Spencer Sunshine is a sociologist, activist, and researcher of the far-right whose work has appeared in publications around the world. Last year, he published the book Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege, which is based on five years of archival research and interviews.
The book centers around the writings of pedophile and Charles Manson–obsessed neo-Nazi James Mason, whose book Siege promotes terrorism and praises racist serial killers. Sunshine shows how Mason was discovered and promoted by important figures in the industrial, neofolk, and other countercultural music scenes of the 1980s and ’90s, and how his ideas have influenced misanthropic right-wing mass murderers in the modern era.
Upon reading the book, it became apparent that its history and subject matter were tied up with Richmond’s. Several bands who were involved in the spread of Mason’s writings played Twisters (Strange Matter’s iconic predecessor) in the 1990s. Over twenty years later, Mason’s words have become more influential than ever. Today, a global network of neo-Nazi terrorists inspired by his work—including the notorious Atomwaffen Division—have killed over a dozen people.
Closer to home, followers of his ideology were arrested by federal agents with 3D printed automatic weapons in Maryland.. They were headed to the VCDL (Virginia Citizens Defense League) 2020 gun rally with the intention of opening fire into the crowd, hoping to spark a civil war.
Sunshine’s presentation, Counterculture and Neo-Nazi Terrorism: How the Neofolk, Industrial, and Black Metal Subcultures Helped Spawn Today’s Most Infamous Terrorist Manifesto, will be at Fuzzy Cactus on Sunday, June 29 at 6 p.m.; the bar and pool table will be open. The event is free, although donations are welcome. He will have copies of his book for sale, which is also available online from the publisher, Routledge.
We spoke with Spencer to give Richmonders some context for his presentation—and why they should care about hate in the scene today.
Ed. note: The author is coming to Richmond this weekend.
Spencer Sunshine presents: Counterculture and Neo-Nazi Terrorism
Sunday, June 29 • 6 p.m. • Fuzzy Cactus
Free entry • Donations welcome • Bar and pool table open
Copies of Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism available for purchase
How long have you been doing antifascist research?
I’ve done this work for over 20 years now. In 1990, I co-founded what was then called an anti-racist—although we would now call it antifascist—youth group to counteract the dominating presence of Nazi skinheads in the punk scene in the Atlanta, Georgia metro area. (I grew up in a small town outside the city.) We were connected to a group of older activists who taught us about the structure of what was then called the White Power movement, and I got involved in anarchist and leftist politics from there.
Fast forward to 2005, when I encountered a group of crypto-fascists who were trying to cross-recruit from anarchists and radical ecologists, and I wrote an article exposing them. One thing led to another as I got more involved in this work. By 2015, there was so much far-right activity that I quit my day job to write about—and actively counter-organize against—it. Of course, Trump was elected the next year, and everything that had been building exploded.
Where did you first hear about James Mason? Can you talk a bit about the connections between him and Charles Manson?
I first heard of Mason around 1999 after Michael Moynihan, the co-author of the seminal book on Norwegian black metal, Lords of Chaos, was outed as the editor and publisher of James Mason’s book Siege. Because of this, the book was known to counterculturalists, although it remained rather fringe for neo-Nazis.
It was rediscovered in 2015 by the neo-Nazi website and discussion board Iron March; the notorious Atomwaffen Division was founded there, as well as the precursor to Patriot Front, the American Vanguard. (James Fields, Jr. had marched with that group at the 2017 Unite the Right rally, before ramming his car into an antifascist march and killing Heather Heyer.) After the rally—which was actually dispersed by the police before it started—the hashtag #ReadSiege skyrocketed: Mason had always advocated not to hold such public events, but to do a terrorism instead. Now fascists were really listening to him.
Mason published the newsletter SIEGE between 1980 and 1986, and soon after it started he began a correspondence with Charles Manson. (The book Siege is an abridged anthology of his newsletters.) Mason took some of Manson’s ideas, combined them with his terroristic version of neo-Nazism, and created a new philosophy called Universal Order, which advocated “Total Attack or Total Dropout.”
If white supremacists wanted to commit violence, Mason advocated that they do it very publicly and with panache in order to help create an environment of chaos, in hopes that society would be destabilized. He argued the Manson Family murders were an example of this.
Meanwhile, the “total dropout” side was modeled on the Manson Family’s retreat to Death Valley, where they were allegedly going to wait out a race war and then take power. Other ideas from Manson were also incorporated, such as his take on gnosticism. This angle became important to Siege because the book was released just as the early 1990s Manson fad peaked, with Guns N’ Roses recording one of his songs for their The Spaghetti Incident? album.
What connections surprised you that you weren’t aware of before researching the book?
The book has two halves—the first on 1970s neo-Nazism and the other on Mason’s collaborators in the 1980s and ’90s. There is almost no scholarship on the first part, despite its importance to the development of U.S. neo-Nazism.
There, I found out a few interesting things. One was that as many groups splintered off the original American Nazi Party (then called the NSWPP) in the 1970s, a terrorist wing developed, which included not just Mason but also Turner Diaries author William Pierce. Two, I found out that it was actually a major change for that movement to accept counterculturalists into its ranks, as up to that point neo-Nazis were extremely socially and culturally conservative. Three, I learned that, in terms of violence, postwar neo-Nazism was comparatively benign for the first few years; the first neo-Nazi mass murder didn’t happen until 1977.
The book’s second half focuses on the roles of four 1980s and countercultural musicians and publishers: musicians Boyd Rice (NON), Michael Moynihan (Blood Axis), and Nikolas Schreck (Radio Werewolf), plus Feral House press founder Adam Parfrey. Between them, they spent nine years figuring out how to promote and sell Mason to the counterculture.
There had long been arguments about whether these guys were neo-Nazis or if their involvement was “just a joke” or simply playing with extremes, which at the time was common in their circles. I had access to Mason’s correspondence, which is in an archive at the University of Kansas, and I was floored by finding out how deeply they were all involved—particularly Parfrey and Rice.
Rice’s connections to neo-Nazis is a matter of public record, even though he always claimed they were only passing personal relationships; he has denied any ideological sympathy. In fact, I found out that not only were these connections much deeper than anyone had known—Rice’s swastika-bedecked letters to Mason are quite a thing to behold—but also that he had introduced Mason to the others, and by doing so, played a key role in creating Siege.
Parfrey’s intense expressions of racist and antisemitic views also came as a surprise, as well as his promise (albeit never fulfilled) to publish a book by Mason. And I hadn’t realized that Parfrey was the first person outside neo-Nazi circles to publish Mason, in his pre-Feral House magazine EXIT.
Have your views changed on how fascism and misanthropic ideologies spread in countercultural spaces?
Only in extent. Because of the Nazi skinheads, we always knew these tendencies were present in the counterculture and had to be guarded against. But in the early 1990s, I had also been taken with this culture of extremes—although I avoided the Nazi fetish that Parfrey and Rice loved so much.
But the research for the book really made me realize how much the constant, and often ambiguous, use of Nazi imagery—be it for shock value, critique, or just unhealthy fascination—created a situation where actual adherence could hide. These guys really pioneered today’s edgelord “It’s just a joke” approach, and too many people bought it.
I had also harbored questions about the extent of the involvement of Parfrey, and (albeit to a much lesser extent) Rice. And I am guilty even today of having Feral House titles on my bookshelf. My only consolation is that I bought them used.
It’s hard to present such detailed research and history without glorifying the protagonists. How do you ensure your work doesn’t contribute to their culture?
This is a perennial question for those of us who write about the Far Right: How much publicity is too much? Obviously, we need to expose them and explain what they are doing, but this also needs to be balanced out so that the level of coverage is kept to the minimum required. I was told that white supremacists sometimes call the Southern Poverty Law Center asking to be written about!
The 1970s neo-Nazi half of the book is written as a straight-up political history, just like the histories of Trotskyist sects are written, while the second one focuses on the counterculturalists’ neo-Nazi connections.
Mason himself has received lots of coverage in mainstream media, and I’m not worried that a detailed, 450-page book is going to boost his profile. I sent him a copy of my book, as he had answered some questions by mail, and he did make some guarded but positive comments about it.
But mostly I look at it this way: anyone who actually thinks neo-Nazi terrorism is a good thing isn’t going to be dissuaded by anything I write. In any event, once a book goes out into the world, you can’t control whether a proponent or opponent reads it. That’s just something all authors have to make peace with.
Why should people in the punk/metal/industrial/goth scenes come to your presentation, especially if they don’t hold these views?
Many people from these scenes have told me how much of an eye-opener the book has been for them. For some, it has provided the smoking gun(s) for what they suspected all along. Others were unconvinced about the situation, and this has pushed them off the fence. And those who defended these guys from the accusations now realize they’d been had.
The details aside, the story is really a morality tale—not just about these countercultures specifically, but also about fetishizing extremes generally. First, there is the question of our own participation—including, and perhaps especially, that of antifascists—in a scene which valorized extremes.
In lieu of strong firewalls, didn’t we all help create a situation in which the wallowing in extremes, including flirtations with Nazi imagery, helped hide those who were dead serious about them? And to what end did this serve anyway? A lot of this stuff was just repurposed reactionary propaganda and schlocky art; one publisher toured around with what he claimed was serial killer Ed Gein’s tombstone. It fit in with the spirit of the times, and although I seriously doubt that this by itself led anyone into white supremacist politics—what purpose did this possibly serve?
Second, as the artist Chloë Lum has pointed out, 20th-century avant-garde art always harbored an assumption that transgression itself was implicitly progressive—even if the artist themself didn’t hold left-leaning ideas. The very act of bursting the social boundaries of “The System,” as it was sometimes called, was assumed to have politically progressive implications. We can now see what a truly mistaken idea that was.
Interview by J. River
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