Spencer Sunshine
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 168
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.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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 pretty obscure. The newsletters were very unpopular.
Behind the Bastards
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He never made more than 100 copies. The original book had a print run of 1,000. 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.
Behind the Bastards
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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 Atomwaffen Division, this neo-Nazi group that its members and associates killed five people. And out of that, everyone in the Atomwaffen Division had to read Siege, which became the hashtag.
Behind the Bastards
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And out of that grew this whole sort of network first of groups and now really totally decentralized like propaganda channels on Telegram, Telegram, 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.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 168
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 Terragram.
Behind the Bastards
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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. They're called accelerationists. They want to accelerate the collapse of things.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 168
And if there's a single ideological text today that's influential on this scene, it is by easily James Mason Siege.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 168
Well, thank you for getting that. I had someone write a review. It was an interesting view from the point 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.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 168
Like the first half is about neo-Nazism 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 U.S. before 2015 than came out before. And certainly about neo-Nazis who are almost always...
Behind the Bastards
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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 that 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 U.S. at all.
Behind the Bastards
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There are only two documents I can really name, and they're both written by National Socialists, actually one in Australia. Right. and won 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.
Behind the Bastards
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Siege is an answer to the questions that faced 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, published and disseminated Siege itself. And part of that is I was just around the scene these people were part of in the 1990s.
Behind the Bastards
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Like I saw one of them, Boyd Rice, play. I had many mutual friends with another, the publisher, Adam Parfrey 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.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 168
And so I will say how this started is right after Charlottesville, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, you say these things and then you just give the name of the thing and people are like, wait a minute, that 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.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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? 1.30 a.m. 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?
Behind the Bastards
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And so there was a spike in interest in it. And Adam Woffin had been doing more and more. Adam Woffin, people are committing murders now. Strange murders are 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.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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, you know, used this very sophisticated research tool called Google.
Behind the Bastards
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And through that, I found that Mason's Papers, there was a huge collection of Mason's Papers at the University of Kansas in 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.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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He'd 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.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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 William Pierce, who wrote the Turner Diaries, and the Skokie incident, which is parodied in the Blues Brothers.
Behind the Bastards
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Some people don't know this. Joseph Paul Franklin shooting and paralyzing publisher Larry Flint and some other things. And I was like, oh, these are all people who came out of one thing, the splintering of the party. And I realized that there basically was a terrorist wing that came out of the splintering.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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. And so I found all their letters to James Mason, and they're adorned with swastikas and 8-8s, and they're helping him.
Behind the Bastards
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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 in published books, but it was like little pieces of flakes of gold scattered around everything. I started picking them up because I realized you could put them together. And so one article turned out, it was supposed to be one article.
Behind the Bastards
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And then it turns two articles. And I sat down to write it and turn it into a book. And then five years later, I finally had the manuscript done. Then it took another year at the publisher's. 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.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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I can give you the Bob Hike letters. I would love those. I think they'll digitize stuff for a price, though.
Behind the Bastards
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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 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.
Behind the Bastards
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No, it is the only book. Actually, I've been in contact with James Mason, and he said on a radio interview, it's not the first of its kind, but it's the best of its kind.
Behind the Bastards
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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, go antiquing. And he if you've seen pictures of his apartment, it's filled with Nazi knickknacks. Right. He's got a knife collection.
Behind the Bastards
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It looks like my apartment, but like in the inverse and fewer plants. So he was a collector. So he was already, 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.
Behind the Bastards
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This guy Laird Wilcox had been an early student 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 70s or something, and started collecting all this material. So they were probably the biggest collection of far-right material.
Behind the Bastards
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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 wingnuts. 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. What we know as neo-Nazism today really only emerged in the 70s is one of my arguments in the book.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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Well, the guy who had made him the head of the party, who was the second head, Harrington. Cliff Harrington. Clifford Harrington did not give him the truthful account of the party's 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.
Behind the Bastards
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Also that I found all these things that had been printed that were wrong by scholars and others that were... And it wasn't their fault. They were taking, 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 1974 or whatever, but he was lying. Mason was one of the co-founders and not him.
Behind the Bastards
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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 parrot skit in Monty Python, if people know this.
Behind the Bastards
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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 this embarrassed other people, they didn't belong. As he told to me, they didn't believe in the one true religion. Hmm. So I asked him about these counterculture figures who have denied they were ever involved in this stuff.
Behind the Bastards
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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, and maybe some of the listeners do, young neo-Nazis go to his apartment and he tutors them.
Behind the Bastards
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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 his, he's proud of his lineage and he wants it documented. And I knew I did him a favor by writing a book about his movement.
Behind the Bastards
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I mean, they don't have the intellectuals and the resources to, and the trained people to write historical books. And I did 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.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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?
Behind the Bastards
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oh, well, Pierce is just a liar. I mean, all these guys are liars.
Behind the Bastards
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You know, there is a terrible book about Pierce by one of the sycophants, who's a professor, actually.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. There's actually a book by Pierce's son too, um, which is interesting.
Behind the Bastards
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Oh, well, unfortunately a lot of it's copy pasta, but, um,
Behind the Bastards
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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 like as accountable as adults are, right? Especially like they were in college at the time.
Behind the Bastards
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But it was like a true, interesting working through it. And I felt like heartfelt apology for it. And yeah. Yeah. Actually, this is a fun fact. You may know a member of the Aryan Nationalist Action, ANA, this terrorist, this bank robbing group from the 80s, I think, became the first person to transition gender.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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So for a strange reason, I know actually a bunch of the stuff about trans people in prison. So anyway,
Behind the Bastards
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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 in it. 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.
Behind the Bastards
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I mean, that's good for me, but I often say what's good for me is bad for society. And so...
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, it's... I don't know. I don't, 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
Behind the Bastards
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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, they're 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 of being queer, all this stuff. The movement's filled with these people.
Behind the Bastards
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Sometimes it's the people are even like, how many straight white men are there in the movement? Um, Like, and it's just sad. You're like, you're being attracted to this because you're so alienated or you're so, your identity is so shaky that you are attracted to this idea of a firm, strong identity.
Behind the Bastards
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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 gonna be. There's such differences between the North and the South.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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And 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 to these things.
Behind the Bastards
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And, you know, someone pointed out the founder of the Feuerkrieg division, when he founded it, was 12. He was arrested when he was 13 or 14, but he founded it at 12.
Behind the Bastards
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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...
Behind the Bastards
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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 necessarily believe in what they're saying. Maybe they understand it a little better.
Behind the Bastards
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I think it's a bunch of post-structuralist academics who don't even understand what they're saying, but that can happen too. Yeah. 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. The slogans and the narratives have already been formed by others.
Behind the Bastards
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You're not necessarily innovating on it as long as you can repeat the dogma. Does it really matter who's saying it? Does it matter if the person is gay or Jewish?
Behind the Bastards
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It was a child. He was an order of nine angles, though, right? He was Ono. He wasn't a neo-Nazi, right? I always try to distinguish. There's some 09As who are not...
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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And they don't seem to have a real ideological, necessarily, connection to some of this, the political stuff. It's just become... And O-9A... They are founded by a neo-Nazi, and many of them are neo-Nazis, as I was going to say. They don't have to be, and all the people aren't. Even if you were supposed to be, they aren't all.
Behind the Bastards
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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 09A and siege culture parallel, Mason's ideas, because Mason's not a Satanist. And in fact, he's recently denounced Order of Nine Angles.
Behind the Bastards
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And when he was around Satanists, they were atheist Satanists around the Church of Satan.
Behind the Bastards
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That when you start saying, hey, we need to commit random murders in this goal of destroying the, like, supposed 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.
Behind the Bastards
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You're just trying to goad people into these violent, random acts of terrorism and more random murders.
Behind the Bastards
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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 are just like, go attack old people from behind. I mean, it's just pathetic stuff.
Behind the Bastards
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Go, you know, beat up homeless people and stab them. It's like, at some point, I often say this in my speeches as 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 apolitical mass shooters and from political mass shooters, right?
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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It's really a neo-Nazi action. Like he was like, clearly, if we look, you look at his stuff or an article called Nazis of Color about this dynamic. But what's 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
Behind the Bastards
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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, you know, online.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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And if they're incels and they're not really connected to other people and they're not connected to their family, 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 have the empathy to think about how it's going to affect other people and their families.
Behind the Bastards
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Some of this is a question of ideas. I think sometimes siege acts as a symbol. People can gesture that if they're neo-Nazis, there's a serious neo-Nazi 450-page tome.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I know. Read Siege. It's like, how many of you have read Siege? And I found out doing the work that there's like an edited hundred page version. And then there's like a little pocket version. And then someone even made the ten tenets of Siege. There's the spark notes murder cult. Well, Adam Woffman Division apparently had a test on Siege to get in.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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It's 450 pages. Man, I read every newsletter and the book and it's, yes, no, no. 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 serious.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. I mean, how many communists have read Das Kapital? Yeah. 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?
Behind the Bastards
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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.
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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 matter if they're young, doesn't have a background in politics,
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is going to take the things 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 99% was great. It was great. It wasn't true. I mean, half of Americans are like, you know, support the Republicans. But like, it's like one thing, and then the person can think about those things.
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They're not going to have complicated ideas. So 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 Terragram 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.
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And then as it's gone out, you know, Terragram people, the Terragram 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.
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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.
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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, 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.
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And I, 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 Alanda Benoist, 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. Hmm.
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You know what I mean? Like people who 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.
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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 U.S. 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's origins. which is maybe a more scholarly thing.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And it's very, the transgression was progressive. And I mean, these guys I'm looking at are working in the 80s 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. It's never true. Right.
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I mean, those of us in the punk scene in the 80s and 90s 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 this 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.
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Sarps were, a lot of them are rightly nationalists. They just weren't Nazis. This is a common, there was groups like rash, red and anarchist skinheads who still exist, but there was a contested train where people trying to pull it in different directions. This is still the case in neofolk and heathen religious circles.
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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.
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I once was mentioned very early on on 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.
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It was progressive or libertarian or a more decent libertarian 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 neofolk scene and you heard about there's Nazis, I have all of the receipts in detail in the book. If that's of interest to you.
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Yeah, and I even 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.
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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 movement. super toxic neo-Nazism that is espousing terrorism.
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And that this is something that we always have to watch out for in our own religious movements, in our own cultural movements, in occult circles. I just did a podcast with some, you know, occult-style esoteric podcast, and I was talking about Satanists who 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.
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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 in 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. But we're not vegans because we're Nazis.
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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, you know, from the group doing it. People brought their partners.
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It wasn't an official group function, but this one member of the group brought her husband, who was Kevin McDonald. Oh, okay. 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.
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But he's like, I'm not here to recruit anyone. I'm here. You know what I mean?
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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 it's a single person, people are going to start leaving.
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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.
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So, yeah, you've 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 to the baser reasons sometimes with people, you know.
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Thank you. Now that you mentioned that, I am on all of the socials, usually at transform6789.com. I'll 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 a zillion people. Anyway, it's Spencer sunshine.com.
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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 $2 a month that you can help me out with the rent and get some exclusive content. So, yep. Well, hell yeah. Thank you so much for joining us today. Yeah. Thanks for having me on the show. It's been great.