Mere Orthodoxy July 10, 2026 20 min signal 2026-07-10

Understanding the origins of the dissident right

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Spencer Sunshine, Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The

Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege (Routledge, New York,

2024), 453pp.

Spencer Sunshine's Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The

Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege (Routledge, 2024)

describes how America's early Cold War neo-Nazi movement reacted and

adapted to the late 1960s American youth counterculture. The story is

told through the person of James Mason, a Boomer neo-Nazi heavily

influenced by Satanism, who, in 1966, at 14 years old, affiliated with

the youth wing of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party (ANP).

Sunshine describes how Mason brought the 1960s counterculture into the

movement's strategy, tactics, and its branding. The book is also a

production and reception history of Mason's magnum opus, Siege, which

is a compilation of his 1970s-1980s neo-Nazi writings. Solicited and

edited by alternative publishers and musicians operating in neo-Nazi,

ethnoseparatist, and Satanist circles, Siege was initially released in

1993 and later retrieved and popularized in the mid-2010s through the

now-defunct online forum Iron March and by the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen

Division.

Let's get some preliminaries out the way. Sunshine is an unabashed

leftist. His 2013 Ph.D. from City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate

Center was on the history of post-1960s anarchism in the United States,

and featured anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan and Bullshit Jobs's David

Graeber.[1] Since 2014, Sunshine has written about facets of the

American right-wing for publications like The New Republic, the

Southern Poverty Law Center, and The Daily Beast --- the kind of

outlets that make many conservative Christian believers auto-roll their

eyes, say "Nope!," and slam their laptops shut. Even so, I'd caution the

skeptical and the wary to keep their tabs open a little longer. Years

ago, I assigned one of Sunshine's longer reports on Oregon's Patriot

movement to my Patrick Henry College undergraduates because Sunshine is

what I call a "digger" and he knows his subject matter in ways many do

not.[2] And if you desire insights about the origins of the alternative

and dissident American right that existed before the "alt-right" and

dissident right we've all heard about over the last ten years,

Sunshine's book will be a key text for many years to come.

You likely didn't hear much about the American Nazi Party (ANP) in your

US history classes, but for almost five years in the 1960s, George

Rockwell and his party knew how to draw headlines. Established in the

late 1950s, the party didn't garner much public attention until 1962. It

was the ANP's Roy James who, that September, charged to the front of a

church in Birmingham, Alabama and repeatedly punched Martin Luther King,

Jr. at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference event.[3]

Rockwell's ANP saw local battles over integration and fair housing as a

way to build its brand. For instance, throughout 1962 and 1963, as the

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) held "Freedom Dweller" pickets,

sit-ins, and "dwell-ins" at newly-built, racially segregated housing

developments in the southern California cities of Torrance and

Carson/Dominguez Hills, the ANP's "Western Division" organized and led

counterprotests.[4], [5] In 1966, Rockwell and his Chicago Division

had appropriated Stokely Carmichael's call for "black power," and had

rallied local "white power" to fight off housing integration in

Southwest Chicago. On August 5, the group attacked a march during which

King himself was struck by a rock. King commented afterwards that he

"[had never seen in Mississippi or Alabama] mobs as hostile and as

hate-filled as [he'd] seen in Chicago."[6]

Sunshine's story really takes off with the assassination of Rockwell in

August 1967, just eight months after re-christening his own organization

as the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP). The name change

reflected Rockwell's desire to tone down the group's explicit Nazi

features, transforming it into a wider, "white power" umbrella

coalition. Indeed, Rockwell had already made efforts to construct a more

"Americanized" Nazism, one in which "Aryan" was replaced with "white,"

where adherents of the Christian Identity movement were made more

comfortable, and where Holocaust denialism had a more "central" role.

Rockwell had even tried to start a "front" --- the Fighting American

Nationalists (FAN) --- he hoped could attract more whites by minimizing

the ANP's "Nazi trappings."[7]

Despite his best efforts at building some form of unified party system,

however, local chapter priorities, strategic and tactical disagreements,

and commonly held frustrations over the leadership style of Rockwell's

successor, Matthias Koehl, split the

the post-Rockwell party along geographic lines by the mid-seventies.

Koehl desperately tried to maintain authority over a rump NSWPP, but

Sunshine relates --- in startling detail --- how that remnant and other

NSWPP splinter groups in northern California, southern California,

Chicago, Virginia, New York/Buffalo, and parts of Ohio evolved,

competed, further divided, changed names, and tried to outbid one

another for personnel, recruits, funding, and market share through the

rest of the 1970s into the 1980s.

Enter the Ohio boy, James Mason, and his assessment of how the 1960s

counterculture impacted the neo-Nazi movement's recruiting, strategy and

tactics, and how, going forward, that counterculture could be

beneficially appropriated.

Mason well understood his era's "vibe shift": the youthful energy; a

new, outside-of-the-home political/advocacy role for women; "free love,"

sexual laxity, and public acceptance of pornography; an anti-law

enforcement bias ("anti-pigism"); and a replacement of the tired, mass

politics-as-usual with militant vanguardism, direct action, and

guerrilla warfare. Mason's writing highlighted the structures and

actions of violent leftist groups such as the Weather Underground,

Symbionese Liberation Army, May 19th Communist Organization, and the

Black Liberation Army. He argued how a "few" could accelerate a collapse

of the "Jew Capitalist system" through bombings, "expropriations,"

street battles, and murder/assassinations. And, like these leftist

groups, Mason believed the "few" included women in more operational

roles, which was very distinct from Rockwell's older, more "stag"

approach.

Unsurprisingly, Mason found his closest allies among the California

splinter groups; that is, from the post-Rockwell factions that were

operating well within the counterculture's ground zero. In the mid

1970s, Mason tried to construct his own above-ground, combined Klan-Nazi

umbrella organization using southern California's National Socialist

Liberation Front (NSLF) as a tandem, underground "armed wing" or

"liberation army." In fact, until the early 1980s, Mason would regularly

look to the NSLF as a seed group, even with that group's various

leadership changes and despite Mason having a short stint of cooperation

with the National Socialist White Workers' Party (NSWWP) in northern

California.

Keeping with the zeitgeist, Mason's own religious beliefs and personal

spirituality were also in flux. In the 1970s, he adhered to Christian

Identity, which Rockwell himself had believed compatible with Nazism. As

time went on, however, Mason transitioned away from his heterodox

Christianity into Nietzscheanism and atheism, decrying any forms of

Christianity as "weak" and "alien." By the 1980s, Mason thought one

could support Christian Identity, but at best, only as a utilitarian

"conveyor belt" into non-Christian racialism.

Mason's spiritual moves and his continued fascination with late 1960s

counterculture also led him to his most controversial stance --- the

assertion that Charles Manson and his followers ("The Family")

represented a tactical and spiritual model for the post-Rockwell

Neo-Nazi movement. In some of Mason's earlier musings on the use of

assassination as a tactic, he lauded Manson Family member Squeaky

Fromme's unsuccessful attempt on President Ford's life). Mason's

personal interactions with Manson Family members and his direct

communication with Manson himself only served to enhance his praise of

the jailed murderer.

The Family, to Mason, was akin to the Weather Underground. It was a

non-monogamous, sexually promiscuous, drug-friendly, countercultural

community of "free love" in which women had an active role in violent,

anti-system plans and operations. The 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, he

argued, were a solid example of direct action and "redemptive violence,"

aimed at accelerating an American race war. The Family's rural outpost

was a place where, if needed, an intentional, white racial community

could sit out the coming societal apocalypse, engage in "mutual aid,"

and establish a new, white racialist, antisemitic polis as the

existing "system" was toppled. Moreover, Manson's "gnosticism," says

Sunshine, guided Mason's eventual move into what he [Mason] described

as "universal order," a "new kind of revolutionary National Socialist

consciousness," that transcended all boundaries between Christianity and

Satanism and identified world-historical "Christ figures" in Jesus,

Hitler, Rockwell, and Manson.

While his promotion of Manson and The Family severed many of Mason's

relationships to older neo-Nazis, it made him very attractive in the

mid-to-late 1980s to the Abraxas Circle, a coterie of

alternative/dissident book publishers and editors, Holocaust deniers,

industrial and deathrock musicians, Nazi skinheads, and, lastly, various

friends, relatives and associates of Anton LaVey, the head of the Church

of Satan.

Over five dense chapters, Sunshine recounts Mason's personal and

professional relationships with the Abraxas Circle, and, in particular,

how Mason's longevity in the American neo-Nazi movement and the access

he had to Charles Manson endeared him to four men within the Circle's

innermost ring (what Sunshine deems the 'Abraxas Clique'): Boyd Rice,

Adam Parfrey, Nikolas Schreck, and Michael Moynihan. Describing itself

as "a sort of Thule Society for the 90s," The Abraxas crowd and Mason

hit it off well, particularly in light of the group's focus on the

occult, fascism, natural inequality, dysgenics, and Social Darwinism.

Schreck, LaVey's son-in-law and one of the founders of the

goth/deathrock band Radio Werewolf, at one time described the group's

aim as introducing young men and women to "the western European

tradition" in order to provide them with a "firm alternative" to the

"dysgenic ocean of mud that has swept the [western] world."

Parfey, who was Schreck's publisher and was Abraxas' conduit to

numerous Holocaust deniers associated with the Institute for Historical

Review (IHR), told James Mason in early communications that they

believed Charles Manson was an "important figure [to save] the white

race from a dysgenic condition."[8] Schreck, Rice, and Parfrey would

use Mason's stories, recollections, and arcana for The Manson File

(1988) and the related documentary,"Charles Manson Superstar." (1989).

Released by Parfrey's Amok Press (now known as Feral House), The Manson

File is one part of a book catalog that includes Joseph Goebbels' novel

Michael: Pages from a German Destiny, assorted LaVey volumes, and two

of Parfrey's own neo-Nazi anthologies (Apocalypse Culture I and

II).[9]

Like many even today, Schreck and Parfrey played the "ironic aesthetics"

card when it comes to their brandishing of neo-Nazism. Sunshine

dismisses their attempts. Regardless of whether Schreck's Radio Werewolf

viewed the use of Nazi and Satanic symbols or references in ironic

terms, Sunshine argues the band had attracted real neo-Nazis by 1988

– the year the mainstream media declared as "the year of the Nazi

skinhead." Schreck's overt relationships and associations had also by

that time moved him well away from mere aesthetics. And Parfrey's Feral

House continued to publish works on Nazi occultism and insider

recollections of the Nazi skinhead music scene. In fact, Sunshine says,

Parfrey was much less reticent about his white racialism near the end of

his life. Parfrey died in 2018, and Feral House is releasing a

posthumous "Apocalypse Omnibus" later this summer.[10]

It was, however, the fourth member of the Abraxas Clique, Michael

Moynihan, who would take on the greatest importance for James Mason's

continued popularity. Moynihan is the one who first pitched Mason with

the idea of compiling a "best of" anthology to get all of his neo-Nazi

materials from the 1970s and 1980s into a single volume. It took longer

than expected, but the Moynihan-edited, first edition of Siege came

out in April 1993. The volume was dedicated to Charles Manson, who Mason

called "the Son of Man." Throughout 1993 and into 1994 --- which was the

year Moynihan was made a Church of Satan high priest --- Mason's Siege

generated serious buzz across the neo-Nazi and black metal worlds. It

was advertised in music fanzines, in Black Flame, the Church of

Satan's regular newsletter, and was the subject of evangelical "shock

jock" Bob Larson's radio talk show. It also had a rare media breakout

moment when mentioned on an episode of the McLaughlin Group.

And then, suddenly, Mason and Siege all but disappeared.

In May 1995, Mason went to prison. While Siege had been making the

rounds, Mason, who was then living in Colorado, had taken up with the

15-year old daughter of a fellow neo-Nazi. Sunshine relates how Mason

had long been into pornography (including an interest in CSAM, or child

sexual abuse material), and it wasn't long before he was arrested,

released, and then re-arrested for CSAM-related crimes, contributing to

the delinquency of a minor, and for menacing the 15-year old's

subsequent boyfriend. Mason would be in and out of prison for the next

four years.

Once released, Mason continued to produce content and worked in retail

security. He had rediscovered a heterodox Christianity in prison. His

prison and post-prison writings are a cafeteria-style bonanza of

(ostensible) Christianity, antisemitism, white racialism, "ancient

aliens" (a la Chariot of the Gods), "alien DNA," and a divine

elevation of Hitler. Between 2001 and 2003, Mason worked with a

different set of alternative, white racialist publishers --- Greg

Johnson and Ryan Schuster --- to release the second edition of Siege

under the imprint Black Sun (now Counter Currents Publishing).[11],

[12] Mason's initial publisher, Moynihan, on the other hand, moved to

editing new English language translations of Italian occultist

philosopher Julius Evola, French New Right thinker Alain de Benoist,

and, most recently with Arcana Europa Media, works by "Germanic

Revival," pagan, Odinist, and Asatru writers.[13]

It was fairly quiet for Mason until Iron March and Atomwaffen Division

(AWD) retrieved and popularized Mason's counterculture-inflected

neo-Nazism for online-savvy Millennials and early Zoomers in the mid

2010s. Those interested in Siege's second reception period will want

to pay very close attention to Sunshine's opening chapter, the

concluding parts of his chapter on Nazi Satanism, and portions of

Chapter 17 ("From Prison to Revival"). Iron March released a third

edition of Siege in 2015, which caught the eye of the Atomwaffen

Division. According to Sunshine, Atomwaffen Division was enchanted by

the entire Mason package: the long-standing white racialism and

antisemitism, the turning-away from Rockwellian-era party building, his

loathing of run-of-the-mill conservative culture-warring, the

comfortability with California "drop-out" drug culture, the love for

Charles Manson and the Family, his connections to Satanism, and, most

importantly, his anti-system accelerationism and the call for direct

action and "cleansing" violence. It took very little time for Mason's

Siege to become Atomwaffen's "Bible" and for Mason to become the

group's guru. And it didn't take long for others to catch on. Sunshine

reports that by July 2017, Siege had approximately 16,000 downloads from

the Iron March forum.

And even more young men and women have "Siege-pilled." Mason's

anthology has been updated and re-released multiple times since its

third edition. As Sunshine attests, one can easily research Mason's

influence on Atomwaffen Division's domestic and international affiliates

or splinters --- groups like Feuerkrieg Division, Sonnenkrieg Division,

and AWD Russland. Or --- and I solemnly warn you, this part gets even

darker --- you can read through available news stories and legal

documents involving the Siege-inspired Order of the Nine Angles (O9A),

the National Socialist Order of the Nine Angles (NSO9A), Satanic Front,

MKY/No Lives Matter (NLM), and 764, the child predator online occult

network.[14] None of this is Sunshine's leftist fever dream.

This book isn't a comfortable read. It isn't an easy read. But it is to

be respected. Sunshine is refreshingly unafraid to show his work. He

offers nine pages of dramatis personae, charts/graphics, a rundown of

the archives he used, a full periodical list of Mason's writings,

granular footnotes, and, for his final hundred pages, eleven full

appendices covering various individuals, groups, and concepts associated

with Mason. I heartily recommend it. Not only that, I strongly recommend

the Routledge series of which Sunshine's book is a part --- the

Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right series. I own a number

of the now over 100-volume series.[15] Together with Brill's free

online Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies[16] (which was

discontinued in 2025, but involves many of the same American and

European scholars), the Routledge series offers some of the best,

up-to-date work on interwar fascism, the interwar, Cold War, and

post-Cold War transnational right, and more granular assessments of far

right phenomena.

Sunshine's Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism clearly

establishes that the counterculture of the "long 1960s" is not merely

a left-wing or so-called "cultural Marxist" story, but that its

appropriation and its impact is also discerned on the political right.

Moreover, at a time in which neo-Nazi, white identitarian, and/or

European New Right outlets are finding their way into vendor tables at

conservative Christian conferences, it is high time for conservative

Christian believers to have a clear, historical perspective on this

entire ecosystem.

-

Spencer Sunshine, "Post-1960 U.S. Anarchism and Social Theory,"

Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York Graduate Center

(September 2013),

https://search.worldcat.org/title/Post-1960-U.S.-anarchism-and-social-theory/oclc/873626873;

and

https://www.gc.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/2023-05/2014_50th_Commencement_Program.pdf. ↩︎

-

Spencer Sunshine, Up in Arms: A Guide to Oregon's Patriot

Movement (Rural Organizing Project and Political Research

Associates, 2016),

https://rop.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Up-in-Arms_Report_PDF.pdf. ↩︎

-

William H. Schmaltz, For Race and Nation: George Lincoln Rockwell

and the American Nazi Party (River's Bend Press, 2013), p. 225;

David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Open Road Media

[ebook], 2015), p. 221. ↩︎

-

Mike Davis and Jon Wiener, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the

Sixties (Verso, 2020), pp. 82-100; M. Keith Claybrook, Jr., "CORE's

Struggle for Fair Housing Rights in LA," Black Perspectives,

African American Intellectual History Society, 1 March 2022,

https://www.aaihs.org/cores-struggle-for-fair-housing-rights-in-la/;

Hadley Meares, "In the summer of '63, black students led protests

against the South Bay's white-only neighborhoods," Curbed Los

Angeles, 27 February 2020,

https://la.curbed.com/2020/2/27/21153265/torrance-fair-housing-protests;

Global Images Works, "Rare Color Footage of Protests Southwood

Riviera Royale - 1963," ID 10916_071,

https://www.globalimageworks.com/library/footage/protests-southwood-riviera-royale-1963. ↩︎

-

The ANP's "Western Division" had its home in the Southern

California cities of Glendale and El Monte. Glendale was one of

Southern California's most notorious "sundown" towns. See Mike

Davis and Jon Wiener, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties

(Verso, 2020), p. 14, 219; Schmaltz, For Race and Nation, pp.

334-336; Angie Crouch, "City of Glendale Apologizes for its History

as a 'Sundown Town," NBC Los Angeles, 13 October 2020,

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/city-of-glendale-apologizes-for-its-history-as-a-sundown-town/2443011/.

Davis and Wiener highlight how California Army National Guard troops

from Glendale were some of the very first deployed in response to

the August 1965 Watts Riots. Davis and Weiner, Set the Night on

Fire, p. 219. This fact is also outlined in State of California,

Military Support of Law Enforcement during Civil Disturbances: A

Report Concerning the California National Guard's Part in

Suppressing the Los Angeles Riot --- August 1965, pp. 13-15 ("1st

Battalion, 160th Infantry"), https://militarymuseum.org/watts.pdf.

On El Monte's racial history, including information on the "El Monte

Boys," the Klan, and the ANP, see the Youtube interview with Fresno

State University professor Dan Cady, "Scared Shitless (Dan Cady),"

on Latinish [Podcast] with Hector Luis Alamo, #64, 3 October 2020,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZbSrLUEPlE. Also see Emma Bianco,

"Demons in the City of Angels: Neo-Nazis and White Nationalism in

Southern California," MA thesis, California State University

Fullerton, Spring 2022, pp. 17-19, 22-23, 28-29,

https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/concern/theses/2v23w245n. ↩︎

-

Schmaltz, For Race and Nation, pp. 415-417; Joanna Hernandez and

Blair Paddock, "'Chicago Tonight' in Your Neighborhood: Martin

Luther King Jr's Legacy in Marquette Park," WTTW News, 13 January

2023,

https://news.wttw.com/2023/01/13/chicago-tonight-your-neighborhood-martin-luther-king-jr-s-legacy-marquette-park. ↩︎

-

Schmaltz goes into additional detail about FAN, particularly FAN

in Chicago, which was the entity through which Matthew Koehl was

recruited. Schmaltz, For Race and Nation, pp. 144-145, 193. ↩︎

-

Sunshine mentions three IHR-connected individuals in particular:

William Grimstad, Keith Stimely, and Michael A. Hoffman II. Grimstad

was the author of The Six Million Reconsidered: Is the 'Nazi

Holocaust' Story a Zionist Propaganda Ploy? (1979), published by

IHR's Noontide Press. Stimely did editorial work (including serving

as chief editor) for IHR's Journal of Historical Review in the

early 1980s. See description in the Finding Aid for "Keith Stimely

Collection on Revisionist History and Neo-Fascist Movements,"

Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon,

https://scua.uoregon.edu/repositories/2/resources/2104. Hoffman

served as IHR's assistant director, and later moved to Coeur

d'Alene, Idaho and published under Independent History and Research,

https://www.revisionisthistory.org/. ↩︎

-

For a discussion of the initial history of Parfrey, Amok Press,

and its catalog (including Goebbels and LaVey), see Michael Lee

Nirenberg, "Conversation with Adam Parfrey (Part One)," Huffpost,

13 October 2015,

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/conversation-with-adam-pa_b_8277892.

Amok Press's translation of Goebbels' Michael: Pages from a German

Destiny was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times. Tom Clark, "The Nazi

Wrote a Novel," Los Angeles Times, 25 October 1987,

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-25-bk-16144-story.html.

For Apocalypse Culture I and II, see

https://feralhouse.com/apocalypse-culture/ and

https://feralhouse.com/apocalypse-culture-ii/. ↩︎

-

On the upcoming Parfrey Apocalypse Omnibus, see interview of

Feral House's Christina Ward, "Member Spotlight: Feral House,"

Community of Literary Magazines and Publishers (CLMP), 13 July 2024,

https://www.clmp.org/news/member-spotlight-feral-house/. See also

https://feralhouse.com/apocalypse-omnibus/. ↩︎

-

Sunshine describes how Black Sun Publications was planning on

publishing individuals like Ernst Junger (who intellectual historian

Richard Wolin recently described in Heidegger in Ruins as a

"conservative revolutionary," a "protofascist," a "fascist

sympathizer," a "spiritual fascist," and "a type of

Frontgeneration Jules Verne"), Nouvelle Droite founder Alain de

Benoist, the 19th century scientific racist Arthur de Gobineau, and

Hindu-Nazi esotericist Savitri Devi (309). Sunshine wrote a much

shorter but more detailed piece on the history of Black Sun

Publications, Counter-Currents, and the Foundation for Human

Understanding (FHU), in which he offers more details about the

publishing of Savitri Devi. Spencer Sunshine, "How a Mainstream

Racist Group Revived the Terroristic Tome 'Siege,' Hatewatch,

Southern Poverty Law Center, 28 March 2024,

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/how-mainstream-racist-group-revived-terroristic-tome-siege/.

Black Sun Publications released And Time Rolls On: The Savitri Devi

Interviews in 2005, and Devi's Gold in the Furnace: Experiences in

Post-War Germany in 2006. These, and even more by Devi, have been

reissued by Counter-Currents Publishing. See

https://counter-currents.com/shop/books/. For historical background

on Devi and her influence on neo-Nazism, see Maria Margaronis,

"Savitri Devi: From the Aryans to the 'Alt Right,' BBC Radio Four,

27 October 2017, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09b19y4. ↩︎

-

In 2016, Greg Johnson described his white racialism to Darryl

Cooper (aka Martyr Made) in this way: "The political order we

envision is ethno-nationalist. We want to create a white homeland in

North America for people of European descent. And the reason for

that is very simple. We don't think that multiculturalism is working

out very well for white people. We look around the world, and in

every white society, birth rates are below replacement. There are

many causes for this, but the principal cause, in our view, is that

we've lost sovereign control of our homelands. There are no white

societies that make the preservation of their people and our race as

a whole a political priority," Greg Johnson, "Darryl Cooper in

Conversation with Greg Johnson," transcript of 2016 Decline of the

West podcast, online transcript dated September 2024, located at

https://counter-currents.com/2024/09/darryl-cooper-in-conversation-with-greg-johnson/. ↩︎

-

Sunshine explains how Michael Moynihan started working with

Joshua Buckley circa 2002. Moynihan and Buckley worked together on

the TYR: Myth-Culture-Tradition journal, and Sunshine attributes

Greg Johnson's conversion to white racialism to Buckley. Sunshine

describes Buckley as a "former Nazi skinhead" and "[someone who]

for decades had been active in White Supremacist politics in the

Atlanta, Georgia area" (248-249). In 2002, Moynihan edited a version

of Julius Evola's Men Among the Ruins with the publisher Inner

Traditions. More recently, Moynihan and Buckley have worked with

translator Jon Graham to publish Alain de Benoist under the Arcana

Europa Media banner --- re-publishing On Being a Pagan (2018) and

The Empire of Myth (2021). Arcana Europa Media also publishes

Stephen Flowers (aka Edred Thorsson), an American runologist and

occultist. See

https://web.archive.org/web/20241110142648/https://arcanaeuropamedia.com/.

According to online corporation data, Buckley appears to operate out

of South Carolina and Georgia, and in addition to Arcana Europa

Media, he maintains companies named for Elder Futhark runes (Ansuz,

Elhaz, Fehu, Raido, and Uruz). ↩︎

-

For background on Atomwaffen Division, see The Soufan Center,

"The Atomwaffen Division: The Evolution of the White Supremacy

Threat," August 2020,

https://thesoufancenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Atomwaffen-Division-The-Evolution-of-the-White-Supremacy-Threat-August-2020-.pdf.

For more on post-Atomwaffen and Siege, see Southern Poverty Law

Center, "Atomwaffen and the Siege Parallax: How One Neo-Nazi's

Life's Work is Fueling a Younger Generation," 22 February 2018,

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/atomwaffen-and-siege-parallax-how-one-neo-nazis-lifes-work-fueling-younger-generation/.

On Atomwaffen and Feuerkrieg Division, see American Odyssey,

"Telegram Messages Reveal New Details About Neo-Nazi Group

Feuerkrieg Division," 2 October 2019,

https://medium.com/americanodyssey/telegram-messages-feuerkrieg-division-jarrett-william-smith-arrested-neo-nazi-34d8dbd32653.

On O9A, see Dominic Alessio, "Racist occultism in the UK: behind the

Order of Nine Angles (O9A)," Open Democracy, 23 July 2020,

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/racist-occultism-uk-behind-order-nine-angles-o9a/,

and also US Department of Justice, "Former U.S. Army Soldier

Sentenced To 45 Years In Prison For Attempting To Murder Fellow

Service Members In Deadly Ambush," 3 March 2023,

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-us-army-soldier-sentenced-45-years-prison-attempting-murder-fellow-service.

On the 764 child predator network, its online precursors, and the

influence of Nazi-Satanism, see the following: [a] Marc-Andre

Argentino, Barrett G, and M.B. Tyler, "764: The Intersection of

Terrorism, Violent Extremism, and Child Sexual Exploitation," 19

January 2024, Global Network on Extremism and Technology,

https://gnet-research.org/2024/01/19/764-the-intersection-of-terrorism-violent-extremism-and-child-sexual-exploitation/;

[b] US Department of Justice, "Member Of Violent 764 Terror

Network Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison For Sexually Exploiting a

Child," 7 November 2024,

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/member-violent-764-terror-network-sentenced-30-years-prison-sexually-exploiting-child;

[c] US Department of Justice, "Four Members of Online Neo-Nazi

Group that Exploited Minors Charged with Producing Child Sexual

Abuse Material," 30 January 2025,

https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/four-members-online-neo-nazi-group-exploited-minors-charged-producing-child-sexual;

[d] Marc-Andre Argentino, "CVLT Historical Threat Assessment of

the Precursor to 764," 31 January 2025,

https://www.maargentino.com/cvlt-historical-threat-assessment-of-the-precursor-to-764/;

and [e] Andrea Marks, "Violent Online Group CVLT Coerced Kids to

Self-Harm, DOJ Says," Rolling Stone, 6 February 2025,

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/violent-online-group-cvlt-indicted-1235258786/. ↩︎

-

For the catalog for the Routledge series, see

https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Fascism-and-the-Far-Right/book-series/FFR?publishedFilter=alltitles&pd=published,forthcoming&pg=1&pp=48&so=pub&view=list. ↩︎

-

For a listing of available volumes and articles in the journal,

see

https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/fasc-overview.xml?language=en. ↩︎

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