.440 --> 0:12:12.280 I only recently. 0:12:12.040 --> 0:12:14.960 A year or two, discovered that his papers existed in 0:12:15.000 --> 0:12:17.160 those archives, and so I wrote to the archivist and 0:12:17.160 --> 0:12:19.400 I said, like, you know, are any of these digitized? 0:12:19.400 --> 0:12:20.800 I would love to see them. And they're like, you know, 0:12:20.840 --> 0:12:22.960 we've only digitized like one box. And they sent me 0:12:23.000 --> 0:12:25.320 a couple of a couple of scans, but most of 0:12:25.320 --> 0:12:27.480 it has not been digitized. So you have to go 0:12:27.520 --> 0:12:31.119 to Kansas if you want to read this old pedophile 0:12:31.240 --> 0:12:33.160 Nazis letters to Charles Manson. 0:12:33.440 --> 0:12:36.120 Well, I do have thousands of pictures I took of 0:12:36.160 --> 0:12:39.680 this correspondence. So yeah, if you request digital copies, they 0:12:39.679 --> 0:12:42.840 won't tell you what they've digitized. And so it's it's 0:12:42.880 --> 0:12:45.959 like you know, trying to like randomly throw darts or something. 0:12:46.000 --> 0:12:47.760 If you get the right file, they have them. 0:12:47.880 --> 0:12:49.800 And I was like, I was begging and pleading. 0:12:49.840 --> 0:12:51.680 I was like, please, just like any letters you have 0:12:51.760 --> 0:12:53.680 with Bob Hyke, I just I just want the Bob 0:12:53.760 --> 0:12:54.400 Hike letters. 0:12:55.040 --> 0:12:57.400 But I can give you the Bob Hike letters. 0:12:57.480 --> 0:12:58.240 I would love those. 0:12:58.360 --> 0:13:01.240 I think they'll they'll digitize stuff for a price. 0:13:01.320 --> 0:13:03.880 Though, Oh I'm sure. I'm sure if I pay for it, 0:13:03.920 --> 0:13:05.040 they would do me the favor. 0:13:05.120 --> 0:13:08.640 But that's the thing is that there's so much interconnection 0:13:08.720 --> 0:13:12.440 here because these stories always get told episodically, right, like 0:13:12.480 --> 0:13:15.480 the story of James Mason and Adam Woffen, the story 0:13:15.520 --> 0:13:17.679 of William Luther Peers, the story of the founding of 0:13:17.720 --> 0:13:21.160 the National Socialist Movement. But nobody takes those pieces and 0:13:21.200 --> 0:13:26.040 slots them together because they interlock. They all interlock, right, 0:13:26.080 --> 0:13:28.080 And so this idea of the lone wolf, I mean, 0:13:28.120 --> 0:13:31.840 I guess James Mason's life's work is to perpetuate and 0:13:31.960 --> 0:13:34.920 motivate the lone wolf, But is it really a lone 0:13:34.960 --> 0:13:36.280 wolf if he's training them? 0:13:36.640 --> 0:13:39.959 Well, the lone wolf question is a long question. A 0:13:40.000 --> 0:13:42.040 lot of people know Metzger moved to the lone wolf 0:13:42.120 --> 0:13:46.080 strategy after a war was sued by the SPLC and collapse, 0:13:46.160 --> 0:13:49.480 but Mason was advocating this beforehand and was very tight 0:13:49.520 --> 0:13:53.360 with Metzger. So there is actually a book describing what 0:13:53.400 --> 0:13:55.760 you've said, putting the pieces together, and it's called Neo 0:13:55.840 --> 0:13:57.880 Nazi terrorism and counterculture. 0:13:57.520 --> 0:14:00.040 Has exactly the I think which you can buy to. 0:14:00.920 --> 0:14:02.560 I mean, like I said, it's the only book that 0:14:02.600 --> 0:14:05.760 I know of that fits these pieces together. 0:14:06.080 --> 0:14:08.040 No, it is the only book. Actually. I've been in 0:14:08.080 --> 0:14:11.200 contact with James Mason, and he said when radio interview, 0:14:11.200 --> 0:14:13.120 it's not the first of its kind, but it's the 0:14:13.160 --> 0:14:14.160 best of its kind. 0:14:14.800 --> 0:14:29.560 A high praise from the book's Nazi pedophile subject. Why 0:14:29.560 --> 0:14:31.840 did he donate his papers to the library because, like 0:14:31.840 --> 0:14:34.960 you said, most people are not only not preserving these 0:14:34.960 --> 0:14:36.840 items where they're not preserving them at all because they 0:14:36.880 --> 0:14:39.960 know what they've done is illegal or embarrassing to everyone involved, 0:14:40.000 --> 0:14:44.360 and they're intentionally destroying the evidence of these kinds of communications. 0:14:44.400 --> 0:14:47.080 But he not only saved them, but he wanted to 0:14:47.120 --> 0:14:49.720 make sure we could read them. Did you talk to 0:14:49.760 --> 0:14:50.920 him at all about why he did that? 0:14:51.200 --> 0:14:53.800 Well, he sold them. He was a wheeler dealer in 0:14:54.440 --> 0:14:58.840 especially American Nazi Party memorabilia. You know, he sold furniture 0:14:59.160 --> 0:15:02.840 on the side like antiques. He'd go antiquing and he 0:15:03.360 --> 0:15:05.480 if you've seen pictures of his apartment, it's filled with 0:15:05.560 --> 0:15:08.120 Nazi nickknacks, right, he's got a knife collection. 0:15:08.640 --> 0:15:11.440 Maybe it looks like it looks like the Area Nation's 0:15:11.480 --> 0:15:12.800 booth at the Tulsa Gun Show. 0:15:13.200 --> 0:15:15.640 It looks like my apartment, but like the in the 0:15:15.680 --> 0:15:21.760 inverse and fewer plants. So he was a collector, so 0:15:21.800 --> 0:15:24.280 he was already on. My understanding is he was already 0:15:24.320 --> 0:15:27.800 selling George Lincoln Rockwell Memory of Bilia or whatever papers 0:15:27.840 --> 0:15:30.640 in such two Kansas. They have this collection there called 0:15:30.640 --> 0:15:34.400 the Wilcox Collection of anti extremist stuff. This guy, Laard 0:15:34.440 --> 0:15:38.200 Wilcox had been in early students for Democratic Society before 0:15:38.200 --> 0:15:41.040 they took the like Marxist turn, and then decided that 0:15:41.120 --> 0:15:43.560 the left and the right were the same, like in 0:15:43.600 --> 0:15:46.520 the seventies or something, and started collecting all this material. 0:15:46.600 --> 0:15:48.960 So they were one of the they're probably the biggest 0:15:49.000 --> 0:15:51.160 collection of far right material. And as I said, at 0:15:51.160 --> 0:15:54.280 the time, libraries weren't collecting it, and people weren't writing 0:15:54.280 --> 0:15:55.960 about it. They were like, oh, these are just a 0:15:55.960 --> 0:15:59.200 bunch of kooks and wing nuts. They're not important. And 0:15:59.480 --> 0:16:01.120 some of this is because, like as I say in 0:16:01.120 --> 0:16:03.960 the book, the first neo Nazi mass murder wasn't until 0:16:04.000 --> 0:16:07.080 the late seventies, like it was what we know as 0:16:07.160 --> 0:16:10.600 neo Nazism today really only emerged in the seventies. Is 0:16:10.600 --> 0:16:13.320 one of my arguments in the book. So the papers 0:16:13.320 --> 0:16:15.040 were there because he sold them. The second thing is 0:16:15.160 --> 0:16:19.840 he is unique, I think, not unique, but very uncommon, 0:16:19.960 --> 0:16:23.680 because he is an unabashed neo Nazi. He does not 0:16:23.760 --> 0:16:26.600 try to hide it. He is not like the NSM, 0:16:26.640 --> 0:16:30.240 which is actually a party he co founded, shockingly, but 0:16:30.400 --> 0:16:33.000 left over that as they turned, because originally it was 0:16:33.040 --> 0:16:35.040 to promote violence, and then as it turned to a 0:16:35.080 --> 0:16:37.800 more traditional Hollywood Nazi party, he left. But it's the 0:16:37.800 --> 0:16:40.080 same one that was at Charlottesville, and Jeff's Scoop was 0:16:40.120 --> 0:16:42.840 the head of I actually taught Jeff Scoop about how 0:16:42.840 --> 0:16:45.560 the party was founded. That was very interesting. I interviewed 0:16:45.600 --> 0:16:46.280 him for the book. 0:16:46.400 --> 0:16:48.479 Another one of those dishonest actors. 0:16:48.200 --> 0:16:50.240 Well, the guy who had made him the head of 0:16:50.240 --> 0:16:53.880 the party, who was actually the second head, Harrington, cliff Harrington. 0:16:53.920 --> 0:16:57.000 Clifford Harrington did not give him the truthful account of 0:16:57.040 --> 0:17:00.000 the parties founding. Harrington claimed he was a co founder, 0:17:00.120 --> 0:17:02.240 and he wasn't. He claimed a different date. This is 0:17:02.240 --> 0:17:04.600 one reason I spent so much time on stuff. Also 0:17:04.680 --> 0:17:06.679 that I found all these things that had been printed that 0:17:06.720 --> 0:17:09.960 were wrong by scholars and others that were and it 0:17:10.000 --> 0:17:11.720 wasn't their fault. They were taken. It was hard to 0:17:11.720 --> 0:17:13.960 get these harder to get these documents, especially when a 0:17:14.000 --> 0:17:16.600 group is moving. And so Harrington claimed he had been 0:17:16.600 --> 0:17:19.000 a co founder in nineteen seventy four or whatever, but 0:17:19.280 --> 0:17:22.960 he was lying. Mason was one of the co founders 0:17:23.000 --> 0:17:27.080 and not him. He only became the head in the eighties. 0:17:27.280 --> 0:17:29.800 So this is some of this stuff I found. Anyway, 0:17:29.800 --> 0:17:31.320 I was gonna say the NSM at one point go, 0:17:31.440 --> 0:17:33.800 we're not neo Nazis, were National Socialists. 0:17:34.560 --> 0:17:37.199 I was like, get the fuck out of here, like really, like, 0:17:37.359 --> 0:17:41.600 come all, your flag is a swastikonic ah. I mean, 0:17:41.640 --> 0:17:45.280 this is absurd, but people will do that, right, It's 0:17:45.320 --> 0:17:47.480 like the Dead Parents skit in Monty Python. 0:17:47.760 --> 0:17:50.399 If people know this and so. But Mason stands out 0:17:50.400 --> 0:17:52.880 because he's always been very upfront about his views. He's 0:17:53.000 --> 0:17:55.520 very proud of them. He's not ashamed. And if this 0:17:55.640 --> 0:17:57.960 is embarrassed other people, they didn't belong He's as he 0:17:58.000 --> 0:17:59.760 told to me, they didn't believe in the one true 0:17:59.760 --> 0:18:03.360 really religion. So I asked him about these counterculture figures 0:18:03.359 --> 0:18:05.879 who have denied they were ever involved in this stuff. 0:18:05.920 --> 0:18:09.280 At the time, he was convinced they were national socialists, 0:18:09.359 --> 0:18:11.400 and he was like, well, they believed in something else 0:18:11.440 --> 0:18:13.359 other than the one True faith. I think that's the 0:18:13.400 --> 0:18:16.600 word he used. So yeah, he is nothing to hide. 0:18:16.640 --> 0:18:19.720 He's very open about it, very open about promoting terrorism, 0:18:20.280 --> 0:18:22.119 as you know, and maybe some of the listeners do. 0:18:22.280 --> 0:18:25.359 Young neo Nazis go to his apartment and he tutors them. 0:18:25.440 --> 0:18:29.040 They take pictures with him. This included Sam Woodward, who 0:18:29.440 --> 0:18:33.040 murdered a young gay Jewish man Blaze Bernstein, recently sentenced 0:18:33.080 --> 0:18:36.360 to life in prison. There's pictures a Woodward in Mason's apartment. 0:18:37.160 --> 0:18:39.639 So yeah, I mean he wants as he's proud of 0:18:39.640 --> 0:18:41.840 his lineage and he wants it documented. And I know 0:18:41.960 --> 0:18:44.200 I did him a favor by writing a book about 0:18:44.240 --> 0:18:47.159 his movement. I mean, they don't have the intellectuals and 0:18:47.200 --> 0:18:51.080 the resources to in the trained people to write historical books, 0:18:51.680 --> 0:18:53.560 and I did it a pretty straight up book. Even 0:18:53.600 --> 0:18:55.919 Mason was like, I kept waiting to read the smear. 0:18:56.000 --> 0:18:58.080 I kept waiting for the smear. There was no smear. 0:18:58.240 --> 0:18:59.560 I was like, yeah, I just wrote it as a 0:19:00.040 --> 0:19:02.960 street book. And so in a way, I've given them 0:19:03.280 --> 0:19:06.560 an insight into their history, which wouldn't exist otherwise. So 0:19:06.640 --> 0:19:08.800 this stuff is always a double edged sword when you 0:19:08.880 --> 0:19:11.600 cover as you know, when you cover fascist groups, they 0:19:11.640 --> 0:19:15.440 want the publicity by and large. I was told sometimes 0:19:15.440 --> 0:19:18.399 at the SPLC, like groups contact them and they're like, 0:19:18.440 --> 0:19:20.280 cover us, give us coverage. 0:19:19.920 --> 0:19:21.280 Sending them their press releases. 0:19:21.400 --> 0:19:22.960 Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. 0:19:23.000 --> 0:19:25.120