Speaker 1: Coll Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, Molly here. I know it's not Thursday. This
Speaker 2: isn't a new episode of Weird Little Guys, but I
Speaker 2: think it is something you might enjoy. There's a book
Speaker 2: that comes up a lot on this show, a book
Speaker 2: called Siege by James Mason. It's a foundational text for
Speaker 2: the modern neo Nazi terrorist. It was required reading for
Speaker 2: members of the Neo Nazi terrorist organization Adam Woffin, and
Speaker 2: it was written by a guy whose life was absolutely
Speaker 2: weird enough for his own series of episodes. One of
Speaker 2: these days, this is an interview with the author of
Speaker 2: a book about that book, and I had a great
Speaker 2: time talking with Spencer Sunshine about his book Neo Nazi
Speaker 2: Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism, The Origins and Afterlife of James
Speaker 2: Mason's Siege. I don't actually recommend reading Siege, but if
Speaker 2: you're interested in that text, you should definitely check out
Speaker 2: Spencer's book about it. The interview went up earlier this
Speaker 2: week as an episode of it could happen here another
Speaker 2: show on the Cool Zone Media network. But I know
Speaker 2: now everybody subscribes to all the shows on the network,
Speaker 2: even if you should, and I thought you all might
Speaker 2: enjoy this too. It provides a little more context for
Speaker 2: that weird Nazi book I keep bringing up. So if
Speaker 2: you haven't already heard this episode on another feed, I
Speaker 2: hope you'll give it a listener.
Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome back to it could happen here.
Speaker 2: I am once again your occasional host, Molly Conker, and
Speaker 2: I am joined today by Spencer Sunshine, the author of
Speaker 2: Neo Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism, The Origins and Afterlife
Speaker 2: of James Mason's Siege. It's available now in paperback. I
Speaker 2: have my paperback copy from Ritledge Press. So Spencer, I
Speaker 2: guess let's get right into it.
Speaker 3: What is Siege and why should we still be talking
Speaker 3: 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 pay. 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 it
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 Adam Offin Division, this
Speaker 4: neo Nazi group that its members and associates killed five people,
Speaker 4: and out of that everyone in the Adam off And
Speaker 4: Division had to read Siege, which became the hashtag. And
Speaker 4: out of that grew this whole sort of network, first
Speaker 4: of groups and now really totally decentralized like propaganda channels
Speaker 4: on Telegram, dub Terogram promoting these same ideas, and so
Speaker 4: it's become very influential today. It gets named in like
Speaker 4: terrorist manifestos. The school shooter, I think it was in Nashville,
Speaker 4: Tennessee that just happened. He makes a reference to people
Speaker 4: who are into siege in his writings, and more and
Speaker 4: more I've documented before him at least twelve murders that
Speaker 4: are either by the Adam Waffin Division, by people inspired
Speaker 4: by Siege culture, or by people directly linked to Terogram.
Speaker 4: So if we want to look at the main text
Speaker 4: animating neo Nazi terrorism today, which has now spread around
Speaker 4: the globe, of this groups in Latin America, there's groups
Speaker 4: in eastern Western Europe. It's even influencing groups in the
Speaker 4: Middle East. Or people in the Middle East. They're called accelerationists.
Speaker 4: They want to accelerate the collapse of things. And if
Speaker 4: there's a single ideological text today that's influential on the scene,
Speaker 4: it is by easily James Mason Siege.
Speaker 2: And what I particularly am enjoying about the book, I
Speaker 2: just told you before we started recording.
Speaker 3: I haven't finished it yet.
Speaker 2: What I'm enjoying about this book is so you know,
Speaker 2: you were saying that Sames Mason started writing this in
Speaker 2: the eighties, right, but nobody was reading it. It was
Speaker 2: very sort of niche. It wasn't popular, even within its
Speaker 2: own niche. He was not a popular man. He had
Speaker 2: a lot of beefs with other leaders in the movement.
Speaker 2: It's rediscovered in the twenty tens. It's big on Iron March.
Speaker 2: It's the animating force behind Adam Waffin. And so all
Speaker 2: of a sudden in the last ten years, people like us,
Speaker 2: you know, researchers of the far right, mainstream journalists, people
Speaker 2: are talking about Siege, they're talking about Mason. But this,
Speaker 2: I think, correct me if I'm wrong, is the only
Speaker 2: book sort of tracing it back to its root. James
Speaker 2: Mason did not come into existence in twenty fifteen on
Speaker 2: the pages of Iron March. Right, they sort of dug
Speaker 2: back up this writing that was at that point thirty
Speaker 2: years old. But this book, I mean, it's an incredible
Speaker 2: work of research, but it's also sort of a picuresque, right.
Speaker 2: It follows James Mason through decades of Nazi history.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: He wasn't just a guy who wrote a newsletter. He
Speaker 2: was a guy who was in a lot of rooms.
Speaker 2: He knew a lot of people. So through the leg
Speaker 2: of James Mason's life, you can follow the origins of
Speaker 2: the modern neo Nazi movement back to the sort of
Speaker 2: splinters and sects and rival personalities of the seventies. Right
Speaker 2: that you can't understand modern neo Nazi organizing if you
Speaker 2: don't know the history that goes back to the sixties
Speaker 2: and seventies.
Speaker 4: Well thank you forgetting that. I had someone write a
Speaker 4: review and it was an interesting view from the viewpoint
Speaker 4: of literary criticism, and he's like, well, this is one
Speaker 4: of these books about a book it's not And I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 4: it kind of is, but it's really And I started
Speaker 4: after I started writing this which has an unusual origin
Speaker 4: or just maybe it is a usual origin. Like the
Speaker 4: first half is about Neo Nazism in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 4: which is incredibly undocumented. There's a huge problem with a
Speaker 4: documentation about the far right in general before twenty fifteen.
Speaker 4: Probably more books have come out in the last ten
Speaker 4: years about the far right in the US before twenty
Speaker 4: fifteen than came out before, and certainly about neo Nazis,
Speaker 4: who are almost always when they are written about American
Speaker 4: neo Nazis, it's usually in a history of the white
Speaker 4: supremacist movement, and there's no differentiation made between them, and
Speaker 4: I would say the National Socialists are quite different from
Speaker 4: other white supremacists for a variety of different reasons. So
Speaker 4: there is no book about Neo Nazism in the nineteen
Speaker 4: seventies in the US at all. There are only two
Speaker 4: documents I can really name, and they're both written by
Speaker 4: National Socialists actually, one in Australia and one the head
Speaker 4: of the New Order which used to be the American
Speaker 4: Nazi Party. It's actually not bad. It's an eight part
Speaker 4: series by Martin Kirk. So the first half is really
Speaker 4: reconstructing what happened in the nineteen seventies because this is
Speaker 4: what Siege is coming out of. This Siege is an
Speaker 4: answer to the questions that faced neo Nazis in the
Speaker 4: nineteen seventies. And then the second half of the book
Speaker 4: is even I would say less about Mason. It's about
Speaker 4: these four countercultural figures who discover Mason, help publish 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 s 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. They unite the Right rally at Charlottesville. Always
Speaker 4: you say these things and just you give the name
Speaker 4: of the thing, and people are like, wait a minute,
Speaker 4: that's like where I live. You know, we're more than that,
Speaker 4: you know. I was in Seattle. I was like, oh,
Speaker 4: I was at Seattle, referring to this nineteen ninety nine demonstration,
Speaker 4: and 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: Unite 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 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 3: Nobody ever gave a speech.
Speaker 4: Nobody gave a speech. As we know, the car attack
Speaker 4: happened like an hour or two later. I got to
Speaker 4: look at a timeline, it'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 Offfen 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. Even in more structured political movements. I think
Speaker 4: it does a tends to attract fringe people, except at
Speaker 4: certain times where people are intentionally using it as a
Speaker 4: strategy as part of a bigger mass movement. Anyway, these
Speaker 4: are questions for terrorism studies, and so there was a
Speaker 4: spike of interest in it. So I was going to
Speaker 4: write a short article for a think tank I used
Speaker 4: to be associated with, which I will not name because
Speaker 4: I had such a bad experience with them, and it
Speaker 4: was going to be an article. I couldn't get the
Speaker 4: facts to line up. As I said, there's terrible scholarship
Speaker 4: about this period, and so I used this very sophisticated
Speaker 4: research tool called Google, and through that I found that
Speaker 4: Mason's papers. There was a huge collection of Mason's papers
Speaker 4: at the University of Kansas and Lawrence, Kansas, so I
Speaker 4: decided I'd go there. I thought I'd just straighten these
Speaker 4: things out. There were some documents I needed, some very
Speaker 4: obscure fanzines and stuff. That'd be the end of the day.
Speaker 4: I got through. Well, first I discovered it's not easy
Speaker 4: to get to Lawrence, Kansas. You have to fly into
Speaker 4: an airport, and then I think I took an uber
Speaker 4: for like an hour. There was like one bus a
Speaker 4: day or something. Anyway, I got there and started poking
Speaker 4: at the papers. It was sixty boxes of his core respondents.
Speaker 4: He had letters incoming and outgoing since the early nineteen sixties.
Speaker 4: As you mentioned, he was an insider to the neo
Speaker 4: Nazi movement, so it was with all these people he
Speaker 4: had kept carving copies of his outgoing letters. Was a
Speaker 4: unique slice of national socialist life in the United States.
Speaker 4: Never seen an archive like it. People didn't keep their
Speaker 4: papers because they were doing illegal activities. The government sees
Speaker 4: them and has them in a warehouse somewhere or whatever.
Speaker 4: This is even in the pre Internet. I can only
Speaker 4: do this because it was pre Internet, and there were
Speaker 4: paper copies of stuff and of the age where I
Speaker 4: grew up doing all research on paper and in archives.
Speaker 4: And I quickly found out what I had. And there
Speaker 4: were two things. One, as I said, was that there
Speaker 4: was this whole story of American neo Nazism, of when
Speaker 4: the American Nazi Party splinters then called the National Socialist
Speaker 4: White People's Party in the nineteen seventies, and all these
Speaker 4: groups come out of it, many of which we know
Speaker 4: parts of, like William Peters who wrote the Turner Diaries
Speaker 4: and the Skoky incident which is parodied in The Blues Brothers.
Speaker 4: Some people don't know this, just so Paul Franklin shooting
Speaker 4: and paralyzing the publisher Larry Flint, and some other things.
Speaker 4: And I was like, Oh, these are all people who
Speaker 4: came out of one thing, a splintering of the party.
Speaker 4: And I realized that there basically was a terrorist wing
Speaker 4: that came out of the splintering. And people knew Mason
Speaker 4: and people knew Pierce, but there was like a couple
Speaker 4: other groups or people, but people didn't put it together
Speaker 4: that they were all like the most radical wing of
Speaker 4: these splinter groups. So there was that story and then,
Speaker 4: as I mentioned, there was a second story about these
Speaker 4: kuntercultural people who had always denied that they were involved
Speaker 4: in national socialism or the level of it. It was
Speaker 4: just a joke, all these things that we hear today,
Speaker 4: almost word for word. And so I found all their
Speaker 4: letters to James Mason, and they're adorned with swastikas and
Speaker 4: eight aids, and they're helping him. Had they reveal the
Speaker 4: extent that they helped him? And the funny thing is
Speaker 4: a lot of this stuff was actually available and out
Speaker 4: in the open. It was published books, but it was
Speaker 4: like little pieces of flakes of gold scattered around everything,
Speaker 4: and I started picking them up because I realized you
Speaker 4: could put them together. And so one article turned out
Speaker 4: was supposed to be one article, and then it turns
Speaker 4: two articles. And I sat down to write it and
Speaker 4: turned into a book. And then five years later I
Speaker 4: finally had the manuscript done. Then took another year at
Speaker 4: the publishers, and then it came out last year. So
Speaker 4: it's been seven years of work, and I've been going
Speaker 4: around doing talks. I did seventeen talks and supported the
Speaker 4: book and as many podcasts and stuff. So I'm still
Speaker 4: The book is still part of my life, as much
Speaker 4: as I would like to sort of put it down.
Speaker 4: But thank you for remedy on the podcast. This is
Speaker 4: not great they have me on the podcast. Not against
Speaker 4: no diss against you, no shade, no shade no.
Speaker 2: And I'm so I'm so jealous of your trip to
Speaker 2: Kansas to see the archives. I only recently a year
Speaker 2: or two, discovered that his papers existed in those archives,
Speaker 2: and so I wrote to the archivist and I said, like,
Speaker 2: you know, are any of these digitized? I would love
Speaker 2: to see them. And there's like, you know, we've only
Speaker 2: digitized like one box. And they sent me a couple
Speaker 2: of a couple of scans, but most of it has
Speaker 2: not been digitized. So you have to go to Kansas
Speaker 2: if you want to read this old pedophile Nazis letters
Speaker 2: 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, I
Speaker 2: was like, please, just like any letters you have with
Speaker 2: Bob Heyke, I just I just want the Bob Hike letters.
Speaker 4: But I can give you the Bob Hyke letters.
Speaker 3: I would love those.
Speaker 4: I think they'll they'll digitize stuff for a price.
Speaker 3: Though, I'm sure. I'm sure if I pay for it,
Speaker 3: they would do me the favor.
Speaker 2: But that's the thing, is that there's so much interconnection
Speaker 2: here because these stories always get told episodically, right, like
Speaker 2: the story of James Mason and Adam Woffen, the story
Speaker 2: of William Luther Peers, the story of the founding of
Speaker 2: the National Socialist Movement. But nobody takes those pieces and
Speaker 2: slots them together because they interlock. They all interlock, right,
Speaker 2: And so this idea of the lone wolf, I mean,
Speaker 2: I guess James Mason's life's work is to perpetuate and
Speaker 2: motivate the lone wolf. But is it really a lone
Speaker 2: wolf if he's training them.
Speaker 4: Well, the lone wolf question is is a long question.
Speaker 4: A lot of people know Metzger moved to the lone
Speaker 4: wolf strategy after a war was sued by the SPLC
Speaker 4: and collapse, but Mason was advocating this beforehand and was
Speaker 4: very tight with Metzger. So there is actually a book
Speaker 4: describing what you've said, putting the pieces together, and it's
Speaker 4: called Neo Nazi Terrorism and Counterculturals exactly. It's the I
Speaker 4: think which you can buy today.
Speaker 2: I mean, like I said, it is the only book
Speaker 2: that 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 2: A high praise from the book's Nazi pedophile subject. Why
Speaker 2: did he donate his papers to the library, because, like
Speaker 2: you said, most people are not not only not per
Speaker 2: deserving these items where they're not preserving them at all
Speaker 2: because they know what they've done is illegal or embarrassing
Speaker 2: to everyone involved, and they're intentionally destroying the evidence of
Speaker 2: these kinds of communications. But he not only saved them,
Speaker 2: but he wanted to make sure we could read them.
Speaker 2: Did you talk to him at all about why he
Speaker 2: 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 2: I mean, it looks like it looks like the Area
Speaker 2: Nation's 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 memoryabilia or whatever, papers and such.
Speaker 4: Two Kansas. They have this collection there called the Wilcox
Speaker 4: Collection of anti Extremist stuff. This guy, Lair Wilcox, had
Speaker 4: been in early students for Democratic Society before they took
Speaker 4: the like Marxist turn, and then decided that the left
Speaker 4: and the right were the same, like in the seventies
Speaker 4: or something, and started collecting all this material. So they
Speaker 4: were one of the they're probably the biggest collection of far
Speaker 4: right material. And as I said, at the time, libraries
Speaker 4: weren't collecting it and people weren't writing about it. They
Speaker 4: were like, oh, these are just a bunch of kooks
Speaker 4: and wing nuts. They're not important. And some of this
Speaker 4: is because, like as I say in the book, the
Speaker 4: first neo Nazi mass murder wasn't until the late seventies,
Speaker 4: like it was what we know as neo Nazism today
Speaker 4: really only emerged in the seventies, is when my arguments
Speaker 4: in the book. So the papers were there because he
Speaker 4: sold them. The second thing is he is unique, I
Speaker 4: think not unique, but very uncommon because he is an
Speaker 4: unabashed neo Nazi. He does not try to hide it.
Speaker 4: He is not like the NSM, which is actually a
Speaker 4: party he co founded shockingly but left over it as
Speaker 4: they turned because originally it was to promote violence, and
Speaker 4: then as it turned to a more traditional Hollywood Nazi party,
Speaker 4: he left. But it's the same one that was at Charlottesville,
Speaker 4: and Jeff's Scoop was the head of I actually taught
Speaker 4: Jeff Scoop about how the party was founded. That was
Speaker 4: very interesting. I interviewed him for the book.
Speaker 3: 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
Speaker 4: that were wrong. The bi scholars and others that were
Speaker 4: and it wasn't their fault. They were taken. It was
Speaker 4: hard to get these harder to get these documents, especially
Speaker 4: when a group is moving. And so Harrington claimed he
Speaker 4: had been a co founder in nineteen seventy four or whatever,
Speaker 4: but he was lying. Mason was one of the co
Speaker 4: founders and not him. He only became the head in
Speaker 4: the eighties. So this is some of this stuff I found. Anyway,
Speaker 4: I was going to say the NSM at one point
Speaker 4: go where not Neo Nazis were National Socialists.
Speaker 5: I was like, get the fuck out of here, like really,
Speaker 5: like 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 Parrots 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 it's
Speaker 4: embarrassed other people, they didn't belong. He's as he told
Speaker 4: to me they didn't believe in the One True religion.
Speaker 4: So I asked him about these counterculture figures who have
Speaker 4: denied they were ever involved in this stuff. At the time,
Speaker 4: he was convinced they were National socialists, and he was like, well,
Speaker 4: they believed in something else other than the One True Faith.
Speaker 4: I think that's the word he used. So yeah, he
Speaker 4: is nothing to hide. He's very open about it, very
Speaker 4: open about promoting terrorism, as you know, and maybe some
Speaker 4: of the listeners do. Young neo Nazis go to his
Speaker 4: apartment and he tutors them. They take pictures with him.
Speaker 4: This included Sam Woodward, who murdered a young gay Jewish man,
Speaker 4: Blaze Bernstein recently sent his to life in prison. There's
Speaker 4: picture is a Woodword in Mason's apartment. So yeah, I
Speaker 4: mean he wants is He's proud of his lineage and
Speaker 4: he wants it documented. And I know I did him
Speaker 4: a favor by writing a book about his movement. I mean,
Speaker 4: they don't have the intellectuals and the resources to in
Speaker 4: the train people to write historical books, and I did
Speaker 4: it a pretty straight up book. Even Mason was like,
Speaker 4: I kept waiting to read the smear I kept waiting
Speaker 4: for the smear. There was no smear. I was like, yeah,
Speaker 4: I just wrote it as a history book, and so
Speaker 4: in a way I've given them an insight into their
Speaker 4: history which wouldn't exist otherwise. So this stuff is always
Speaker 4: a double edged sword when you cover as you know,
Speaker 4: when you cover fascist groups, they want the publicity, by
Speaker 4: and large. I was told sometimes at the SPLC, like
Speaker 4: groups contact them and they're like, cover us, give us.
Speaker 3: Coverage, sending them their press releases.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: But I mean, I think someone like Mason, I guess
Speaker 2: he doesn't see this smear because, like you said, he's
Speaker 2: proud of himself. So this is I think is an
Speaker 2: honest appraisal of his legacy, and most people would see
Speaker 2: that as a 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 there promoting Nazi terrorism. What's
Speaker 4: the point of, like, you know, denouncing this or something.
Speaker 2: I mean, Whereas I think someone like Pierce, I think
Speaker 2: sometimes when people write honestly about Pierre, obviously he's been
Speaker 2: dead for twenty five years, but he resisted the characterization
Speaker 2: that he was inciting terrorism, even though he like Mason
Speaker 2: very much, was.
Speaker 4: Oh well, Pierce is just a liar. I mean, all
Speaker 4: these guys exactly.
Speaker 3: That's what I mean.
Speaker 2: But I think a book like this about Pierce, I
Speaker 2: think he would not have enjoyed, whereas Mason is at
Speaker 2: least honest about his legacy.
Speaker 4: You know, there is a terrible book about Pierce by
Speaker 4: one of the sycophants who is a professor actually Griffin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that again, that is one of those dishonest histories.
Speaker 2: I think we were talking before we started recording that
Speaker 2: the problem with archival research trying to write a history
Speaker 2: of these movements is they are dishonest actors.
Speaker 3: And so Robert S. Griffin, he wrote, what is it
Speaker 3: the fame of a dead Man's Deeds? Is that what
Speaker 3: it's called?
Speaker 2: He went into it, you know, saying like, I'm going
Speaker 2: to write this neutral appraisal of this figure of the movement,
Speaker 2: about William Luther Pierce. And over the weeks that he
Speaker 2: spent on the compound to write it, and he spent
Speaker 2: time with Peers on the compound in Hillsborough, became radicalized
Speaker 2: and is a Nazi. Now are he still alive? I mean,
Speaker 2: he could take issue with that characterization if he wants.
Speaker 2: But I'm sure you've read the book.
Speaker 3: 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 3: I've read that. It's quite good.
Speaker 4: Well, unfortunately a lot of it's copy pasta.
Speaker 1: But.
Speaker 2: I think his insight into his relationship with his father
Speaker 2: is very unique. It is called The Sins of My
Speaker 2: Father by Kelvin Pearce. I mean, that's a window you
Speaker 2: don't often get, although I guess now we do also
Speaker 2: have the Klansman's Son by Don Black's daughter.
Speaker 4: Black's daughter or son.
Speaker 3: 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. And 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 3: From Donald Lanyan.
Speaker 2: Donna Langen was known as pretty Boy Pedro when she
Speaker 2: was the head of the Argan Republican Armies, a bank
Speaker 2: robbery gang out of Ellaheim City. Yeah, she was the
Speaker 2: first person to win a battle with the federal government
Speaker 2: to transition in federal.
Speaker 4: Prison to get surgery.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And just recently, actually, there was a filing in her case.
Speaker 2: She's trying to get the way the case is titled
Speaker 2: in the court records is still Peter Langan, her dead name,
Speaker 2: and the judge denied her petition to retitle the case.
Speaker 3: But she has transitioned and is in a women's prison.
Speaker 4: Is she in Texas?
Speaker 3: Oh gosh, I could look up in the BOP where
Speaker 3: she is.
Speaker 4: Texas bans prisoners from changing their names.
Speaker 3: She is in FMC cars.
Speaker 4: Well, that isn't in Dallas, Texas. Yea, yeah, that's why.
Speaker 4: That's why.
Speaker 2: So she's still in the BOP system under her dead name,
Speaker 2: but she was allowed to physically transition. So that's again
Speaker 2: just a strange twist of history, right, that the person
Speaker 2: who won that legal model for us was a Nazi
Speaker 2: 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: has surgery who was in prisoned 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 transpower 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 so anyway.
Speaker 3: No, it's I mean, it's a remarkable, remarkable history.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So you started writing this book after Unite the Right.
Speaker 3: Because there was this renewed interest in siege.
Speaker 2: I mean, because what has the experience been, like, you know,
Speaker 2: over the course of spending the last six years of
Speaker 2: your life working on this, realizing that it is only
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 2: And so, I mean, I think it would have been
Speaker 2: an important work of history regardless. But I guess as
Speaker 2: you're working on it, realizing that the body count is
Speaker 2: only growing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, 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 yeah, numerous stories of people being you know, of
Speaker 4: not white descent, either they're hiding that they're not, or
Speaker 4: they're a mixed race descent and they're sort of passing
Speaker 4: as wide of being Jewish and 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
Speaker 4: alienated or you were so your identity is so shaky
Speaker 4: that you are attracted to this idea of a firm,
Speaker 4: strong identity. And I mean sometimes people forget fascism in
Speaker 4: Italy and Germany arose and basically the last two countries
Speaker 4: that arose and solidified in Europe, Like those were countries
Speaker 4: that wasn't clear what Italy was going to be. There's
Speaker 4: such differences between the north and the south. There's no reason,
Speaker 4: Like it was unclear originally whether Germany was going to
Speaker 4: be Austria too, you know, and so they were. It's
Speaker 4: a 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 one of
Speaker 4: the things that attracts people to neo Nazism, I think
Speaker 4: is this strong affirmation of an identity, and people with
Speaker 4: mixed identities or conflicted about it or filled with self
Speaker 4: loathing are drawn to this for that reason. One of
Speaker 4: the many reasons. People get drawn.
Speaker 3: Into these things, and they recruit so young.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think in the book you're talking about this,
Speaker 2: you know, all the way back to James Mason's origins
Speaker 2: that he became interested in the Nazi Party is a
Speaker 2: fourteen year.
Speaker 4: Old joined it, joined it at fourteen.
Speaker 2: So he's a child, right getting into this movement, and
Speaker 2: now that he is an old man, he is in
Speaker 2: turn in doctrinating children. Right that Adam Woffen members are
Speaker 2: very young, I guess were Adam Woffin technically doesn't exist anymore,
Speaker 2: but most of the most of the young men who
Speaker 2: spilled blood for Adam Waffen were twenty years old, nineteen
Speaker 2: 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 2: And which tragic, obviously tragic, heartbreaking, disgusting. But imagine being
Speaker 2: one of the adults who is in that.
Speaker 3: Group and 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
Speaker 4: during the.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they speak in tongues and they sort of parrot
Speaker 2: the cadence of the way adults speak.
Speaker 3: 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. They 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 could happen too, And so I think people like, well,
Speaker 4: I don't know, I was a pretty smart twelve year old.
Speaker 4: Maybe I would understand it better. But you just need
Speaker 4: somebody repeating it. It's the slogans and the narratives have
Speaker 4: already been formed by others. You're not necessarily innovating on it.
Speaker 4: As long as you can repeat the dogma. It doesn't
Speaker 4: really matter who's saying. It doesn't matter if you're at
Speaker 4: the person is gay or Jewish.
Speaker 3: And I mean the Estonian twelve year old was not
Speaker 3: a one off.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: In the Ethan Melzer case a year or two ago,
Speaker 2: Ethan Melzer was a US Army private who was trying
Speaker 2: to set up his unit in Turkey to be attacked
Speaker 2: by Middle Eastern terrorist groups. And the person he was
Speaker 2: communicating with online sort of goading him into these acts
Speaker 2: was a child.
Speaker 3: It was a child.
Speaker 4: He was the Order of Nine Angles though right he
Speaker 4: was ONA. He wasn't a near Nazi, right. I always
Speaker 4: try to distinguish there's some nine A's who are not.
Speaker 2: He was at the bleed point of Adam Waffin splinter
Speaker 2: group and ONA. He was involved with rape Waffen A
Speaker 2: was he?
Speaker 3: Yeah. The lineage of these groups is so messy.
Speaker 2: I think some of them don't even understand the ideological
Speaker 2: lineage of the sect they've ended up in. But Melzer
Speaker 2: was at that sort of bleed point where Adam Woffen
Speaker 2: was 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: nasphoon 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 an
Speaker 4: O nine A. They are founded by neo Nazi and
Speaker 4: many of them are Neo Nazis. And so I was
Speaker 4: going to say they're not. They don't have to be,
Speaker 4: and all the people aren't. And even if you were
Speaker 4: supposed to be they are, they aren't all. And so
Speaker 4: we're just getting through these various online forums on Telegram
Speaker 4: and elsewhere. Sometimes they just spread over all kinds of
Speaker 4: the different platforms. We're getting just this syncretic mix of
Speaker 4: these things. And this is one of the things that
Speaker 4: made nine A and Siege Culture are parallel Mason's ideas,
Speaker 4: because Mason's not a Satanist, and in fact, he's recently
Speaker 4: denounced Ordered nine Angles, and when he was around Satanists
Speaker 4: they were atheist Satanists around the Church of Saint that
Speaker 4: when you start saying, hey, we need to commit random
Speaker 4: murders in this goal of destroying the like suppose the
Speaker 4: Jewish controlled society, so there could be a white arian revolution. Like,
Speaker 4: it doesn't matter if you have a really political reason
Speaker 4: or if you're thinking that these heretical acts will destroy
Speaker 4: somehow the consensus. Reality, you're just trying to go people
Speaker 4: into these violent, random acts of terrorism and more random murders, right.
Speaker 3: 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 cull 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 guy 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 is 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 online.
Speaker 4: I think, especially younger people who went through COVID zoomers,
Speaker 4: and I guess people younger than that would be Generation
Speaker 4: Alpha spend more time online than any other generation. Obviously
Speaker 4: they must, and this becomes especially when they're much younger
Speaker 4: the horizon of the world right, and if they're in
Speaker 4: cells and they're not really connected to other people and
Speaker 4: they're not connected to their family like it, it just
Speaker 4: drives these impulses more and more, and they don't have
Speaker 4: the maturity to look outside of it, or to think
Speaker 4: about the repercussions of it, or think of have the
Speaker 4: empathy to think about how it's going to affect other
Speaker 4: people in their families.
Speaker 2: And so when it comes to Siege, what would you
Speaker 2: say its current role in this sort of evolving syncretic
Speaker 2: murder culture that we have, is it is Siege's legacy
Speaker 2: now just that it's ideological lineage lives on in sort
Speaker 2: of the terogram milieu.
Speaker 3: Or is it still itself influential?
Speaker 4: Oh, 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 3: They didn't read it, they didn't all read it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know, read Siege just like, how many of
Speaker 4: you have read Siege? And I found out doing the
Speaker 4: work that there's like an edited one hundred page version,
Speaker 4: and then there's like a little pocket version, and then
Speaker 4: someone even made the ten Tenants of Siege.
Speaker 3: There's the spark notes murder called.
Speaker 4: Well Adam Waften 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 going to like it's a
Speaker 4: boring text. I mean I read it twice in like, I've.
Speaker 2: Read portions, but I'm not going to sit here and
Speaker 2: say I read the whole book.
Speaker 3: It's four hundred and fifty page.
Speaker 4: Man, I read every news letter and the book and
Speaker 4: it's yes, no, oh. So it acts as the symbol
Speaker 4: to be like, look, we have a serious intellectual thing.
Speaker 4: How many Christians have read the Bible. Let's be really sorting.
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, I think that's the right analogy, right,
Speaker 2: that it is a foundational text, but they're not all
Speaker 2: sitting down and digesting or even understanding it. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, how many Communists have read Dos Capital, even
Speaker 4: just volume one, which I have. I would like to
Speaker 4: say I have, actually, is it more or less boring
Speaker 4: than siege? It's more intellectual and so there's that, and
Speaker 4: there's also like the conclusions are there, right, the whole
Speaker 4: argument is developed in siege. But you really just need
Speaker 4: to take the conclusions, which is, you can't do any
Speaker 4: political work. It's hopeless. You need to go out and
Speaker 4: commit dramatic acts of violence to help inspire people, and
Speaker 4: then you know, maybe afterwards there'll be some aryan blah
Speaker 4: blah blah. Frankly, that's all you need to know about it,
Speaker 4: because that's what it advocates. You just need the praxis
Speaker 4: that it concludes. And most actstivists aren't intellectuals. Like I
Speaker 4: always say, like a movement can have three slogans and
Speaker 4: what you need to do on the left, you need
Speaker 4: to make sure those are the right slogans pointing in
Speaker 4: the right direction, because somebody who flows into activism who's young,
Speaker 4: who it doesn't matter if they're young, doesn't have a
Speaker 4: background of politics, is going to take the thing seriously
Speaker 4: that you say. And you can only say so many
Speaker 4: things to people. Political movements are stupid. I mean, this
Speaker 4: is why we are. The ninety nine percent was great,
Speaker 4: it was great, it wasn't true. I mean half of
Speaker 4: Americans are like it, you know, support the Republicans, but like,
Speaker 4: it's like one thing, and then the person can think
Speaker 4: about those things. They're not going to have complicated ideas.
Speaker 4: So what is what are the slogans that come out
Speaker 4: of something? What are the basic what does it boil
Speaker 4: down to the things you're saying? And people have inherited
Speaker 4: that from Siege or inherited it secondhand, you know, because
Speaker 4: 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: Tterogram 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 ideas.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So Terogram is directly downstream of Siege. Right.
Speaker 2: So Siege was a newsletter that became a book. People
Speaker 2: read the book, and the people who read that book
Speaker 2: turned it back into a zine. Right, So it's it's
Speaker 2: sort of oh to someone it's moving through its phases
Speaker 2: and now it's regressing back into sort of mimetic zine form.
Speaker 4: But people who join these movements who want something more intellectual,
Speaker 4: because everyone who joins a religious or political movement, some
Speaker 4: people want a more rigorous They're like, well, what's the
Speaker 4: reason for this? Well, I have these questions. How do
Speaker 4: 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 there weren't people who developed social science other than
Speaker 4: someone like Alndebenoist, who's saying something much more complicated than
Speaker 4: most white supremacs are. And so like theology just allowed
Speaker 4: something intellectual for people to chew on, you know what
Speaker 4: I mean, Like people are real smart who are very
Speaker 4: analytical want something to chew on with the ideas, whether
Speaker 4: it really changes their practice or not. And I think
Speaker 4: there has to be something that serves that need.
Speaker 2: And so I guess wrapping up, because we're supposed to
Speaker 2: keep these daily shows short. What is the takeaway that
Speaker 2: you want people to to come away from this book with?
Speaker 2: 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 understan standing
Speaker 4: of that political movement's origins, which is maybe a more
Speaker 4: scholarly thing. And I am my next book, I hope
Speaker 4: if I can get a contract, is to write a
Speaker 4: history of national socialism in America, because again, there's not
Speaker 4: a single book that describes that, which is very strange.
Speaker 4: Certainly not a history post war, and there may be
Speaker 4: a pre war one, but not one that puts it
Speaker 4: all together. So there's a lot of ignorance about this movement.
Speaker 4: And the second part about the cultural actors is about
Speaker 4: the danger of taking a radical cultural movement and to
Speaker 4: use impulses like transgression and turn them into the very
Speaker 4: toxic 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 is 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 and 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 mean,
Speaker 4: these guys I'm looking at are and working in the
Speaker 4: eighties and you see it now. We've all seen it
Speaker 4: with four Chan like that was never that isn't true,
Speaker 4: and that was never true true, right. I mean, those
Speaker 4: of us in the punk scene in the eighties and
Speaker 4: nineties could see this, even if we certainly didn't put
Speaker 4: it that way. With like skinheads in particular. It was
Speaker 4: contested terrain where people were trying to take the subculture
Speaker 4: and pull it to the left and right right. There
Speaker 4: were so many Nazis, but there were anti fascist skinheads too, Sharps.
Speaker 4: Sharps to some extent, Sharps were a lot of them
Speaker 4: are righting nationalists, they just weren't just Nazis. This is
Speaker 4: a common There was grips like rash Red and anarchist
Speaker 4: skinheads who still exist, but there was a contested terrain
Speaker 4: where people trying to pull it in different directions. This
Speaker 4: is still the case in neo folk and heathen religious circles,
Speaker 4: and that's sort of you. There's an implication which I
Speaker 4: don't think I can only like put it into words now,
Speaker 4: that like the transgressive elements of these subcultures didn't necessarily
Speaker 4: go one way or the other, and it was something
Speaker 4: you'd have to fight over, like they could go in
Speaker 4: any direction. And I think it was clear in four
Speaker 4: Chan early on. I once was mentioned very early on
Speaker 4: in four Chan and someone chimed in and they're like,
Speaker 4: leave him alone, he's my friend. And I'm like, which
Speaker 4: of my friends are on four Chan and defending me?
Speaker 4: But like four Chan didn't have to end up the
Speaker 4: way it did. You know, the earlier internet culture wasn't
Speaker 4: like this. It was progressive or libertarian, or a more
Speaker 4: decent libertarian for reading of libertarianism than we have now.
Speaker 4: So that's the second part. I mean, other than these guys,
Speaker 4: if you ever were in the industrial or neo folk
Speaker 4: scene and you heard about there's Nazis, I have all
Speaker 4: of the receipt in detail in the book. If that's
Speaker 4: of interest to you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Boyd Rice will tell you he never meant it,
Speaker 2: but I've read some of the primary documents that lead
Speaker 2: 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 toxic 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 accult circles. I
Speaker 4: just did a podcast with some you know, a cult
Speaker 4: style esoteric podcast, and I'm 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
Speaker 4: just about these things.
Speaker 2: That's an important takeaway too that you know, in any subculture,
Speaker 2: especially the sort of transgressive subcultures like you know, counterculture
Speaker 2: music and art, and you know, occult spaces have a
Speaker 2: magical practice that you engage in people who engage in,
Speaker 2: you know, practice pagan faiths in all these subcultures, you
Speaker 2: need to call out these bad actors early and often
Speaker 2: push back, don't let them bully you, and push them
Speaker 2: out of your.
Speaker 4: Spaces absolutely, and Nazis ruin everything. They intentionally go into
Speaker 4: all these spaces and sometimes don't intentionally. Actually this was
Speaker 4: a comment on Stormfront. I learned from talking about Nazis
Speaker 4: and 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 3: 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, from the
Speaker 4: group doing it. People brought their partners. It wasn't an
Speaker 4: official group function. But this one member of the group
Speaker 4: brought her husband, who is Kevin McDonald. Oh, and they
Speaker 4: were vegetarians or vegans, and people were like holy fuck.
Speaker 4: And he was like, I mean, I feel a little
Speaker 4: sympathetic to him. He's like, hey, man, I don't know,
Speaker 4: I'm just I'm a I'm a vegetarian or whatever. I'm
Speaker 4: 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 2: It's the barbecue is over when 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.
Speaker 3: Out is that more Nazis show up.
Speaker 4: Well, if it's a single person, people are gonna start leaving.
Speaker 4: People of color are gonna leave, Jews are gonna leave,
Speaker 4: LGBTQ plus people are gonna leave, and you're gonna end
Speaker 4: up the one person losing many more So, even just
Speaker 4: on your own, you know, enlightened self interest if you
Speaker 4: want to keep your group together. And I've seen this
Speaker 4: again and again and again, and then they're like, you're
Speaker 4: defending a Nazi, so you're one too, So yeah, you
Speaker 4: got to kick these people out, even just for practical reasons.
Speaker 4: I have a very low bar for people these days,
Speaker 4: and I try to appeal I try to appeal to
Speaker 4: the baser reasons sometimes with people.
Speaker 3: You know well.
Speaker 2: If you would like to learn more about how a
Speaker 2: couple of guys in the counterculture movement in the eighties
Speaker 2: are responsible for the publication of the book that serves
Speaker 2: as the bible for modern Nazi terrorism, you can pick
Speaker 2: up a copy of Neo Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism,
Speaker 2: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege by Spencer
Speaker 2: Sunshine from Routlige Press is available, I think wherever books
Speaker 2: are sold. I bought my copy directly from the publisher
Speaker 2: Routledge Press. I think it was only twenty seven dollars.
Speaker 2: You know, a bargain and a steal, So pick up
Speaker 2: a copy of that and where else can people find
Speaker 2: your work?
Speaker 4: Spencer, thank you for now that you mentioned that. I
Speaker 4: am on all of the socials usually at Transform sixty
Speaker 4: seven eight nine. Have a webpage if you want. If
Speaker 4: you have an RSS feed. 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 content. So yeah,
Speaker 4: hell yeah.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. It's been great.
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