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