The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 2: No Fascist USA? The American Nazi Party

Mike: I assure you there are fascists in the US.

[Theme song]

Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi lies

Race and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi lies

Hollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews died

Army, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi lies

Mike: One of the more pernicious lies I hear about US fascism is that it doesn’t exist, particularly in the present day. So I’m here today with journalist and sociologist Dr. Spencer Sunshine, PhD from CUNY’s Grad School. Spencer has written for Colorlines, Truthout, and The Daily Beast and has an organizing guide out through PopMob called 40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street-Legal Tactics for Community Activists. Thanks for coming on the pod.

Spencer Sunshine: Thanks for having me on the show, Mike.

Mike: Of course! So Spencer’s here to talk about the American Nazi Party; its successor, the National Socialist White People’s Party; and its remnants today. So let’s start with a brief history of US fascism before the American Nazi Party.

Spencer: Sure, so fascism as an actual political current is about 100 years old in the United States. The first Nazi group, or Nazi cell, in the United States formed in 1922 by German expats in the Bronx. And there were probably earlier groups that were Italian Fascist groups. Like many radical political traditions that started in Europe, in the United States these were first brought to the country by immigrants from Europe.

If we look further than that, if we use fascism as a broader term involving any organized white supremacist groups, of course we’d easily go back to the 1860s and the Ku Klux Klan and similarly styled far right groups go back in the United States well before that. So fascism is a longstanding political tradition in our country. It’s a century old. The fact that people can’t acknowledge this shows something interesting about the psyche of the United States where people just can’t admit that there are radical political movements here, or that such a noxious political movement such as fascism could take fairly, what looks like permanent roots in our country.

Mike: Okay, so let’s talk about the American Nazi Party itself. How was it founded? What did it do?

Spencer: So before the war there were two groups that were pro-Nazi. There was the German American Bund, who were tied to the Nazi Party in various ways; and an American group called the Silver Shirts. As you may imagine, during the war, nazism became taboo in the country. A lot of the leaders were arrested.

After the war it took quite a while for, what then became neo-nazism, neo-nazi groups to establish themselves. There was a group called the National States Rights Party who mostly recruited from Klan members and were the core organizers for nazis, but they did not say on the– On the outside of the package it did not say that; although on the inside it was.

So the American Nazi Party was sort of special because it was the first group to openly declare itself a nazi group and to, the phrase they used was, “raise the swastika,” to actually appear in public. You know, at the time they used the old stormtrooper uniforms, these brown uniforms with a swastika armband. You rarely see it these days, but this was pretty common through the early 90s for nazi groups to do this.

So the American Nazi Party was founded in 1959. There was a precursor group in 1958 by George Lincoln Rockwell. He had done advertising; was very good. And came from a vaudeville family. This is a really crazy story, but Bob Hope was actually at his christening. He used these advertising techniques to form this group. It was designed to get media attention, and the idea was for him that conservatives could never become radical enough and could never really attract the people they needed. So by using this imagery, he could attract the kinds of people that he wanted, and he could use the presence of nazis– He used to say, “No one can ignore nazis marching in the streets.” –use this public image to gain media attention which he could then use as a recruiting tool.

The party was never very big. It continued through the 60s. They did a lot of– It was almost an agitprop kind of project. The kind of murders that we associate with the nazi movement these days– They had punch ups at rallies and stuff. But the kind of violence and murders that we associate with neo-nazism these days did not come until later, which is an interesting thing.

He was assassinated by a fellow party member in 1967. Right before then he had changed his organizing strategy. He had a very successful rally in Marquette Park, Chicago, which was actually against Martin Luther King’s plan to desegregate. It was some of his late marches doing housing desegregation in Chicago. It was in an Eastern European neighborhood, a lot of Eastern European immigrants who were resisting Black Chicagoans from moving into their neighborhood. Thousands of people came to this rally. He then changed his tack a bit. He renamed the party the National Socialist White People’s Party which is a mouthful, and we’ll call it the NSWPP from now on. And he renamed the party newspaper to White Power which is the slogan we know today that he coined. So it was a move from being an antisemitic nazi party to kind of being an aggressive white nationalist party because it was the first time that he had drawn a lot of grassroots support.

He was assassinated. He was replaced by his subordinate Matt Koehl. At first it was three people. It was Robert Lloyd, Koehl, and William Pierce (Who’s important. He later formed his own party called the National Alliance.

Mike: We’ll talk about them in a bit.

Spencer: And he wrote a very influential book called The Turner Diaries. These three that ran the party for a while, and then, what’s a nazi party without a führer? Or tin pot führer at least? Kicks the other two out. And runs the party until his death a few years ago. In 1983 the party became called New Order and actually degenerated into a Hitler-worshipping, almost private Hitler-worshipping cult. It still exists. Koehl died a few years ago and was replaced by his subordinate Martin Kerr.

Mike: So before we talk about the remnants today, I want to talk about some of the splinter groups that formed in the 70s. I’m thinking the second NSLF, the National Alliance that you mentioned, the NSPA, the NSWWP.

Spencer: A mouthful of alphabet soup.

Mike: Yes.

Spencer: So the importance of Koehl taking control is that Rockwell was a very charismatic guy. A lot of his followers really adored him. They ended up fetishizing him almost as a god-like figure. The way they had– Some of them, you know, praised him the way they had Adolf Hitler before him. In the post-war period, people had started almost worshipping and sometimes literally worshipping Hitler and made altars to him and treated him as a kind of demigod.

So Koehl did not have charisma and acted in ways that alienated most of his party membership. Over the years, especially between 1973 and 1974, a lot of the party members left; the active units, they called them units the chapters, left and formed their own groups. And this became very important because this is what laid the groundwork for there to be a decentralized neo-nazi movement in the United States, the kind of which we see today. So it laid the epistemological foundation for it because before there had been a single party, a single organization with chapters. Now there were all these separate groups that had different relationships with them and that could pursue different strategies. And they did pursue different strategies.

So the first big split was in 1970 when William Pierce is kicked out. This takes a little while for the real splintering to happen. So the first group I’ll talk about is the National Socialist Liberation Front because their influence can be felt today on the alt-right, on the terrorist wing of the neo-nazis today. It was originally the name was used in the late 60s as a college student group that William Pierce actually ran that was associated with the party. They were trying to take off the energy of the New Left. You know, there were a lot of liberation fronts was a popular name for armed new left groups. This was an attempt to recruit college students. It only got one good organizer which we can talk about later which was David Duke. It was never an independent entity.

The name was revived in 1974 when, probably the best organizer in the United States, Joseph Tommasi, who was based in Los Angeles, was suspended by the party, and he founded his own group. They used the NSLF name.

Mike: Can you talk about why he was suspended?

Spencer: He was– There’s a lot of discussion about this. Accusations that he was– Some of it was cultural clashes within the nazis. He was pulling off the counterculture. He had long hair. They didn’t like to dress in uniform. They wore like fatigues and stuff. He was accused of bringing his girlfriends over to the party headquarters.

Koehl was making all of the party members (They had bought their own headquarters. This was a time they still had physical headquarters was an emphasis.) sell their headquarters. They made all the chapters sell their headquarters buildings and give the proceeds to Koehl which angered a lot of people and caused a lot of these splits because the people themselves had bought them, and they just thought he was trying to enrich himself which he probably was. He was basically shutting the party down and making a cult around himself and taking all the money.

But there was a very interesting– What probably really prompted it is– It’s attached to the Watergate scandal. Someone in the C.R.E.E.P. (The group, the Nixon support group that got involved in Watergate, it was an acronym for them.) hired Tommasi’s nazis to help get another far right, a little more moderate, party on the ballot in California to pull votes away from Republicans. This was the American Independent Party. It has a funny history. It comes out of the George Wallace campaigns earlier. Then later, I think Cliven Bundy from the Bundy ranch actually joined. Remnants of the party exist today and have attracted people from the militia movement.

[Spencer's correction to this story: https://twitter.com/transform6789/status/1388206831630180362?s=19]

Anyway, these nazis were hired by Republicans to get another far right party on the ballot to pull votes away in a certain election. I forget the details now. I’m sorry. The party– Koehl was angry that he had made this deal. This made the newspapers. It made the New York Times and stuff. This angered the party that he had done this without their permission. And they took money from it. So that may have been– A lot of more serious people think that was the actual reason for the initial suspension. And then there was a break when Tommasi formed his own group.

The NSLF was important because they openly advocated armed resistance and bombings and such and did do a few of these, although rather moderate in Los Angeles. This was a break from the parent party which always stressed legality. While there had been violent currents in it, they were really kept kind of under the rug, and it was just a sort of wing of the party of certain people including William Pierce.

And then Tommasi didn’t last long, though. He was killed in a scuffle with members of the former party at his former headquarters. He accosted one and the guy had this kid, an 18-year-old, and he shot him. Tommasi again, another charismatic organizer, founded this group, but didn’t last long. That group however did continue it had four different leaders and continued until 1986. James Mason, who we’ll talk about later, joined that group after Tommasi’s passing.

Mike: Okay so that’s the NSLF. What about the National Alliance?

Spencer: The National Alliance is a group founded by William Pierce after he got kicked out of the NSWPP. He was flirting with Willis Carto, another major nazi leader who became, amongst other things, the main popularizer of Holocaust denial in America. They had a falling out. Carto had a falling out with everyone.

Pierce founded– The group was originally the National Youth Alliance, then became the National Alliance. It was a membership based group. They tried to recruit professionals. Pierce had been an engineering professor out in Oregon before he joined the party. He was very articulate. He did not have the sort of crass approach, you know. He produced more sophisticated propaganda as well as sort of more interesting theoretical documents. So they continued. The remnants of the group exists today. They had up to a thousand members. They ended up having a huge group property out in West Virginia. It was the headquarters building. He lived there.

He wrote a book in the 70s called The Turner Diaries which is a really badly written book. It’s a fantasy novel about how some white supremacists will form a terrorist movement, and they will help promote a race war, through terrorism will promote a race war in America. And you know this will end up in the Day of the Rope where the white supremacists kill people of color and Jews and create a white ethnostate. It’s a tremendously popular book around the world. It’s sold up to a half a million copies. You can still get it today. It still inspires people today.

So Pierce’s group, they didn’t do a lot of public actions especially till later in life.  Although, their probably biggest rally was in 2002. It was a supposedly pro-Palestine rally in Washington, D.C., that blamed Israel for 9/11, and hundreds of people came to it. They tended to shy away from this stuff. But it was the biggest group, and the most serious group, in the United States for many years.

After Pierce died, of course they tried to continue the group and everyone broke up into squabbling. One of the main organizers who’s come out of it who’s still active today is Billy Roper who’s part of the Shield Wall project in Arkansas. I think there’s one chapter left. The headquarters of the party still exists. There’s been a bunch of legal fights with everyone engaged in lawsuits and various other physical conflicts with each other, and the group has sort of degenerated. So that’s the second one, that’s the National Alliance.

Mike: Okay, so let’s talk about–you actually mentioned this on Twitter kind of the other day–the NSPA.

Spencer: The NSPA actually was another one of the early splinters that left in 1970. Led by a fellow named Michael Collin. [The name is actually Frank Collin -Mike] They were based in Chicago. They had seen or taken part in Rockwell’s popular organizing in Marquette Park in the 60s, and they didn’t understand why the party wouldn’t follow up with that. And that’s what they wanted to do. Again, there was a fighting over the headquarters building.

They split off formed their own group. A very small group until they started having rallies in Marquette Park that were still resisting desegregation and attracted community support. Basically, no one wanted to side with this white community that did not want Black people to move in, and they became their champions. And part of the– The thing here is that people in the neighborhood, there were a lot of like Ukrainian immigrants, people who had been from countries that were occupied by the Nazis, who were pro-Nazi. A lot of the areas the Nazis occupied people, you know what I mean, supported them. There were a lot of people, basically, with collaborationist backgrounds, and they didn’t have a problem with this. And the nazis championed their cause.

And they would hold large rallies in Marquette Park. Some of them attracted thousands of people. They became most famous for the Skokie incident which apparently is being forgotten today by younger people. but was known to everybody in the United States of a certain age. The Chicago city tried to stop them from having their Marquette rallies by putting a bunch of legal barriers. They had to have a huge insurance– Had to take insurance out to do it that was unaffordable. So to get around this they threatened a march in Skokie, Illinois, which was a largely Jewish suburb, wealthy suburb. A lot of Holocaust survivors lived there. Skokie resisted them through legal means. Eventually the case went to the Supreme Court. It was in the national news for like a year or so. It started in 1977. Went to the Supreme Court. The ACLU championed it. The ACLU had been defending nazis before this but this became what they’re famous for. Their most famous case.

The Supreme Court upheld that local cities could not put unreasonable blocks such as insurance requirements on political groups from marching including nazis. They couldn’t stop them from using particular symbols or something. They attempted to ban that. So everyone knew there were neo-nazis in America. It also made the NSPA briefly the most important nazi group, neo-nazi group in America, because at this point there was all these splinter factions from the NSWPP and were all vying to be the most important group or to set up, or attract other groups to them, or to lead coalitions of them. There were different formulations of this. They all had, you know, weird relationships with each other as they were doing this.

So the NSPA, because of this lawsuit and the attention it got, became the most popular of these groups, and certainly the most well known of these groups briefly. It eclipsed even the parent party for a while. So that was probably the high point of attention of neo-nazism in America in the 70s. Although, throughout the decade, nazis would consistently make the newspapers. They were a very small movement; had maybe a thousand people in the movement in the US. It became, unlike in the 60s, newspapers, the media started to really love them. So there’s tons of coverage of various nazi splinter groups in the various cities for all of their actions. There’s a documentary film called California Reich. You can watch it on YouTube. We’ll talk about it in a minute. It’s about a group in California and such. There was lots of stuff like that. These two things weren’t outliers.

Mike: Okay, so–

Spencer: So Collin– Oh there’s a funny ending to it. Collin and his people, they started running for alderman and like city council in Chicago. Some of them did quite well, got like 16% of the vote. But quickly the party started to wane in popularity. Collin’s subordinates wanted to get rid of him, so they rifled through his desk and found child porn of him with young teenage boys. They turn him in to the police. He was arrested for child molestation. It also came out his father was a Jewish man who had been in a concentration camp. So there was some real deep stuff going on here. Even though he was a successful organizer, right, against the odds.

He went to jail. He was replaced by Harold Covington. We can talk about Covington if we want. He’s important in the Greensboro Massacre and then died only a few years ago. Remained an organizer. And then Covington was replaced by someone else and the party frittered away. But yeah, there was a real plot twist in that one after Skokie.

Mike: Okay, do you want to talk about the NSWWP?

Spencer: Sure, so this was a group– This was the California leader Allen Vincent. He, like everyone else, broke off of the parent party. Founded– He was important cause he was– He wasn’t a charismatic organizer, but he could attract followers, and he really liked to get in street fights just as a person. He was a good, stable organizer unlike a lot of these people. Did a lot of crazy rallies in San Francisco. So of course there were fights at his events. At one point he opened a bookstore I believe in the Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco on the same block as a synagogue that a bunch of survivors went to. His bookstore was quickly burned down.

He worked with James Mason. Worked with him for a while between 1978 and 1980. Was the editor of his paper The Stormer. Briefly, after the NSPA star faded, his group became a national group. This lasted a few years and it faded away like many of these other groups. So he was well known for the documentary California Reich was filmed about his group while it was still a chapter of the NSWPP before he broke away and became the NSWWP, just to totally confuse anybody about these acronyms.

Mike: The National Socialist White–

Spencer: White Workers Party. The original group is the National Socialist White People’s Party. His group is the National Socialist White Workers Party. Although you might think they’re more of an anticapitalist group from the parent party that wasn’t true.

He lived quite a while through the late 90s. He popped back up in the late 90s, met Jeff Shoep who at the time was running the National Socialist Movement, and became his mentor for a brief period of time. Then he passed away.

Mike: Now let’s talk about the groups that exist today or the various remnants of it today. So I was going to start with Don Black and Stormfront.

Spencer: So Don Black was originally in the National Socialist Youth Movement. It was sort of part of the parent party for people who were under eighteen. There were all these names of these other groups, so people didn’t– Their membership card didn’t say American Nazi Party or NSWPP. You know he left like many other people. Many neo-nazis, almost all neo-nazis from the 70s were in the party at least at first. That was everybody’s entre into this world.

So he had been involved in the Dominica debacle. This was in 1981. A group of white supremacists were hired to invade the Caribbean island of Dominica and overthrow the government. They’d made a deal with the– The leader had been deposed and they were going to allow the white supremacists to keep a base there. They were turned in, of course, by somebody, and they all went to jail including Don Black.

Later however, he founded Stormfront. It was an early– It wasn’t the first at all, but it became the first very popular neo-nazi website. The important thing, it had all these forums where people could have discussions. And it was publicly available, so it was easy for reporters, especially, to go look at the discussions and be able to quote from them which became very important for its visibility. And this was the biggest neo-nazi or white nationalist website really until The Daily Stormer I believe in 2016-2017.

So now it’s a bit– If you look at it, it’s clearly a web 1.0 website and looks a little old school. But it’s still the main popular site throughout the 90s and the 00s. And it’s still I think for people who are probably gen X and older who are white supremacists, it’s still the place that they hang out at. So it had a very important place in the–

You know, nazis and other white nationalists have always had a hard time because they were locked out–especially before social media in the last few years even–they were locked out of mainstream platforms. And they need to have alternative platforms. Nazis are actually early adopters to the bbs. The first Nazi or white supremacist bbs opened in 1983. It was actually founded by a former member of Hitler Youth that moved to the United States. And so they were very early adapters to this technology because it was a way for them to get around the media block out. I mean even if they printed newspapers, they couldn’t sell them at newsstands. You know even these weird tankie communist sects could sell their newspapers at least some newsstands.

Mike: Right. Okay so next up, I guess his story intersects with Don Black’s story. We’ll talk about occasional political candidate, former Klan leader, former NSLF member David Duke.

Spencer: So Duke was a member of the original college student NSLF. He essentially took it over. He was at a party conference in the early 70s, and at this conference, they said NSLF will be– The group itself is changing its name to the White Student Alliance and Duke will be the leader. And this is interesting because it shows Duke’s evolution from an outright neo-nazi– He went to school in Louisiana and would go do these free speech– There was a free speech zone, and he would go sell the NSLF newspaper and give neo-nazi speeches. It was a big– You know, he was very well known on campus for this and attracted a lot of attention. There’s pictures of him in a Nazi uniform demonstrating against one of the lefty Jewish lawyers Kunstler who had gone to speak at his school. He had a sign that said “Gas the Chicago Seven” who was this left leaning, it was this left leaning political trial in the late 60s.

So he took over this new group, and the group kept evolving. So it’s originally the National Socialist Liberation Front; then it’s the White Student Alliance; then it’s the White Youth Alliance; and then it’s the Nationalist Party. And then he forms a Ku Klux Klan group or joins one, it’s a little vague, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. And this is important because it shows his evolution from a nazi to a kind of white nationalist youth organizer– to a white nationalist student organizer to a white nationalist youth organizer to just a white nationalist organizer. So each time the pool is rippling out, and he’s trying to find the right formula that attracts the most people, from very niche to much broader.

He becomes– So he forms this newfangled Klan group that doesn’t wear hoods, and he’s very good with media. This was sort of a new thing to have somebody appear in media who was dressed nice and could talk well, wasn’t trying to– You know, Rockwell had waved swastikas in people’s faces and was trying to infuriate them, and Duke was doing exactly the opposite. Became very successful. Was very young. He was still in his twenties. He was running one of the more successful Klan groups. One of the things he’s remembered for today, he started a Klan Border Watch on the California border to attempt to patrol for illegal immigrants. There he was working with Tom Metzger who later became popular for other things as well as Louis Beam. These were two white supremacist leaders in the 80’s who promoted armed struggle. Were the most militant leaders. Started out in Duke’s Klan. And as well as Don Black. And I believe Duke married Black’s ex-wife. They were all entangled in these ways.

So after the Klan stuff he starts running for office in Louisiana and does quite well. And at one point is elected state representative in Louisiana in 1989. This is sort of the high point of the wave of conservatism that goes along with Reagan’s reign of power from 1980 to 88, which continues with Bush I to 92. There becomes a revival of popular mainstream American racism. And sort of white flight that had started is very ensconced. There’s all these racial conflicts in the late 80s and early 90s like Howard Beach and the Hasidic Jewish and Black riots in Crown Heights. So there’s an incredible amount of violent racial tension in the country at the time, and so he’s sort of taking advantage of this. He runs for other offices, does quite well, but can’t get elected again.

And then he’s mostly well known for this, and it’s the slow burn for the next few decades. He was at Charlottesville which was an interesting moment. To me, this was a sort of handing of the torch from from him to Richard Spencer as the mainstream white nationalist leader. That’s how I saw what went on. Although, you know, they didn’t actually rally at Charlottesville. The rally itself was dispersed by the police before it began. There was no speeches or ceremony which he could do this, although there was some speeches in a park later.

Mike: Let’s talk about the National Socialist Movement.

Spencer: Yes. The NSM was yet another splinter party. It was formed in 1975 by people who again had come out of the NSWPP. Robert Brannan was its leader. They were sort of going in different directions at the same time. Some of the elements, which included James Mason as well as a guy named Greg Hurls, wanted a more pro-armed struggle line. They were very close to the NSLF. Brannan wanted a more sort of traditional thing, what was called the “uniform and demonstrate” which meant that they would get people in nazi uniforms and hold a rally in public and attract a lot of media attention. People would come and protest and that would just spur that.

One of the things they did–they were based in Ohio, southern Ohio–they used to hold a “Free Rudolph Hess” rally I think for over a dozen years in Cincinnati. He was a Nazi leader. He had parachuted to Britain with the intent of creating a peace deal with the British in the early 40s I believe, and then remained imprisoned until his death. I think he committed suicide in the– I think he died in the late 80s early 90s. He lived a long time in Spandau Prison.

So this group had some popularity in the early-mid 70s. There was of course splintering of this as Mason left it and went to work with Allen Vincent’s group.  And it remained a tiny group with one or two units until the 90s when the then-leader, second leader Clifford Harrington, recruited a teenager named Jeff Shoep. Harrington wasn’t a great organizer, but he did, unlike some people, understood there was a revival in neo-nazism in the 80s and 90s through the skinhead thing and wanted to recruit nazi skinheads. Got Shoep to take the party over for him, and then Shoep grew it into the leading neo-nazi party in the United States. It had dozens of chapters in the 00s in particular. I think around 2006 was its height which is a very unusual time for it to be successful.

Partly they were pulling from the rest of the movement. The National Alliance collapsed, and other groups in the movement collapsed and they were able to sort of steal their local units and absorb them. But that group still exists today. They were at Charlottesville. They make the news. They just were in the news. There was a rally in Arizona.

They’re the main group, if you want a nazi group that’s going to go and march in uniforms or use nazi symbols–instead of the old brownshirt uniforms, they use black uniforms–and put swastikas on a flag to get attention, that’s the group that will do that. So they are on their fourth leader now, Burt Colucci I believe, who like many of them just got arrested. A number of the members have murdered people over the years. A lot of people who– They’re sort of the least together group. Yeah they’re the kind of group that if you have some sort of countercultural affiliation, if you’re not interested in being a professional organizer that you might want to join, if you’re a biker, if you’re like a skinhead, and if its important for you to have a card saying you belong to a nazi party and you want to yell at people in public that you’re a nazi and beat your chest about that and talk about how much you love Adolf Hitler, this is the group for you. It’s not a sophisticated organizing project.

Mike: Alright, so you have a book in the works about this next one. Let’s talk about James Mason, Universal Order, and Siege.

Spencer: So I’ve been working on this book for a while. One day it will be done. James Mason was a teenage member of the American Nazi Party in the 1960s although he never met Rockwell. His mentor in the party was William Pierce. So he met Pierce when he was I believe sixteen years old. Pierce let Mason, who was having a hard time at home, run away from home and stay with him at the party headquarters. Taught him how to– Or got him to learn how to use a printing press which was important before computers. A lot of groups would physically produce their own newspapers themselves with their own printing presses. This helped him out since it was very difficult for nazis to find a printer that would print their publications.

So he was in the American Nazi Party. He was in it as it became the NSWPP. He hung around for a while and didn’t leave until later. But then he ended up starting to join these other splinter groups while staying in the party. He left in 76. By that time he had already helped form the NSM, and he had also joined secretly the NSLF. This was after Tommasi died, so under the second leader. And he was a supporter of the National Alliance. So at one point, he’s a super insider who’s like a member of four different neo-nazi parties. And he’s always wrangling in the mid 70s as the different groups try to create– try to become the lead group or create an alliance of different groups to overtake the NSWPP. What unites them is that they all hate Koehl who’s that leader. They can’t do it, as I said before. The NSPA become the leader for a moment because of the Skokie incident.

Mason fought with everyone. He did this thing you see from some activists who are sort of sectarian, is they get more and more theoretically specific and crankier and crankier; they fall out with more and more people until they run a project that’s really just them and whoever is helping them directly. So he has a falling out with the NSM, and he joins Allen Vincent’s group. Runs his newspaper, but he doesn’t really like Vincent because he’s not radical enough. Mason is deciding more and more that it’s hopeless to do public organizing.

He comes up with some very strange ideas, not just that nazis should engage in guerilla warfare, but at the time there starts to be these nazi serial killers. Nazis start doing these multiple murders, like Joseph Paul Franklin are serial killers. He killed up to 22 people. He was another former NSWPP member. Roved around he country as a sniper killing mixed race and other couples– Mixed race couples and others, Black people, Jews. And other people just start butchering people, either just doing these random murders or doing workplace massacres. One of the first of them was in New Rochelle by Fred Cowan in New Rochelle, New York. It’s just north of New York City in 1977. And there’s a lot of serial killers at this time. It’s the height for serial killers in America. And so Mason comes up with this theory that not just is guerilla warfare good but these racially based murders are good by nazis and by others. And that the nazis can use them as an attempt to destabilize the system–he starts calling it the system–because nazis can never work through legal means to build a party that will be able to take over the system. He’s like every time we try to do this, we get shut down. We either get shut down in the streets, or the courts shut us down, or just shut out of the media. That had been Rockwell’s strategy was to attract media attention and build an organization. He’s like, “We can’t do any of that. We really don’t need organization. We need mass chaos to disrupt the system, and only after the system is disrupted will nazis have a chance to take power.

He eventually later on starts to praise armed radical left and Black nationalist groups who are coming into conflict with the system, which he doesn’t in the 70s but he starts doing it in the 80s. So he has a falling out with Vincent. The NSLF, this is revived under its third leader in 1980, becomes public again. It had actually been absorbed into Allen Vincent’s group and then it comes back out as a separate group. He restarts Siege. It’s originally the NSLF newspaper. It’s sort of their theoretical paper. But it’s just him running it, and he’s developing these ideas about how murder can be used to forward the nazi cause. Then he comes into contact with Charles Manson. Starts to promote that Manson should be the new nazi guru, just like George Lincoln Rockwell had been, just like Adolf Hitler had been. Portrays him as this spiritual racist figure. Manson had carved a swastika in his head in prison and was sympathetic. He mentions– A lot of people don’t know he was extremely racist and antisemitic.

This creates yet another tiff between James Mason and the people he’s working with. The leader of the party at that point, the fourth leader Karl Hand, who by the way is a big fan of yours. Can I tell a story on your podcast?

Mike: Yeah.

Spencer: So do you know about the interest of Karl Hand in you?

Mike: No.

Spencer: Oh you don’t? So I actually wrote– As part of this book, I’m writing people who were involved in this movement. And Karl Hand lives upstate, runs a party called the Racial Nationalist Party of America, and he was based for a long time in upstate New York. He is obsessed with you, Mike. After your appearance on Tucker Carlson, he wanted to have a fight with you. Like some sort of, go into a boxing ring, and have a fight. He’s an older man now, he’s in his 70s. And so I wrote him, and he sent back a whole packet of literature and it included a flier about you with a description of his attempts to contact you and arrange a fist fight with you.

Mike: Huh…

Spencer:  So you have a fan. You have a fan. I think he said he wrote to the school you were teaching at. Anyways you have a fan in this generation of neo-nazis. And so, anyway, Hand and Mason had a falling out. In what must have been unique in the anals of– the annals? I don’t know. You can see I read a lot and don’t know how to say certain words. In the history of American neo-nazism, they had an amicable split. Hand actually gave Mason some money to continue Siege. So after 1982 until 1986 Siege is just run by James Mason.

It’s a very small. It’s like a newsletter. He printed it himself. It was six pages long. There was almost no graphics in it. It had a sort of red– It doesn’t– Although Mason was a talented graphic designer, I think, it was very plain. It was mostly text. It had a red banner that was it. He ran it off on his own mimeograph machine. Made like 75 copies of it. So this small newsletter that was running 75 copies will become quite influential in retrospect. He ran this till 1986. After the split with the NSLF in 1982, Mason started saying it was published by the Universal Order which directly said that Charles Manson was their spiritual leader. Although, he didn’t talk about Manson that much. He never describes what Manson’s supposed to do other than, they’re not just a neo-nazi group. It’s neo-nazism and more. It was a kind of really spiritual national socialism. Although, he’s never specific about what that means. But he clearly has been enchanted by Charles Manson and essentially become a follower of him.

So this sort of peters out. He becomes more and more cynical. He even gives up that these random murders are going to do anything. He doesn’t think that the system will be able to be destabilized, but he does advocate–and this is what’s influential today– He says, “Either you can drop out and wait through the apocalypse,” you know that’s coming. He becomes convinced that the whole system is going to crumble. And this sort of pessimism is very popular in the 80s across the political spectrum. Partly driven by the Cold War and the survivalist movement. But he says, “You can hide out and wait for the end to come, and then live through it, and we’ll have our chance. Or if you’re going to go be a terrorist, do it with style. Do it in a way– Don’t just kill somebody and be killed. Do it in a way that has panache, and that will inspire people, and that’s done well. Plan it well. Don’t just freak out and shoot somebody and be killed by the police.” And this philosophy is what becomes popular with Atomwaffen remnants and others today. Like these are your two options. I think it was called “Total attack or total drop out.”

By 1986, he’s pretty burned out, and that’s the end of it. Basically in short order, his book becomes– His newsletters become found by people in the industrial music scene, by Boyd Rice, who’s this industrial musician, who’s still alive today, and that denies all of this stuff that happened. He recruits several other people. He’s in contact with Adam Parfrey, who founded Feral House Press which is still around today; [Michael] Moynihan, who was an industrial and then neo-folk musician; and Nicholas Schreck, a Satanist who’s married to Anton LaVey’s daughter Zeena. They all work to promote James Mason. They start publishing him in various things. Moynihan takes the newsletters and turns them into a book.which he publishes. It’s an anthology of the newsletters. He publishes them himself called Siege in 1993.

It becomes a cult classic. It’s promoted by this network of people. Basically it’s part of the punk rock and assorted underground music and cultural scene, there was a real right wing edge to it, part of which is a predecessor to the alt-right. People like Jim Goad who was the direct inspiration for people like Gavin McInnes of the Proud Boys. There’s a lot of nazi imagery circulating, so actual nazis can function in the scene, and it’s never clear who’s using nazi imagery ironically, or with some interest in nazism but they’re not an actual nazi, and who’s an actual nazi. It’s very unclear, and in this confusion, they can hide, circulate their things, and get some attention. And they do get attention with this book. It gets– There are interviews and it’s covered in the alternative weekly newspapers, which were very popular at the time since the internet wasn’t what it is now, many which had circulation in tens of thousands in different cities. So they were able to use this network to popularize James Mason’s ideas.

The book goes out of print. Gets reprinted in 2003 by a fellow in Montana. And he keeps it in circulation, and then it gets picked up with the alt-right, with the Iron March platform which is a discussion board that all these contemporary terrorists, alt-right terrorist groups, neo-nazi terrorist groups come out of, Atomwaffen and others come out of. And they reprint the book yet again. It continues to be circulated as a pro-terrorism cult classic.

Mike: So do you think there are any other individuals or groups worth mentioning?

Spencer: There are like scattered ones. There’s a guy named Rocky Suhayda, I believe is his name who runs a group called the American Nazi Party. It used to get a lot of attention because he was good at using social media and various internet media. So people could always quote him and say the American Nazi Party says X or Y. Although, he was just a random NSWPP member.

Art Jones came out of the party while he was in Chicago, and he’s a sort of perennial candidate there. But in 2016, the Republicans failed to run someone against him in the primary. It was in a heavily Democratic district. And so in lieu of that he became the Republican candidate for– I forget what it was, US rep or something. And he’s a nazi, a Holocaust denier. And so this was all in the news, you know “How is a Holocaust denier the Republican candidate?” This had been– This was a strategy that Nazis developed in the 70s. They would run for offices. Until the late 70s, it was a much more kind of benign movement in a way, not ideologically, but in their tactics, they had not moved into this murderous terrorism phase until a little later on. And so he continues that kind of– It’s actually a toolbox of tactics that go back into the 60s: doing things that are kind of publicity stunts to get attention, one of which is running for office. So briefly Jones got in the press. He was in the press again. He tried to run again in 2020, but the Republicans finally like, they put somebody up. I mean, this is the problem, parties have limited resources. If you’re putting someone up just to defeat somebody else in the primary even though you know you won’t win in the general, that’s a waste of your resources. It shows how nazis and other white supremacists can sort of drain resources from the mainstream in an attempt to just not let them get a foothold in the various places that they’re trying to– In the various little cracks they’re trying to stick their fingers in.

Mike: And you mentioned Harold Covington. Do you want to talk about him too?

Spencer: Sure. Covington died a couple years ago but had some influence even on the alt-right. He was again a member of the NSWPP. He had taken over the NSPA from Collin after he’d gotten Collin arrested for being a child molester and exposed him as of Jewish descent. Ran that party for a bit. He was also– Some members of his party–he was in North Carolina–took part in the Greensboro massacre in 1979 where a joint group of nazis and Klansmen had killed communists who unwisely held a “Death to the Klan” march but were not prepared for what they had prodded.

He ran for attorney general around the same time in North Carolina, state attorney general, and got 40% of the vote. There are a few other instances like this where neo-nazis were able to get a huge amount of votes around this time period. This is around the period where Duke’s– Well Duke’s elected later, I guess. So he goes to this– He does all this crazy stuff. He goes to Africa to fight in Rhodesia. He was this contentious fellow. Had falling outs with everyone.

Moves to the Pacific Northwest, and becomes the last of this old guard of people who are advocating the states in the Pacific Northwest, which are overwhelmingly white, break off from the rest of the country and form a white ethnostate. His last group was called the Northwest Front which I believe still exists today. And they would both advocate this idea, try to get involved in the various– There’s a regionalist/independence movement called Cascadia that wants to break some of that area off, but it wants a kind of lefty leaning, ecological state or regionalist entity, and so he tried to give that a specifically racist cast. So this created, again, a lot of these groups in the Cascadian movement, whatever you think about it (There’s a lot of kooks.) they had to move and take their resources just to fight the white nationalists within their ranks, to make sure the white na– Because it was popular. You go to Portland; you see people with Cascadian flags on their porches and stuff. There’s a sort of intuitive popularity for it there. So they then had to redirect resources to fight against these people, to show that they weren’t racist. It might have been good in a way because it forces groups to commit to an anti-racist stance. The presence of white nationalists sometimes does shape up these majority groups to affirm anti-racism. So maybe there is a silver lining to that.

Mike: Dr. Sunshine, thank you again for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast. You can keep up to date with Dr. Sunshine’s writings through his newsletter the Sonnenschein Update which you can find on his website. And you can donate to his Patreon. It’s also on his website, spencersunshine.com. This has been real fun. Hope we can have you back again for a book release.

Spencer: Yeah, it was great chatting with you as always, Mike.

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