It Could Happen Here - (Maybe Don't) Read Siege

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

Molly talks to Spencer Sunshine about his book, Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege. Sunshine's book explores the history of Siege, the book that is today's nazi terrorist's bible. https://www.routledge.com/Neo-Nazi-Terrorism-and-Countercultural-Fascism-The-Origins-and-Afterlife-of-James-Masons-Siege/Sunshine/p/book/9780367190606See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Tune in and join in the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Cool Zone Media. 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 Counter-Cultural Fascism, the Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege. It's available now in paperback. I have my paperback copy from Rutledge 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 1993, but that is an edited version of newsletters

published in the 80s by a fellow named James Mason, who was a lifelong neo-Nazi. He joined the American Nazi Party at age 14 in 1966. 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 power

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 a hundred copies The original book had a print run of a 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 2015. 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 Atomoffin Division, this neo-Nazi group that its members and associates killed five people.

And out of that, everyone in the Atomoffin 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 of totally decentralized like propaganda channels on Telegram, Dubterragram, 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 12 murders that were either by the Atomwaffen Division, by people inspired by siege culture, or by people directly linked to Terrogram. So if we want to look at the main text animating neo-Nazi terrorism today, which is now spread around the globe, there's groups in Latin America, there's groups in Eastern and Western Europe, it's even influencing groups in the Middle East or people in the Middle East that called accelerationists. They want to accelerate the collapse of things. And if there's a single ideological text today that's influential in this scene, it is by

easily James Mason Siege. And what I particularly am enjoying about the book, and 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're saying that James Mason started writing this in the 80s, 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 2010s. It's big on Iron March. It's the animating force behind Adam Waffent. And so all of a sudden in the last 10 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 2015 on the pages of Iron March, right? They sort of dug back up this writing that was at that point 30 years old. But this book, I mean, it's an incredible work of research, but it's also sort of a picaresque, 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 lens 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 70s, to the sort of splinters and sects and rival personalities of the 70s, right? That you can't understand modern neo-Nazi organizing if you don't know the history that goes back to the 60s and 70s. Well, thank you for getting 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-Naziism in the 1970s, which is incredibly undocumented. There's a huge problem with documentation about the far right in general before 2015. Probably more books have come out in the last 10 years about the far right in the US before 2015 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 1970s 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 1970s, because this is what Siege is coming out of. This Siege is an answer to the questions that face neo-Nazis in the 1970s. And then the second half of the book is even, I would say, less about Mason.

It's about these four countercultural figures who discovered Mason, helped publish him and eventually created it, published a disseminated siege itself. And part of that is I was just around the scene these people were part of in the 1990s. Like I saw one of them Boyd Rice play. I had many mutual friends with another, the publisher Adam Parfri of Feral House. So like I was like right around what these people were doing

as part of the 90s counterculture. So I became very interested in that because these people always denied their background, you know, or 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 then you just 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 1999 demonstration. And I'm like, people 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 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. That's all I garbled now, right? 130, yeah. Yeah, that sounds right. And the book is co-dedicated to Heather Hare, 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 in interest in it.

And Adam Waffen had been doing more and more. Adam Waffen, 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 attract, 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 gonna 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 gonna 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. It'd be the end of the day. I got there. 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. It was like one bus a day or something. Anyway, I got there and started poking at the papers. It was 60 boxes of his correspondence.

He had letters incoming and outgoing since the early 1960s. As you mentioned, he was an insider to the neo-Nazi movement. So it was with all these people. He had kept carbon copies of his outgoing letters. It 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 I'm 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, it's then called the National Socialist White People's Party, in the 1970s and all these groups come out of it, many of which we know parts of like pierce wrote the turner diaries and the skokie incident which is pretty in the blues brothers some people don't know this just a paul franklin shooting and paralyzing us the publisher larry flint and some other things. I was like all these are all people who came out of one thing the splitting of the party. And i realize 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 countercultural 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. It's how I found all their letters to James Mason and they're adorned with swastikas and eight eights and they're helping him. They 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 a published books, but it was like little

pieces of flakes of gold scattered around everything i started picking them up. Is i realize you can put them together and so one article turn it was supposed to be one article and then it turns two articles and i set down to write it and turn into a book and then five years later i finally had the manuscript done that took another year at the publishers. Then it 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 17 talks in support of 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 having me on the podcast. This is great that you have me on the podcast.

Not against, no diss against you. No shade, no shade. No, and I'm so jealous of your trip to Kansas to see the archives. I only recently, like a year or two, discovered that his papers existed in those archives. And so I wrote to the archivists and I said, like, you know, are any of these digitized?

I would love to see them. And they're like, you know, we've only digitized like one box and they sent me 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 a digital copies, they will 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. I know I was like I was begging and pleading I was like please just like any letters you have with Bob Hite I just I just want the Bob Hite letters but. I can give you the Bob Hite letters. I would love those. I think they'll they'll digitize stuff for for a price though. Oh, 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 Waffen, the story of William Luther Pierce, 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 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 a long question. A lot of people know Metzger moved to the lone wolf strategy after a war

was sued by the SPLC and collapsed, but Mason was advocating this beforehand and was very tight with Metzger moved to the lone wolf strategy after a war was sued by the SPLC and collapsed 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 countercultural fascism. Exactly. It's the I think. Which you can buy today. I mean, like I said, it's 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 one radio interview, it's

not the first of its kind, but it's the best of its kind. That's a high praise from the book's Nazi pedophile subject. Jon Stewart is back at The Daily Show and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with the Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the shows, correspondents and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups,

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podcasts. Why did he donate his papers to the library? Because like you said, most people are not, not only not preserving 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? in especially American Nazi Party memorabilia. He sold furniture on the side, like antiques. He'd go antiquing. And if you've seen pictures of his apartment,

it's filled with Nazi knickknacks, right? He's got a knife collection. It looks like the Aryan Nations booth at the Tulsa Gun show. It looks like my apartment, but in the inverse, and fewer plants. So he was a collector. So he was already I, my understanding is he was already selling George Lincoln Rockwell, memorabilia or whatever papers and such to Kansas. They have this collection there called the Wilcox collection of anti extremist stuff. This guy Laird Wilcox had been an 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 were 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 70s. Like, it was what we know as neo-Nazism today

really only emerged in the 70s, is one of 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 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 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. The guy who had made him the head of the party, who was actually the second head, Herrington. Cliff Herrington. Clifford Herrington did not give him the truthful account of the party's founding. Harington claimed he was a co-founder and he wasn't, and he claimed a different date. This is one reason

I spent so much time on stuff. Also that I found all these things had been printed that were wrong by scholars and others that were, and it wasn't their fault. They were taken. It was harder to get these documents, especially when a group is moving. And so Harington claimed he had been a co-founder in 1974 or whatever, but he was lying. Mason was one of the co-founders and not him. He only became the head in the 80s. So this is some of the stuff I found.

Anyway, I was going to say the NSM at one point go, we're not neo-Nazis, we're national socialists. I was like, get the fuck out of here. Like really? Like come on, your flag is a swastika on it. Oh, I mean, this is absurd. But people will do that, right? It's like the dead parents get in Monty Python, if people know this.

And so but Mason is stands out because he's always been very upfront about his views. He's very proud of them. He's not ashamed. And if this embarrassed other people, they didn't belong. 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 has nothing to hide. He's very open about it, very open about promoting terrorism. As you know, 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, Blaise Bernstein, recently sentenced to life in prison. There's pictures of Woodward in Mason's apartment. So yeah I mean he wants 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 and 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 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, us give us coverage sending them their press releases Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but I think someone like Mason I guess he doesn't see the 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 smear, 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 denouncing this or something? Whereas I think someone like Pierce, I think sometimes when people write honestly about Pierce, I mean, obviously he's been dead for 25 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 are liars. 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 was a professor actually. Robert S. Griffin. Yeah. And that, again, that is one of the sycophants who was a professor, actually. Robert S. 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. Yes. 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 Willie Luther Pierce. And over the weeks that he spent on the compound to write it, and he spent time with Pierce on the compound in Hillsborough, became radicalized and is a Nazi now. I mean, he's still alive. I mean, he could take issue with that characterization if he wants, but

I mean, he's still alive. I mean, he could take issue with that characterization if he wants, but yes, if I'm sure you've read the book, it's not neutral. It is a hagiography of Pierce. Yeah, there's actually a book by Pierce's son too, which is interesting. I have read that. It's quite good. Well, unfortunately, a lot of it's copypasted, but. Well, I think his insight into his relationship with his father is very unique.

It is called The Sins of my father by Kelvin Pierce. I mean, that's a window you don't often get, although I guess now we do also have, um, the Klansman son by, um, Don Black's daughter. Black's daughter or son. She has transitioned. Oh, I did not know that. Well, Mazel Tov. 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. I feel like children raised in this are not 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 Nationalists Action, ANA, this terrorist is a bank robbing group from the 80s, I think became the first person to transition gender from Donna Langen. Donna Langen was known as Pretty Boy Pedro when she was the head of the Aryan Republican Army. Yes, there we go. A bank robbery gang out gender from being- Donna Langen. Donna Langen was known as Pretty Boy Pedro when she was the head of the Aragon Republican Army as a bank robbery gang out of Elohim 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, the way the case is titled in the court records is still Peter L Langan her dead name And the judge denied her petition to retitle the case But she has transitioned as and isn't a women's prison. Is she in Texas?

Oh gosh, I could look up in the the BOP where she is Texas bans prisoners from changing their names She is in FMC Carswell. Yeah, that is in Dallas. That's Yeah, 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? The person who won that legal battle 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, trans person to have surgery who was imprisoned at the time. Because I think that was recently and then everything, you know, everything they changed, they I know that they slow down their trans policies 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. So anyway. No, I mean, it's a remarkable, a remarkable history. Yeah. So you started writing this book after Unite the Right because there was this renewed interest in

siege. I mean, I guess 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'll 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, 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. sad young people who can't deal with their problems, engaged in hurting other people who are often not so different than them. I mean, there's a trans man who was in Adam often.

You know, like there are- Tyler Parker Depepe, yeah. Numerous stories of people being 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, of 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?

And it's just sad. You're like, you're being attracted to this because you're so alienated, or 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 in 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 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-Naziism, 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 to these things. And they recruit so young. I mean, I think in the book you're talking about all the way back to James Mason's origins that he became interested in the Nazi party as a 14-year-old. Joined it. Joined it, joined it at 14. So he's a child, right? Getting into this movement. And now that he is an old man,

he is in turn indoctrinating children, right? The Atomwaffen members are very young, I guess were, Atomwaffen technically doesn't exist anymore, but most of the young men who spilled blood for Atomwaffen were 20 years old, 19 years old. And you know, someone pointed out, the founder of the Foyer Creek Division, when he founded it, was 12.

He was arrested when he was 13 or 14, but he founded it at 12. And which, tragic, obviously tragic, heartbreaking, disgusting. But imagine being one of the adults who is in that group and finding out that your Fuhrer was 12. I grew up in the South in an extremely Protestant area at the height of that like 80s fundamentalist 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- Mm. 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. And 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 don't say 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 can happen too. And so I think people like, well, I don't know, I was a pretty smart 12 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 does it really matter who's saying it? Does it matter if you're if the person is gay or Jewish? I mean, the Estonian 12 year old was not a one-off.

You know, like 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 neo-Nazi, right? I always try to distinguish, there's some Oh9As who are not. He was at the bleed point of an Adam Waffen splinter group and Ohno, he was involved with Rape Waffen. Oh, 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 yeah, Melzer was at that sort of bleed point where Adam Waffen 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 cult. The guy who just did the Nashville 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 just become- Nihilism. And O9A, they are founded by neo-Nazi, and many of them are neo-Nazis, as I was going to say. They're not, they don't have to be and all the people are it even if you were supposed to be there 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. the different platforms, we're getting just this syncretic mix of these things. And this is one of the things that made O9A and siege culture a parallel of Mason's ideas,

because Mason's not a Satanist, and in fact, he's recently denounced Order of Nine Angles. And when he was around Satanists, they were atheist Satanists around the Church of Satan. That when you start saying, hey, we need to commit random murders in this goal of destroying the, like, suppose a Jewish controlled society so there could be a white Aryan 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 goad people into these violent random acts of terrorism and more random murders. Right. And the end result is the same.

Your thinking is the same and the end result 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 cult who are ostensibly political, ostensibly neo-Nazi and Order of Nine Angles. But in reality, you're just just like go attack old people from behind I mean, it's just pathetic stuff go, you know beat up homeless people and and and stab them It's like at some point often say this in my speeches has 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 apolitical 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, often the body count 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

was his action necessarily any different than like a school shooting or whatever? It's 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 murder cult 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 their world, right? And if they're incels and they're not really connected to other people and they're not connected to their family, like it

Just 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 I have the empathy to think about how it's gonna affect other people and their families Catch Jon Stewart back in action on The Daily Show and in your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. From his hilarious satirical takes on today's politics and entertainment to the unique voices of correspondents and contributors, it's your perfect companion to stay on top of what's happening now. Plus, you'll get special content just for podcast listeners,

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Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn, and I'm an investigative journalist. When a group of models from the UK wanted my help, I went on a journey deep into the heart of the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playboy, my doll. Lingerie, topless. I said, yes, please.

Because at the center of this murky world is an alleged predator. You know who he is because of his pattern of behavior? He's just spinning the web for you to get trapped in it. He's everywhere and has been everywhere. It's so much worse and so much more widespread than I had anticipated. Together, we're going to expose him and the rotten industry he works in.

It's not just me. We're an army in comparison to him. Listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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? Is Siege's legacy now just that its ideological lineage lives on in sort of the pterogram milieu or is it still itself influential? Well, 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 450 page tone. They didn't read it. They didn't already

Yeah, I know read siege is like how many of you've read seeds and I found out doing the work that there's like an edited 100 page version and then there's like a little pocket version and then someone even made the ten tenants of siege There's this the spark notes murder cult. Well Adamen Division apparently had a test on siege to get in. 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 and like. I've read portions, but I'm not going to sit here and say I read the whole book.

It's 450 pages. Man, I read every newsletter and the book and it's yes, no, no. So, it acts as a symbol to be like, look, we have a serious intellectual thing. How many Christians have read the Bible? Let's be really serious. Jessica Morrison I think that, 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. Jared Sussman Yeah. I mean, how many communists have read Das Kapital? No, 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 activists 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 doesn't have a background of politics, is going to take the things seriously that you say. And you can only say so many things to people. Political movements are stupid mean this is why we are the ninety nine percent was great it was it was great wasn't true i mean half of americans are like it you know support the republicans. What like it's like one thing and then the person can think about those things are not gonna have complicated ideas so what is what is what are the slogans that come out of something what are 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 pterogram 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, pterogram people, the pterogram 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 it, or even if they don't know that's the origin of those ideas. Right. So pterogram 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 sort of- Oh, to some level. Right, 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 see and as they get older will turn to see or move out of it. They're like, what were the ideas behind this? Why 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 Alon DeBenoist, who's saying something much more complicated than most white supremacists 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 praxis 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 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 just a better understanding of that political movement to 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 she was like, essentially in Mazzal, I read it in the 20th century, there was always this assumption that transgressive art, avant-garde art was implicitly progressive.

Sometimes it was ideological, but even when 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 in working in the eighties and you see it now we've all seen it with 4chan like that was never that isn't true. And that was never true. Never true and that was never true never true, right? I mean those of us in the punk scene in the 80s and 90s It 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 to sharps sharps to some extent Sharps were a lot of of them are rightly nationalists. They just weren't Nazis. This is a common, there was groups like rash red, nanarchist skinheads who still exist, but there was a contested terrain where people are trying to pull it in different directions. This is still the case in neo-folk and heathen religious circles and that's sort of, 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 on 4chan early on I once was mentioned very early on at 4chan 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 4chan and defending me. But like 4chan 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 of 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, Boyd Rice will tell you he never meant it, but I've, I've read some of the primary documents that lead me to believe otherwise. Yeah. And I made a video of him creatively entitled Boyd Rice Neo 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, they were very obscure movements at the time.

And, you know, people are not familiar with them, but are, 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 this is something that we always have to watch out for in our own religious movements and our own cultural movements and occult circles. I just did a podcast with some, you know, occult style esoteric podcast and I was talking about Satanists to become Nazis. Satanists are sort of, I would say split these days, but there's definitely

a Nazi, you know, piece in there, 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 this sort of transgressive subcultures, like, you know, counterculture music and art and, you know, occult spaces, if you have a magical practice that you engage in, people who engage in, you know, practice pagan faiths. In all of 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 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 time, 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 an unofficial party like a barbecue. It was people from the group doing it. People brought their partners. It wasn't an official group function, but this with people 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 was 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 vegetarian or whatever. I'm here with my wife. She's going to a party. 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? 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 going to end up happening if you don't push the Nazi out is that more Nazis show up. Well, if you if it's a single person, people are going to start leaving.

People of color are going to leave. Jews are going to leave. LGBTQ plus people are going to leave and you're going to end up defending this 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, I try to appeal. I try to appeal to the baser reasons sometimes with

people. Well, if you would like to learn more about how a couple of guys in the counterculture movement in the 80s 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 Counterculture Fascism, the Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege by Spencer Sunshine from Rutledge Press. It's available, I think, wherever books are sold. I bought my copy directly from the publisher, Rutledge Press. I think it was only $27, 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. Now that you mentioned that, I am on all of the all of the socials, usually at transform 6789. Have a web page 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 followers, zillion people anyway, Spencer sunshine.com. Also, if you'd like to support anti-fascist research and get a warm warm fuzzy feeling, you should sign up for my Patreon for as little as $2 a month

that you can help me out with the rent and get some exclusive content. So yep. Well, yeah, thank you so much for joining us today. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. It's been great. What Happened Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio 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. John Stewart is back at The Daily Show and he's bringing his signature wit and insight

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or wherever you get your podcasts. We want to speak out and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn, an investigative journalist, and this is my journey deep into the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playerboy, my dog. He was like, I'll take you to the top, I'll make you a star.

To expose an alleged predator and the rotten industry he works in. It's honestly so much worse than I had anticipated. We're an army in comparison to him. From Novel, listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and batter than ever. I'm Erica.

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