Speaker 1: Colson Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome back to it could happen here. I
Speaker 2: am once.
Speaker 3: Again your occasional host, Molly Conker, and I am joined
Speaker 3: today by Spencer Sunshine, the author of Neo Nazi Terrorism
Speaker 3: and Countercultural Fascism, The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege.
Speaker 3: It's available now in paperback. I have my paperback copy
Speaker 3: from Routledge Press. So, Spencer, I guess let's get right
Speaker 3: into it. What is Siege and why should we still
Speaker 3: be talking about it?
Speaker 4: Well, unfortunately, we should still be talking about it because
Speaker 4: it's still influential. It was a book originally published in
Speaker 4: nineteen ninety three, but that is an edited version of
Speaker 4: newsletters published in the eighties by a fellow named James Mason,
Speaker 4: who is a lifelong neo Nazi. He joined the American
Speaker 4: Nazi Party at age fourteen in nineteen sixty six. He
Speaker 4: is still an active ideological believer in national socialism. It's
Speaker 4: a book that in it he makes the argument that
Speaker 4: any kind of normal legal political activity was pointless for
Speaker 4: Neo Nazis to engage in and like forming organizations, holding marches,
Speaker 4: making the traditional propaganda, trying to build up parties even
Speaker 4: guerrilla warfare. At the end of it, he becomes very
Speaker 4: cynical about and he says, through what are essentially dramatic
Speaker 4: random acts of violence, of terrorism or murder. He even
Speaker 4: goes into praising serial killers like Joseph Paul Franklin, we
Speaker 4: can destabilize the government and society and after this neo
Speaker 4: Nazis can come to power. This has become a very
Speaker 4: influential idea. More recently he was rediscovered. It was a
Speaker 4: pretty obscure The newsletters were very unpopular that he never
Speaker 4: made more than one hundred copies. The original book had
Speaker 4: a print run of one thousand, so it was a
Speaker 4: sort of obscure text. It was known amongst neo Nazi
Speaker 4: circles for some unusual reasons. It became mixed up with
Speaker 4: some countercultural figures and that was actually what made up
Speaker 4: more well known. But it was revived in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 4: It was found by these younger aspiring terrorists, let's say
Speaker 4: at the time, around a message board called Iron March.
Speaker 4: It became the bible of the adamoff And Division, this
Speaker 4: new Nazi group that its members and associates killed five
Speaker 4: people and out of that everyone in the Adam offf
Speaker 4: and Division had to read siege, which became the hashtag,
Speaker 4: and out of that grew this whole sort of network,
Speaker 4: first of groups and now really totally decentralized, like propaganda
Speaker 4: channels on telegram to Terogram promoting these same ideas, and
Speaker 4: so it's become very influential today. It gets named in
Speaker 4: like terrorist manifestos. The school shooter I think it was
Speaker 4: in Nashville, Tennessee that just happened. He makes a reference
Speaker 4: to people who are into siege in his writings, and
Speaker 4: more and more I've documented before him at least twelve
Speaker 4: murders that are either by the Adam Waffin Division, by
Speaker 4: people inspired by siege culture, or by people directly linked
Speaker 4: to Terogram. So if we want to look at the
Speaker 4: main text animating neo Nazi terrorism today, which has now
Speaker 4: spread around the globe, of this groups in Latin America,
Speaker 4: there's groups in eastern Western Europe. It's even influencing groups
Speaker 4: in the Middle East or people in the Middle East.
Speaker 4: They're called accelerationists. They want to accelerate the collapse of things.
Speaker 4: And if there's a single ideological text today that's influential
Speaker 4: on this scene, it is by easily James Mason Siege.
Speaker 3: And what I particularly am enjoying about the book I
Speaker 3: just told you before we started recording.
Speaker 2: I haven't finished it yet.
Speaker 3: What I'm enjoying about this book is so you know,
Speaker 3: you were saying that James Mason started writing this in
Speaker 3: the eighties, right, but nobody was reading it. It was
Speaker 3: very sort of niche. It wasn't popular, even within its
Speaker 3: own niche. He was not a popular man. He had
Speaker 3: a lot of beefs with other leaders in the movement.
Speaker 3: It's rediscovered in the twenty tens. It's big on Iron March.
Speaker 3: It's the animating force behind Adam Waffin, and so all
Speaker 3: of a sudden in the last ten years, people like us,
Speaker 3: you know, researchers of the far right, mainstream journalists, people
Speaker 3: are talking about Siege, they're talking about me. But this,
Speaker 3: I think, correct me if I'm wrong, is the only
Speaker 3: book sort of tracing it back to its root. James
Speaker 3: Mason did not come into existence in twenty fifteen on
Speaker 3: the pages of Iron March, right, they sort of dug
Speaker 3: back up this writing that was at that point thirty
Speaker 3: years old. But this book, I mean, it's an incredible
Speaker 3: work of research. But it's also sort of a picuresque, right.
Speaker 3: It follows James Mason through decades of Nazi history.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: He wasn't just a guy who wrote a newsletter. He
Speaker 3: was a guy who was in a lot of rooms.
Speaker 3: He knew a lot of people. So through the lens
Speaker 3: of James Mason's life, you can follow the origins of
Speaker 3: the modern neo Nazi movement back to the sort of
Speaker 3: splinters and sects and rival personalities of the seventies. Right
Speaker 3: that you can't understand modern neo Nazi organizing if you
Speaker 3: don't know the history that goes back to the sixties
Speaker 3: and seventies.
Speaker 4: Well, thank you for getting that. I had someone write
Speaker 4: a review and it was an interesting view from the
Speaker 4: viewpoint of literary criticism. And he's like, well, this is
Speaker 4: one of these books about a book it's not. And
Speaker 4: I'm like, yeah, it kind of is, but it's really
Speaker 4: and I started after I started writing this which has
Speaker 4: an unusual origin, or just maybe it is a usual origin.
Speaker 4: Like the first half is about neo Nazism in the
Speaker 4: nineteen seventies, which is incredibly undocumented. There's a huge problem
Speaker 4: with a documentation about the far right in general before
Speaker 4: twenty fifteen. Probably more books have come out in the
Speaker 4: last ten years about the far right in the US
Speaker 4: before twenty fifteen than came out before, and certainly about
Speaker 4: neo Nazis, who are almost always when they are written
Speaker 4: about American Neo Nazis, it's usually in a history of
Speaker 4: the white supremacist movement, and there's no differentiation made between them,
Speaker 4: and I would say the National Socialists are quite different
Speaker 4: from other white supremacists for a variety of different reasons.
Speaker 4: So there is no book about neo Nazism in the
Speaker 4: nineteen seventies in the US at all. There are only
Speaker 4: two documents I can really name, and they're both written
Speaker 4: by National Socialists actually when in Australia and one the
Speaker 4: head of the New Order which used to be the
Speaker 4: American Nazi Party. It's actually not bad. It's an eight
Speaker 4: part series by Martin Kirk. So the first half is
Speaker 4: really reconstructing what happened in the nineteen seventies, because this
Speaker 4: is what siege is coming out of. This siege is
Speaker 4: an answer to the questions that faced neo Nazis in
Speaker 4: the nineteen seventies. And then the second half of the
Speaker 4: book is even I would say less about Mason. It's
Speaker 4: about these four countercultural figures who discover Mason, helped published him,
Speaker 4: and eventually published and disseminated Siege itself. And part of
Speaker 4: that is I was just around the scene these people
Speaker 4: were part of in the nineteen nineties. Like I saw
Speaker 4: one of them, boyd Rice play. I had many mutual
Speaker 4: friends with another, the publisher Adam Parfrey of Farrell House.
Speaker 4: So like, I was like right around what these people
Speaker 4: were doing as part of the nineties counterculture. So I
Speaker 4: became very interested in that because these people always denied
Speaker 4: their background, you know, or left it off or something.
Speaker 4: And I found just so many smoking guns in this.
Speaker 4: And so I will say how this started is right
Speaker 4: after Charlottesville. The Right rally at Charlottesville. Always you say
Speaker 4: these things and just you give the name of the thing,
Speaker 4: and people are like, wait a minute, that's like where
Speaker 4: I live. You know, we're more than that, you know,
Speaker 4: I was in Seattle. I was like, oh, I was
Speaker 4: at Seattle, referring to this nineteen ninety nine demonstration, and
Speaker 4: I'm like, people are here weren't even necessarily born then,
Speaker 4: and just saying at Seattle doesn't mean anything. So after
Speaker 4: younit the right, there was a spike in popularity in
Speaker 4: Siege and the hashtag read siege because it looked like
Speaker 4: the rally followed what he said, and he said, no
Speaker 4: one in an American society will allow neo Nazis to succeed.
Speaker 4: And a lot of people don't know this, but what
Speaker 4: happened at the initial rally is that it wasn't the
Speaker 4: street fighting people might be familiar with, even that's fading
Speaker 4: from memory. Was before it was supposed to start, And
Speaker 4: when it was supposed to start at noon, the police,
Speaker 4: who had been standing a block away and letting everything unfold,
Speaker 4: marched in and forced everyone out, Meaning the rally never happened.
Speaker 2: Nobody ever gave a speech.
Speaker 4: Nobody gave a speech. As as we know, the car
Speaker 4: attack happened like an hour or two later. I got
Speaker 4: a lot, got a timeline. That's all like garbled now right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: that sounds right. And the book is co dedicated to
Speaker 4: Heather Hair I just want to point out, so it
Speaker 4: seemed to coincide with what Mason said. He's like, you
Speaker 4: can't do legal work, you have to do a terrorism right,
Speaker 4: And so there was a spike and interest in it,
Speaker 4: and Adam often had been doing more and more. Adam
Speaker 4: often people are committing murders, strange murders. They're all very
Speaker 4: strange murders, which I think speaks to a lot of
Speaker 4: the personalities who are involved in this and other forms
Speaker 4: of violence, and even in more structured political movements, I
Speaker 4: think it does attract tends to attract fringe people, except
Speaker 4: at certain times where people are intentionally using it as
Speaker 4: a strategy as part of a bigger mass movement. Anyway,
Speaker 4: these are questions for terrorism studies, and so there was
Speaker 4: a spike of interest in it. So I was going
Speaker 4: to write a short article for a think tank I
Speaker 4: used to be associated with, which I will not name
Speaker 4: because I had such a bad experience with them, and
Speaker 4: it was going to be an article. I couldn't get
Speaker 4: the facts to line up. As I said, there's terrible
Speaker 4: scholarship about this period, and so I used this very
Speaker 4: sophisticated research tool called Google, and through that I found
Speaker 4: that Mason's papers. There was a huge collection of Mason's
Speaker 4: papers at the University of Kansas and Lawrence, Kansas. So
Speaker 4: I decided I'd go there. I thought I'd just straightened
Speaker 4: these things out there were some documents I needed, some
Speaker 4: very obscure fanzines and stuff. That'd be the end of
Speaker 4: the day. I got through. Well, first I discovered it's
Speaker 4: not easy to get to Lawrence, Kansas. You have to
Speaker 4: fly into an airport, and then I think I took
Speaker 4: an uber for like an hour. There was like one
Speaker 4: bus a day or something. Anyway, I got there and
Speaker 4: started poking at the papers. It was sixty boxes of
Speaker 4: his correspondence. He had letters incoming and outgoing since the
Speaker 4: early nineteen sixties. As you mentioned, he was an insider
Speaker 4: to the neo Nazi movement, so it was with all
Speaker 4: these people he had kept carbon copies of his outgoing letters.
Speaker 4: It was a unique slice of national socialist life in
Speaker 4: the United States. Never seen an archive like it. People
Speaker 4: didn't keep their papers because they were doing illegal activities.
Speaker 4: The government sees them and has them in a warehouse
Speaker 4: somewhere or whatever. This is even in the pre Internet.
Speaker 4: I can only do this because it was pre Internet
Speaker 4: and there were paper copies of stuff, and of the
Speaker 4: age where I grew up doing all research on paper
Speaker 4: and in archives. And I quickly found out what I had.
Speaker 4: And there were two things. One, as I said was
Speaker 4: that there was this whole story of American neo Nazism,
Speaker 4: of when the American Nazi Party splinters then called the
Speaker 4: National Socialistory People's Party in the nineteen seventies, and all
Speaker 4: these groups come out of it, many of which we
Speaker 4: know parts of, like William Peers who wrote the Turner
Speaker 4: Diaries and the Skoky Incident which is parodied, and the
Speaker 4: Blues Brothers. Some people don't know this just so Paul
Speaker 4: Franklin shooting and paralyzing US publisher Larry Flint, and some
Speaker 4: other things. And I was like, Oh, these are all
Speaker 4: people who came out of one thing, a splintering of
Speaker 4: the party. And I realized that there basically was a
Speaker 4: terrorist wing that came out of the splintering. And people
Speaker 4: knew Mason and people knew Pierce, but there was like
Speaker 4: a couple other groups or people, but people didn't put
Speaker 4: it together that they were all like the most radical
Speaker 4: wing of these splinter groups. So there was that story.
Speaker 4: And then, as I mentioned, there was a second story
Speaker 4: about the these countercultural people who had always denied that
Speaker 4: they were involved in national socialism or the level of it.
Speaker 4: It was just a joke. All these things that we
Speaker 4: hear today almost word for word. And so I found
Speaker 4: all their letters to James Mason, and they're adorned with
Speaker 4: swastikas and eight eights and they're helping him. Had they
Speaker 4: reveal the extent that they helped him? And the funny
Speaker 4: thing is a lot of this stuff was actually available
Speaker 4: and out in the open. It was published books, but
Speaker 4: it was like little pieces of flakes of gold scattered
Speaker 4: around everything. And I started picking them up because I
Speaker 4: realized you could put them together. And so one article
Speaker 4: turned out was supposed to be one article, and then
Speaker 4: it turns two articles. And I sat down to write
Speaker 4: it and turned into a book. And then five years
Speaker 4: later I finally had the manuscript done, then took another
Speaker 4: year at the publishers, and then it came out last year.
Speaker 4: So it's been seven years of work, and I've been
Speaker 4: going around doing talks. I did seventeen talks and support
Speaker 4: of the book and as many podcasts and stuff. So
Speaker 4: I'm still the book is still part of my life,
Speaker 4: as much as I would like to sort of put
Speaker 4: it down. But thank you Remedy on the podcast this
Speaker 4: is not It's great they have me on the podcast
Speaker 4: Not Against No diss against you. No shade, no shade no.
Speaker 3: And I'm so I'm so jealous of your trip to
Speaker 3: Kansas to see the archives.
Speaker 2: I only recently.
Speaker 3: A year or two, discovered that his papers existed in
Speaker 3: those archives, and so I wrote to the archivist and
Speaker 3: I said, like, you know, are any of these digitized?
Speaker 3: I would love to see them. And they're like, you know,
Speaker 3: we've only digitized like one box. And they sent me
Speaker 3: a couple of a couple of scans, but most of
Speaker 3: it has not been digitized. So you have to go
Speaker 3: to Kansas if you want to read this old pedophile
Speaker 3: Nazis letters to Charles Manson.
Speaker 4: Well, I do have thousands of pictures I took of
Speaker 4: this correspondence. So yeah, if you request digital copies, they
Speaker 4: won't tell you what they've digitized. And so it's it's
Speaker 4: like you know, trying to like randomly throw darts or something.
Speaker 4: If you get the right file, they have them.
Speaker 2: And I was like, I was begging and pleading.
Speaker 3: I was like, please, just like any letters you have
Speaker 3: with Bob Hyke, I just I just want the Bob
Speaker 3: Hike letters.
Speaker 4: But I can give you the Bob Hike letters.
Speaker 2: I would love those.
Speaker 4: I think they'll they'll digitize stuff for a price.
Speaker 2: Though, Oh I'm sure. I'm sure if I pay for it,
Speaker 2: they would do me the favor.
Speaker 3: But that's the thing is that there's so much interconnection
Speaker 3: here because these stories always get told episodically, right, like
Speaker 3: the story of James Mason and Adam Woffen, the story
Speaker 3: of William Luther Peers, the story of the founding of
Speaker 3: the National Socialist Movement. But nobody takes those pieces and
Speaker 3: slots them together because they interlock. They all interlock, right,
Speaker 3: And so this idea of the lone wolf, I mean,
Speaker 3: I guess James Mason's life's work is to perpetuate and
Speaker 3: motivate the lone wolf, But is it really a lone
Speaker 3: wolf if he's training them?
Speaker 4: Well, the lone wolf question is a long question. A
Speaker 4: lot of people know Metzger moved to the lone wolf
Speaker 4: strategy after a war was sued by the SPLC and collapse,
Speaker 4: but Mason was advocating this beforehand and was very tight
Speaker 4: with Metzger. So there is actually a book describing what
Speaker 4: you've said, putting the pieces together, and it's called Neo
Speaker 4: Nazi terrorism and counterculture.
Speaker 2: Has exactly the I think which you can buy to.
Speaker 3: I mean, like I said, it's the only book that
Speaker 3: I know of that fits these pieces together.
Speaker 4: No, it is the only book. Actually. I've been in
Speaker 4: contact with James Mason, and he said when radio interview,
Speaker 4: it's not the first of its kind, but it's the
Speaker 4: best of its kind.
Speaker 3: A high praise from the book's Nazi pedophile subject. Why
Speaker 3: did he donate his papers to the library because, like
Speaker 3: you said, most people are not only not preserving these
Speaker 3: items where they're not preserving them at all because they
Speaker 3: know what they've done is illegal or embarrassing to everyone involved,
Speaker 3: and they're intentionally destroying the evidence of these kinds of communications.
Speaker 3: But he not only saved them, but he wanted to
Speaker 3: make sure we could read them. Did you talk to
Speaker 3: him at all about why he did that?
Speaker 4: Well, he sold them. He was a wheeler dealer in
Speaker 4: especially American Nazi Party memorabilia. You know, he sold furniture
Speaker 4: on the side like antiques. He'd go antiquing and he
Speaker 4: if you've seen pictures of his apartment, it's filled with
Speaker 4: Nazi nickknacks, right, he's got a knife collection.
Speaker 3: Maybe it looks like it looks like the Area Nation's
Speaker 3: booth at the Tulsa Gun Show.
Speaker 4: It looks like my apartment, but like the in the
Speaker 4: inverse and fewer plants. So he was a collector, so
Speaker 4: he was already on. My understanding is he was already
Speaker 4: selling George Lincoln Rockwell Memory of Bilia or whatever papers
Speaker 4: in such two Kansas. They have this collection there called
Speaker 4: the Wilcox Collection of anti extremist stuff. This guy, Laard
Speaker 4: Wilcox had been in early students for Democratic Society before
Speaker 4: they took the like Marxist turn, and then decided that
Speaker 4: the left and the right were the same, like in
Speaker 4: the seventies or something, and started collecting all this material.
Speaker 4: So they were one of the they're probably the biggest
Speaker 4: collection of far right material. And as I said, at
Speaker 4: the time, libraries weren't collecting it, and people weren't writing
Speaker 4: about it. They were like, oh, these are just a
Speaker 4: bunch of kooks and wing nuts. They're not important. And
Speaker 4: some of this is because, like as I say in
Speaker 4: the book, the first neo Nazi mass murder wasn't until
Speaker 4: the late seventies, like it was what we know as
Speaker 4: neo Nazism today really only emerged in the seventies. Is
Speaker 4: one of my arguments in the book. So the papers
Speaker 4: were there because he sold them. The second thing is
Speaker 4: he is unique, I think, not unique, but very uncommon,
Speaker 4: because he is an unabashed neo Nazi. He does not
Speaker 4: try to hide it. He is not like the NSM,
Speaker 4: which is actually a party he co founded, shockingly, but
Speaker 4: left over that as they turned, because originally it was
Speaker 4: to promote violence, and then as it turned to a
Speaker 4: more traditional Hollywood Nazi party, he left. But it's the
Speaker 4: same one that was at Charlottesville, and Jeff's Scoop was
Speaker 4: the head of I actually taught Jeff Scoop about how
Speaker 4: the party was founded. That was very interesting. I interviewed
Speaker 4: him for the book.
Speaker 2: Another one of those dishonest actors.
Speaker 4: Well, the guy who had made him the head of
Speaker 4: the party, who was actually the second head, Harrington, cliff Harrington.
Speaker 4: Clifford Harrington did not give him the truthful account of
Speaker 4: the parties founding. Harrington claimed he was a co founder,
Speaker 4: and he wasn't. He claimed a different date. This is
Speaker 4: one reason I spent so much time on stuff. Also
Speaker 4: that I found all these things that had been printed that
Speaker 4: were wrong by scholars and others that were and it
Speaker 4: wasn't their fault. They were taken. It was hard to
Speaker 4: get these harder to get these documents, especially when a
Speaker 4: group is moving. And so Harrington claimed he had been
Speaker 4: a co founder in nineteen seventy four or whatever, but
Speaker 4: he was lying. Mason was one of the co founders
Speaker 4: and not him. He only became the head in the eighties.
Speaker 4: So this is some of this stuff I found. Anyway,
Speaker 4: I was gonna say the NSM at one point go,
Speaker 4: we're not neo Nazis, were National Socialists.
Speaker 5: I was like, get the fuck out of here, like really, like,
Speaker 5: come all, your flag is a swastikonic ah. I mean,
Speaker 5: this is absurd, but people will do that, right, It's
Speaker 5: like the Dead Parents skit in Monty Python.
Speaker 4: If people know this and so. But Mason stands out
Speaker 4: because he's always been very upfront about his views. He's
Speaker 4: very proud of them. He's not ashamed. And if this
Speaker 4: is embarrassed other people, they didn't belong He's as he
Speaker 4: told to me, they didn't believe in the one true
Speaker 4: really religion. So I asked him about these counterculture figures
Speaker 4: who have denied they were ever involved in this stuff.
Speaker 4: At the time, he was convinced they were national socialists,
Speaker 4: and he was like, well, they believed in something else
Speaker 4: other than the one True faith. I think that's the
Speaker 4: word he used. So yeah, he is nothing to hide.
Speaker 4: He's very open about it, very open about promoting terrorism,
Speaker 4: as you know, and maybe some of the listeners do.
Speaker 4: Young neo Nazis go to his apartment and he tutors them.
Speaker 4: They take pictures with him. This included Sam Woodward, who
Speaker 4: murdered a young gay Jewish man Blaze Bernstein, recently sentenced
Speaker 4: to life in prison. There's pictures a Woodward in Mason's apartment.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I mean he wants as he's proud of
Speaker 4: his lineage and he wants it documented. And I know
Speaker 4: I did him a favor by writing a book about
Speaker 4: his movement. I mean, they don't have the intellectuals and
Speaker 4: the resources to in the trained people to write historical books,
Speaker 4: and I did it a pretty straight up book. Even
Speaker 4: Mason was like, I kept waiting to read the smear.
Speaker 4: I kept waiting for the smear. There was no smear.
Speaker 4: I was like, yeah, I just wrote it as a
Speaker 4: street book. And so in a way, I've given them
Speaker 4: an insight into their history, which wouldn't exist otherwise. So
Speaker 4: this stuff is always a double edged sword when you
Speaker 4: cover as you know, when you cover fascist groups, they
Speaker 4: want the publicity by and large. I was told sometimes
Speaker 4: at the SPLC, like groups contact them and they're like,
Speaker 4: cover us, give us coverage.
Speaker 2: Sending them their press releases.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: But I mean I think someone like Mason, I guess
Speaker 3: he doesn't see this mirror because, like you said, he's
Speaker 3: proud of himself. So this is I think, is an
Speaker 3: honest appraisal of his legacy, and most people would see
Speaker 3: that as a smear, but he's proud of it.
Speaker 4: Well, it's not a smear. I don't need to say
Speaker 4: anything bad about him. He's he's there promoting Nazi terrorism.
Speaker 4: What's the point of, like, you know, denouncing this or something.
Speaker 3: I mean, Whereas I think someone like Pierce, I think
Speaker 3: sometimes when people write honestly about Peer, obviously he's been
Speaker 3: dead for twenty five years, but he resisted the characterization
Speaker 3: that he was inciting terrorism, even though he, like Mays
Speaker 3: and very much was.
Speaker 4: Oh well, Pierce is just the liar. I mean, all
Speaker 4: these guys.
Speaker 2: Exactly, That's what I mean. But I think a book
Speaker 2: like this about Pierce.
Speaker 3: I think he would not have enjoyed, whereas Mason is
Speaker 3: at least honest about his legacy.
Speaker 4: You know, there is a terrible book about Pierce by
Speaker 4: one of the sick of fants who is a professor actually.
Speaker 2: Ardess Griffin.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that again, that is one of those dishonest histories.
Speaker 3: I think we were talking before we started recording that
Speaker 3: the problem with archival research trying to write a history
Speaker 3: of these movements is they are dishonest actors.
Speaker 2: And so Robert S. Griffin, he wrote what is it
Speaker 2: the Fame of a dead Man's Deeds?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 2: Is that what it's called.
Speaker 3: He went into it, you know, saying like, I'm going
Speaker 3: to write this neutral appraisal of this figure of the movement,
Speaker 3: about Willie Luther Pierce, and over the weeks that he
Speaker 3: spent on the compound to write it, and he spent
Speaker 3: time with Pierce on the compound in Hillsborough, became radicalized
Speaker 3: and is a Nazi.
Speaker 2: Now are he still alive?
Speaker 3: I mean, he could take issue with that characterization if
Speaker 3: he wants, But yes, I'm sure you've read the book.
Speaker 2: It's not neutral. It's a has giography of Peers.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's actually a book by Pierce's son too, which
Speaker 4: is interesting.
Speaker 2: I've read that it's quite good.
Speaker 4: Well, unfortunately a lot of it's copy pasta.
Speaker 3: But I think his insight into his relationship with his
Speaker 3: father is very unique. It is called The Sins of
Speaker 3: My Father by Kelvin Pearce. Yeah, I mean that's a
Speaker 3: window you don't often get, although I guess now we do.
Speaker 3: Also have The Klansman's Son by Don Black's.
Speaker 4: Daughter Black's daughter or son.
Speaker 2: She has transitions.
Speaker 4: Oh, I did not know that, well, Mazeltov. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: I remember reading their work before Trump, and they actually
Speaker 4: wrote one of the most moving resignations from the movement
Speaker 4: that I've read, very much taking you know, being accountable
Speaker 4: even though they were raised in it. I feel like
Speaker 4: children raised in this are not like as accountable as
Speaker 4: adults are, right, especially like they were in college at
Speaker 4: the time. But it was like a true interesting working
Speaker 4: through it, and I felt like heartfelt apology for it.
Speaker 4: And yeah, actually, this is a fun fact. You may
Speaker 4: know a member of the Aryan Nationalist Action A and A.
Speaker 4: This terrorist is a bank robbing group from the eighties.
Speaker 4: I think became the first person to transition gender.
Speaker 2: From Donald Langen.
Speaker 3: Donna Langen was known as pretty Boy Pedro when she
Speaker 3: was the head of the Rigan Republican Armies. It a
Speaker 3: bank robbery gang out of Allahem City.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: She was the first person to win a battle with
Speaker 3: the federal government to transition in.
Speaker 4: Federal prison to get surgery.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And just recently, actually, there was a filing in her case.
Speaker 3: She's trying to get the way the case is titled
Speaker 3: in the court records.
Speaker 2: Is still Peter.
Speaker 3: Langen, her dead name, and the judge denied her petition
Speaker 3: to retitle the case.
Speaker 2: But she has transitioned and is in a women's prison.
Speaker 4: Is she in Texas?
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, I could look up in the BOP where
Speaker 2: she is.
Speaker 4: Texas bands prisoners from changing their names.
Speaker 2: She is in FMC cars.
Speaker 4: That isn't in Dallas, Texas. Yeah, yeah, that's yeah, that's why.
Speaker 3: So she's still in the BOP system under her dead name,
Speaker 3: but she was allowed to physically transition. So that's again
Speaker 3: just a strange twist of history, right that the person
Speaker 3: who won that legal model for us was a Nazi
Speaker 3: bank robber.
Speaker 4: Well, she has also long repudiated those politics, so I
Speaker 4: think she's been the only person to have surgery, transperson
Speaker 4: to have surgery who was imprisoned at the time, because
Speaker 4: I think that was recently and then everything, you know,
Speaker 4: everything they changed. They I know that they slowed down
Speaker 4: their trans policies waiting to see the results of the election.
Speaker 4: So for a strange reason, I know, actually a bunch
Speaker 4: of the stuff about trans people in prison and.
Speaker 3: So anyway, No, it's I mean, it's a remarkable, remarkable history.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So you started writing this book after Unite the
Speaker 3: Right because there was this renewed interest in Siege. I mean,
Speaker 3: I guess what has the experience been like, you know,
Speaker 3: over the course of spending the last six years of
Speaker 3: your life working on this, realizing that it is only
Speaker 3: because becoming more relevant and not less.
Speaker 4: Well, the problem is is like for people like us
Speaker 4: who watch the far right, like our work is only
Speaker 4: important or people are only interested in it when there
Speaker 4: is a big upswing, and then like that's when people
Speaker 4: are interested, and that's when it is more important. So
Speaker 4: on one hand, it's good that I didn't spend five
Speaker 4: years and then no one remembered what Siege was and
Speaker 4: it was just a blip. I mean, that's good for me,
Speaker 4: But I have to say what's good for me is
Speaker 4: bad for society, and so, I mean.
Speaker 3: I think it would have been an important work of
Speaker 3: history regardless. But I guess as you're working on it,
Speaker 3: realizing that the body count is only growing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's I don't know, I don't really you know,
Speaker 4: what do you say about that? I call these people
Speaker 4: empty people spreading emptiness. Like it's hard for me even
Speaker 4: to get mad at the more aggressive neo Nazis and
Speaker 4: white supremacists, Like often they're young, and I just see
Speaker 4: like sad young people who can't deal with their problems,
Speaker 4: engaged in like hurting other people who are often not
Speaker 4: so different than them, you know. I mean there's a
Speaker 4: trans man who was in Adam. Often, you know, like
Speaker 4: they're numerous stories of people being you know, of not
Speaker 4: white descent, either they're hiding that they're not, or they're
Speaker 4: a mixed race descent and they're sort of passing as
Speaker 4: wide of being Jewish, of being queer, all this stuff.
Speaker 4: The movement's filled with these people. Sometimes it's the people
Speaker 4: are even like how many straight white men are there
Speaker 4: in the movement, Like and it's just sad. You're like,
Speaker 4: I see you're being attracted to this because you're so alienated,
Speaker 4: or you're so your identity is so shaky that you
Speaker 4: are attracted to this idea of a firm, strong identity.
Speaker 4: And I mean sometimes people forget fascism in Italy and
Speaker 4: Germany arose and basically the last two countries that arose
Speaker 4: and solidified in Europe, like those were countries that wasn't
Speaker 4: clear what Italy was going to be. There's such differences
Speaker 4: between the north and the south. There's no reason, Like
Speaker 4: it was unclear originally whether Germany was going to be
Speaker 4: Austria too, you know, and so they were. It's a
Speaker 4: way part of fascism is shoring up that national identity
Speaker 4: which was very fragmented, and it works the same I
Speaker 4: think with people's identities. And one of the things that
Speaker 4: attracts people to neo Nazism, I think is this strong
Speaker 4: affirmation of an identity, and people with mixed identities or
Speaker 4: conflicted about it or filled with self loathing are drawn
Speaker 4: to this for that reason. One of the many reasons
Speaker 4: people get drawn into these things.
Speaker 2: And they recruit so young.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think in the book you're talking about this,
Speaker 3: you know, all the way back to James Mason's origins
Speaker 3: that he became interested in the Nazi Party as a
Speaker 3: fourteen year.
Speaker 4: Old, joined it, joined it at fourteen.
Speaker 3: So he's a child, right getting into this movement, and
Speaker 3: now that he is an old man, he is in
Speaker 3: turn in doctrinating children. Right that Adam Woffen members are
Speaker 3: very young, I guess were Adam Woffin technically doesn't exist anymore,
Speaker 3: but most of the most of the young men who
Speaker 3: spilled blood for Adam Waffen were twenty years old years old.
Speaker 4: And you know, someone pointed out the founder of the
Speaker 4: feuer Krieg Division when he founded it was twelve. He
Speaker 4: was arrested when he was thirteen or fourteen, but he
Speaker 4: founded it at twelve.
Speaker 3: And which tragic, obviously tragic, heartbreaking, disgusting. But imagine being
Speaker 3: one of the adults who was in that group and
Speaker 3: finding out that your fear was twelve.
Speaker 4: I grew up in the South in an extremely Protestant
Speaker 4: area at the height of that like eighties fundamentals Christian
Speaker 4: Christian right thing, and there were I knew about. These
Speaker 4: are kind of an older thing. Child preachers. Have you
Speaker 4: ever heard of child preachers? This was a big thing during.
Speaker 3: The Yeah, they speak in tongues and they sort of
Speaker 3: parrot the cadence of the way adults speak.
Speaker 2: But if you listen carefully, they're not saying anything.
Speaker 4: If they've memorized the way that adults give these barn
Speaker 4: burning you know, adult Protestants evangelicals give these barn burning sermons,
Speaker 4: but they don't necessarily understand what they're saying. And so,
Speaker 4: I mean, I think it's pretty common people adults will
Speaker 4: do this and believe in what they're saying. Maybe they
Speaker 4: understand it a little better. I think there's a bunch
Speaker 4: of post structuralist academics who don't even understand what they're saying.
Speaker 4: But that can happen too, And so I think people
Speaker 4: like well, I don't know, I was a pretty smart
Speaker 4: twelve year old. Maybe I would understand it better. But
Speaker 4: you just need somebody repeating it. It's the slogans and
Speaker 4: the narratives have already been formed by others. You're not
Speaker 4: necessarily innovating on it. As long as you can repeat
Speaker 4: the dogma, it doesn't really matter who's saying. It doesn't
Speaker 4: matter if you're if the person is gay or Jewish.
Speaker 2: And I mean the Estonian twelve year old was not
Speaker 2: a one off.
Speaker 3: You know. In the Ethan Melzer case a year or
Speaker 3: two ago, Ethan Melzer was a US Army private who
Speaker 3: was trying to set up his unit in Turkey to
Speaker 3: be attacked by Middle Eastern terrorist groups. And the person
Speaker 3: he was communicating with online sort of goading him into
Speaker 3: these acts was a child.
Speaker 2: It was a child.
Speaker 4: He was the Order of Nine Angles though right he
Speaker 4: was on. He wasn't a near Nazi, right. I always
Speaker 4: try to distinguish there's some nine A's who are not.
Speaker 3: He was at the bleed point of Adam Waffin's splinter
Speaker 3: group and Ona. He was involved with rape Waffen, was he? Yeah,
Speaker 3: The lineage of these groups is so messy. I think
Speaker 3: some of them don't even understand the ideological lineage of
Speaker 3: the sect they've ended up in. But but Melzer was
Speaker 3: at that sort of bleed point where Adam Woffin was
Speaker 3: becoming ONA.
Speaker 4: But I think what we're seeing now, and definitely in
Speaker 4: these last two school shootings in the last month, is
Speaker 4: a syncretic murder cull. The guy who just did the
Speaker 4: Naspau one was black. But if you start looking at
Speaker 4: both of their manifestos. They're referring to all different kinds
Speaker 4: of things, some of whom are white supremacists and neo Nazis,
Speaker 4: many of whom aren't just other school shooters, and they
Speaker 4: don't seem to have a real ideological, necessarily connection to
Speaker 4: some of this the political stuff. It's not become. And
Speaker 4: nine A they are founded by neo Nazi and many
Speaker 4: of them are neo Nazis. And so I was going
Speaker 4: to say they're not. They don't have to and all
Speaker 4: the people are it, and even if you are supposed
Speaker 4: to be, they aren't all. And so we're just getting
Speaker 4: through these various online forums on Telegram and elsewhere. Sometimes
Speaker 4: they just spread over all kinds of the different platforms.
Speaker 4: We're getting just this syncretic mix of these things. And
Speaker 4: this is one of the things that made nine A
Speaker 4: and Siege Culture a parallel Mason's ideas, because Mason's not
Speaker 4: a Satanist, and in fact he's recently denounced ordered at
Speaker 4: angles and when he was around Satanists, they were atheist
Speaker 4: Satanists around the Church of Satan. That when you start saying, hey,
Speaker 4: we need to commit random murders in this goal of
Speaker 4: destroying the suppose the Jewish controlled society, so there could
Speaker 4: be a white arian revolution. Like, it doesn't matter if
Speaker 4: you have a really political reason or if you're thinking
Speaker 4: that these heretical acts will destroy somehow the consensus. Reality.
Speaker 4: You're just trying to go people into these violent, random
Speaker 4: acts of terrorism and more random murders.
Speaker 2: Right, and the end result is the same they're.
Speaker 4: Thinking is the same, and the end results is the same.
Speaker 4: So they start cross pollinating. And then what's the difference
Speaker 4: between the school shooter cults? You know, and now we
Speaker 4: have groups like the Maniac murder cult who are ostensibly political,
Speaker 4: ostensibly neo Nazi and Order of nine angle has been
Speaker 4: a reality or just like go attack old people from behind.
Speaker 4: I mean it's just pathetic stuff. Go, you know, beat
Speaker 4: up homeless people and stab them. It's like at some
Speaker 4: point often say this and my speeches, and it's become
Speaker 4: more and more real. Is like everything blends together in
Speaker 4: our society, I think. You know, you start with like
Speaker 4: school shooters, and it's hard to distinguish them from like
Speaker 4: a political mass shooters and from political mass shooters. Right
Speaker 4: at one point, it just becomes this one thing that's
Speaker 4: like all mixed together because we're having in the United States,
Speaker 4: we're having these constant attacks and constant that often the
Speaker 4: body account is very high. Like what becomes the difference anymore?
Speaker 4: Does it really matter? Like the Allen Texas gott who
Speaker 4: was a Latino neo Nazi who killed a bunch of
Speaker 4: people in an outlet mall, this is really a neo
Speaker 4: Nazi action, like he was, like clearly if you look
Speaker 4: at his stuff or an article called Nazis of color
Speaker 4: about this dynamic. But was his action how was his
Speaker 4: action necessarily any different than like a school shooting or whatever,
Speaker 4: or just like you know, it's just like he's going
Speaker 4: somewhere and killing random people, Like what is this about?
Speaker 4: So I think we're seeing this syncretic murdercal is really
Speaker 4: I know, other people have different ways of posing this
Speaker 4: that is sprawling out on different online platforms and appealing
Speaker 4: to very young, alienated people, probably whose whole lives are
Speaker 4: you know, online. I think, especially younger people who went
Speaker 4: through COVID zoomers and I guess people younger than that
Speaker 4: would be Generation Alpha spend more time online than any
Speaker 4: other generation. Obviously they must, and this becomes especially when
Speaker 4: they're much younger. The horizon other world, right, And if
Speaker 4: they're in cells and they're not really connected to other
Speaker 4: people and they're not connected to their family, like it
Speaker 4: just it just dry gives these impulses more and more,
Speaker 4: and they don't have the maturity to look outside of
Speaker 4: it or to think about the repercussions of it, or
Speaker 4: think of have the empathy to think about how it's
Speaker 4: going to affect other people in their families.
Speaker 3: And so when it comes to Siege, what would you
Speaker 3: say its current role in this sort of evolving syncretic
Speaker 3: murder culture that we have, is it is Siege's legacy
Speaker 3: now just that it's ideological lineage lives on in sort
Speaker 3: of the terogram milieu, or is it still itself influential?
Speaker 4: Well, some of this is a question of ideas. I
Speaker 4: think sometimes Siege acts as a symbol. People can gesture
Speaker 4: that their neo Nazis is a serious neo Nazi four
Speaker 4: hundred and fifty page tone.
Speaker 2: They didn't read it, They didn't all read it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know, just like how many of you have
Speaker 4: read Siege? And I found out doing the work that
Speaker 4: there's like an edited one hundred page version and then
Speaker 4: there's like a little pocket version and then someone even
Speaker 4: made the ten Tenants of Siege.
Speaker 2: There's this the spark Notes murder called.
Speaker 4: Well Adam often division apparently had a test on siege
Speaker 4: to get in. And I'm like, I know these people
Speaker 4: didn't write. They're like a lot of very disturbed or
Speaker 4: you know, people who aren't gonna like it's a boring text.
Speaker 4: I mean I read it twice in like.
Speaker 3: I've read portions, but I'm not going to sit here
Speaker 3: and say I read the whole book.
Speaker 2: It's four hundred and fifty page.
Speaker 4: Man, I read every newsletter and the book and it's yes, no. Oh,
Speaker 4: So it acts as the symbol to be like, look,
Speaker 4: we have a serious intellectual thing. How many Christians have
Speaker 4: read the Bible. Let's be really sorting.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, I think that's the right analogy, right,
Speaker 3: that it is a foundational text. But they're not all
Speaker 3: sitting down and digesting or even understanding it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, how many Communists have read Dos Capital No,
Speaker 4: even just volume one, which I have I would like
Speaker 4: to say I have, Actually, is it more or less
Speaker 4: boring than Siege? It's more intellectual? And so there's that,
Speaker 4: and there's also like the conclusions are there, right, the
Speaker 4: whole argument is developed in siege. But you really just
Speaker 4: need to take the conclusions, which is you can't do
Speaker 4: any political work. It's hopeless. You need to go out
Speaker 4: and commit dramatic acts of violence to help inspire people,
Speaker 4: and then you know, maybe afterwards there'll be some aaran
Speaker 4: blah blah blah. Frankly, that's all you need to know
Speaker 4: about it, because that's what it advocates. You just need
Speaker 4: the praxie that it concludes. And most activists aren't intellectuals.
Speaker 4: Like I always say, like a movement can have three
Speaker 4: slogans and what you need to do on the left,
Speaker 4: you need to make sure those are the right slogans
Speaker 4: pointing in the right direction. Because somebody who flows into
Speaker 4: activism who's young, it doesn't matter if they're young, doesn't
Speaker 4: have a background of politics, is going to take the
Speaker 4: thing seriously that you say. And you can only say
Speaker 4: so many things to people. Political movements are stupid. I mean,
Speaker 4: this is why we are the ninety nine percent was great?
Speaker 4: It was it was great, wasn't true? I mean half
Speaker 4: of Americans are like it, you know, support the Republicans,
Speaker 4: but like it's like one thing and then the person
Speaker 4: can think about those things. They're not going to have
Speaker 4: complicated ideas. So what is what are the slogans that
Speaker 4: come out of something? What are the basic what does
Speaker 4: it boil down to the things you're saying? And people
Speaker 4: have inherited that from Siege or inherited it secondhand, you know,
Speaker 4: because Terogram is very well versed in what Siege is about.
Speaker 4: I mean, Adam often had to read it, so they
Speaker 4: were more I think, into it as a text. And
Speaker 4: then as it's gone out, you know, Tarogram people, the
Speaker 4: Teogram collective certainly knew what was in it and stuff,
Speaker 4: and so people are being affected by it even if
Speaker 4: they don't know, even if they haven't read, or even
Speaker 4: if they don't know, that's the origin of those.
Speaker 2: Ideas, right. So Tterogram is directly downstream of Siege.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: So Siege was a newsletter that became a book. People
Speaker 3: read the book, and the people who read that book
Speaker 3: turned it back into a zine. Right, So it's it's
Speaker 3: sort of oh to someone, right, it's moving through its
Speaker 3: phases and now it's regressed sing back into sort of
Speaker 3: mimetic zine form.
Speaker 4: But people who join these movements who want something more
Speaker 4: intellectual because everyone who joins a religious or political movement.
Speaker 4: Some people want a more rigorous They're like, well, what's
Speaker 4: the reason for this? Well, I have these questions. How
Speaker 4: do you answer them? What is why are we doing this?
Speaker 4: Want more rigorous? Some people want a more rigorous background
Speaker 4: can turn to siege, and as they get older, will
Speaker 4: turn to siege or move out of it. And they're like,
Speaker 4: what were the ideas behind this? Why did we have
Speaker 4: these ideas? And I think that's it's normal. I mean,
Speaker 4: there are all kinds of weird intellectual groundings for white supremacists.
Speaker 4: A lot of it is theology, which is sort of curious.
Speaker 4: And I kind of concluded at some point that you
Speaker 4: just needed something complicated because they couldn't use race science anymore,
Speaker 4: and they weren't people who developed social science other than
Speaker 4: someone like a Londebenoist who's saying something much more complicated
Speaker 4: than most white supremacis are. And so like theology just
Speaker 4: allowed something intellectual for people to chew on, you know
Speaker 4: what I mean, Like people are real smart who aren't
Speaker 4: very analytical, one something to chew on with the ideas,
Speaker 4: whether it really changes their practice or not. And I
Speaker 4: think there has to be something that serves that need.
Speaker 3: And so I guess wrapping up because we're supposed to
Speaker 3: keep these daily shows short. What is the takeaway that
Speaker 3: you want people to come away from this book with?
Speaker 3: I guess, especially in this political moment.
Speaker 4: I think there's two things. The book has two things. One,
Speaker 4: I just want to have people have a better understanding
Speaker 4: of neo Nazism in the US and how it developed.
Speaker 4: It's just one big blur. It's part of other things,
Speaker 4: and I see it as a distinct strain, and I
Speaker 4: want people to have a just a better understanding of
Speaker 4: that political movements origins, which is maybe a more scholarly thing.
Speaker 4: And I am my next book, I hope if I
Speaker 4: can get a contract, is to write a history of
Speaker 4: national socialism in America, because again there's not a single
Speaker 4: book that describes that, which is very strange. Certainly not
Speaker 4: a history post war, and there may be a pre
Speaker 4: war one, but not one that puts it all together.
Speaker 4: So there's a lot of ignorance about this movement. And
Speaker 4: the second part about the cultural actors is about the
Speaker 4: danger of taking a radical culture movement and to use
Speaker 4: impulses like transgression and turn them into the very toxic
Speaker 4: politics into terrorist politics. At the end of the day,
Speaker 4: I had a discussion on Blue Sky. It was amazing.
Speaker 4: You could see. It wasn't Twitter. I had a useful
Speaker 4: discussion on Blue Sky and where I learned something. It
Speaker 4: was just fabulous, And it was this woman posted that
Speaker 4: which was like essentially in Matzau I read it. In
Speaker 4: the twentieth century, there was always this assumption that transgressive art,
Speaker 4: avant garde art was implicitly progressive. Sometimes it was ideological,
Speaker 4: but even when it wasn't, even when it had some
Speaker 4: dodgy elements, the impulse of it led to progressive, left
Speaker 4: leaning politics, and it's very transgression was progressive. And I
Speaker 4: mean these guys I'm looking at are and working in
Speaker 4: the eighties and you see it now. We've all seen
Speaker 4: it with four Chan like that was never that isn't true,
Speaker 4: and that was never true, never true, right, I mean,
Speaker 4: those of us in the punk scene in the eighties
Speaker 4: and nineties could see this, and if we certainly didn't
Speaker 4: put it that way. With like Skinheads in particular, it
Speaker 4: was contested terrain where people were trying to take the
Speaker 4: subculture and pull it to the left and right right.
Speaker 4: There were so many Nazis, but there were anti fascist
Speaker 4: skinheads too, Sharps. Sharps to some extent, Sharps were a
Speaker 4: lot of them are rightling nationalists, they just weren't just Nazis.
Speaker 4: This is a common There was grips like rash Red
Speaker 4: and anarchist skinheads who still exist. But there was a
Speaker 4: contested terrain where people trying to pull it in different directions.
Speaker 4: This is still the case in neo folk and heathen
Speaker 4: religious circles, and that's sort of you There's an implication
Speaker 4: which I don't think I can only like put it
Speaker 4: into words now, that like the transgressive elements of these
Speaker 4: subcultures didn't necessarily go one way or the other, and
Speaker 4: it was something you'd have to fight over, Like they
Speaker 4: could go and have any direction. And I think it
Speaker 4: was clear in four Chan early on. I once was
Speaker 4: mentioned very early on in four Chan and someone chimed
Speaker 4: in and they're like, leave them alone. He's my friend,
Speaker 4: And I'm like, which of my friends are on four
Speaker 4: Chan and defending me? But like four Chan didn't have
Speaker 4: to end up the way it did. You know, the
Speaker 4: earlier Internet culture wasn't like this. It was progressive or
Speaker 4: libertarian or a more decent libertarian for reading of libertarianism
Speaker 4: than we have now. So that's the second part. I mean,
Speaker 4: other than these guys, if you ever were in the
Speaker 4: industrial or neo folk scene and you heard about there's Nazis,
Speaker 4: I have all of the receipt in detail in the book.
Speaker 4: If that's of interest to you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Boyd Rice will tell you he never meant it,
Speaker 3: but I've read some of the primary documents that lead
Speaker 3: me to believe otherwise.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And I even made a video of him creatively entitled
Speaker 4: Boyd Rice New Nazi Collaborator. And I know you're like, Spencer,
Speaker 4: what are you really getting at here? And I show
Speaker 4: the letters and stuff, and just if you're not familiar
Speaker 4: with these figures, I know a lot of people there
Speaker 4: were very obscure movements at the time, and you know,
Speaker 4: people are not familiar with them. But I think are
Speaker 4: familiar enough with this idea of like a super radical
Speaker 4: cultural movement about step by step I show how it
Speaker 4: can move into fully politicized a transgressive movement can move
Speaker 4: into a fully politicized super time neo Nazism that is
Speaker 4: espousing terrorism, and that that this is something that we
Speaker 4: always have to watch out for in our own religious
Speaker 4: movements and our own cultural movements and occult circles. I
Speaker 4: just did a podcast with some you know, occult style
Speaker 4: esoteric podcast and I was talking about Satanists to become Nazis.
Speaker 4: Satanists are sort of, I would say, split these days,
Speaker 4: but there's definitely a Nazi, you know, peace in there
Speaker 4: are a very visible one. And so some of it's just
Speaker 4: about these things.
Speaker 3: That's an important takeaway too that you know, in any subculture,
Speaker 3: especially these sort of transgressive subcultures like you know, counterculture
Speaker 3: music and art and you know, occult spaces, you have
Speaker 3: a magical practice.
Speaker 2: That you engage in. People who engage in you know,
Speaker 2: practice pagan faiths and all these subcultures.
Speaker 3: You need to call out these bad actors early and
Speaker 3: often push back, don't let them bully you, and push
Speaker 3: them out of your spaces.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, and Nazis ruin everything. They intentionally go into all
Speaker 4: these spaces and sometimes don't intentionally. Actually this was a
Speaker 4: comment on Stormfront I learned from talking about Nazis in
Speaker 4: the animal rights movement, and they're like, Spencer doesn't understand.
Speaker 4: We're not infiltrating these movements. We're just vegans. We're just
Speaker 4: also Nazis. Like, but we're not vegans because we're Nazis.
Speaker 4: We're not coming here from some other reason.
Speaker 2: Well, you can't let them sit with you either way.
Speaker 4: Well, this is a funny story. I don't know if
Speaker 4: you have tied, but I heard this story from a
Speaker 4: friend of mine that they were in a vegan group
Speaker 4: in southern California, I think, and they had a unofficial party,
Speaker 4: like a barbecue. It's people from the group, you know,
Speaker 4: from the group doing it. People brought their partners. It
Speaker 4: wasn't an official group function. But this white member of
Speaker 4: the group brought her husband, who was Kevin McDonald. Oh,
Speaker 4: and they were vegetarians or vegans, and people were like
Speaker 4: holy fuck. And he was like, I mean, I feel
Speaker 4: a little sympathetic to me. He's like, hey, man, I
Speaker 4: don't know. I'm just I'm a I'm a vegetarian or whatever.
Speaker 4: I'm here with my wife. She's going to a party.
Speaker 2: Like, no, you're not allowed to have friends. You're not
Speaker 2: allowed to have friends, you're not allowed to have hobbies.
Speaker 2: You can't be here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But he's like, I'm not here to recruit anyone.
Speaker 4: I'm here. You know what I mean.
Speaker 3: It's the barbecue is over with the race scientist shows up.
Speaker 4: Well, this became a big discussion in the group about
Speaker 4: whether to push him out or not. But you have
Speaker 4: to do these things. And if you even if you
Speaker 4: don't want to, they're my friend or everyone's welcome or whatever.
Speaker 4: What is gonna end up happening if you don't push
Speaker 4: the Nazi out is that more Nazis show up. Well,
Speaker 4: if you if it's a single person, people are gonna
Speaker 4: start leaving. People of color are gonna leave, Jews are
Speaker 4: gonna leave, LGBTQ plus people are gonna leave, and you're
Speaker 4: gonna end up defending this one person losing many more. So,
Speaker 4: even just on your own, you know, enlightened self interest,
Speaker 4: if you want to keep your group together. I've seen
Speaker 4: this again and again and again, and then they're like,
Speaker 4: you're defending a Nazi, so you're one too, So yeah,
Speaker 4: you got to kick these people out, even just for
Speaker 4: practical reasons. I have a very low bar for people
Speaker 4: these days, and I try to I try to appeal.
Speaker 4: I try to appeal to the baser reasons sometimes with people,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 3: Well, if you would like to learn more about how
Speaker 3: a couple of guys in the counterculture movement in the
Speaker 3: eighties are responsible for the publication of the book that
Speaker 3: serves as the bible for modern Nazi terrorism. You can
Speaker 3: pick up a copy of Neo Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism,
Speaker 3: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege by Spencer
Speaker 3: Sunshine from Routlige Press is available I think wherever books
Speaker 3: are sold. I bought my copy directly from the publisher
Speaker 3: Routledge Press. I think it was only twenty seven dollars.
Speaker 2: You know, a bargain and.
Speaker 3: A steal, So pick up a copy of that and
Speaker 3: where else can people find your work?
Speaker 2: Spencer?
Speaker 4: Thank you for now that you mentioned that. I am
Speaker 4: on all of the socials usually at Transform sixt seven,
Speaker 4: eight nine. Have a web page if you want, if
Speaker 4: you have an RSS fee. If someone said this recently,
Speaker 4: they're like, it's actually one of the better ways to
Speaker 4: keep track of people, as like this is your follow
Speaker 4: rezillion people anyway, Spencersunshine dot com. Also, if you'd like
Speaker 4: to support anti fascist research and get a warm, fuzzy feeling,
Speaker 4: you should sign up for my Patreon for as little
Speaker 4: as two dollars a month. You can help me out
Speaker 4: with the rent and get some exclusive contact.
Speaker 2: So yep, well hell yeah, thank you so much for
Speaker 2: joining us today.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. It's been great.
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