Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #437 Counter-Culture Fascism

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Intro­duc­tion: Detail­ing the phe­nom­e­non of counter-cul­ture fas­cism, this broad­cast is a sup­ple­ment to FTRs 211, 222. In its pur­suit of becom­ing a mass move­ment, fas­cism has tra­di­tion­al­ly turned to alien­at­ed and left­ist ele­ments in order to recruit street sol­diers. (The “North­ern” or “Strasserite” branch of the Nazi SA was such an ele­ment in the ear­ly Nazi par­ty under Hitler.) Today, coun­ter­cul­ture fas­cists are uti­liz­ing the alter­na­tive music and pub­lish­ing scenes to recruit alien­at­ed indi­vid­u­als to their cause. The major focal point of the pro­gram is the book Lords of Chaos, pub­lished by Fer­al House. Co-authored by Michael Moyni­han, a Satanist, blood fetishist and Nazi and fas­cist fel­low trav­el­er, the book is an expose of the black met­al music scene. (Moyni­han is pic­tured below, left.) At a deep­er lev­el, how­ev­er, the work is some­thing of a fas­cist recruiting/promoting mechanism–projecting Moyni­han’s own far-right polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy onto the black met­al music scene as a whole. (Many—perhaps most– black met­al fans are mere­ly “par­ty-on” types, and not nec­es­sar­i­ly fas­cists or right­ists at all.)

The broad­cast sets forth Moyni­han’s asso­ci­a­tions with, and pro­mo­tion of, some tru­ly evil, mur­der­ous fas­cists and Nazi/racists. Anoth­er cen­tral point of dis­cus­sion is Moyni­han’s long time friend, pro­fes­sion­al asso­ciate and polit­i­cal fel­low trav­el­er Adam Par­frey, the own­er of Fer­al House and a sig­nif­i­cant pres­ence on the alter­na­tive pub­lish­ing scene. Coa­lesc­ing in the Abraxas Foun­da­tion, an alter­na­tive music/occult/fascist/Social Dar­win­ist think tank (their descrip­tion), Par­frey, Moyni­han and Boyd Rice have inter­twined musi­cal and polit­i­cal cul­tures with a coun­ter­cul­ture fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy. (Rice is pic­tured at right and above, with Nazi asso­ciate Robert Heick.)

Par­frey’s sig­nif­i­cant and grow­ing pres­ence in the con­spir­a­cy pub­lish­ing field is worth not­ing. Fer­al House polit­i­cal books–much of their inven­to­ry deals with cul­tur­al, not polit­i­cal, subjects–tend to be uneven: many vol­umes have excel­lent mate­r­i­al mixed in with dri­v­el, some of the books are quite good and oth­ers ludi­crous and insane.

What is impor­tant about the use of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries in the con­text of a pro­to-fas­cist polit­i­cal view is the con­fu­sion that can result for those who come to real­ize that in fact, Lee Har­vey Oswald did not kill Kennedy. This aware­ness may leave some in a rel­a­tivis­tic political/intellectual uni­verse. “Maybe the Holo­caust did­n’t hap­pen!” In the era of the big lie, Par­frey and oth­ers who mar­ket some polit­i­cal truth mixed in with the vilest of fas­cist ide­olo­gies are tru­ly dan­ger­ous and are sow­ing the seeds of doom.

Although Par­frey and com­pa­ny have deep con­nec­tions to fas­cist and Nazi ele­ments and have worked exten­sive­ly to fur­ther some of those ele­ments’ projects, one should not be too quick to label Par­frey a fas­cist him­self. Rather, he might be termed a “fel­low trav­el­er,” whose efforts on behalf of, and asso­ci­a­tion with, Nazi/fascist ele­ments may be due to Par­frey’s devo­tion to the pro­mul­ga­tion of “extreme cul­ture.”

Defy­ing easy def­i­n­i­tion, “extreme cul­ture” could be said to be defined by any­thing that is edgy, over-the-top and, more often than not, offen­sive and/or unbe­liev­able.

Exem­pli­fy­ing the cog­ni­tive para­me­ters of the “extreme cul­ture” dis­sem­i­nat­ed by Par­frey and com­pa­ny are the pro­nounce­ments of a severe­ly dis­turbed indi­vid­ual named Dan Right­my­er, pub­lished by Fer­al House under the nom de plume “Alex Con­stan­tine.” (Rightmyer/Constantine is pic­tured at right, being tor­tured by his demons). In addi­tion to claim­ing that he has repelled mag­nets from his “cra­ni­um” and “knocked out a light bulb and a new CD play­er,” Right­my­er has stat­ed that he has been tor­tured by pulsed audio­grams.” (An audio­gram is a pic­to­r­i­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a sound wave, the worst thing one can get from an audio­gram is a paper cut. )

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Parfrey/Moynihan/Rice’s pro­fes­sion­al and ide­o­log­i­cal asso­ci­a­tion with (and pro­mo­tion of) cur­rent and for­mer Amer­i­can Nazis includ­ing James Mason, Michael Mur­ray, Joseph Franklin, the wife of con­vict­ed mur­der­er David Lane and con­vict­ed mur­der­er Per­ry “Red” Warthan; the Abraxas con­tin­gen­t’s glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Charles Man­son; the asso­ci­a­tion between ele­ments of Satan­ic reli­gion and the Abraxas milieu; the asso­ci­a­tion between ele­ments of Odin­ist reli­gion and the Abraxas/Feral House net­work; the overt glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of mur­der and vio­lence by the Abraxas/Feral House milieu; con­nec­tions between the Moynihan/Parfrey/Rice milieu and para­mil­i­tary right-wingers such as Robert N. Tay­lor; the gen­e­sis of coun­ter­cul­ture fas­cism in the peri­od between the World Wars; the effort on the part of these coun­ter­cul­ture fas­cists to enlist the aid of left­ists and peo­ple of col­or as “hommes de mains.” Par­frey’s recruit­ment of Lib­er­ty Lob­by Holo­caust denier Kei­th Stime­ly to write Fer­al House press releas­es; ver­ba­tim repro­duc­tion of the bizarre state­ments (lies? hal­lu­ci­na­tions?) of Fer­al House author Dan Right­my­er (aka “Alex Con­stan­tine”); state­ments by asso­ciates of Rightmyer/Constantine that his bizarre pro­nounce­ments are due to the effects of drug abuse; con­tra­dic­tions in the iden­ti­ty of the “wit­ness­es” Rightmyer/Constantine claim can ver­i­fy his stat­ments (he has nev­er pro­duced such “wit­ness­es”).

1. The dis­cus­sion begins with the fright­en­ing and ter­ri­fy­ing sit­u­a­tion of the late Joe Fer­gu­son, whose posthu­mous admi­ra­tion of neo-Nazis, Charles Man­son and Tim­o­thy McVeigh moti­vat­ed his mass-mur­der/ sui­cide. It was while watch­ing the recount­ing of the ghast­ly events of 9/11 that Mr. Emory absorbed the account of this small­er hor­ror. Indeed, Fer­gu­son’s psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­jec­tion of his per­son­al­i­ty into a posthu­mous con­cep­tion is, in cer­tain respects, like the behav­ior of the 9/11 attack­ers. Like James Cagney, in the movie “White Heat”, the hijack­ers and Fer­gu­son imag­ined that their fiery demise would imbue them with a com­bi­na­tion of noto­ri­ety and phys­i­cal tran­scen­dence. By dis­sem­i­nat­ing a poi­so­nous adu­la­tion of Man­son and his ilk, the pur­vey­ors of counter-cul­ture fas­cism, quite delib­er­ate­ly in most cas­es, set oth­ers on their course toward obliv­ion. The unmit­i­gat­ed evil prop­a­gat­ed by Michael Moyni­han, Boyd Rice, pub­lish­ing guru Adam Par­frey and their fel­low trav­el­ers is set forth in this pro­gram.

“Agi­tat­ed, shirt­less under his body armor and hold­ing a 9mm semi­au­to­mat­ic pis­tol, dis­grun­tled secu­ri­ty guard Joseph Fer­gu­son stared straight into the video cam­era held by a man who would short­ly become the fifth life snuffed out in Fer­gu­son’s 24-hour killing spree. ‘I’ve tak­en four vic­tims,’ Fer­gu­son said from the Ran­cho Cor­do­va home where he held a Burns Inter­na­tion­al Secu­ri­ty col­league and his wife hostage for near­ly 18 hours before shoot­ing him­self to death in a gun­bat­tle with offi­cers. ‘That should be enough to last a week in the news. . . . He was fas­ci­nat­ed with neo-Nazism, Tim­o­thy McVeigh and Charles Man­son. . . . .”

“Sacra­men­to Killer Vowed Not to Be Tak­en Alive” by Michelle Gui­do; San Jose Mer­cury News; 9/11/2001; pp. 1A-14A.

2. Intro­duc­ing the book that is at the cen­ter of this dis­cus­sion, author Kevin Coogan encap­su­lates the sto­ry of Black Met­al musi­cian Varg Vikernes and his vic­tim, Oys­tein Aarseth. This sto­ry is the cen­ter­piece of Lords of Chaos, co-authored by Moyni­han and Didrik Soder­lind.

Lords of Chaos, a recent book-length exam­i­na­tion of the Satan­ic black met­al music scene is less con­cerned with sound than fury. Authors Michael Moyni­han and Didrik Soder­lind zero in on Nor­way, where a tiny clique of black met­al musi­cians torched some church­es in 1992. The church burn­ers’ own price of wor­ship was a small Oslo record store called Hel­vete (Hell). Hel­vete was run by the god­fa­ther of Nor­we­gian black met­al, Oys­tein Aarseth (‘Eurony­mous’, or ‘Prince of Death’), who first brought black met­al to Nor­way with his group May­hem and his Death­like Silence record label. . . .”

“How Black is Black Met­al?” by Kevin Coogan; Hitlist; February/March 1999 [Vol­ume One, Num­ber One]; p. 1. 

3. Reflect­ing the mythol­o­giz­ing of what is, in real­i­ty (for most crea­tures who pur­sue this type of music and cul­ture), a mediocre, inglo­ri­ous exis­tence, Vikernes named him­self after a fig­ure from Lord of the Rings.

” . . . Lords of Chaos, how­ev­er, is far less inter­est­ed in Eurony­mous than in the man who killed him, Varg Vikernes, a church burn­er who dubbed him­self ‘Count Grish­nackh’ after an evil ogre in Lord of the Rings. Vikernes is now serv­ing a 21-year sentence—Norway’s tough­est penalty—in a max­i­mum secu­ri­ty prison for bru­tal­ly stab­bing Eurony­mous to death on August 10, 1993. After his arrest just sev­en days lat­er, the Count jus­ti­fied him­self by claim­ing that Eurony­mous was a com­mu­nist ‘queer’ who had cheat­ed him out of Burzum roy­al­ties. He also claimed that Eurony­mous was plot­ting to kill him. After being ostra­cized from the black met­al com­mu­ni­ty, Vikernes announced that he was now no longer a black met­al Satanist, but rather a Nazi Odin­ist because the Jews had ‘killed my father Odin.’ ”

(Idem.)

4. Coogan notes that Moyni­han infers from the behav­ior of Vikernes a grow­ing trend among Black Met­al afi­ciona­dos toward mur­der and vio­lence. As will be seen, this infer­ence is itself a pro­jec­tion of Moyni­han’s own polit­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion and not nec­es­sar­i­ly a reflec­tion of the bulk of black met­al musi­cians and fans.

If Lords of Chaos were only about the antics of the most extreme wing of black met­al, it would be an infor­ma­tive and enter­tain­ing look at pop cul­ture Grand Guig­nol. The book, how­ev­er, sug­gests that the events in Nor­way reflect a grow­ing ten­den­cy among alien­at­ed youth from Mia­mi to Moscow, who are now alleged­ly blend­ing black met­al, Satanism, and cur­rents of fas­cism into a cul­tur­al­ly explo­sive Molo­tov cock­tail. Vikernes, how­ev­er, is real­ly famous for mur­der, not music, while the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of black met­al musi­cians and fans are not, and are not like­ly to become, church burn­ers, mur­der­ers, or Nazi Odin­ists.

To but­tress its the­sis, LORDS OF CHAOS points to met­al­heads turned mur­der­ers, includ­ing ‘Balfagor’ from the Swedish Satan­ic band Nefan­dus, who attacked a black man in a self-described ‘nig­ger­hunt’; Bard Eithun (‘Faust’) from the Nor­we­gian group Emper­or, who mur­dered a gay man that sought to seduce him; and Jon Nod­vei­dt from the Swedish group Dis­sec­tion, who butchered an Alger­ian immi­grant. LORDS OF CHAOS even devotes an entire chap­ter to an obscure two-man Ger­man band called Absurd, who cold­ly exe­cut­ed an annoy­ing fel­low high school stu­dent. Although the mem­bers of Absurd are self-pro­claimed Nazis and Vikernes fans, even they report­ed that they com­mit­ted the crime for per­son­al, not polit­i­cal, motives.

LORDS OF CHAOS also dwells on the activ­i­ty of oth­er­wise high­ly obscure fas­cist pro­pa­gan­dists with no direct ties to black met­al who are nev­er­the­less try­ing to recruit its fol­low­ers into their cause. It even adopts a far right spin on Jun­gian the­o­ry when it sug­gests that Vikernes may have tapped into an anti-Chris­t­ian racial/cultural arche­type that is alleged­ly still aglow in the Nor­we­gian col­lec­tive uncon­scious. The book also pro­files racist killers with no known ties to black met­al, such as the Flori­da youth clique called the Lords of Chaos. Before being dethroned by local police, the Lords burnt down a church, mur­dered a gay teacher, and were plan­ning to slaugh­ter black vis­i­tors to Dis­ney World with silencer-equipped auto­mat­ic weapons.

LORDS OF CHAOS cul­mi­nates with a paean to the ‘fire, which, it claims, burns bright inside the black met­al under-ground despite the attempts of mys­te­ri­ous unnamed ‘forces of finance and mate­ri­al­ism’ to ‘root it out and stamp it out.’ ”

(Ibid.; p. 2.)

5. Fer­al House, the pub­lish­er of Lords of Chaos, dis­trib­utes one of Vikernes’ CD’s. In this con­text, it is sig­nif­i­cant that Fer­al House own­er Adam Par­frey is part of a coun­ter­cul­ture, Social Darwinist/fascist milieu that over­laps both the alter­na­tive music and pub­lish­ing fields.

 . . . Lords of Chaos’s pub­lish­er, Fer­al House, itself dis­trib­utes one of Vikernes’ Burzum CD’s ‘Filos­fem’. . . LORDS OF CHAOS has gen­er­al­ly been per­ceived as an expose of a col­or­ful music sub-cul­ture, and it does indeed pro­vide much valu­able infor­ma­tion about an oth­er­wise inac­ces­si­ble scene. Yet what real­ly makes the book fas­ci­nat­ing is that its main author, Michael Moyni­han, is him­self an extreme right­ist whose fusion of pol­i­tics with aes­thet­ic vio­lence shapes a not-so-hid­den sub cur­rent that runs through­out LORDS OF CHAOS. The book itself, how­ev­er, is not a ‘fas­cist’ tract in the strict sense of the term, in part because Moyni­han co-wrote the book with Didrik Soder­lind, a for­mer music crit­ic for a main­stream Nor­we­gian paper who is now an edi­tor at Play­boy. More­over, Fer­al House edi­tor Adam Par­frey clear­ly want­ed to pub­lish a pop­u­lar book on the strange uni­verse of black met­al rather than a polit­i­cal polemic. Nor does Moyni­han him­self fit eas­i­ly into the more con­ven­tion­al def­i­n­i­tions of fas­cism. LORDS OF CHAOS is best char­ac­ter­ized as a palimpsest with the author’s own polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy at work just below the sur­face of a text osten­si­bly devot­ed sole­ly to ana­lyz­ing an extrem­ist musi­cal sub-cul­ture.

(Idem.)

6. One of the points of action and asso­ci­a­tion between Moyni­han, and his pub­lish­er Adam Par­frey is the Abraxas Foun­da­tion, which unit­ed both of them with Satanist and fas­cist Boyd Rice. Abraxas is described by Moyni­han as an ‘occultist-fas­cist think tank’—it is linked to the Church of Satan, about which more will be said lat­er.

Michael Moyni­han is an inter­est­ing fel­low. . . In 1989, the youth­ful Boston­ian joined forces with the San Fran­cis­co-based Abraxas Foun­da­tion, which he described as an ‘occultist-fas­cist think tank’ linked to the Church of Satan. Moyni­han dubbed his own wing of the Abraxas Foun­da­tion ‘Axis San­guinar­ies’ [Blood Axis] because: Blood can be seen as LIFE, and at the same time it can be equat­ed to DEATH. It is essen­tial to vio­lence in almost all instances. It has pow­er­ful sex­u­al con­no­ta­tions. It is the key flu­id of his­to­ry . . . [Axis] high­lights the genet­ic aspect of blood, bound togeth­er in the will of a peo­ple or race. It describes allies of mind and blood, mobi­lized for total war­fare. It also reit­er­ates the piv­otal nature of blood in human exis­tence, both per­son­al and world-his­toric.’

Accord­ing to some reports, Moyni­han’s blood fetish includ­ed drink­ing (non AIDS-infect­ed) blood. He was also sus­pect­ed of set­ting fire to a manger scene on the Cam­bridge Com­mons, just across from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty, in 1987, A note left by the fire­bug at the smoky scene the day after Christ­mas asked: ‘How many more fires before you real­ize your gods are dead? DEAD!’

(Ibid.; pp. 2–3.)

7. Fur­ther devel­op­ing the ide­ol­o­gy of Abraxas, the pro­gram high­lights its fascis­tic under­tones and its empha­sis on dis­sem­i­nat­ing this phi­los­o­phy to youth. (Note the pic­ture of Rice and his Amer­i­can Front pro­tégé Robert Heick, in full Nazi uni­form and bran­dish­ing dag­gers for the cam­era: http://www.canuck.com/Srl/rice.html .)

. . . . As for the Abraxas foun­da­tion, it was found­ed by anoth­er blood fetishist named Boyd Rice in 1984. The name came from Abraxas, a Gnos­tic deity that com­bined with­in itself the forces of light and dark­ness, good and evil. Rice hoped that his foun­da­tion would help cre­ate ‘a new demo­graph­ic of peo­ple who are into the occult, Fas­cism, and Social Dar­win­ism. It’s out there as an alter­na­tive for kids who are grow­ing up and need that infor­ma­tion.’ Both Rice and Moyni­han came out of the ‘indus­tri­al’ music scene. . . .

(Idem.)

8. One of the indus­tri­al music acts that helped to break the cul­tur­al taboo against uti­liz­ing fas­cist imagery was “Throb­bing Gris­tle” and its chief bard Gen­e­sis P. Orridge. (Note that Moyni­han, among oth­ers, held this group and its suc­ces­sor acts in con­tempt. In Moyni­han’s opin­ion, the group and its leader lacked true fas­cist polit­i­cal con­vic­tion.)

 . . . ‘Throb­bing Gris­tle’, the linch­pin of the post-punk ‘indus­tri­al’ turn, dressed in cam­ou­flage gear dec­o­rat­ed with an SS-look­ing light­ning bolt patch, and issued songs like ‘Zyk­lon B Zom­bie’ and ‘Salon Kit­ty’ (named after an SS-run broth­el in Berlin). The cov­er for the Throb­bing Gris­tle song ‘Dis­ci­pline’ on Fetish Records showed the group out­side the for­mer Nazi Min­istry of Pro­pa­gan­da build­ing in Berlin. Throb­bing Gris­tle called their hack­ney-based record­ing stu­dio the Death Fac­to­ry, and its Indus­tri­al Records logo was an uniden­ti­fied pic­ture of Auschwitz. Many punks despised Throb­bing Gris­tle as misog­y­nist ‘death art’ fas­cists. At a July 6, 1978 con­cert at the Lon­don Film Co-op (where Boyd Rice also appeared), a fight even broke out between Throb­bing Gris­tle and mem­bers of the Rock Against Racism-allied bands the Slits and the Rain­coats. . . .

(Ibid.; p. 4.)

9. Coogan explains the fas­cist aes­thet­ics under­ly­ing the cul­ture to which “Throb­bing Gris­tle” belongs.

 . . . The Indus­tri­al­ist fas­ci­na­tion with taboo break­ers extend­ed to charis­mat­ic lead­ers like Hitler and Man­son, who became icon­ic fig­ures in a world where evil was more real than good, and hate more strong than love. Yet because they, like the Mar­quis de Sade before them, were also fear­less dis­rupters of mid­dle-class moral­i­ty, a Hitler or Man­son were also, in a sense, per­verse role mod­els. The sheer bleak­ness of indus­tri­al cul­ture also pro­vid­ed fer­tile ground for future mis­an­thropy. If evil was more pow­er­ful than good, evil was also more nat­ur­al. In a tru­ly Hobbe­sian world the Social Dar­win­ists and the Malthu­sians were right when they argued that only the strong could and should sur­vive.

(Idem.)

10. Not unprece­dent­ed, this world­view reflects one that became extant dur­ing the peri­od lead­ing up to World War II.

. . . The sense of despair felt by indus­tri­al cul­ture was not unique. A sim­i­lar heroic/pessimistic world­view appeared in Europe after World War I. In the ear­ly 1920’s there arose what I shall call ‘counter-cul­tur­al fas­cism.’ More a sen­si­bil­i­ty than a move­ment, it fused Friedrich Niet­zsche’s idea of the indi­vid­ual will-to-pow­er and his con­tempt for mid­dle-class moral­i­ty with Oswald Spen­gler’s belief in the immi­nent down­fall of the West. Artists like Futur­ist founder Fil­ip­po Marinet­ti, Ezra Pound, Gabriele D’An­nun­zio, and Ernst Junger viewed tra­di­tion­al forms of con­ser­vatism with the same con­tempt that they felt for social democ­ra­cy, ratio­nal­ism, and the Enl­ght­en­ment. While Gen­e­sis P. Orridge was not real­ly a coun­ter­cul­tur­al fas­cist, Throb­bing Gris­tle stood on he cusp of a revival of a ‘counter cul­tur­al fas­cist’ turn in seg­ments of haute Bohemia.

(Idem.)

11. More about the fas­cist man­i­fes­ta­tions of the Abraxas net­work

Anoth­er set of ides asso­ci­at­ed with the Abraxas net­work had ear­li­er been pro­mot­ed by a rad­i­cal Ital­ian fas­cist named Fran­co Fre­da. Fre­da, who advo­cat­ed a com­bined right-and-left-wing ter­ror­ist assault on the mid­dle class Estab­lish­ment, first out­lined his ideas at a 1969 meet­ing of the far-right Euro­pean Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Front in Regens­burg, Bavaria. In his talk, which was lat­er pub­lished as La Dis­in­te­grazione del Sis­tema [The Dis­in­te­gra­tion of the Sys­tem], Fre­da argued that the ‘ner­vous sys­tem of the bour­geois world’ had to be dis­rupt­ed with utmost vio­lence by far right ‘polit­i­cal sol­diers’ work­ing in an alliance with the far left.

(Idem.)

12. One of the political/ideological antecedents of the Abraxas fas­cist aes­thet­ic is Julius Evola. Evola’s work was financed by the SD—the SS intel­li­gence ser­vice. (For more about Evola, see—among oth­er programs—FTR#233.)

Fre­da derived essen­tial parts of his strat­e­gy from the Ital­ian con­ser­v­a­tive rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­o­rist Julius Evola, the ‘Her­bert Mar­cuse’ of the post­war Euro­pean far right. Evola argued in books like Cal­vacare la Tigre (Rid­ing the Tiger) that the col­lapse of mod­ern mass soci­ety was some­thing to be wel­comed, not resist­ed. Rad­i­cal Evolans like Fre­da believed that vio­lent shocks to the sys­tem could only has­ten the inevitable col­lapse of the hat­ed mod­ern order. . . .

(Idem.)

13. Next, the pro­gram sets forth the pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment of Adam Parfrey—a fel­low in the Abraxas Foun­da­tion and the pub­lish­er of Lords of Chaos.

 . . . The new hip regime of mean was exem­pli­fied by the infa­mous Los Ange­les Amok cat­a­log. Amok Press’ best­seller Apoc­a­lypse Cul­ture, a col­lec­tion of rants, raves, con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and aes­thet­ic ter­ror­ist tracts, was anoth­er key text. Adam Par­frey, own­er of Amok and lat­er Fer­al House, first entered the scene in 1980 with IDEA, a south­ern Cal­i­for­nia-based Re/Search-type jour­nal about punk cul­ture. He then moved to New York, where he met the art design­er George Pet­ros. . . .In 1984, Par­frey and Pet­ros cre­at­ed Exit, a New York-based jour­nal heavy on graph­ic design.

(Ibid.; pp. 5–6.)

14. Far from benign and aloof, Par­frey’s lit­er­ary efforts have served to dis­sem­i­nate the views and efforts of some of the very worst Nazis and fas­cists.

“Par­frey worked with Pet­ros on the first three issues of Exit, before leav­ing to cre­ate Amok Press. Once a suc­cess de scan­dale, Exit’s increas­ing fas­ci­na­tion with fas­cism doomed it to just six issues. Issue Five, for exam­ple, fea­tured a par­tic­u­lar­ly ran­cid piece of anti-Semi­tism enti­tled ‘The Exe­cu­tion of Carl Jung’, which was ‘con­ceived by George Pet­ros’ with ‘text researched by Robert N. Tay­lor,’ a for­mer para­mil­i­tary Min­ute­man leader turned racial Odin­ist. The final 1994 Exit includ­ed con­tri­bu­tions from Michael Moyni­han and James Mason, an Amer­i­can Nazi whose book Siege was pub­lished by Moyni­han. While pro­duc­ing Exit, Pet­ros also served as an edi­tor at Sec­onds, an eclec­tic New York-based music mag­a­zine that Moyni­han, Rice, and Par­frey reg­u­lar­ly write for.”

(Ibid.; p. 6.)

15. One of the orga­ni­za­tions with a philo­soph­i­cal affin­i­ty for Abraxas, Gen­e­sis P. Orridge, etc., is the Church of Satan and its late founder, Anton LaVey. (Both Moyni­han and Boyd Rice are mem­bers of this orga­ni­za­tion.)

The new glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of the instinc­tu­al and the bar­bar­ic, the belief in the sur­vival of the fittest, and the hatred of both Chris­t­ian moral­i­ty and lib­er­al human­ism were all music to the ears of Anton LaVey, the founder and head of the San Fran­cis­co-based Church of Satan. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, Boyd Rice devel­oped close ties with LaVey in the ear­ly 1980’s. In 1984, Rice set up the Abraxas Foun­da­tion as a ‘social Dar­win­ist think tank.’ An Abraxas tract called WAKE pro-claimed ‘Long Live Death!’ and hailed Malthu­sian­ism as ‘Nature’s Eter­nal Fas­cism.’ (The Church of Satan also main­tained close ties to Gen­e­sis P. Orridge.) Today Rice is him­self a mem­ber of the Church’s gov­ern­ing inner cir­cle, the Coun­cil of Nine. . . .

(Idem.)

16. Among the fel­low trav­ellers of LaVey are peo­ple who espouse Odin­ist reli­gion. With­in that milieu, in turn, are peo­ple of a tru­ly mur­der­ous bent. Note the pres­ence in this Satanist/Nazi milieu of the wife of con­vict­ed Order mur­der­er David Lane. (For more about The Order, see—among oth­er programs—FTR#‘s 89, 386, 399, and the var­i­ous pro­grams dis­cussing the top­ics of OJ Simp­son case, the Okla­homa City bomb­ing, and Ser­pen­t’s Walk. Impor­tant back­ground infor­ma­tion on The Order can be obtained from RFA’s 10–13—available from Spit­fire.)

 . . . LaVey, who is often only seen as a lib­er­tar­i­an mav­er­ick, called for a new kind of fas­cism in a 1994 inter­view with Michael Moyni­han in Sec­onds. Moyni­han’s essay, ‘The Faus­t­ian Spir­it of Fas­cism,’ was also pub­lished in the Church of Satan’s mag­a­zine, The Black Flame. LaVey even con­tributed an intro­duc­tion to a new edi­tion of ‘Rag­nar Red­beard’s Might is Right, a Niet­zschean and Social Dar­win­ist tract first pub­lished in 1896 which LaVey had lib­er­al­ly pla­gia­rized in his own book, The Satan­ic Bible. The edi­tor of the new edi­tion of Might is Right is list­ed as Katia Lane. She is the wife of David Lane, an Odin­ist leader of the high-pro­file far right para­mil­i­tary group called the Order, who is now serv­ing a life sen­tence for con­spir­ing to mur­der a Den­ver radio per­son­al­i­ty named Alan Berg

(Idem.)

17. The after­word of Might is Right (edit­ed by the wife of con­vict­ed Order killer David Lane) was penned by George Hawthorne, head of the Ra Ho Wa racist musi­cal group. After­word author George Hawthorne is also the founder of Resis­tance Records, now owned by the Nation­al Alliance. (For more about Resis­tance Records and the Nation­al Alliance, see FTR#211.) Before being appro­pri­at­ed by the Nation­al Alliance, Resis­tance Records was dis­trib­uted by the fas­cist Lib­er­ty Lob­by. In charge of this dis­tri­b­u­tion was Todd Blod­gett, a for­mer Rea­gan White House staff mem­ber. (For more about the Nazi under­pin­nings of the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion, see—among oth­er programs—FTR#‘s 180, 332, 421.)

The author of Might is Right’s after­word is, arguably, even more; ‘dev­il­ish’ than LaVey. He is none oth­er than George Hawthorne, head of the white racist musi­cal group Ra Ho Wa (Racial Holy War) and founder of Resis­tance Records, whom Michael Moyni­han inter­viewed for Sec­onds and The Black Flame, Moyni­han is also thanked in the new edi­tion of Might is Right for help­ing make the book pos­si­ble.

(Idem.)

18. Pro­mot­ing and extolling Charles Man­son, the Abraxas milieu came into con­tact with James Mason, among oth­er mem­bers of the Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty.) “In the mid-1980’s, Adam Par­frey formed Amok Press, the pre­cur­sor to Fer­al House, with Ken Swezey of the Amok cat­a­log. Amok’s first book, Michael, was an Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Nazi Prpa­gan­da Min­is­ter Joseph Goebbels’ sole nov­el. Par­frey’s next book, Apoc­a­lypse Cul­ture was fol­lowed in 1988 by The Man­son File, which was edit­ed by Niko­las Schreck (the boyfriend of LaVey’s daugh­ter Zeena) in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Boyd Rice and oth­ers. Rice reg­u­lar­ly vis­it­ed Man­son, and even cam­paigned to get him released from jail through an Abraxas spin-off called the Friends of Jus­tice.” (Idem.)

19. A piv­ot point in the devel­op­ment of the Abraxas Foun­da­tion’s pro­fes­sion­al rela­tion­ship with mem­bers and alum­ni of the Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty was con­vict­ed mur­der­er Per­ry ‘Red’ Warthan. Warthan cat­alyzed the rela­tion­ship between ANP mem­ber James Mason and the Abraxas con­fig­u­ra­tion. Among the ranks of the Nazis asso­ci­at­ed with the Abraxas milieu is Robert Heick, seen here in Nazi uni­form with Abraxas/Moynihan/Parfrey col­league Boyd Rice: http://www.canuck.com/Srl/rice.html .)

Via Man­son, the Abraxas cir­cle came into con­tact with James Mason, a for­mer mem­ber of George Lin­coln Rock­well’s Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty (ANP) and the eccen­tric head of the Nation­al Social­ist Lib­er­a­tion Front (NSLF). Mason had estab­lished con­tact with Man­son in the ear­ly 1980’s through an NSLF mem­ber named Per­ry ‘Red’ Warthan. Warthan lat­er mur­dered a 17-year-old high school stu­dent in Oroville, Cal­i­for­nia, because the boy told police that Warthan had been dis­trib­ut­ing racist lit­er­a­ture. In the late 1980’s, Rice got into hot water due to his friend­ship with Robert Heick is the leader of a skin-head group called Amer­i­can Front that once attacked the San Fran­cis­co anar­chist book­store “Bound Togeth­er.” Although he denied hav­ing any polit­i­cal ties to Heick, the grow­ing unpop­u­lar­i­ty of Abraxas in San Fran­cis­co led Rice to decamp to Den­ver, Col­orado.

(Ibid.; pp. 6–7.)

20. Next, the pro­gram high­lights the rela­tion­ship between Abraxas fel­low Adam Par­frey and the late Kei­th Stime­ly, the for­mer edi­tor of the Lib­er­ty Lob­by’s Jour­nal of His­tor­i­cal Review (the lead­ing Holo­caust denial pub­li­ca­tion.) Par­frey hired Stime­ly to write press releas­es for Fer­al House (pub­lish­er of Lords of Chaos).

As for Par­frey, he first moved his pub­lish­ing oper­a­tion from New York to Los Ange­les. After the LA riots, he relo­cat­ed to Port­land and then returned south to Venice, Cal­i­for­nia. While in Port­land, Par­frey (whose own moth­er is Jew­ish) hired the late Kei­th Stime­ly, an open­ly gay for­mer edi­tor of The Jour­nal of His­tor­i­cal Review, the world’s lead­ing Holo­caust-denial out­fit, to write Fer­al House press releas­es. Stime­ly’s name also appeared on a leaflet, along with that of Moyni­han and Port­land artist Dia­bo­los Rex, as part of a Boyd Rice/NON ‘Total War’ per­for­mance in that city. . . .

(Ibid.; p. 7.)

21. Moyni­han’s Storm Press pub­lished Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty mem­ber James Mason’s tract Siege, which glo­ri­fies Man­son and oth­er mass mur­der­ers as exem­plars of the chaos that Nation­al Social­ism should embrace. (Joseph Fer­gu­son embod­ied the trag­ic dis­til­late of this phi­los­o­phy.) Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, Mason (and through him, Moyni­han) advo­cate vio­lence against the sys­tem by anyone—left, right, white black, brown or oth­er­wise.) In this respect, Mason is an advo­cate of a stance approx­i­mat­ing that of the fas­cist Third Posi­tion. (For more about the Third Posi­tion, see, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR#‘s 252, 285, 352, as well as Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Shows M19 and M21, avail­able from Spit­fire.) Note that Fer­al House guru Adam Par­frey assist­ed in the pub­li­ca­tion of Siege.

“. . . One year lat­er, Moyni­han was more pre­oc­cu­pied by lit­er­ary than legal mat­ters. His Den­ver-based Storm Press pub­lished Siege, a 400-page anthol­o­gy of the writ­ings of James Mason, the Nazi fan of Charles Man­son. In his acknowl­edge­ments, Moyni­han (‘Michael M. Jenk­ins’) thanked (among oth­ers) both Adam Par­frey and Anton LaVey for their help in facil­i­tat­ing Siege’s pub­li­ca­tion. Mason argued in Siege that Nation­al Social­ism had lost its vio­lent, rev­o­lu­tion­ary edge. ‘We want to see crime and chaos rise to such a degree where the Sys­tem becomes no longer viable and falls apart,’ he wrote. In a tract called ‘Smash­ing the Pig Sys­tem,’ he growled: ‘If a bunch of Black Nation­al­ists rob a Brinks truck, if they kill some Sys­tem Pigs, WHO CARES??!!

(Idem.)

22. Note Siege’s glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of James Franklin, the role mod­el for Nation­al Van­guard Books’ tract Hunter. That book (pub­lished by the lit­er­ary wing of the Nation­al Alliance that also pub­lish­es The Turn­er Diaries and Ser­pen­t’s Walk) glo­ri­fies the killing of inter­ra­cial cou­ples.)

Siege also paid homage to white racist ‘lone wolf’ assas­sins like Mason’s for­mer Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty col­league Joseph Franklin, who spe­cial­ized in shoot­ing inter­ra­cial cou­ples (‘race trai­tors’); and James Huber­ty, who mas­sa­cred a large­ly His­pan­ic clien­tele at a McDon­ald’s restau­rant in San Diego. Mason felt that the lone wolves mere mere­ly express­ing healthy ‘Viking berserk­er rage’ against ‘Big Broth­er.’ He espe­cial­ly liked the fact that, since they act­ed alone, these lone wolves were very dif­fi­cult to catch. Siege also glo­ri­fied Charles Man­son. Mason even cre­at­ed a Man­son-inspired suc­ces­sor group to the NSLF called the Uni­ver­sal Order in an effort to tran­scend the tra­di­tion­al ‘left-right spec­trum.’ In his intro­duc­tion to Siege, Moyni­han also high­light­ed Mason’s call for a uni­ty of [ide­o­log­i­cal and behav­ioral] extremes against the Sys­tem. . . .

(Idem.)

23. As bizarrely vio­lent and aber­rant as it appears at first glance, the phi­los­o­phy espoused in Siege and Lords of Chaos reflects the Freda/Evola call the desta­bi­liza­tion of the “sys­tem.”

 . . . For all its crude­ness, Siege echoed Fran­co Freda’s rad­i­cal Evolan call for total social dis­rup­tion in La Dis­in­te­grazione del Sis­tema. Storm also plans to issue the first Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Evola’s 1953 book, Gli Uomi­ni e Ie Rovine (Men Among the Ruins). In August 1993, one year after Siege was pub­lished, Varg Vikernes mur­dered Eurony­mous. Although Moyni­han was not a black met­al­ist, the lure of Nor­way’s new Charles Man­son [Vikernes] too much to resist. . . .

(Idem.)

24. Among the fas­cist the­o­rists Moyni­han relies upon in his book is one “Kadmon”—himself a pro­fes­sion­al asso­ciate of Moyni­han’s.

In Lords of Chaos, Moyni­han sug­gests that Vikernes is an avatar of a long-repressed Odin­ist arche­type anal­o­gous to what Jung claimed for Nazi Ger­many in his famous 1936 essay on Wotan. . . . In Lords of Chaos, Moyni­han relies upon ‘Kad­mon,’ edi­tor of a Vien­na-based jour­nal called Aor­ta, to bol­ster the racial arche­type the­sis. Kad­mon argues that Nor­we­gian black met­al­ists are mod­ern day exam­ples of an ancient martial/mystical band of Were­wolf-like ‘berserk­er’ war­riors known as the Osko­r­ei. No dis­in­ter­est­ed schol­ar, Kad­mon is also a polit­i­cal sup­port­er of Vikernes as well as Moyni­han’s col­lab­o­ra­tor. His band Allersee­len, for exam­ple, put out a joint CD with Moyni­han’s group Blood Axis. A blood fetishist, Kad­mon named his jour­nal Aor­ta because it is ‘a blood-red cycle. In Aor­ta there is my blood. The blood of the poet, the blood of the magi­cian, the blood of the war­rior.’ Kad­mon also devot­ed one issue of Aor­ta to ‘the Odin­ist Nor­we­gian com­pos­er Varg Vikernes . . .who is cur­rent­ly in prison due to his Viking ethics.’

(Ibid.; p. 8.)

25. Lords of Chaos neglects to men­tion that its glo­ri­fied pro­tag­o­nist Eurony­mous was plan­ning to dyna­mite a punk anti-fas­cist house.

 . . . Giv­en how much valu­able infor­ma­tion Lords of Chaos does present, it is some­what incred­i­ble that the book fails to note that at the time that Vikernes mur­dered Eurony­mous, he was also plan­ning to destroy an Oslo-based punk anti-fas­cist squat called Blitz House. After his arrest for mur­der, the police dis­cov­ered that he had about 330 pounds of stolen dyna­mite in his pos­ses­sion. . . .

(Idem.)

26. An even more sig­nif­i­cant omis­sion is the fail­ure Lords of Chaos to note that among the appar­ent influ­ences on Vikernes’ mur­der of Eurony­mous was the ide­ol­o­gy of the Abraxas milieu itself!

Lords of Chaos also ignores anoth­er obvi­ous cul­tur­al influ­ence on Vikernes, the Abraxas net­work’s glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of killers like Charles Man­son! Vikernes’ home town, Bergen, is also home to Jan Bru­un’s Hyper­to­nia World Enter­pris­es. Bru­un is a major dis­trib­u­tor of Charles Man­son mem­o­ra­bil­ia like ‘Watch­ing Satan—the Lega­cy of Charles Man­son.’ He knows Moyni­han and inter­viewed him for an Ital­ian jour­nal apt­ly named Hel­ter Skel­ter. Moyni­han also thanks Bru­un, an avowed social Dar­win­ist and Malthu­sian, in the acknowl­edge­ments to Lords of Chaos. It seems almost impos­si­ble to believe that Vikernes would not have known about Hyper­to­nia World Enter­pris­es, espe­cial­ly since Bru­un was in con­tact with Eurony­mous and even sold May­hem LP’s.

(Idem.)

27. Next, the broad­cast high­lights Moyni­han’s own asso­ci­a­tion with the racist/Odinist orga­ni­za­tion the Asatru Alliance. As with the rest of the Abraxas political/cultural envi­ron­ment, the Asatru Alliance inter­sects the milieu of the Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty and the para­mil­i­tary Min­ute­men.

Despite his use of Kad­mon’s the­o­ries, Moyni­han claims in Lords of Chaos that ‘there is absolute­ly no spe­cif­ic con­nec­tion’ between prac­ti­tion­ers of Nordic reli­gion and the black met­al scene. ‘In fact,’ he writes, ‘pub­lic assump­tions that such a link would exist have been a severe lia­bil­i­ty to these groups.’ Moyni­han, how­ev­er, neglects to men­tion that he him­self is a lead­ing mem­ber of a U.S. based racial­ist ‘Old Norse and Ger­man­ic reli­gion’ move­ment called the Asatru Alliance of Inde­pen­dent Kin­dreds (AA), which in head­quar­tered in Ari­zona.

The Asatru Alliance evolved out of a 1960’s Odinist/Nordic revival move­ment called the Asatril Free Assem­bly. The Asatru Alliance fac­tion argued that a Norse reli­gious move­ment should only include peo­ple of North­ern Euro­pean descent. It also pub­lish­es a jour­nal called Vor Tru which is edit­ed by Robert Ward, the for­mer edi­tor of a right­ist music zine called The Fifth Path. He is also almost cer­tain­ly the ‘R, Ward’ thanked by Moyni­han for his type­set­ting con­tri­bu­tion to Siege. Anoth­er Asatru Alliance, ‘Val­gard’ (Michael Mur­ray), was a for­mer mem­ber of Rock­well’s Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty.

(Idem.)

28. Robert Tay­lor is anoth­er of the unsa­vory asso­ciates of Moyni­han and Fer­al House­’s Adam Par­frey. As of 1999, Moyni­han lived in Port­land Ore­gon, where he moved in order to work for Fer­al House.

Moyni­han’s close friend Robert Nicholas Tay­lor, who pub­lish­es an Odin­ist jour­nal called The Con­tin­u­ing Clan, is yet anoth­er Asatru Alliance big­wig with a far right bio. The right­ist music jour­nal Ohm Clock reports that dur­ing ’ a 12-year stint as a nation­al spokesman for the Min­ute­men, he [Tay­lor] went on to become Direc­tor of Intel­li­gence and set up the first gueril­la train­ing schools ever to exist in the Unit­ed States.’ Tay­lor’s call for the racial balka­niza­tion of Amer­i­ca, an argu­ment asso­ci­at­ed with the late ‘Kla­n­ar­chist’ leader Robert Miles, was also fea­tured in the last issue of Exit. Moyni­han now [1999] lives in Port­land, where he moved in order to work for Fer­al House. . . .

(Ibid.; pp. 9–10.)

29. Moyni­han con­tin­ues to pro­pa­gan­dize on behalf of Vikernes. Note that Vikernes’ CD’s are joint­ly dis­trib­uted by Fer­al House audio.

 . . . True to his prin­ci­ples, Moyni­han is quite active in the pro­pa­gan­da sup­port net­work for Vikernes. He is, for exam­ple, a lead­ing con­trib­u­tor to a right­ist jour­nal called Filosofem, which is pub­lished by a group also called Blood Axis. Filosofem is locat­ed at 5 Rue Gabriel Price in Metz, France. This same address is the source of a series of pro-Vikernes leaflets which car­ry the name Cymo­phane on them. Filosofem also takes its name from a Burzum CD that Vikernes record­ed in 1993 while out on bail. That CD is cur­rent­ly being joint­ly dis­trib­uted by Mis­an­thropy Records, Cymo­phane Pro­duc­tions, and Fer­al House Audio.

(Ibid.; p. 10.)

30. Anoth­er of the occult fas­cists asso­ci­at­ed with Moyni­han and the Abraxas net­work is Ker­ry Bolton, pub­lish­er of Nexus among oth­er peri­od­i­cals.

Lords of Chaos also con­tains an inter­view with Ker­ry Bolton, a New Zealand-based Satanist who is try­ing to pop­u­lar­ize fas­cism inside pop cul­ture with a series of small jour­nals like Key of Alo­cer, The Nexus and The Flam­ing Sword. His essays have also appeared in The Black Flame and Filosofem. In one of his writ­ings Bolton even calls the Futur­ist (and lat­er Fas­cist) Fil­ip­po Marinet­ti a fore­run­ner of ‘Indus­tri­al Cul­ture’. His pub­li­ca­tions also fea­ture Moyni­han, R.N. Tay­lor, Boyd Rice, Kad­mon, and oth­ers like them. . . .

 

 . . . Bolton also leads an overt­ly fas­cist mag­i­cal sect called the Black Order. The Black Order’s New Zealand address is con­ve­nient­ly reprint­ed in an illus­tra­tion in Lords of Chaos. A French far right­ist and OTO leader named Chris­t­ian Bouchet also pops up in Lords of Chaos. Along with pub­lish­ing his own occult jour­nal Lutte du Peo­ple he edits. Bouchet advo­cates an alliance with the far left, applauds Cas­tro for resist­ing Amer­i­can impe­ri­al­ism, and prais­es the French nine­teenth cen­tu­ry anar­chist Pierre-Joseph Proud­hon. H even offered a eulo­gy for the Ger­man ultra-left­ist Ulrike Mein­hof, a leader of the ter­ror­ist Rote Armee Frak­tion, RAF. Nou­velle Resis­tance is also behind a pro-Vikernes music fanzine called Napalm Rock, whose edi­tor Lords of Chaos inter­views. Giv­en his own back­ground and pub­licly pro­claimed polit­i­cal views, it seems fair­ly obvi­ous that Moyni­han would not be ter­ri­bly dis­traught if a new wave of ‘berserk­er youth’ chose to fol­low in Vikernes’ path—regardless of whether or not he holds the Coun­t’s most extreme polit­i­cal state­ments in high regard.

(Idem.)

31. In light of the ideological/cultural pro­pa­gan­diz­ing of Moyni­han, Par­frey, Rice, the Abraxas net­work and the oth­er fas­cists and Nazi fel­low trav­el­ers recount­ed in the text above, the moti­va­tion pro­pelling the bloody demise of Joseph Fer­gu­son seems less obscure.

Agi­tat­ed, shirt­less under his body armor and hold­ing a 9mm semi­au­to­mat­ic pis­tol, dis­grun­tled secu­ri­ty guard Joseph Fer­gu­son stared straight into the video cam­era held by a man would short­ly become the fifth life snuffed out in Fer­gu­son’s 24-hour killing spree. ‘I’ve tak­en four vic­tims,’ Fer­gu­son said from the Ran­cho Cor­do­va home where he held a Burns Inter­na­tion­al Secu­ri­ty col­league and his wife hostage for near­ly 18 hours before shoot­ing him­self to death in a gun­bat­tle with offi­cers. ‘That should be enough to last a week in the news. . . . He was fas­ci­nat­ed with neo-Nazism, Tim­o­thy McVeigh and Charles Man­son. [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s]

“Sacra­men­to Killer Vowed Not to Be Tak­en Alive” by Michelle Gui­do; San Jose Mer­cury News; 9/11/2001; pp. 1A-14A.

32. Obvi­ous­ly, Par­frey and com­pa­ny have deep con­nec­tions to fas­cist and Nazi ele­ments and have worked to fur­ther some of those ele­ments’ projects. One should not be too quick to label Par­frey a fas­cist him­self. Rather, he might be termed a “fel­low trav­el­er,” whose efforts on behalf of, and asso­ci­a­tion with, Nazi/fascist ele­ments may be due to Par­frey’s devo­tion to the pro­mul­ga­tion of “extreme cul­ture.”

Defy­ing easy def­i­n­i­tion, “extreme cul­ture” could be said to be defined by any­thing that is edgy, over-the-top and, more often than not, offen­sive and/or unbe­liev­able.

Exem­pli­fy­ing the cog­ni­tive para­maters of the “extreme cul­ture” dis­sem­i­nat­ed by Par­frey and com­pa­ny are the pro­nounce­ments of an indi­vid­ual named Dan Right­my­er, pub­lished by Fer­al House under the nom de plume “Alex Con­stan­tine.”

Claim­ing to be an expert on, and vic­tim of, mind con­trol, Rightmyer/Constantine sent a let­ter to the now-defunct mag­a­zine Mon­do 2000, in which he made some remark­able state­ments.

He claims to have been tor­tured by “pulsed audio­grams.” An audio­gram is a  graph, con­struct­ed  in order to chart a  per­son­’s hear­ing loss. The worst thing one can suf­fer at the hands of an audio­gram is a paper cut. Rightmyer/Constantine’s stat­ment is not only demon­stra­bly false, but absurd.

The piece de resis­tance, how­ev­er, is his claim to have repelled mag­nets “from his cra­ni­um,” an act he claims was wit­nessed by “two of the lead­ing child psy­chol­o­gists in the coun­try.”

. . . . For five years I have been the vic­tim of a for­mal tor­ture pro­gram at the hands of the CIA. The tor­ture is elec­tro­mag­net­ic and dif­fi­cult to trace, retal­i­a­tion for my polit­i­cal research. . . . I have been sub­ject­ed to a gru­elling dai­ly reg­i­men of tor­ture ren­dered from a remote source. I have been burned by microwaves, kept awake for days at a stretch by shriek­ing nois­es in my ears, the effect of pulsed audio­grams. One evening I was hit by an infra-sound attack . . . on my spine, the most painful expe­ri­ence of my life. I was left crawl­ing and scream­ing across the floor. For die-hard skep­tics, I can offer this proof: Two of the lead­ing child psy­chol­o­gists in the coun­try once wit­nessed mag­nets repelled from my cra­ni­um. When I wrote a let­ter to Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al about my plight (it was ignored), friends of mind [sic] were sub­ject­ed to microwave attack. . . . [Ital­ics are Mine–D.E.]

33. Yet anoth­er of Rightmyer/Constantine’s claims con­cern­ing mag­nets being repelled from his head:

. . . . I have numer­ous wit­ness­es who will tes­ti­fy on the wit­ness stand that my
head has been so mag­ne­tized it repelled mag­nets. Yet Mar­tin claimed I was
lying. I am not. . . .

“Con­stan­tine vs. Canon”; Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry Research List; 3/18/1999.

34. On a KPFK chat board (KPFK is the Paci­fi­ca radio out­let in Los Ange­les) Rightmyer/Constantine was chal­lenged to iden­ti­fy the two psy­chol­o­gists who had sup­pos­ed­ly wit­nessed the mag­nets inci­dent. Mirac­u­lous­ly, the iden­ti­ty of the two sup­posed wit­ness­es changed com­plete­ly! In addi­tion, Rightmyer/Constantine claims he “knocked out a light bulb and a new CD play­er”!

Obvi­ous­ly, Rightmyer/Constantine’s account is at fun­da­men­tal vari­ance with his ear­li­er account. One should not be too ready to brand him a liar, how­ev­er. He may just be hal­lu­ci­nat­ing (see below.)

I have respond­ed to this ques­tion on Inter­net dis­cus­sion lists when seri­ous peo­ple were inter­est­ed. Two for­mer col­leagues of a well-known KPFK talk show host wit­nessed the episode. It was the least spec­tac­u­lar event that occurred on the after­noon in ques­tion, BTW. I also knocked out a light bulb and a new CD play­er. [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.] Since you haven’t stooped to flames, I’ll explain ... I was tar­get­ed by elec­tron­ic weapons — these are not so obscure these days, after all, and all of the past ridicule on this mes­sage board is mis­placed, not to men­tion cru­el. I have for 20 years fought as fierce­ly as any­one for human rights on a num­ber of fronts — and was tor­tured for it. We know the sort of per­son who flames tor­ture vic­tims, don’t we? Why would I respond to that sort of lowlife. My focus is on fed­er­al­ly-spon­sored atroc­i­ties, cor­rup­tion, cov­er-ups ... not idiots who have to strug­gle with a sim­ple expla­na­tion for an event that is not real­ly so far-out, after all. I’ve writ­ten about the tech­nol­o­gy in two books. Read them, check the foot­notes, and you’ll under­stand where I’m com­ing from.
AC

35. An alter­na­tive expla­na­tion for Rightmyer/Constantine’s expe­ri­ences was pro­vid­ed by a col­league of his. In a Google chat forum, he not­ed the fol­low­ing (repost­ed by anoth­er par­tic­i­pant):

More stuff on Dan Right­my­er — the kook known as pen
name ‘Alex Con­stan­tine.’

I’ve respond­ed ade­quate­ly to Dan Right­my­er and his sil­ly bil­ly pal Bri­an in anoth­er recent thread. But there is some­thing else you good folks real­ly ought to know about Dan ‘Alex Con­stant­Whine’ Right­my­er. (Sung to the tune of the ‘Bev­er­ly Hill­bil­lies’ theme...) Come and lis­ten to my sto­ry ‘bout a nut named Dan, Hears voic­es in his head he says are from ‘The Man.’ He says ‘They filled my nog­gin full of elec­tron­ic bugs!’ But he does­n’t let you know that he’s done a lot of DRUGS. (ACID, that is. LSD. ‘Hun­dreds of trips.’)

‘Hun­dreds of acid trips’ is the admis­sion Dan made to his for­mer best friend, S.M. Any rea­son­able per­son who wants the full sto­ry should feel free to write me or call me. I’ll tell ya how to talk to this for­mer best friend for your­self — you’ll hear all sorts of out­ra­geous, hilar­i­ous sto­ries about Dan’s his­to­ry of mas­sive drug abuse, as well his insane behav­ior.

(Here’s a sam­ple: Once, one of Dan’s inner ‘tor­men­tors’ iden­ti­fied him­self by name. Dan found that a gen­tle­man of this name was list­ed in the phone book. Dan, who owned a firearm, threat­ened to go to the house of this obvi­ous­ly-inno­cent par­ty and shoot him!)

Discussion

14 comments for “FTR #437 Counter-Culture Fascism”

  1. If one is keep­ing track of fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy creep­ing into mass cul­ture I can sug­gest fol­low­ing up on asso­ciates of Gen­e­sis P, Orridge ‚Dave Tibet of the group Cur­rent 93 pro­fess­es to be influ­enced by Fran­cis Park­er Yock­ey and his group released a record titled Emperi­um as well as a few oth­ers with overt Crow­ley themes.

    Posted by Kent Kritz | June 20, 2009, 3:19 pm
  2. yeah that guys a nazi for sure

    Posted by htrain | June 28, 2010, 1:20 pm
  3. [...] FTR #437 Counter-Cul­ture Fas­cism [...]

    Posted by « Thrive »: An example of counter-culture fascism | Lys-d'Or | May 30, 2012, 10:49 am
  4. Adam Par­frey briefly attend­ed an edi­to­r­i­al meet­ing of an alter­na­tive news­pa­per we were involved with in Port­land. My impres­sion was that he was most­ly work­ing an unex­plored cor­ner of the pub­lish­ing mar­ket. How­ev­er, one of his asso­ciates had attend­ed a polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion group we had and tried to defend the intel­lec­tu­al util­i­ty of Yock­ey’s book “Imperi­um”. We did­n’t buy it. At the time, the own­er of Pow­ells Books in Port­land thought the book was so dan­ger­ous he kept the few copies he had in a locked room.

    In an inter­est­ing cul­tur­al par­al­lel This sto­ry ran today about Ger­man coun­ter­cul­ture 200 years ago, Grimms Fairy Tales.
    Here’s the link and some com­men­tary:

    “The the­o­ry that the Grimms’ tales, par­tic­u­lar­ly the more bru­tal ones such as How Chil­dren Played Butch­er With Each Oth­er, in which a whole fam­i­ly mas­sacres itself, had an adverse effect on the Ger­man char­ac­ter was expressed fre­quent­ly after the sec­ond world war.
    In his 1978 book Roots of Ger­man Nation­al­ism, Louis Sny­der argued that the broth­ers helped to shape cer­tain dele­te­ri­ous traits, such as dis­ci­pline, obe­di­ence, author­i­tar­i­an­ism, glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of vio­lence and nation­al­ism, which became part of the nation­al char­ac­ter. That was the rea­son allied com­man­ders banned the book in schools after the war, argu­ing that they had found the roots of Nazism in the Grimms’ world.
    A British major, TJ Leonard, even said the fairy­tales had helped Ger­mans teach their chil­dren “all the vari­eties of bar­barous­ness”, mak­ing it easy for them to fit into the “role of the hang­man”.
    The Ger­man author Gün­ther Birken­feld saw in the fairy­tales the answer to “how the Ger­man peo­ple were able to per­pe­trate the atroc­i­ties of Belsen and Auschwitz”.
    The book was there­fore large­ly banned from the Ger­man nurs­ery – which was simul­ta­ne­ous­ly under­go­ing its own anti-author­i­tar­i­an, pro-mod­erni­sa­tion reac­tion to Nazism – for decades. At the same time though, it was becom­ing increas­ing­ly hijacked out­side Ger­many by Dis­ney and Hol­ly­wood.
    Matussek and oth­ers are call­ing for a re-think about the place the Grimm tales have in Germany’s cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty.”

    http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/12/20/200th-anniversary-of-grimms-fairy-tales-triggers-a-year-of-celebration-and-cultural-examination/

    Posted by Swamp | December 20, 2012, 9:44 am
  5. Maybe this is just a play­ful ref­er­ence to pio­neer­ing Colom­bian black met­al band Para­bel­lum. Or at last, that’s about the best sce­nario we can hope for at this point:

    The GOP Just Named its Hot New Inno­va­tion Lab After a Nazi Pis­tol
    Adam Wein­stein on Gawk­er
    2/4/2014 10:36am

    The Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee today excit­ed­ly announced the launch of a new start­up lab to bring techies and cre­atives togeth­er, Sil­i­con Val­ley-style, to get Repub­li­cans elect­ed. Oh, and they named it for a Nazi gun, a type of ammo, and a phi­los­o­phy that puts war before peace.

    Wel­come to Para Bel­lum Labs, Amer­i­ca! “Para Bel­lum Labs will help cre­ate a cul­ture to allow the RNC to inno­vate faster and recruit more tal­ent­ed peo­ple who can build dig­i­tal plat­forms to under­stand pub­lic opin­ion, engage vot­ers and pow­er elec­tions,” RNC Chair­man Reince Priebus gushed in a press release this morn­ing. Para Bel­lum plans to recruit on top engi­neer­ing school cam­pus­es and hold fun hackathons.

    The charm offen­sive all starts with the video above, which makes Para Bel­lum look like a much cool­er place than DeVry Insti­tute to get your asso­ci­ate’s degree in IT. “I chose to be a part of Para Bel­lum Labs because this is some­thing that has nev­er been done before,” says new employ­ee Lau­ren. (By Repub­li­cans, no, this has not been done before. Not suc­cess­ful­ly. But by Democ­rats, well, um. Yeah.)

    The thing about Para Bel­lum, though, is that name. In Latin, it lit­er­al­ly means “(pre­pare)* for war.” That’s dumb enough, prob­a­bly: Hey, ide­al­is­tic young pro­gram­mers! Let’s save the world by crush­ing our ene­mies, see­ing them dri­ven before us, and hear­ing the lamen­ta­tion of their women.

    In fact, it’s part of an old Roman cliche, “Si vis pacem, para bellum”—if you seek peace, pre­pare for war. That’s been quite an inspir­ing lit­tle phrase through his­to­ry, at least to mil­i­tarists. It was espe­cial­ly inspir­ing to Deutsche Waf­fen und Muni­tions­fab­riken, the Ger­man gov­ern­men­t’s arms man­u­fac­tur­er from the late impe­r­i­al era to World War II.

    DWM start­ed using the “para­bel­lum” phrase as a name for its sig­na­ture guns—first, the light machine gun used by the Kaiser’s best dur­ing World War I, and then its most icon­ic gun: the Para­bel­lum Pis­tole, or the Luger pis­tol. You know, this one:

    ...

    Yep, Nazi para­bel­lum! The gun was so pop­u­lar in the Third Reich that its ammunition—one of the first to use a slug that was 9 mil­lime­ters in diameter—became known as “9 mm para­bel­lum,” which you can find now at your local gun store. Assum­ing, of course, that Oba­ma and FEMA aren’t buy­ing it all up for the upcom­ing counter-rev­o­lu­tion.

    All of which begs the ques­tion: Repub­li­cans, if you could name your new hip mil­len­ni­al pro­gram­mer lab any­thing, why’d you set­tle on a Latin phrase that car­ries some seri­ous Hit­lerite bag­gage?

    Sure, sure, you’re try­ing to sep­a­rate your­selves from the pack, as new employ­ee Jesse explains in the Para Bel­lum video: “You could go try to work on the west coast and poten­tial­ly make a cool app, or you could actu­al­ly phys­i­cal­ly change his­to­ry.”

    Yeah. But Jesse: You know who else actu­al­ly phys­i­cal­ly changed his­to­ry?

    ...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 4, 2014, 3:55 pm
  6. https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=6V2ndbXT2zo

    Tom Met­zger inter­views boyd rice

    Posted by Christian Yates | November 7, 2016, 7:41 pm
  7. Remem­ber the sto­ry about the neo-Nazi-turned-Islamist who mur­dered two of his neo-Nazi room­mates, result­ing in the dis­cov­ery of a fourth neo-Nazi room­mate who was plan­ning a morter attack on a Flori­da nuclear plant who was also and in pos­ses­sion of high-explo­sives and radioac­tive mate­r­i­al? Well, in case it’s not abun­dant­ly obvi­ous that this group pos­es a seri­ous threat to the pub­lic, here’s an arti­cle about how mem­bers of their par­tic­u­lar neo-Nazi group — “Atom­waf­fen” (Ger­man for “Atom­ic Weapon”) — have been respon­si­ble for a num­ber of recent mur­ders around the coun­try and more mur­ders should be expect­ed because Atom­waf­fen pro­duces ISIS-style videos pro­mot­ing mass neo-Nazi vio­lence designed to sab­o­tage and implode soci­ety:

    Pro-Pub­li­ca

    Cal­i­for­nia Mur­der Sus­pect Said to Have Trained With Extrem­ist Hate Group
    The 20-year-old man charged in Orange Coun­ty with killing a gay Jew­ish col­lege stu­dent ear­li­er this month is said to have belonged to Atom­waf­fen Divi­sion, a neo-Nazi group.

    by A.C. Thomp­son, ProP­ub­li­ca, Ali Win­ston, spe­cial to ProP­ub­li­ca, and Jake Han­ra­han, spe­cial to ProP­ub­li­ca
    Jan. 26, 2018, 7:46 p.m. EST

    The Cal­i­for­nia man accused of killing a 19-year-old Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia stu­dent ear­li­er this month is an avowed neo-Nazi and a mem­ber of one of the most noto­ri­ous extrem­ist groups in the coun­try, accord­ing to three peo­ple with knowl­edge of the man’s recent activ­i­ties.

    The man, Samuel Wood­ward, has been charged in Orange Coun­ty, Cal­i­for­nia, with mur­der­ing Blaze Bern­stein, who went miss­ing in ear­ly Jan­u­ary while vis­it­ing his fam­i­ly over win­ter break. Pros­e­cu­tors allege that Wood­ward stabbed Bern­stein more than 20 times before bury­ing his body in an Orange Coun­ty park where it was even­tu­al­ly dis­cov­ered. The two men had attend­ed high school togeth­er.

    Wood­ward, 20, is set to be arraigned on Feb. 2 and has not yet entered a plea. Orange Coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors say they are exam­in­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the killing was a hate crime — Bern­stein was Jew­ish and open­ly gay — and some recent news reports have sug­gest­ed that the alleged killer might hold far-right or even white suprema­cist polit­i­cal beliefs.

    Now, three peo­ple with detailed knowl­edge of Woodward’s recent past have been able to shed more light on the young man’s extrem­ist activ­i­ties. They said Wood­ward was a mem­ber of the Atom­waf­fen Divi­sion, an armed Fas­cist group with the ulti­mate aim of over­throw­ing the U.S. gov­ern­ment through the use of ter­ror­ism and guer­ril­la war­fare.

    The orga­ni­za­tion, which cel­e­brates Hitler and Charles Man­son, has been tied to four oth­er mur­ders and an elab­o­rate bomb plot over the past eight months. Experts who study right-wing extrem­ist move­ments believe Atomwaffen’s com­mit­ment to vio­lence has made it one of the more dan­ger­ous groups to emerge from the new wave of white suprema­cists.

    Two of the three peo­ple who described Woodward’s affil­i­a­tions are friends of his; the oth­er is a for­mer mem­ber of Atom­waf­fen Divi­sion.

    ProPublica’s rev­e­la­tions about Woodward’s back­ground add a new ele­ment to a mur­der case that has attract­ed con­sid­er­able local and nation­al news cov­er­age. But they also raise fresh con­cerns about groups like Atom­waf­fen Divi­sion, shad­owy out­fits of uncer­tain size that appear capa­ble of gen­uine harm.

    Wood­ward joined the orga­ni­za­tion in ear­ly 2016 and lat­er trav­eled to Texas to attend Atom­waf­fen meet­ings and a three-day train­ing camp, which involved instruc­tion in firearms, hand-to-hand com­bat, camp­ing and sur­vival skills, the for­mer mem­ber said. ProP­ub­li­ca has obtained pho­tographs of Wood­ward at an out­door Atom­waf­fen meet­ing in the scrub­by Texas coun­try­side. One of the pho­tos depicts Wood­ward and oth­er mem­bers mak­ing straight-armed Nazi salutes while wear­ing skull masks. In oth­er pic­tures, Wood­ward is unmasked and eas­i­ly iden­ti­fi­able.

    The young man is pro­fi­cient with both hand­guns and assault rifles, accord­ing to one per­son who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Texas train­ing and watched him shoot. That per­son also said that Wood­ward helped orga­nize a num­ber of Atom­waf­fen mem­bers in Cal­i­for­nia.

    Social media posts and chat logs shared by Woodward’s friends show that he open­ly described him­self as a “Nation­al Social­ist” or Nazi. He “was as anti-Semit­ic as you can get,” accord­ing to one acquain­tance.

    ProP­ub­li­ca con­tact­ed Orange Coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors regard­ing Woodward’s alleged neo-Nazi activ­i­ties. Michelle Van Der Lin­den, a spokesper­son for the Dis­trict Attorney’s Office, said she couldn’t com­ment direct­ly on the case, but said the inves­ti­ga­tion is ongo­ing, with detec­tives explor­ing all pos­si­ble leads.

    Wood­ward told police Bern­stein had tried to kiss him while they were in the park, accord­ing to a sealed affi­davit obtained by the Orange Coun­ty Reg­is­ter.

    ...

    Atom­waf­fen start­ed in 2015 and is esti­mat­ed to have about 80 mem­bers scat­tered around the coun­try in small cells; the for­mer mem­ber said the group’s ranks have grown since the lethal and chaot­ic “Unite the Right” ral­ly last sum­mer in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia.

    While many of the new white extrem­ist groups have con­scious­ly avoid­ed using Nazi imagery, Atom­waf­fen has done the oppo­site. The name can mean “Atom­ic Weapons” in Ger­man, and the orga­ni­za­tion embraces Third Reich iconog­ra­phy, includ­ing swastikas, the Totenkopf, or death’s head insignia, and SS light­ning bolts. The group fre­quent­ly pro­duces YouTube videos fea­tur­ing masked Atom­waf­fen mem­bers hik­ing through the back­coun­try and fir­ing weapons. They’ve also filmed them­selves burn­ing the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion and set­ting fire to the Amer­i­can flag at an Atom­waf­fen “Dooms­day Hate­camp.”

    Atomwaffen’s biggest inspi­ra­tion seems to be James Mason, a long-time fas­cist who belonged to the Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty and lat­er, dur­ing the 1970s, joined a more mil­i­tant off­shoot. Dur­ing the 1980s, Mason pub­lished a newslet­ter called SIEGE, in which he eschewed polit­i­cal activism in favor of cre­at­ing a new fas­cist regime through mur­der, small “lone wolf” ter­ror attacks, and all-out war against the gov­ern­ment. Mason also struck up a friend­ship with the late Charles Man­son, who has become anoth­er hero for Atom­waf­fen.

    The orga­ni­za­tion first gained a mea­sure of nation­al atten­tion in May of last year, when 18-year-old Devon Arthurs, one of Atomwaffen’s found­ing mem­bers, was charged in state court in Tam­pa, Flori­da, with mur­der­ing two of his room­mates, Andrew Oneschuk, 18, and Jere­my Him­mel­man, 22. Both vic­tims were Atom­waf­fen loy­al­ists.

    The mur­ders alleged­ly occurred after Arthurs trad­ed Nazism for rad­i­cal Islam. When police took Arthurs into cus­tody, accord­ing to news accounts based on police reports, he claimed he had shot his for­mer com­rades because they had taunt­ed him about his Mus­lim faith and plot­ted vio­lent attacks to fur­ther their fas­cist agen­da. Arthurs told inves­ti­ga­tors he killed Onsechuk and Him­mel­man “because they want to build a Fourth Reich.”

    ...

    When law enforce­ment searched the apart­ment in Tam­pa, Flori­da, where Arthurs and the oth­ers lived, they found firearms, a framed pho­to­graph of Okla­homa City bomber Tim­o­thy McVeigh, rifles, ammu­ni­tion, and a cool­er full of a high­ly volatile explo­sive called HMTD. Inves­ti­ga­tors also dis­cov­ered radioac­tive mate­r­i­al in the home.

    The bomb-mak­ing mate­r­i­al belonged to a fourth room­mate, Atom­waf­fen leader Bran­don Rus­sell, a Flori­da Nation­al Guards­man. Arthurs told author­i­ties that Rus­sell had been plan­ning to blow up a nuclear pow­er plant near Mia­mi. Ear­li­er this month Rus­sell plead­ed guilty in fed­er­al dis­trict court in Tam­pa to ille­gal pos­ses­sion of explo­sives and was sen­tenced to five years in fed­er­al prison.

    Atom­waf­fen sur­faced again in con­nec­tion with a dou­ble homi­cide in Reston, Vir­ginia, in Decem­ber 2017. A 17-year-old neo-Nazi alleged­ly shot to death his girlfriend’s par­ents, Buck­ley Kuhn-Frick­er and Scott Frick­er, who had urged their daugh­ter to break up with him. The accused, who shot him­self as well but sur­vived and remains hos­pi­tal­ized, was charged as a juve­nile in state court in Vir­ginia with two counts of homi­cide.

    The 17-year-old was a big fan of Atom­waf­fen and James Mason, accord­ing to report­ing by the Huff­in­g­ton Post, which exam­ined his social media trail.

    The for­mer Atom­waf­fen mem­ber in con­tact with ProP­ub­li­ca said that the teen was more than a fan: He was in direct com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the group.

    “Their rhetoric is some of the most extreme we have seen,” said Joan­na Mendel­son, a senior researcher at the Anti-Defama­tion League’s Cen­ter on Extrem­ism. The group, she said, views itself as the rad­i­cal van­guard of the white suprema­cist move­ment, the front­line sol­diers of an immi­nent race war.

    ———-

    “Cal­i­for­nia Mur­der Sus­pect Said to Have Trained With Extrem­ist Hate Group” by A.C. Thomp­son, Ali Win­ston, and Jake Han­ra­han; Pro-Pub­li­ca; 01/26/2018

    ““Their rhetoric is some of the most extreme we have seen,” said Joan­na Mendel­son, a senior researcher at the Anti-Defama­tion League’s Cen­ter on Extrem­ism. The group, she said, views itself as the rad­i­cal van­guard of the white suprema­cist move­ment, the front­line sol­diers of an immi­nent race war.”

    Extreme even by neo-Nazi stan­dards. That’s Atom­waf­fen. Hence, a cel­e­bra­tion of Hitler and Charles Man­son:

    ...
    The orga­ni­za­tion, which cel­e­brates Hitler and Charles Man­son, has been tied to four oth­er mur­ders and an elab­o­rate bomb plot over the past eight months. Experts who study right-wing extrem­ist move­ments believe Atomwaffen’s com­mit­ment to vio­lence has made it one of the more dan­ger­ous groups to emerge from the new wave of white suprema­cists.
    ...

    And in the case of the mur­der of Blaze Bern­stein, it appears that being Jew­ish and gay was prob­a­bly enough to pre­cip­i­tate the mur­der. That’s the kind of peo­ple that join Atom­waf­fen:

    ...
    The man, Samuel Wood­ward, has been charged in Orange Coun­ty, Cal­i­for­nia, with mur­der­ing Blaze Bern­stein, who went miss­ing in ear­ly Jan­u­ary while vis­it­ing his fam­i­ly over win­ter break. Pros­e­cu­tors allege that Wood­ward stabbed Bern­stein more than 20 times before bury­ing his body in an Orange Coun­ty park where it was even­tu­al­ly dis­cov­ered. The two men had attend­ed high school togeth­er.

    Wood­ward, 20, is set to be arraigned on Feb. 2 and has not yet entered a plea. Orange Coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors say they are exam­in­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the killing was a hate crime — Bern­stein was Jew­ish and open­ly gay — and some recent news reports have sug­gest­ed that the alleged killer might hold far-right or even white suprema­cist polit­i­cal beliefs.

    Now, three peo­ple with detailed knowl­edge of Woodward’s recent past have been able to shed more light on the young man’s extrem­ist activ­i­ties. They said Wood­ward was a mem­ber of the Atom­waf­fen Divi­sion, an armed Fas­cist group with the ulti­mate aim of over­throw­ing the U.S. gov­ern­ment through the use of ter­ror­ism and guer­ril­la war­fare.
    ...

    And this group is esti­mat­ed to have 80 mem­ber scat­tered around the coun­try in small cell (pos­si­bly plan­ning nuke plant attacks?) after start­ing in 2015. And the man charged with this crime, Samuel Wood­ward, has report­ed­ly been involved with that recruit­ment effort:

    ...
    Wood­ward joined the orga­ni­za­tion in ear­ly 2016 and lat­er trav­eled to Texas to attend Atom­waf­fen meet­ings and a three-day train­ing camp, which involved instruc­tion in firearms, hand-to-hand com­bat, camp­ing and sur­vival skills, the for­mer mem­ber said. ProP­ub­li­ca has obtained pho­tographs of Wood­ward at an out­door Atom­waf­fen meet­ing in the scrub­by Texas coun­try­side. One of the pho­tos depicts Wood­ward and oth­er mem­bers mak­ing straight-armed Nazi salutes while wear­ing skull masks. In oth­er pic­tures, Wood­ward is unmasked and eas­i­ly iden­ti­fi­able.

    The young man is pro­fi­cient with both hand­guns and assault rifles, accord­ing to one per­son who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Texas train­ing and watched him shoot. That per­son also said that Wood­ward helped orga­nize a num­ber of Atom­waf­fen mem­bers in Cal­i­for­nia.

    Social media posts and chat logs shared by Woodward’s friends show that he open­ly described him­self as a “Nation­al Social­ist” or Nazi. He “was as anti-Semit­ic as you can get,” accord­ing to one acquain­tance.

    ...

    Atom­waf­fen start­ed in 2015 and is esti­mat­ed to have about 80 mem­bers scat­tered around the coun­try in small cells; the for­mer mem­ber said the group’s ranks have grown since the lethal and chaot­ic “Unite the Right” ral­ly last sum­mer in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia.
    ...

    And this mur­der was just the lat­est Atom­waf­fen mur­der. There’s also the mur­ders in Flori­da that revealed the nuke plant plot, along with a 17 year old Atom­waf­fen asso­ciate who mur­der his girl­friend’s par­ents after they object­ed to their daugh­ter dat­ing a neo-Nazi:

    ...
    When law enforce­ment searched the apart­ment in Tam­pa, Flori­da, where Arthurs and the oth­ers lived, they found firearms, a framed pho­to­graph of Okla­homa City bomber Tim­o­thy McVeigh, rifles, ammu­ni­tion, and a cool­er full of a high­ly volatile explo­sive called HMTD. Inves­ti­ga­tors also dis­cov­ered radioac­tive mate­r­i­al in the home.

    The bomb-mak­ing mate­r­i­al belonged to a fourth room­mate, Atom­waf­fen leader Bran­don Rus­sell, a Flori­da Nation­al Guards­man. Arthurs told author­i­ties that Rus­sell had been plan­ning to blow up a nuclear pow­er plant near Mia­mi. Ear­li­er this month Rus­sell plead­ed guilty in fed­er­al dis­trict court in Tam­pa to ille­gal pos­ses­sion of explo­sives and was sen­tenced to five years in fed­er­al prison.

    Atom­waf­fen sur­faced again in con­nec­tion with a dou­ble homi­cide in Reston, Vir­ginia, in Decem­ber 2017. A 17-year-old neo-Nazi alleged­ly shot to death his girlfriend’s par­ents, Buck­ley Kuhn-Frick­er and Scott Frick­er, who had urged their daugh­ter to break up with him. The accused, who shot him­self as well but sur­vived and remains hos­pi­tal­ized, was charged as a juve­nile in state court in Vir­ginia with two counts of homi­cide.

    The 17-year-old was a big fan of Atom­waf­fen and James Mason, accord­ing to report­ing by the Huff­in­g­ton Post, which exam­ined his social media trail.

    The for­mer Atom­waf­fen mem­ber in con­tact with ProP­ub­li­ca said that the teen was more than a fan: He was in direct com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the group.
    ...

    And the two guid­ing lights for this new domes­tic ter­ror threat are none oth­er than James Mason and Charles Man­son. This is where we are. Still:

    ...

    While many of the new white extrem­ist groups have con­scious­ly avoid­ed using Nazi imagery, Atom­waf­fen has done the oppo­site. The name can mean “Atom­ic Weapons” in Ger­man, and the orga­ni­za­tion embraces Third Reich iconog­ra­phy, includ­ing swastikas, the Totenkopf, or death’s head insignia, and SS light­ning bolts. The group fre­quent­ly pro­duces YouTube videos fea­tur­ing masked Atom­waf­fen mem­bers hik­ing through the back­coun­try and fir­ing weapons. They’ve also filmed them­selves burn­ing the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion and set­ting fire to the Amer­i­can flag at an Atom­waf­fen “Dooms­day Hate­camp.”

    Atomwaffen’s biggest inspi­ra­tion seems to be James Mason, a long-time fas­cist who belonged to the Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty and lat­er, dur­ing the 1970s, joined a more mil­i­tant off­shoot. Dur­ing the 1980s, Mason pub­lished a newslet­ter called SIEGE, in which he eschewed polit­i­cal activism in favor of cre­at­ing a new fas­cist regime through mur­der, small “lone wolf” ter­ror attacks, and all-out war against the gov­ern­ment. Mason also struck up a friend­ship with the late Charles Man­son, who has become anoth­er hero for Atom­waf­fen.
    ...

    So this appears to be part of the Man­son lega­cy: inspir­ing ‘white ISIS’.

    And don’t for­get that when Atom­waf­fen makes ISIS-style videos advo­cat­ing vio­lence designed to col­lapse soci­ety and trig­ger a race war, that’s what ‘drop­ping the mask’ looks like for Nazis and oth­er vio­lent far-right move­ments. The ‘Alt-Right’ peo­ple in suits and ties like Richard Spencer who strive to cre­ate an air of respectabil­i­ty for Nazis by not dress­ing like a Nazi are mere­ly mask­ing what Atom­waf­fen is putting on full dis­play: that the ‘Alt-Right’ col­lec­tion of con­tem­po­rary neo-Nazi thought is heav­i­ly over­lap­ping with Charles Man­son’s hopes and dreams which is why Atom­waf­fen open­ly wor­ships him:

    The Huff­in­g­ton Post

    The Mani­ac Neo-Nazis Keep­ing Charles Manson’s Race War Alive
    How Atom­waf­fen wants to make Hel­ter Skel­ter real.

    By Luke O’Brien and Christo­pher Math­ias
    11/21/2017 04:28 pm ET Updat­ed Nov 21, 2017

    Charles Man­son is dead now, and we are the rich­er for it. Man­son was a thief, a pimp and a mur­der­ous cult leader bent on race war. He was true scum.

    No won­der some alt-righters are pour­ing out drinks for him.

    “A great rev­o­lu­tion­ary,” said one com­menter of Man­son on the Iron­March neo-Nazi inter­net forum.

    “The world real­ly does feel a lit­tle emp­ti­er,” said anoth­er.

    One bereaved big­ot sim­ply post­ed a Celine Dion lyric: “Near, far, wher­ev­er you are I believe that the heart does go on ...”

    “Hero.” “Cham­pi­on.” “War­rior of Truth.” Such were the trib­utes used Mon­day to describe a dement­ed butch­er.

    If you’re won­der­ing who might rhap­sodize a psy­chot­ic racist in this man­ner, the answer is oth­er psy­chot­ic racists, many of whom belong to Atom­waf­fen Divi­sion, a par­tic­u­lar­ly blood­thirsty and anti-Amer­i­can branch of the so-called alt-right that has made wor­ship­ping Man­son a part of their cultish devo­tion to vio­lent insur­rec­tion.

    Even with­in the alt-right — a loose asso­ci­a­tion of white suprema­cists and fas­cists — the Atom­waf­fen Divi­sion is con­sid­ered extreme. The group, whose name trans­lates to “Atom­ic Weapons Divi­sion,” puts out ISIS-style pro­pa­gan­da videos on YouTube that fea­ture mem­bers clad in skull masks and cam­ou­flage out­fits, some­times on train­ing exer­cis­es in the woods, often hold­ing guns and the organization’s dis­tinc­tive yel­low-and-black nuclear-themed flags. In one video, mem­bers burn a copy of the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion on a grill.

    pic.twitter.com/20BooyUUr2— SIEGE Cul­ture (@siegeculture_) Novem­ber 15, 2017

    Atom­waf­fen is best known for a dou­ble homi­cide in Tam­pa this May, in which Devon Arthurs, a mem­ber of the group who had con­vert­ed to a vio­lent, fun­da­men­tal­ist ver­sion of Islam, shot and killed two of his room­mates, who were also Atom­waf­fen mem­bers. A fourth room­mate, Bran­don Rus­sell, was arrest­ed lat­er for hav­ing bomb-mak­ing equip­ment and radioac­tive mate­r­i­al. Rus­sell, too, was part of Atom­waf­fen. He had a framed pho­to of Okla­homa City bomber Tim­o­thy McVeigh in his bed­room.

    Apoc­a­lyp­tic luna­cy has always been part of far-right pol­i­tics, and a vig­or­ous strain of it runs through today’s alt-right white suprema­cist move­ment. It should come as no sur­prise, then, that Man­son, whose once-upon-a-time sta­tus as a long­hair could nev­er obscure the swasti­ka carved into his fore­head, might serve as a new ves­sel of mad­ness for today’s vio­lent racists. In many ways, he was a fore­bear of groups like Atom­waf­fen and a bug-eyed pro­to­type for the mod­ern race war­rior.

    Manson’s deranged polit­i­cal teach­ings were a mish-mash of Sci­en­tol­ogy, occultism and Nazism, all bun­dled into an orig­i­nal end-of-days tale. Stay with me, he told his fol­low­ers, and you’ll be saved from the com­ing race war.

    “Man­son was moti­vat­ed by an apoc­a­lyp­tic belief in the immi­nent end of the world through a race war in which the White pop­u­la­tion was doomed to defeat,” Jef­frey Kaplan wrote in Ency­clo­pe­dia of White Pow­er: A Source­book on the Rad­i­cal Racist Right. “The vic­to­ri­ous Black pop­u­la­tion would in time real­ize that the White man is genet­i­cal­ly more fit to gov­ern, and would seek in vain for White sur­vivors of the racial Holo­caust to assume the reins of pow­er. The Man­son fam­i­ly, hav­ing sur­vived the apoc­a­lypse by hid­ing in a time­less cave at the cen­ter of the world, would then emerge to take pow­er.”

    This world­view led Man­son and his fol­low­ers into an espe­cial­ly des­o­late part of Death Val­ley called Bark­er Ranch in 1969, where Time mag­a­zine described them as “holed up in run-down cab­ins” lead­ing an “indo­lent, almost sav­age exis­tence, singing Manson’s songs, danc­ing, swim­ming in a small pool, steal­ing cars for cash and pick­ing through garbage for food.” Here they would dodge the apoc­a­lypse.

    By the ear­ly 1980s, of course, Man­son had failed to dodge his own down­fall. He wasn’t in a time­less cave at the cen­ter of the world. He was in a cell in San Quentin, serv­ing a life sen­tence for the grue­some mur­ders of sev­en peo­ple. Man­son had led his fol­low­ers, known as The Fam­i­ly, in the 1969 slay­ings of actress Sharon Tate and six oth­er peo­ple in a two-night killing spree in Los Ange­les.

    It was in prison that Man­son start­ed a cor­re­spon­dence with a long­time Amer­i­can neo-Nazi named James Mason, who would come to view “Char­lie” as a prophet of hate. Mason was the type of man who con­sid­ered Auschwitz a “damned nice place,” and his wingnut jour­ney would take him from the heart of orga­nized white suprema­cy to years of inept obscu­ri­ty and, ulti­mate­ly, back to a faint rel­e­vance in the Trump era thanks to the alt-right and Atom­waf­fen.

    A fas­cist since he was 13, when he joined the youth move­ment of George Lin­coln Rockwell’s Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty, Mason had rad­i­cal­ized him­self while watch­ing black peo­ple take to the streets dur­ing the civ­il rights era. As a young adult, he set up Nazi booths at coun­ty fairs in south­ern Ohio, where he’d grown up.

    “We should shoot for bring­ing down the sys­tem,” he would lat­er say. “Destroy the sys­tem.”

    Mason even­tu­al­ly left the Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty and joined a splin­ter group called the Nation­al Social­ist Lib­er­a­tion Front. Some NSLF mem­bers were fans of Man­son, which prompt­ed Mason to begin research­ing the cult leader. In 1980, Mason reached out to the incar­cer­at­ed Man­son. The two began com­mu­ni­cat­ing reg­u­lar­ly by mail and phone.

    “What I dis­cov­ered was a rev­e­la­tion equal to the rev­e­la­tion I received when I first found Adolf Hitler,” Mason would lat­er explain.

    Through “Char­lie,” Mason came to under­stand that Hitler’s death had brought about the end of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. Every gov­ern­ment in the world was now part of an anti-white glob­al con­spir­a­cy run by “super cap­i­tal­ists” and “super com­mu­nists.” Noth­ing about West­ern cul­ture or its insti­tu­tions could be sal­vaged. It would all have to be blown to smithereens.

    “It’s just like a human organ­ism that has ingest­ed a fatal dose of poi­son,” Mason would explain. “[If] you fall asleep with it and try to ride it out, you’re going to die, but if you become sud­den­ly, vio­lent­ly ill and expel that poi­son — even though the expe­ri­ence may be rather unpleas­ant — you at least have a chance to live. Man­son called that Hel­ter Skel­ter.”

    So inspired by “Char­lie” was Mason that he took the mur­der­ous cult leader’s advice and renamed his neo-Nazi orga­ni­za­tion Uni­ver­sal Order. Mason began writ­ing a newslet­ter called “Siege” to pro­mote Manson’s views as a con­tin­u­a­tion of Hitler’s phi­los­o­phy. In 1992, Mason would col­lect these writ­ings into a book that neo-Nazi skin­head leader Tom Met­zger called “435 pages of hot rev­o­lu­tion­ary style white pro­pa­gan­da.”

    For Mason and oth­er white suprema­cists, Man­son was almost a divine being, an atavis­tic incar­na­tion of hate. The cult leader fit neat­ly into a strain of fas­cist mag­i­cal real­ism called “Eso­teric Hit­lerism” that became pop­u­lar after World War II when the Greek writer Sav­it­ri Devi pro­posed that Hitler was the ninth avatar of Vish­nu and racist dupes some­how bought into it.

    This type of crazy remains en vogue among the alt-right today, with notable expo­nents such as Andrew “weev” Auern­heimer, a neo-Nazi hack­er and the web­mas­ter for The Dai­ly Stormer, whose charis­mat­ic rav­ings make him the clos­est thing to a con­tem­po­rary Man­son in the move­ment. (Auern­heimer has ties to Atom­waf­fen and after the Arthurs mur­ders issued an over­loud decla­ma­tion about how he knew the shoot­er and the vic­tims but had pre­vi­ous­ly banned Arthurs from a Dai­ly Stormer forum.)

    But the effects of Man­son on today’s white suprema­cist move­ment — in no small part thanks to Mason’s efforts — go beyond evil juju. Con­sid­er white sep­a­ratism in the mod­ern con­text. Orga­nized racists in Amer­i­ca these days like to call them­selves “white nation­al­ists.” This of course is part­ly a pub­lic rela­tions gam­bit — “white nation­al­ist” is maybe more palat­able than “neo-Nazi” or “white suprema­cist” — but it’s also an accu­rate descrip­tion of what they want.

    Groups across the racist polit­i­cal spec­trum want a White Nation, an eth­no-state, some­where in Amer­i­ca for just the White Race. The three-piece-suit-wear­ing fig­ure­head of the alt-right, Richard Spencer, is very open about this. So is vet­er­an skin­head Jeff Schoep, the leader of the Nation­al Social­ist Move­ment. As is KKK-enthu­si­ast Brad Grif­fin, aka Hunter Wal­lace, a leader of the League of the South.

    In 2000, Mason wrote Man­son to thank him for this brand of white sep­a­ratism. In a two-page his­to­ry of the Uni­ver­sal Order he penned for Kaplan’s The Ency­clo­pe­dia of White Pow­er, Mason wrote:

    Although few would real­ize or admit it, the grad­ual move away from “White Suprema­cy” toward White Sep­a­ratism, from any hopes of recov­er­ing the U.S. gov­ern­ment, toward estab­lish­ing new, inde­pen­dent regions, is pre­cise­ly what ani­mat­ed the cre­ation of the Man­son enclaves in the Death Val­ley dur­ing the 1960s. At issue is bare sur­vival as a species as the world sys­tem begins to crum­ble and die.

    Mason’s adu­la­tion of Man­son made him some­what of an out­lier in the Amer­i­can neo-Nazi scene of the 1980s. And Man­son ven­er­a­tion remains a prick­ly sub­ject for cur­rent white nation­al­ists. On Storm­front, anoth­er neo-Nazi forum, the com­men­tary Mon­day about Manson’s pass­ing most­ly had a “Good rid­dance and thank God he’s dead” tenor. The Man­son Fam­i­ly killed white peo­ple, after all. And Manson’s degen­er­a­cy reflects poor­ly on white suprema­cy.

    But degen­er­a­cy has nev­er pre­vent­ed neo-Nazis from attract­ing sup­port­ers. For years, Mason’s “Charlie”-inspired insights were sought after by oth­er promi­nent racists, includ­ing Met­zger, who inter­viewed Mason for over an hour in 1993 for his “Race and Rea­son” show. When talk turned to vio­lence, as it often does with far-right extrem­ists, Mason clucked dis­ap­prov­ing­ly about a 1984 mass shoot­ing in which a sur­vival­ist gun­man took out his rage at “inter­na­tion­al bankers” by mas­sacring 21 peo­ple in a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, Cal­i­for­nia. “It wouldn’t be such a bad thing if they would pick their tar­gets a lit­tle more care­ful­ly,” he said.

    Mason fad­ed into rel­a­tive obscu­ri­ty for the rest of the ’90s and ear­ly aughts, when he was in and out of prison on weapons charges and for an inap­pro­pri­ate rela­tion­ship with a 14-year-old girl, of whom he had tak­en nude pho­tographs.

    But in 2017, the year his hero “Char­lie” would pass into the astral plane, Mason has found new rel­e­vance, and a fawn­ing group of dis­ci­ples in Atom­waf­fen.

    Ear­li­er this year Atom­waf­fen repub­lished Mason’s book “Siege” online, and announced the launch of a new Uni­ver­sal Order web­site.

    “JAMES MASON IS BACK!” read a July head­line on the fas­cist zine Noose, an Atom­waf­fen site. After years of try­ing, the arti­cle said, Atom­waf­fen mem­bers had final­ly tracked down Mason for an exclu­sive inter­view!

    And to the vio­lent group’s absolute glee, Mason was still Mason, an unhinged admir­er of Man­son and mass mur­der­ers.

    “My views on Man­son have not changed,” he told an Atom­waf­fen mem­ber. “We had a soci­ety post-WW2 that was dis­in­te­grat­ing, a mile a minute. We had a hip­pie gen­er­a­tion, a coun­try that was head­ing head­long into nation­al sui­cide. Manson’s com­mune was solid­ly, solid­ly white.”

    When asked for his thoughts on Anders Breivik, the far-right Nor­we­gian ter­ror­ist con­vict­ed of killing 77 peo­ple in a bomb­ing and mass shoot­ing in 2011, Mason replied that Breivik was “dead-on.”

    “I’m nev­er gonna dis­own any­body who does some­thing like that,” Mason said.

    Else­where in the inter­view, Mason said he’s “mild­ly encour­aged” by the rise of Don­ald Trump.

    As recent­ly as Sun­day, one day before Man­son died, Mason appar­ent­ly wrote an arti­cle on the Uni­ver­sal Order web­site: a 1,400-word trea­tise prais­ing Nazi eugen­ics and euthana­sia.

    No word from Siegecul­ture about Char­lie’s death until we’ve com­plet­ed our sur­prise. We have a memo­r­i­al in the works, more on it lat­er this week. Satanspeed. pic.twitter.com/3M0t3qWtNY— SIEGE Cul­ture (@siegeculture_) Novem­ber 20, 2017

    Mason’s young devo­tees, mean­while, have hint­ed on Twit­ter — anoth­er key rad­i­cal­iza­tion plat­form — that they’re plan­ning a memo­r­i­al for “Char­lie,” a more elab­o­rate send-off for this pro­to-alt-right Hit­ler­ian avatar of death and ter­ror.

    ...

    ———-

    “The Mani­ac Neo-Nazis Keep­ing Charles Manson’s Race War Alive” by Luke O’Brien and Christo­pher Math­ias; The Huff­in­g­ton Post; 11/21/2017

    “If you’re won­der­ing who might rhap­sodize a psy­chot­ic racist in this man­ner, the answer is oth­er psy­chot­ic racists, many of whom belong to Atom­waf­fen Divi­sion, a par­tic­u­lar­ly blood­thirsty and anti-Amer­i­can branch of the so-called alt-right that has made wor­ship­ping Man­son a part of their cultish devo­tion to vio­lent insur­rec­tion.”

    Charles Man­son: Patron saint of the guys who want to blow up your local nuclear pow­er plant. Because of course.

    And this group makes ISIS-style videos encour­ag­ing Amer­i­cans to declare war on the coun­try through acts of vio­lence in order to make Charles Man­son’s visions of race war and the col­lapse of soci­ety a real­i­ty:

    ...
    Even with­in the alt-right — a loose asso­ci­a­tion of white suprema­cists and fas­cists — the Atom­waf­fen Divi­sion is con­sid­ered extreme. The group, whose name trans­lates to “Atom­ic Weapons Divi­sion,” puts out ISIS-style pro­pa­gan­da videos on YouTube that fea­ture mem­bers clad in skull masks and cam­ou­flage out­fits, some­times on train­ing exer­cis­es in the woods, often hold­ing guns and the organization’s dis­tinc­tive yel­low-and-black nuclear-themed flags. In one video, mem­bers burn a copy of the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion on a grill.
    ...

    But let’s not for­get that so much of what excites Atom­waf­fen mem­bers with Man­son’s race war ram­blings is the kind of world­view that excites a lot more than just Attomwaf­fen. Most far-right­ists are just less overt about it in pub­lic:

    ...
    Apoc­a­lyp­tic luna­cy has always been part of far-right pol­i­tics, and a vig­or­ous strain of it runs through today’s alt-right white suprema­cist move­ment. It should come as no sur­prise, then, that Man­son, whose once-upon-a-time sta­tus as a long­hair could nev­er obscure the swasti­ka carved into his fore­head, might serve as a new ves­sel of mad­ness for today’s vio­lent racists. In many ways, he was a fore­bear of groups like Atom­waf­fen and a bug-eyed pro­to­type for the mod­ern race war­rior.

    Manson’s deranged polit­i­cal teach­ings were a mish-mash of Sci­en­tol­ogy, occultism and Nazism, all bun­dled into an orig­i­nal end-of-days tale. Stay with me, he told his fol­low­ers, and you’ll be saved from the com­ing race war.

    “Man­son was moti­vat­ed by an apoc­a­lyp­tic belief in the immi­nent end of the world through a race war in which the White pop­u­la­tion was doomed to defeat,” Jef­frey Kaplan wrote in Ency­clo­pe­dia of White Pow­er: A Source­book on the Rad­i­cal Racist Right. “The vic­to­ri­ous Black pop­u­la­tion would in time real­ize that the White man is genet­i­cal­ly more fit to gov­ern, and would seek in vain for White sur­vivors of the racial Holo­caust to assume the reins of pow­er. The Man­son fam­i­ly, hav­ing sur­vived the apoc­a­lypse by hid­ing in a time­less cave at the cen­ter of the world, would then emerge to take pow­er.”
    ...

    Apoc­a­lyp­tic luna­cy has always been part of far-right pol­i­tics, and a vig­or­ous strain of it runs through today’s alt-right white suprema­cist move­ment. It should come as no sur­prise, then, that Man­son, whose once-upon-a-time sta­tus as a long­hair could nev­er obscure the swasti­ka carved into his fore­head, might serve as a new ves­sel of mad­ness for today’s vio­lent racists. In many ways, he was a fore­bear of groups like Atom­waf­fen and a bug-eyed pro­to­type for the mod­ern race war­rior

    Yep, Man­son was indeed a “bug-eyed pro­to­type for the mod­ern race war­rior.” And note how Amer­i­can Nazi James Mason’s expe­ri­ences with Man­son led him to con­clude that there’s a com­bined ‘super-cap­i­tal­ist’ and ‘super-com­mu­nist’ glob­al con­spir­a­cy against white peo­ple. It’s hard not to notice the over­lap with with the gen­er­al world­view of Steve Ban­non or Alex Jones. That’s how unfor­tu­nate­ly top­i­cal Charles Man­son’s ideas are today:

    ...
    It was in prison that Man­son start­ed a cor­re­spon­dence with a long­time Amer­i­can neo-Nazi named James Mason, who would come to view “Char­lie” as a prophet of hate. Mason was the type of man who con­sid­ered Auschwitz a “damned nice place,” and his wingnut jour­ney would take him from the heart of orga­nized white suprema­cy to years of inept obscu­ri­ty and, ulti­mate­ly, back to a faint rel­e­vance in the Trump era thanks to the alt-right and Atom­waf­fen.

    A fas­cist since he was 13, when he joined the youth move­ment of George Lin­coln Rockwell’s Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty, Mason had rad­i­cal­ized him­self while watch­ing black peo­ple take to the streets dur­ing the civ­il rights era. As a young adult, he set up Nazi booths at coun­ty fairs in south­ern Ohio, where he’d grown up.

    “We should shoot for bring­ing down the sys­tem,” he would lat­er say. “Destroy the sys­tem.”

    Mason even­tu­al­ly left the Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty and joined a splin­ter group called the Nation­al Social­ist Lib­er­a­tion Front. Some NSLF mem­bers were fans of Man­son, which prompt­ed Mason to begin research­ing the cult leader. In 1980, Mason reached out to the incar­cer­at­ed Man­son. The two began com­mu­ni­cat­ing reg­u­lar­ly by mail and phone.

    “What I dis­cov­ered was a rev­e­la­tion equal to the rev­e­la­tion I received when I first found Adolf Hitler,” Mason would lat­er explain.

    Through “Char­lie,” Mason came to under­stand that Hitler’s death had brought about the end of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. Every gov­ern­ment in the world was now part of an anti-white glob­al con­spir­a­cy run by “super cap­i­tal­ists” and “super com­mu­nists.” Noth­ing about West­ern cul­ture or its insti­tu­tions could be sal­vaged. It would all have to be blown to smithereens.

    “It’s just like a human organ­ism that has ingest­ed a fatal dose of poi­son,” Mason would explain. “[If] you fall asleep with it and try to ride it out, you’re going to die, but if you become sud­den­ly, vio­lent­ly ill and expel that poi­son — even though the expe­ri­ence may be rather unpleas­ant — you at least have a chance to live. Man­son called that Hel­ter Skel­ter.”
    ...

    “Through “Char­lie,” Mason came to under­stand that Hitler’s death had brought about the end of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. Every gov­ern­ment in the world was now part of an anti-white glob­al con­spir­a­cy run by “super cap­i­tal­ists” and “super com­mu­nists.” Noth­ing about West­ern cul­ture or its insti­tu­tions could be sal­vaged. It would all have to be blown to smithereens.

    Isn’t that pret­ty much the far-right zeit­gi­est nowa­days? There’s a giant glob­al con­spir­a­cy against white peo­ple per­pe­trat­ed by left-wing ‘com­mu­nists’. And when you point out that almost all the wealth and pow­er is held by right-wing cap­i­tal­ists, the far-right throws in ‘super-cap­i­tal­ists’ into the mix of bad­dies too. Isn’t that more or less the gener­ic ‘angry-white Alt-Right male’ zeit­gi­est con­stant­ly get­ting pumped out by places like InfoWars and Bre­it­bart? Isn’t con­tem­po­rary far-right nihilism in the West deeply infused with the spir­it of Man­son’s Hel­ter Skel­ter? It sure seems like it, which is why Charles Man­son is so trag­i­cal­ly top­i­cal.

    And giv­en that so much of the Alex Jones/Breitbart world­view wraps itself in an ‘us against Big Broth­er’ exte­ri­or, it’s also worth keep­ing in mind that the core prin­ci­ple behind Nazism and most far-right ide­olo­gies is some­thing very close to the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ple behind the ‘Big Broth­er’ in Orwell’s 1984: pow­er for pow­er’s sake. Achieved and held at any cost, through any means nec­es­sary. That is the core of far-right reac­tionary thought if you strip every­thing else away. Joy in wield­ing pow­er mer­ci­less­ly cou­pled with a raw ter­ror in los­ing that pow­er and a will­ing­ness to do any­thing to get it. That, com­bined with a hefty dose of sadis­tic hate, is the core of much of these ide­olo­gies. It’s why Nazis are so ready and will­ing to com­mit acts of ter­ror and prop­a­gate Big Lies in order to achieve their objec­tives: fas­cism is about the pow­er. That’s pret­ty much it. Every­thing else is just win­dow dress­ing. Just like Big Broth­er.

    So there real­ly is a group plot­ting against white peo­ple: Nazis and their fas­cist allies who want to col­lapse soci­ety via ter­ror and hate so they can seize con­trol. That’s who. Because if you look at the col­lec­tion of far-right move­ments around the worlds, it’s typ­i­cal­ly a meta-move­ment of aspir­ing Big Broth­ers who care about lit­tle more than hav­ing unchecked pow­er and being free to car­ry out their every sadis­tic whim. And Hel­ter Skel­ter, and its con­tem­po­rary memet­ic Alt-Right troll-war­rior vari­ants, are just a means to that end of seiz­ing com­plete pow­er. The Nazis are lit­er­al­ly try­ing to become Big Broth­er by label­ing the non-Naz­i­fied ele­ments of soci­ety Big Broth­er and declar­ing war on it and that’s def­i­nite­ly an agen­da that qual­i­fies as a plot against white peo­ple. And every­one else.

    And that’s all why it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that, while Atom­waf­fen is indeed an out­lier the neo-Nazi scene in terms of their extreme­ly open calls for basi­cal­ly ISIS-style domes­tic ter­ror and sab­o­tage, it’s not like they aren’t just say­ing what a large frac­tion of the far-right qui­et­ly talks about and plots behind closed doors. So when you read about how Atom­waf­fen and/or Charles Man­son are con­sid­ered out­lier in the neo-Nazi scene, don’t for­get about this word of endorse­ment from none oth­er than Andrew ‘weev’ Auern­heimer:

    ...
    For Mason and oth­er white suprema­cists, Man­son was almost a divine being, an atavis­tic incar­na­tion of hate. The cult leader fit neat­ly into a strain of fas­cist mag­i­cal real­ism called “Eso­teric Hit­lerism” that became pop­u­lar after World War II when the Greek writer Sav­it­ri Devi pro­posed that Hitler was the ninth avatar of Vish­nu and racist dupes some­how bought into it.

    This type of crazy remains en vogue among the alt-right today, with notable expo­nents such as Andrew “weev” Auern­heimer, a neo-Nazi hack­er and the web­mas­ter for The Dai­ly Stormer, whose charis­mat­ic rav­ings make him the clos­est thing to a con­tem­po­rary Man­son in the move­ment. (Auern­heimer has ties to Atom­waf­fen and after the Arthurs mur­ders issued an over­loud decla­ma­tion about how he knew the shoot­er and the vic­tims but had pre­vi­ous­ly banned Arthurs from a Dai­ly Stormer forum.)
    ...

    Don’t for­get: Auern­heimer called Atom­waf­fen “a good bunch of dudes” fol­low­ing the dou­ble-mur­der in Flori­da. They’re only “extreme” in terms of how extreme­ly out in the open they are about the kinds of things neo-Nazi move­ments qui­et­ly plot about. But oth­er than that, by neo-Nazi stan­dards they real­ly aren’t all that extreme. And that whole gen­er­al poi­so­nous mind-set pumped out by right-wing media across the world that white peo­ple are under attack by the world real­ly could have been the kind of thing you would hear com­ing out of Charles Man­son’s mouth. In oth­er words, when the far-right drops the mask, you’re going to be look­ing at Charles Man­son. Or one of his admir­ers wear­ing a skull mask.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 29, 2018, 10:32 pm
  8. @ Pter­rafractyl–

    A cou­ple of points:

    With Atom­waf­fen mak­ing ISIS-style videos advo­cat­ing may­hem, we should not for­get that their medi­at­ed exhor­ta­tions, like James Mason’s call for “lone-wolf” vio­lence, gained impuni­ty from civ­il suits hold­ing them to finan­cial account for vio­lence com­mit­ted by con­sumers of their mate­r­i­al as a result of Glenn Green­wald’s efforts.

    Also:

    Mason’s “Siege” was pub­lished by Adam Par­frey, a degen­er­ate who has shep­herd­ed a drug-addled psy­chopath named Dan Right­my­er, aka Dan Righ­tuy­er aka “Alex Con­stan­tine” (the nom de plume under which he pub­lish­es). Right­my­er and Par­frey have latched on to my late dear friend Mae Brus­sel­l’s mate­r­i­al.

    That is why I have coun­seled that peo­ple should steer clear of the vul­tures that have descend­ed on her grave.

    Mae spent–and gave–her life work­ing against the likes of Charles Man­son, James Mason et al.

    Par­frey pro­motes, and caters to, those ele­ments.

    Best,

    Dave Emory

    Posted by Dave Emory | January 30, 2018, 11:59 pm
  9. A sus­pect has been appre­hend­ed in the recent arson attacks on three black church­es in Louisiana and, sur­prise!, the sus­pect has what appears to at last have tan­gen­tial ties to racist groups. Specif­i­cal­ly, the sus­pect, Hold­en Matthews, appears to be involved in the “black met­al” music scene with a big focus on pagan reli­gions and Norse mythol­o­gy:

    The Dai­ly Beast

    ‘Evil Act’: Hold­en Matthews Charged With Arson of 3 Black Louisiana Church­es
    Sher­if­f’s deputy’s son took an inter­est in black met­al and pagan social media pages, which had con­nec­tions to neo-Nazism and white suprema­cy.

    Olivia Mess­er, Julia Arci­ga, Kel­ly Weill, Adam Rawns­ley
    04.10.19 9:48 PM ET

    Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards on Thurs­day described the three fires that destroyed pre­dom­i­nant­ly black church­es in rur­al Louisiana as an “evil act” com­mit­ted by the son of a sheriff’s deputy.

    Hold­en Matthews was arrest­ed Wednes­day on three counts of sim­ple arson for fires that on destroyed the church­es in St. Landry Parish over ten days. The fires were set on March 26, April 2, and April 4, and destroyed St. Mary Bap­tist Church, Greater Union Bap­tist Church, and Mount Pleas­ant Bap­tist Church, respec­tive­ly. Matthews, 21, was booked into jail Wednes­day evening.

    Louisiana State Fire Mar­shal “Butch” Brown­ing, at a Thurs­day morn­ing press con­fer­ence, called the fires “an attack on our God and our reli­gion.”

    “In my career, I have nev­er seen such a spir­i­tu­al mis­sion that has come home so quick­ly,” said Brown­ing, who not­ed that Matthews’ arrest was quick in part because “we felt that oth­er crimes were immi­nent.”

    An arrest war­rant report­ed­ly showed that offi­cials con­nect­ed Matthews to the crimes through the charred remains of a brand of gas can found at the scene of the April 4 fire. Matthews alleged­ly used his deb­it card and ID to pur­chase that same brand of gas can, along with a lighter and a 10 pack of auto­mo­tive shop tow­els on March 25, The Advo­cate reports.

    The same col­or and mod­el pick­up that Matthews dri­ves was also present at two of the church­es short­ly before the fires were report­ed to 911, accord­ing to video footage ref­er­enced in the arrest war­rant.

    FBI agent Eric J. Rom­mal, also at the press con­fer­ence, said the bureau is inves­ti­gat­ing whether the crimes were “bias-moti­vat­ed.”

    “Right now we are just mak­ing sure we gath­er all the facts,” he said, when pressed on the issue.

    A Face­book page that appeared to belong to Matthews showed he was active in pagan and black met­al pages, and that he com­ment­ed on two memes about far-right for­mer neo-Nazi met­al musi­cian Varg Vikernes, who served 15 years in prison for killing a fel­low met­al musi­cian and burn­ing church­es in Nor­way. The com­ments revealed lit­tle oth­er than that they indi­cat­ed his famil­iar­i­ty with the fig­ure.

    The pagan cir­cles Matthews and Vikernes fre­quent­ed can be pop­u­lar with neo-Nazis. Matthews fre­quent­ly post­ed about pagan beliefs, and recent­ly uploaded a pic­ture of a gun and a knife with the cap­tion “I car­ry this..... maybe not legal­ly but I only tru­ly fol­low the law of Odin..... which says as you said, arm your­self...... Odins advice> mod­ern law.” Odin is a pagan Norse god.

    One of the pagan pages Matthews was active on specif­i­cal­ly for­bade racism and “nazi stuff.” Matthews also appeared aware of the reli­gion’s white suprema­cist asso­ci­a­tions. In one post, a group mem­ber not­ed that a draw­ing of a pagan fig­ure had a swasti­ka-like design on his belt. “well yea the belt gives him extra strength and pow­er..... white pow­er lmao jk jk I had to,” Matthews wrote.

    ...

    ———-

    “‘Evil Act’: Hold­en Matthews Charged With Arson of 3 Black Louisiana Church­es” by Olivia Mess­er, Julia Arci­ga, Kel­ly Weill, and Adam Rawns­ley; The Dai­ly Beast; 04/10/2019

    “A Face­book page that appeared to belong to Matthews showed he was active in pagan and black met­al pages, and that he com­ment­ed on two memes about far-right for­mer neo-Nazi met­al musi­cian Varg Vikernes, who served 15 years in prison for killing a fel­low met­al musi­cian and burn­ing church­es in Nor­way. The com­ments revealed lit­tle oth­er than that they indi­cat­ed his famil­iar­i­ty with the fig­ure.”

    So Matthews has social media posts that make it clear he has a strong inter­est in black met­al and pagan­ism. And while there did­n’t appear to be posts where he expressed racist atti­tudes, he did com­ment on some posts about who served 15 years in prison for killing a fel­low met­al musi­cian and burn­ing church­es in Nor­way. And Matthews did make a ‘white pow­er’ joke, but oth­er than that his social media pro­file does­n’t appear to be filled with neo-Nazi con­tent which, of course, does­n’t mean he was­n’t a neo-Nazi but indi­cates he was­n’t open about it if he was:

    ...
    The pagan cir­cles Matthews and Vikernes fre­quent­ed can be pop­u­lar with neo-Nazis. Matthews fre­quent­ly post­ed about pagan beliefs, and recent­ly uploaded a pic­ture of a gun and a knife with the cap­tion “I car­ry this..... maybe not legal­ly but I only tru­ly fol­low the law of Odin..... which says as you said, arm your­self...... Odins advice> mod­ern law.” Odin is a pagan Norse god.

    One of the pagan pages Matthews was active on specif­i­cal­ly for­bade racism and “nazi stuff.” Matthews also appeared aware of the reli­gion’s white suprema­cist asso­ci­a­tions. In one post, a group mem­ber not­ed that a draw­ing of a pagan fig­ure had a swasti­ka-like design on his belt. “well yea the belt gives him extra strength and pow­er..... white pow­er lmao jk jk I had to,” Matthews wrote.
    ...

    And now here’s a piece in The Advo­cate that includes a num­ber of screen­shots of Math­ews’s social media posts, includ­ing the com­ments about the Varg Vikernes meme. It’s worth not­ing that Matthews appears to be defend­ing a movie about the Nor­we­gian black met­al scene, Lords of Chaos, in his com­ments to the meme about Viker­nes’s depic­tion in the movie. Vikernes slammed the movie as “made up” and com­plained about being por­trayed by a Jew­ish actor. Matthews com­ments appear to defend the movie. The arti­cle also notes that Matthews post­ed in recent months about being vis­it­ed by Hel, the Norse mythol­o­gy god­dess of death, after Matthews per­formed an unspec­i­fied “sac­ri­fice.” And that points towards per­haps some sort of reli­gious zealotry and men­tal ill­ness play­ing a role in these arson attacks. So while it’s quite intrigu­ing that Matthews has social media com­ments about a memes about a neo-Nazi black met­al musi­cian who burned down church­es in Nor­way, it’s still unclear to what extent Matthews’s actions were dri­ven by neo-Nazi beliefs vs reli­gious hatred:

    The Advo­cate

    Before church fires arrest, Hold­en Matthews post­ed on Face­book about sac­ri­fice, vis­it from god­dess

    Advo­cate staff report Apr 11, 2019 — 2:11 pm

    In the months lead­ing up to a trio of fires that destroyed three St. Landry church­es, the sus­pect­ed arson­ist shared on social media about his inter­est in “black metal,“a Nor­we­gian music genre con­nect­ed to mul­ti­ple church burn­ings and anti-Chris­t­ian val­ues.

    Those posts caught the eyes of law enforce­ment, as Louisiana State Fire Mar­shal Butch Brown­ing said in a news con­fer­ence Thurs­day that they were inves­ti­gat­ing the ties between the sus­pec­t’s fer­vor for “black met­al” and the fires he’s accused of set­ting.

    Hold­en Matthews, 21, of Opelousas, was arrest­ed Wednes­day on three counts of sim­ple arson of a reli­gious build­ing. Inves­ti­ga­tors said he set overnight fires that destroyed three Bap­tist church­es with­in 10 days. Offi­cials said they’re still inves­ti­gat­ing if there was a “hate motive” in the arsons.

    His social media pages, how­ev­er, indi­cate his fan­dom for the music genre that law enforce­ment is inves­ti­gat­ing.

    In one post, Matthews shared that he was vis­it­ed by Hel, the Norse mythol­o­gy god­dess of death, after Matthews per­formed an unspec­i­fied “sac­ri­fice.”

    In anoth­er post, he wrote that he carved a Thor’s ham­mer pen­dant from a bone after anoth­er Face­book user asked for advice on where to buy one. Thor’s ham­mer is a Norse sym­bol con­nect­ed to the god of thun­der. The ham­mer also has mod­ern day con­nec­tions to fol­low­ers of neo-Norse reli­gions, such as Asatru.

    “Although its tra­di­tion­al ori­gins are non-racist, and although most Asatruers today are not racist, the Thor’s Ham­mer sym­bol has been appro­pri­at­ed by neo-Nazis and oth­er white suprema­cists, espe­cial­ly those who prac­tice racist or white suprema­cist ver­sions of neo-Norse beliefs under the guise of Odin­ism or Wotanism,” accord­ing to the Anti-Defama­tion League.

    Matthews also showed his devo­tion to the Norse god Odin through his likes on Face­book and his activism in a Face­book group called “fol­low­ers of the old ways.” He liked mul­ti­ple posts about the god of war, includ­ing a prayer to Odin that said, “you who choos­es the slain, look on my deeds.”

    Here are screen­shots from his recent social media posts and com­ments.

    [see screen shots 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10]

    ...

    ———

    “Before church fires arrest, Hold­en Matthews post­ed on Face­book about sac­ri­fice, vis­it from god­dess” by Advo­cate staff; The Advo­cate; 04/11/2019

    “In one post, Matthews shared that he was vis­it­ed by Hel, the Norse mythol­o­gy god­dess of death, after Matthews per­formed an unspec­i­fied “sac­ri­fice.””

    So the guy was def­i­nite­ly into mak­ing “sac­ri­fices” to Norse gods and if he had neo-Nazi racist beliefs he was­n’t real­ly reveal­ing that on social media. And yet it’s hard to come up with a more racist act than the burn­ing of three black church­es in an area over a short peri­od of time. That’s clas­sic racist domes­tic ter­ror­ism. Is it pos­si­ble the church burn­ings were dri­ven by some­thing oth­er than racism? Well, that seems unlike­ly giv­en the cir­cum­stances, but it’s worth not­ing that Matthews’s social media posts days before his arrest show Matthews had a deep hatred of specif­i­cal­ly Bap­tists. The three black church­es he burned down were all Bap­tist church­es. Accord­ing to Matthews’s post, he can­not “stand all these bap­tists around here, bunch of brain­washed peo­ple try­ing to find hap­pi­ness in a reli­gion that was forced on their ances­tors just as it was on mine,” and wished that “more blacks [sic] peo­ple would look into ancient beliefs of pre Chris­t­ian Africa.” So while it’s hard to ignore the overt racist nature of the burn­ing of three specif­i­cal­ly black church­es, it would appear that an intense anti-Chris­t­ian (and specif­i­cal­ly anti-Bap­tist) sen­ti­ment could have been at least part of what drove Matthews’s actions:

    CNN

    Louisiana arson sus­pect expressed dis­gust with Bap­tist church­es on Face­book

    By Paul P. Mur­phy and Sami­ra Said, CNN
    Updat­ed 8:16 PM ET, Fri April 12, 2019

    (CNN)Four days before his arrest in con­nec­tion with the three Louisiana Bap­tist church fires, Hold­en Matthews expressed dis­gust with Bap­tist beliefs on Face­book, CNN has learned.

    Respond­ing to a post about “afrikan spir­i­tu­al­i­ty,” Matthews, post­ing under the name Noc­tis Matthews, said he can­not “stand all these bap­tists around here, bunch of brain­washed peo­ple try­ing to find hap­pi­ness in a reli­gion that was forced on their ances­tors just as it was on mine.”

    In the post­ing, Matthews said he wished that, “more blacks [sic] peo­ple would look into ancient beliefs of pre Chris­t­ian Africa.”

    An acquain­tance, Nygyl Bryyn, con­firmed to CNN the pro­file and alias is that of Hold­en Matthews. He says his friend is not racist and believes the church­es were, “vic­tims of cir­cum­stances.”

    All three church­es author­i­ties say Matthews burned down were black Bap­tist church­es in the heart of south cen­tral Louisiana’s Cajun and Cre­ole coun­try.

    The sus­pect is the 21-year-old son of a St. Landry Parish sher­if­f’s deputy and may have been influ­enced by “black met­al” music and its “asso­ci­at­ed his­to­ry with church burn­ings,” the state fire mar­shal’s office said.

    CNN reached out to Matthews’ lawyer and the pros­e­cu­tor’s office but have not yet received a response. When CNN asked author­i­ties if they were aware of the post­ing, they said because the inves­ti­ga­tion was ongo­ing they would not detail any par­tic­u­lar leads they are fol­low­ing.

    While the motive is still under inves­ti­ga­tion, author­i­ties said that Matthews’ inter­est in black met­al music may have influ­enced his behav­ior.

    Black met­al is a sub­genre of heavy met­al music that typ­i­cal­ly takes on anti-Chris­t­ian, satan­ic and pagan themes.

    The black met­al songs typ­i­cal­ly have a fast tem­po and fea­ture shriek­ing vocals, heav­i­ly dis­tort­ed gui­tars and uncon­ven­tion­al song struc­tures.

    A song from the sus­pec­t’s band, Pagan Car­nage, ref­er­enced church burn­ings.

    The day after police say Matthews burned down St. Mary Bap­tist Church in Port Barre, a video was post­ed on his band’s YouTube page of his song, “Dia­bol­i­cal Soul Feast.”

    “The holy church is now destroyed,” Matthews screams in the final lyrics of the song. “Burn­ing down in Odin’s name.”

    Bryyn says that Matthews writes and per­forms the song.

    ...

    Greater Union was among three his­tor­i­cal­ly black church­es in rur­al St. Landry Parish, west of Baton Rouge, that police said were inten­tion­al­ly torched over a 10-day span.

    St. Mary Bap­tist Church in Port Barre, locat­ed about six miles south­east of Greater Union, burned first on March 26. Greater Union Bap­tist was set ablaze on April 2. Mount Pleas­ant Bap­tist Church burned on April 4.

    ———-

    “Louisiana arson sus­pect expressed dis­gust with Bap­tist church­es on Face­book” by Paul P. Mur­phy and Sami­ra Said; CNN; 04/12/2019

    “Respond­ing to a post about “afrikan spir­i­tu­al­i­ty,” Matthews, post­ing under the name Noc­tis Matthews, said he can­not “stand all these bap­tists around here, bunch of brain­washed peo­ple try­ing to find hap­pi­ness in a reli­gion that was forced on their ances­tors just as it was on mine.”

    Were Matthews’s actions dri­ven by a desire to encour­age black Amer­i­cans to return to pre-Chris­t­ian reli­gions out a belief that Chris­tian­i­ty had been imposed on them just as it was imposed on Matthews’s ances­tors? Not dri­ven by racism but instead dri­ven by a sense of lib­er­at­ing the black Bap­tists from the Chris­tian­i­ty that had been imposed on them. If so, Matthews may have dis­cov­ered the sec­ond worst rea­son to burn down church­es. Neo-Nazi beliefs are obvi­ous­ly worse, but this would still be pret­ty awful:

    ...
    In the post­ing, Matthews said he wished that, “more blacks [sic] peo­ple would look into ancient beliefs of pre Chris­t­ian Africa.”

    An acquain­tance, Nygyl Bryyn, con­firmed to CNN the pro­file and alias is that of Hold­en Matthews. He says his friend is not racist and believes the church­es were, “vic­tims of cir­cum­stances.”

    All three church­es author­i­ties say Matthews burned down were black Bap­tist church­es in the heart of south cen­tral Louisiana’s Cajun and Cre­ole coun­try.
    ...

    And note that Matthews him­self wrote and per­forms a song about burn­ing down church­es in Odin’s name. And the videos of one of those songs was post­ed a day after one of the church burn­ings:

    ...
    The black met­al songs typ­i­cal­ly have a fast tem­po and fea­ture shriek­ing vocals, heav­i­ly dis­tort­ed gui­tars and uncon­ven­tion­al song struc­tures.

    A song from the sus­pec­t’s band, Pagan Car­nage, ref­er­enced church burn­ings.

    The day after police say Matthews burned down St. Mary Bap­tist Church in Port Barre, a video was post­ed on his band’s YouTube page of his song, “Dia­bol­i­cal Soul Feast.”

    “The holy church is now destroyed,” Matthews screams in the final lyrics of the song. “Burn­ing down in Odin’s name.”

    Bryyn says that Matthews writes and per­forms the song.
    ...

    So it almost has the feel of Matthews real­ly was engag­ing in some sort of sac­ri­fi­cial act when he burned these church­es down. If they had­n’t all been black church­es it would be eas­i­er to attribute the moti­va­tion pri­mar­i­ly to anti-Chris­t­ian Odin­ist zealotry. We’re left with this remark­able set of facts where Matthews does­n’t over­ly seem like he was dri­ven by neo-Nazi beliefs even when you fac­tor in the whole black met­al Odin­ist part of his back­ground and instead he may have been pri­mar­i­ly dri­ven by his overt intense anti-Chris­t­ian beliefs. But there’s no get­ting around the fact that he did­n’t just burn down three church­es after express­ing anti-Chris­t­ian sen­ti­ments. He burned down three black church­es. So if he was­n’t try­ing to send a racist mes­sage and ter­ror­ize the local black com­mu­ni­ty and was instead try­ing to send a gener­ic anti-Chris­t­ian mes­sage that was an incred­i­ble over­sight on his part.

    And now we’re learn­ing that pros­e­cu­tors are adding hate crime charges. Although it’s unclear if the charges are for a hate crime over race or a hate crime over reli­gion:

    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Sus­pect in Louisiana church fires charged with hate crimes

    By MELINDA DESLATTE
    04/15/2019

    OPELOUSAS, La. (AP) — The white man sus­pect­ed in the burn­ings of three African Amer­i­can church­es in Louisiana will remain in jail, denied bond Mon­day by a judge, as state pros­e­cu­tors added new charges declar­ing the arsons a hate crime.

    Twen­ty-one-year-old Hold­en Matthews, the son of a sheriff’s deputy, entered his not guilty plea via video con­fer­ence from the St. Landry Parish jail. The judge set a Sep­tem­ber tri­al date.

    In deny­ing bail, state Dis­trict Judge James Doher­ty sided with law enforce­ment offi­cials who said they wor­ried Matthews would try to flee the area or set more fires.

    “We felt that he was an imme­di­ate risk to pub­lic safe­ty,” said Louisiana Fire Mar­shal Butch Brown­ing. “In my mind, I felt anoth­er fire was immi­nent.”

    Tes­ti­fy­ing in court, Brown­ing out­lined a litany of evi­dence, includ­ing some new details of the inves­ti­ga­tion, that he said tied Matthews to the torch­ing of the three black church­es over 10 days.

    The fire mar­shal described cell­phone records plac­ing Matthews at the fire loca­tions, and he said images on the phone showed all three church­es burn­ing before law enforce­ment arrived and showed Matthews “claim­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty” for the fires.

    Matthews, who had no pre­vi­ous crim­i­nal record, was arrest­ed Wednes­day on three charges of arson of a reli­gious build­ing. Pros­e­cu­tors filed doc­u­ments Mon­day adding three more charges, accus­ing Matthews of vio­lat­ing Louisiana’s hate crime law, a link author­i­ties had pre­vi­ous­ly stopped short of mak­ing.

    Brown­ing said fed­er­al offi­cials also are con­sid­er­ing fil­ing addi­tion­al fed­er­al hate crime and arson charges against Matthews.

    Matthews, shack­led and wear­ing an orange prison jump­suit, nev­er spoke to the court dur­ing the hear­ing, let­ting his court-appoint­ed lawyer enter the not guilty plea for him. His par­ents watched their son’s appear­ance on video con­fer­ence from the court­room, his dad repeat­ed­ly wring­ing his hands and, at one point, leav­ing the room in tears.

    The fires, all start­ed with gaso­line, occurred in and around Opelousas, about 60 miles west of Louisiana’s cap­i­tal city of Baton Rouge.

    Matthews’ arrest came a lit­tle more than two weeks after the first blaze at the St. Mary Bap­tist Church on March 26 in Port Barre, a town just out­side of Opelousas. Days lat­er, the Greater Union Bap­tist Church and Mount Pleas­ant Bap­tist Church in Opelousas were burned. Each was more than 100 years old.

    The church­es were emp­ty at the time, and no one was injured. But at one loca­tion, two occu­pants of a near­by home had to evac­u­ate when the sid­ing on the home start­ed to catch fire from the church.

    The fires set the com­mu­ni­ty on edge. Gov. John Bel Edwards said the church burn­ings were a reminder “of a very dark past of intim­i­da­tion and fear.”

    ...

    Pros­e­cu­tors, through Browning’s tes­ti­mo­ny, gave more insight into the evi­dence that law enforce­ment used to build their case against Matthews.

    The fire mar­shal said a receipt shows Matthews bought a gas can and a pack­age of oil rags sim­i­lar to those found at the site of the fires. A lighter and the pack­age of oil rags, miss­ing some of its con­tents, were found in Matthews’ truck, Brown­ing said. He said Matthews doc­u­ment­ed the fire on his cell­phone, while video sur­veil­lance in the area around the church­es showed a truck sim­i­lar to the one Matthews dri­ves. Matthews had copies of news reports about the fires on his phone as well, Brown­ing said.

    “He actu­al­ly super­im­posed him­self on those news reports, claim­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for these fires,” Brown­ing said.

    In addi­tion, Brown­ing said video on Matthews’ phone showed a con­ver­sa­tion with a friend before the fires in which he talked about burn­ing church­es and using gaso­line to do it. The fire mar­shal said Matthews post­ed on Face­book about and showed inter­est in a movie called “Lords of Chaos,” which Brown­ing said is a recent Nor­we­gian film that involved church burn­ings.

    Matthews had shown inter­est in “black met­al,” an extreme sub­genre of heavy met­al, Brown­ing said. The music has been linked, in some instances, to fires at Chris­t­ian church­es in Nor­way in the 1990s.

    “The evi­dence we have was unequiv­o­cal,” Brown­ing said. Lat­er he added: “He has clear­ly demon­strat­ed the char­ac­ter­is­tics of a patho­log­i­cal fire set­ter.”

    ———-

    “Sus­pect in Louisiana church fires charged with hate crimes” by MELINDA DESLATTE;

    ; 04/15/2019

    “Matthews, who had no pre­vi­ous crim­i­nal record, was arrest­ed Wednes­day on three charges of arson of a reli­gious build­ing. Pros­e­cu­tors filed doc­u­ments Mon­day adding three more charges, accus­ing Matthews of vio­lat­ing Louisiana’s hate crime law, a link author­i­ties had pre­vi­ous­ly stopped short of mak­ing.

    So we’ll see what exact­ly the nature is of those hate crime charges. It was either race-based hatred, reli­gion-based hatred, or both. But there was clear­ly some hatred involved. All in all, the ambi­gu­i­ty around this case is a reminder that if you burn down a bunch of black church­es in trib­ute to your Odin­ist beliefs it’s going to be real­ly hard to con­vince peo­ple you aren’t a neo-Nazi if you are indeed not an actu­al neo-Nazi but are instead just an insane Odin­ist big­ot. It’s one of those reminders that hope­ful­ly does­n’t apply to too many real world sit­u­a­tions but here we are.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 15, 2019, 12:16 pm
  10. @Pterrafractyl–

    It turns out that the late Adam Par­frey actu­al­ly was involved with the screen­play of the book.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_Chaos_(film)

    Excerpt: ” . . . . Lords of Chaos is based on the 1998 book of the same name. Orig­i­nal­ly, Japan­ese direc­tor Sion Sono was set to direct a film based on the book, with Jack­son Rath­bone star­ring as Varg Vikernes.[3][4] It would have been Sono’s first Eng­lish-lan­guage film. The screen­play was writ­ten by Hans Fjellestad (who was ear­li­er report­ed to be the film’s direc­tor as well[5]), Ryan Page, Adam Par­frey (the book’s pub­lish­er), and Sono. . . .”

    Posted by Dave Emory | May 9, 2019, 2:54 pm
  11. Pres­i­dent Trump’s order to fly flags at half-staff in response to the mass shoot­er attacks over the week­end expires today, August 8th, 2019. And as the FBI’s for­mer assis­tant direc­tor of coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence, Frank Fig­ili­uzzi, recent point­ed out, August 8th, which can be writ­ten as 8/8, the kind of numero­log­i­cal sym­bol­ism neo-Nazis love. So fol­low­ing the El Paso neo-Nazi attack, Trump choos­es 8/8 as the day to raise the flags back to full staff. What a coin­ci­dence:

    The Inde­pen­dent

    Trump plan to re-raise flags on August 8 will send mes­sage to neo-Nazis, for­mer FBI offi­cial warns

    ‘No one’s think­ing about this, no one’s giv­ing [Trump] the advice,’ says for­mer assis­tant direc­tor of coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence

    Zami­ra Rahim
    08/07/2019 12:34

    A for­mer FBI offi­cial has claimed that Don­ald Trump’s deci­sion to re-raise flags on 8 August is a mis­take, because the date is sig­nif­i­cant to white suprema­cist groups and neo-Nazis.

    Flags in US pub­lic build­ings have been fly­ing at half-mast since the shoot­ings in El Paso and Day­ton last week.

    “We have to under­stand the adver­sary and the threat we’re deal­ing with,” Frank Fig­ili­uzzi said dur­ing an inter­view on MSNBC focused on the prob­lem of white suprema­cy.

    “It’s the lit­tle things and the lan­guage and mes­sag­ing that mat­ters.

    “The pres­i­dent said that we will fly our flags at half-mast on 8 August. That’s 8/8.

    “Now, I’m not going to imply that he did this delib­er­ate­ly but I am using it as an exam­ple of the igno­rance of the adver­sary that’s being demon­strat­ed by the White House.

    “The num­bers 8/8 are very sig­nif­i­cant in neo-Nazi and white suprema­cy move­ments.

    “Why? Because the let­ter H is the eighth let­ter of the alpha­bet and to [neo-Nazis] the num­bers 8/8 togeth­er stand for Heil Hitler.”

    Mr Trump issued a direc­tive on 4 August, order­ing the US flag to be flown at half staff at the White House and pub­lic and mil­i­tary build­ings.

    The direc­tive expires at sun­set on 8 August.

    “No one’s think­ing about this, no one’s giv­ing him the advice,” Mr Fig­ili­uzzi said. “Or he’s reject­ing the advice.”

    The for­mer FBI offi­cial served as the agency’s assis­tant direc­tor of coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence from 2011 to 2012.

    He worked as a spe­cial agent for 25 years, on mat­ters includ­ing ter­ror­ism and for­eign coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence.

    The for­mer official’s com­ments have been mocked by far-right fig­ures includ­ing Ann Coul­ter, who called the crit­i­cism “crazy”.

    “I clear­ly said I’m not say­ing Trump did this delib­er­ate­ly, I’m say­ing he needs advice on how extrem­ists will inter­pret rais­ing the flag on 8/8,” Mr Figli­uzzi said on Twit­ter, in response to the con­tro­ver­sial com­men­ta­tor.

    “He needs advice on putting out the fire he start­ed. Are you part of that solu­tion?”

    The South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­tre (SPLC) and the Anti-Defama­tion League (ADL) have both clas­si­fied 88 as a hate sym­bol used by white suprema­cists.

    “One of the most com­mon white suprema­cist sym­bols, 88 is used through­out the entire white suprema­cist move­ment, not just neo-Nazis,” the ADL’s web­site reads.

    “One can find it as a tat­too or graph­ic sym­bol; as part of the name of a group, pub­li­ca­tion or web­site; or as part of a screen­name or e‑mail address. It is even some­times used as a greet­ing or sign-off.

    “The num­ber is fre­quent­ly com­bined with anoth­er white suprema­cist numer­ic code, 14.”

    The num­bers came to nation­al promi­nence in June 2018 when Milo Yiannopou­los, a far-right online com­men­ta­tor, mocked Talia Lavin, a for­mer New York­er fact check­er, by send­ing her $14.88 on Pay­Pal.

    Extrem­ists use 14 to refer to a white suprema­cist mantra, which is 14 words long, about future gen­er­a­tions.

    ...
    ———–

    “Trump plan to re-raise flags on August 8 will send mes­sage to neo-Nazis, for­mer FBI offi­cial warns” by Zami­ra Rahim; The Inde­pen­dent; 08/07/2019

    ““We have to under­stand the adver­sary and the threat we’re deal­ing with,” Frank Fig­ili­uzzi said dur­ing an inter­view on MSNBC focused on the prob­lem of white suprema­cy.”

    Know thy adver­sary. It’s gen­er­al­ly good advice. Advice that includes an aware­ness of your adver­sary’s sym­bol­ism. The Trump White House of course com­plete­ly acci­den­tal­ly made this mis­take *win­kety wink wink*.

    And note who decid­ed to try and mock Fig­ili­uzzi over his obser­va­tion: Ann Coul­ter:

    ...
    The for­mer official’s com­ments have been mocked by far-right fig­ures includ­ing Ann Coul­ter, who called the crit­i­cism “crazy”.

    “I clear­ly said I’m not say­ing Trump did this delib­er­ate­ly, I’m say­ing he needs advice on how extrem­ists will inter­pret rais­ing the flag on 8/8,” Mr Figli­uzzi said on Twit­ter, in response to the con­tro­ver­sial com­men­ta­tor.
    ...

    So it’s worth recall­ing that Ann had a sim­i­lar response to these kinds of neo-Nazi numero­log­i­cal obser­va­tions back in Jan­u­ary of 2017: On Jan­u­ary 5, 2017, Coul­ter decid­ed to sim­ply tweet out “14!” which no oth­er expla­na­tion. This was wide­ly seen as a ref­er­ence to the “14 Words”, but Coul­ter coun­tered that it was actu­al­ly just a ref­er­ence to the num­ber of days left in Oba­ma’s pres­i­den­cy (there were actu­al­ly 15 days left, as lots of oth­er GOP­ers were tweet­ing at the time). And guess who was in the group of peo­ple who made the ‘mis­take’ of assum­ing Coul­ter was try­ing to squeeze in a neo-Nazo shout out: oth­er neo-Nazis, who glee­ful­ly respond­ed with “88!”:

    The Huff­in­g­ton Post

    Ann Coul­ter Clar­i­fies ‘14!’ Tweet Was Ref­er­ence To Obama’s Pres­i­den­cy End­ing
    Some white suprema­cists ini­tial­ly thought she was refer­ring to one of their slo­gans.

    By Jen­na Amat­ul­li
    01/05/2017 01:53 pm ET Updat­ed Jan 05, 2017

    Con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor Ann Coul­ter sent out a cryp­tic tweet Thurs­day morn­ing that some white suprema­cists read as a ref­er­ence to one of their most well-known slo­gans.

    14!
    — Ann Coul­ter (@AnnCoulter) Jan­u­ary 5, 2017

    Coul­ter lat­er insist­ed that the “14” was sole­ly in ref­er­ence to the days left in Barack Obama’s pres­i­den­cy, as some on Twit­ter had ini­tial­ly guessed.

    Inas­much as today is Day 14 on the Oba­ma Count­down Clock, I tweet­ed “14.” pic.twitter.com/ArR3JMApGV
    — Ann Coul­ter (@AnnCoulter) Jan­u­ary 5, 2017

    To sh*t‑for-brains, des­per­ate hys­ter­ics: If you put your head on the desk & think real­ly, real­ly, real­ly hard, I bet you can fig­ure it out. pic.twitter.com/8ypJfWHlWz
    — Ann Coul­ter (@AnnCoulter) Jan­u­ary 5, 2017

    But that’s is in 15 days. Not 14. Even the GOP agrees.

    In 15 days, let’s turn the page... pic.twitter.com/DdeIGPT3KP
    — GOP (@GOP) Jan­u­ary 5, 2017

    15 days.
    — Lau­ra Ingra­ham (@IngrahamAngle) Jan­u­ary 5, 2017

    Unfor­tu­nate­ly, 14 hap­pens to be a pop­u­lar ref­er­ence for white suprema­cists.

    Dog whis­tle: heard pic.twitter.com/yKmfKJxLIr
    — Park­er Mol­loy (@ParkerMolloy) Jan­u­ary 5, 2017

    That’s because the most pop­u­lar slo­gan for white suprema­cists hap­pens to be 14 words: “We must secure the exis­tence of our peo­ple and a future for white chil­dren.” The phrase is wide­ly referred to as “14 Words” or “Four­teen Words” or just “14.” It was coined by David Lane, a mem­ber of the white suprema­cist ter­ror­ist group known as The Order.

    ...

    Coulter’s “14!” was over­whelm­ing­ly answered with “88,” a ref­er­ence to anoth­er one of Lane’s white suprema­cist terms. It stems from his “88 Pre­cepts,” a list of state­ments on what he calls “nat­ur­al law.”

    Accord­ing to the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter, 88 is often used among neo-Nazis, because H is the eighth let­ter of the alpha­bet and 88 stands for “Heil Hitler.”

    @AnnCoulter 88.
    — Glob­al­ist Tears ?? (@PreppyAltRight) Jan­u­ary 5, 2017

    @AnnCoulter 88.
    — EmoryM ??? (@EmoryMyers) Jan­u­ary 5, 2017

    Well, regard­less of whether it’s 14 or 15 days until Obama’s out of office, Ann Coul­ter sure knows how to rile peo­ple up ? even if it’s unin­ten­tion­al.

    ———-

    “Ann Coul­ter Clar­i­fies ‘14!’ Tweet Was Ref­er­ence To Obama’s Pres­i­den­cy End­ing” by Jen­na Amat­ul­li; The Huff­in­g­ton Post; 01/05/2017

    Coulter’s “14!” was over­whelm­ing­ly answered with “88,” a ref­er­ence to anoth­er one of Lane’s white suprema­cist terms. It stems from his “88 Pre­cepts,” a list of state­ments on what he calls “nat­ur­al law.””

    A “14!” shoutout and “88!” shout backs. Along with oth­er gen­er­al­ly sup­port­ive tweets from from Twit­ter users like “Prep­pyAl­tRight”. You can still see the many ‘Alt Right’ respons­es to her orig­i­nal tweet, although many respons­es have been delet­ed.

    That’s all part of the con­text of the White House­’s curi­ous tim­ing to bring flags back to full staff.

    Oh, and let’s not for­get that 8/8/2019 hap­pens to be the 50th anniver­sary of the mur­der of Sharon Tate by the Man­son fam­i­ly. Mur­ders intend­ed to set off “Hel­ter Skel­ter” and Man­son’s envi­sioned race war. So while 8/8 on any year is going to be spe­cial day to neo-Nazis, 8/8/2019 is an extra spe­cial neo-Nazis anniver­sary. Made all the more extra spe­cial thanks to the White House­’s ‘mis­take’. *win­kety wink wink wink*

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 8, 2019, 2:16 pm
  12. Posted by Dave Emory | August 8, 2019, 3:08 pm
  13. Here’s an inter­est­ing look at what life is like for the patron saint of Atom­waf­fen, James Mason: a Den­ver jour­nal­ist, Jere­my Jojo­la, tried to get an inter­view with Mason and ask him if he feels any respon­si­bil­i­ty for the mur­ders done by Atom­waf­fen. Mason reject­ed a request for an inter­view, so Jojo­la wait­ed out­side of Mason’s home and tried to get an inter­view with Mason when he was out and about. It turns out Mason lives in gov­ern­ment-sub­si­dized ‘Sec­tion 8’ apart­ment. Jojo­la watched Mason head out from his apart­ment and head to the local day shel­ter for home­less senior cit­i­zens for a free meal. A few days lat­er, Jojo­la actu­al­ly approached Mason at a park­ing lot to ask him if he felt any respon­si­bil­i­ty for inspir­ing Atom­waf­fen’s vio­lence. Mason admit­ted that he still advis­es mem­bers of Atom­waf­fen, but ini­tial­ly say­ing he did­n’t encour­age such vio­lence, telling Jojo­la, “If they were act­ing on my words, they wouldn’t be doing the things they’re doing.” But lat­er in the inter­view he hedges those calls to avoid vio­lence by sug­gest­ing that if Atom­waf­fen mem­bers do choose to com­mit vio­lence they bet­ter make it count, say­ing, “If you must do it, it seems to me to be only com­mon sense that you’d want to do it right, because it’s the end of your life...You may die out there in the street via SWAT team, or you may spend the rest of your life in the joint. Make it count for god’s sake.” So Mason isn’t against Nazi vio­lence. He’s just against non-strate­gic Nazi vio­lence that does­n’t advance the Nazi cause:

    9News.com

    A promi­nent neo-Nazi lives in an apart­ment not far from down­town Den­ver
    An unas­sum­ing man who lives near down­town Den­ver is a well-known neo-Nazi and a ris­ing icon with­in a vio­lent white extrem­ist group known as Atom­waf­fen.

    Author: Jere­my Jojo­la
    Pub­lished: 5:23 PM MST Novem­ber 25, 2019
    Updat­ed: 10:18 PM MST Novem­ber 25, 2019

    DENVER —

    In the bustling neigh­bor­hood around Colorado’s Capi­tol build­ing, the grey-haired man wear­ing a kha­ki jack­et and black slacks can often be seen walk­ing to the local gro­cery store, pick­ing up trash in front of his apart­ment build­ing or going an a stroll to a local senior cen­ter.

    Beneath the unas­sum­ing and benign facade is a promi­nent mod­ern-day fig­ure with­in the grow­ing white suprema­cy move­ment.

    James Nolan Mason, 67, lives a seem­ing­ly qui­et life around his Sec­tion 8 apart­ment build­ing, yet online, the life-long neo-Nazi has recent­ly found his name, image and writ­ings held to high esteem by a vio­lent group called Atom­waf­fen, which means “atom­ic weapon” in Ger­man.

    “Atom­waf­fen is a small neo-Nazi orga­ni­za­tion whose mem­bers see them­selves as sol­diers prepar­ing them­selves for an impend­ing race war,” said Joan­na Mendel­son, an inves­tiga­tive researcher who’s been track­ing Mason and Atom­waf­fen for the Anti-Defama­tion League. “They paint a pic­ture of a geno­cide and that they see them­selves as need­ing to rise up against the tide that seeks their destruc­tion.”

    A book called “Siege,” which is a com­pi­la­tion of Mason’s newslet­ters from the 1980s, has become required read­ing for mem­bers of Atom­waf­fen. Mendel­son said “Siege Cul­ture” is embraced by young men flock­ing to the white suprema­cy move­ment.

    Not only are young men embrac­ing Mason and his racist philoso­phies online, they have been mak­ing pil­grim­ages to Den­ver to vis­it their icon in per­son.

    Online images and videos show Mason pos­ing with men in fatigues and skull masks at Red Rocks and in his apart­ment adorned with swasti­ka flags and oth­er Nazi mem­o­ra­bil­ia.

    Mason has also been active­ly spread­ing Atomwaffen’s mes­sage from his Den­ver apart­ment to the world, through web­sites and pod­casts.

    Accord­ing to the Counter Extrem­ism Project, a non­prof­it that tracks hate groups, Siege Cul­ture and Atom­waf­fen can be tied to five mur­ders.

    ...

    9Wants to Know sought an inter­view with Mason to ask him if he feels any respon­si­bil­i­ty for inspir­ing young men to vio­lence.

    In a typed let­ter, Mason declined an inter­view for “pure­ly tac­ti­cal rea­sons.”

    Even­tu­al­ly the author of this arti­cle watched Mason walk from his Sec­tion 8 apart­ment and then get a free lunch at a day shel­ter for home­less senior cit­i­zens in Den­ver this month.

    A few days lat­er the author caught up with Mason at a West Col­fax park­ing lot to ask if he feels respon­si­ble for inspir­ing vio­lence.

    “If they were act­ing on my words, they wouldn’t be doing the things they’re doing,” Mason said of Atom­waf­fen mem­bers.

    Mason admit­ted dur­ing the exchange with 9Wants to Know that he still advis­es mem­bers of Atom­waf­fen, but claims he tells them not to act out with vio­lence.

    Yet, Mason seems to con­tra­dict him­self when he talks about how Atom­waf­fen should com­mit vio­lence.

    “If you must do it, it seems to me to be only com­mon sense that you’d want to do it right, because it’s the end of your life,” Mason said. “You may die out there in the street via SWAT team, or you may spend the rest of your life in the joint. Make it count for god’s sake.”

    Mendelsen said this type of rhetoric is what Mason is known for.

    “There is no doubt that he dances the line between say­ing that ‘I’m not asso­ci­at­ed with this group,’ and yet show­ing all the mark­ers that indi­cate that he is ful­ly embed­ded with­in this neo-Nazi orga­ni­za­tion, Atom­waf­fen,” Mendel­son said.

    Mason has writ­ten much about his dis­taste for “the sys­tem,” includ­ing the U.S. gov­ern­ment, yet when he was asked about his reliance on char­i­ty and tax­pay­ers, he claimed he’s a “gueril­la war­rior” and that he’s doing what he can to sur­vive.

    The Den­ver FBI office and Den­ver Police would not say if any of their law enforce­ment offi­cers have had con­tact with Mason.

    Den­ver Police did indi­cate there are recent police records that have been gen­er­at­ed that con­tain Mason’s name, how­ev­er those records were denied dis­clo­sure. In a let­ter about the records, the city said “we believe it would be con­trary to the pub­lic inter­est to pro­vide records from ongo­ing inves­ti­ga­tions and the vic­tim iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion you seek.”

    ———-

    “A promi­nent neo-Nazi lives in an apart­ment not far from down­town Den­ver” by Jere­my Jojo­la; 9News.com; 11/25/2019

    “There is no doubt that he dances the line between say­ing that ‘I’m not asso­ci­at­ed with this group,’ and yet show­ing all the mark­ers that indi­cate that he is ful­ly embed­ded with­in this neo-Nazi orga­ni­za­tion, Atom­waf­fen,” Mendel­son said.”

    Yeah, it’s not exact­ly a con­vinc­ing act on Mason’s part. The guy whose book is required read­ing for Atom­waf­fen mem­bers pre­tends to not be asso­ci­at­ed with Atom­waf­fen at the same time he leaves an exten­sive inter­net record spread­ing their mes­sage and show­ing him­self hang­ing out with them:

    ...
    A book called “Siege,” which is a com­pi­la­tion of Mason’s newslet­ters from the 1980s, has become required read­ing for mem­bers of Atom­waf­fen. Mendel­son said “Siege Cul­ture” is embraced by young men flock­ing to the white suprema­cy move­ment.

    Not only are young men embrac­ing Mason and his racist philoso­phies online, they have been mak­ing pil­grim­ages to Den­ver to vis­it their icon in per­son.

    Online images and videos show Mason pos­ing with men in fatigues and skull masks at Red Rocks and in his apart­ment adorned with swasti­ka flags and oth­er Nazi mem­o­ra­bil­ia.

    Mason has also been active­ly spread­ing Atomwaffen’s mes­sage from his Den­ver apart­ment to the world, through web­sites and pod­casts.
    ...

    He may be finan­cial poor, but he has a wealth of young Nazis who idol­ize him, which is arguably the worst pos­si­ble kind of for­tune.

    Also keep in mind that, while Atom­waf­fen is respon­si­ble for at least five mur­ders, three of those mur­ders were fel­low Atom­waf­fen mem­bers. And those mur­dered mem­bers hap­pened to be active­ly plan­ning on a mor­tar attack on a Flori­da nuclear plant with the goal of trig­ger­ing a melt­down and forc­ing the mass depop­u­la­tion of that region of Flori­da so they could set up a Fourth Reich there, which is an exam­ple of Atom­waf­fen’s aspi­ra­tions for cat­a­stroph­ic lev­els of mass mur­der and also pre­sum­ably the kind of strate­gic vio­lence that gets Mason’s approval.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 27, 2019, 1:18 pm
  14. We already knew the 2024 US elec­tion was going to have a ‘civ­il war’/insurrection theme. There’s no avoid­ing it this year. And while the pri­ma­ry sources of those civ­il war sen­ti­ments were obvi­ous­ly going to be cen­tered around Don­ald Trump and his 2024 cam­paign of vengeance, here’s a set of arti­cles that serve as a painful reminder that the spark for a larg­er con­flict does­n’t have to come from Trump him­self. With the cur­rent polit­i­cal zeit­geist, any lunatic capa­ble or vio­lence is poten­tial­ly capa­ble of being that spark. At least as long as the rest of ‘usu­al sus­pect’ lunatics play their roles.

    And that brings us to the griz­zly sto­ry out of Penn­syl­va­nia about Justin Mohn, a 32 year old man who killed and decap­i­tat­ed his father. Mohn then post­ed a 14 video on social media hold­ing up the sev­ered head and “fifth col­umn” groups — which he said includes undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants, the LGBTQ com­mu­ni­ty, Black Lives Mat­ter and antifa — who are work­ing in con­cert with the “trai­tor­ous” fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to destroy the U.S.while call­ing for a mass mili­tia upris­ing against all fed­er­al employ­ees who should be killed on sight. Mohn’s father was a fed­er­al employ­ee for 20 years. The video — which sure sounds a lot like the ‘white ISIS’ videos Atom Waf­fen is known for — man­aged to get over 5,000 views on YouTube and went viral on Twit­ter before being tak­en down.

    That mass mili­tia upris­ing obvi­ous­ly did­n’t hap­pen. But we’re still faced with the ques­tion about just how much poten­tial did some­thing like this have to spark some­thing big­ger. For starters, it turns out Mohn has self-pub­lished a num­ber of books, includ­ing a 2017 book “The Rev­o­lu­tion Leader’s Sur­vival Guide.” His lat­est pub­lished essay was titled “Amer­i­ca’s Com­ing Bloody Rev­o­lu­tion.” Did Mohn have any sort of fol­low­ing he expect to fol­low his war cries? Or was this an entire­ly iso­lat­ed indi­vid­ual? We don’t have those answers, but those ques­tions bring us to the bizarre cir­cum­stances of Mohns appre­hen­sion by local police: he fled to a Nation­al Guard train­ing facil­i­ty around 100 miles away. Mohn was found there, armed with a gun, and tak­en into cus­tody with­out inci­dent. So the guy decap­i­tat­ed his father, made a video call­ing for a mass mili­tia upris­ing and war on all fed­er­al employ­ees that went viral on social media, and then drove to a Nation­al Guard train­ing facil­i­ty and allowed him­self to be cap­tured with­out inci­dent while armed. It’s a strange sto­ry.

    But whether or not Mohn had any fol­low­ers, that does­n’t mean an inci­dent like this could­n’t be used by oth­ers to spark some­thing big­ger. Which brings us to the now pre­dictable response across right-wing social media: claims that it was all a gov­ern­ment false flag psy­op designed to build sup­port for a pair of bills under con­sid­er­a­tion in the House and Sen­ate that would lim­it mili­tia activ­i­ties. Claims ampli­fied by promi­nent ‘alt-right’ fig­ures like Lau­ra Loomer. And as we’re going to see, Loomer isn’t just a far right social media per­son­al­i­ty. She’s increas­ing­ly a favorite of Don­ald Trump. In fact, Trump report­ed­ly asked cam­paign aides last year if they could find a spot for her inside the Trump cam­paign. Loomer, for her part, has pub­licly expressed inter­est in being Trump’s press sec­re­tary should he win a sec­ond term. Trump is appar­ent­ly so enam­ored with Loomer that we had a report a cou­ple weeks ago filled with anony­mous Trump cam­paign staffers basi­cal­ly warn­ing about Trump’s ties to Loomer becom­ing a lia­bil­i­ty dur­ing the gen­er­al elec­tion. It’s the kind of anony­mous­ly sourced sto­ry that sug­gests the con­cern inside the cam­paign about Trump cozy­ing up to Loomer in com­ing months is sig­nif­i­cant and grow­ing. It’s also a sign that Trump is plan­ning on run­ning a cam­paign for dark­er and more dan­ger­ous than any­thing we saw in 2016 or 2020.

    So we have a grue­some domes­tic ter­ror attack weaponized as a deep state anti-mili­tia plot by a media per­son­al­i­ty who is like­ly only going to grow clos­er to Trump as this insane 2024 cam­paign sea­son plays out. And we aren’t even close to elec­tion day yet. On one lev­el, it’s the trag­ic and bizarre sto­ry of a man you has clear­ly gone insane and com­mit­ting a grue­some but utter­ly ran­dom crime. But on anoth­er lev­el, there’s noth­ing ran­dom about this. It’s exact­ly the kind of hor­rif­ic tragedy we should expect by now giv­en the polit­i­cal zeit­geist of the Unit­ed States in 2024. Don­ald Trump has made oppo­si­tion to the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment a cen­tral plat­form of a reelec­tion agen­da, after all. That’s what the whole Sched­ule F/Project 2025 scheme is all about. And now, with the show­down at the bor­der in Texas over ille­gal immi­gra­tion and calls for direct con­fronta­tion between states and the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, the civ­il war zeit­geist is absolute­ly unavoid­able, espe­cial­ly for men­tal­ly unhinged indi­vid­u­als in the thrall of this kind of QAnon-style world­view. How many domes­tic ter­ror attacks of this nature can we expect in 2024? And how will those attacks be weaponized spun? Time will tell, but with the Trump cam­paign fram­ing 2024 as elec­tion that must be won at all costs, it’s not hard to imag­ine what hap­pened in Penn­syl­va­nia is just a pre­lude to what’s to come. Espe­cial­ly if Trump ends up trail­ing in the polls the clos­er we get to Elec­tion Day. That’s all part of grim con­text of the Penn­syl­va­nia behead­ing sto­ry. Justin Mohn may or may not have been a lone iso­lat­ed delu­sion­al indi­vid­ual. We don’t know yet. But what’s clear is that this isn’t a lone iso­lat­ed sto­ry. This inci­dent is very relat­ed to the mad­ness of the 2024 elec­tion cycle and Trump’s vengeance, so let’s hope this isn’t a sign of what’s to come:

    Vice

    Man Post­ed YouTube Video With Father’s Sev­ered Head While Rant­i­ng About Joe Biden

    Justin Mohn was arrest­ed in Penn­syl­va­nia after his moth­er found the head­less corpse. His social media shows a long his­to­ry of trou­bling far-right con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and talk­ing points.

    by Mack Lam­oureux
    by Tess Owen
    Jan­u­ary 31, 2024, 12:15pm

    A man who police allege killed and decap­i­tat­ed his father, post­ed a YouTube video show­ing off the head while call­ing for vio­lence and rail­ing against Joe Biden, a “com­mu­nist takeover of Amer­i­ca” and “far-left woke mobs.”

    A 14-minute video titled “Mohn’s Militia—Call to Arms for Amer­i­can Patri­ots” appeared on YouTube on Tues­day after­noon. In the video, a man iden­ti­fied as 32-year-old Justin Mohn, sits at a desk in a bed­room wear­ing plas­tic gloves. He picks up a sev­ered head, wrapped in plas­tic. “This is the head of Mike Mohn,” he says to the cam­era. “A fed­er­al employ­ee of over 20 years, and my father.”

    Mohn, who appeared to be read­ing from a script, deliv­ered a con­spir­a­cy-laden speech that would not be out of place on wide­ly-watched, far-right broad­casts.

    “The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment has declared war on America’s cit­i­zens and the Amer­i­can states,” he said. “Amer­i­ca is rot­ting from the inside, as far-left woke mobs rav­age our once pros­per­ous coun­try.”

    He rant­ed about “the glob­al­ist, com­mu­nist takeover of Amer­i­ca” and “bribed mem­bers of the deep state.” He went on against “fifth col­umn” groups, which he said includes undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants, the LGBTQ com­mu­ni­ty, Black Lives Mat­ter and antifa, who are work­ing in con­cert with the “trai­tor­ous” fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to destroy the U.S.

    In the video Mohn declared him­self the “the com­man­der of Amer­i­ca’s nation­al net­work of mili­tias” and issued a call to “patri­ots and mili­tia mem­bers” for vio­lence.

    “All fed­er­al employ­ees are to be killed on site,” he said. “All FBI, IRS and oth­er fed­er­al law enforce­ment offices, as well as fed­er­al cour­t­hous­es, are to be sieged around the coun­try. All fed­er­al agents, U.S. mar­shals, fed­er­al judges and bor­der patrol are to be killed or else cap­tured, tor­tured for infor­ma­tion, and pub­licly exe­cut­ed for betray­ing their coun­try. Earn your place in heav­en by send­ing a trai­tor to hell ear­ly.”

    He also went on about a num­ber of oth­er ral­ly­ing points, ones often spo­ken about by main­stream right-wing politi­cians and media fig­ures, includ­ing “legit­i­mate” elec­tion results and return­ing to Judeo-Chris­t­ian roots.

    The grue­some video racked up more than 5,000 views before YouTube removed it for vio­lat­ing its poli­cies on graph­ic vio­lence and vio­lent extrem­ism. Like many oth­er videos that fea­ture muti­la­tions and death, the video of show­ing his fathers head ini­tial­ly went viral on Twit­ter (now called X) where it was shared wide­ly by “ver­i­fied” users. X is now send­ing any­one search­ing for key­words relat­ing to the video to a blank page.

    ...

    Mohn fled the scene in his father’s car and was lat­er appre­hend­ed 100 miles away by offi­cers from the Fort Indiantown Gap Police Depart­ment. He’d jumped a fence sur­round­ing a Nation­al Guard Train­ing Facil­i­ty there. Police tracked him by ping­ing his cell­phone.

    Mohn’s sim­mer­ing anti-gov­ern­ment hos­til­i­ties and mes­sian­ic delu­sions are some­thing that shined through the man’s robust online foot­print. Mohn has self-pub­lished mul­ti­ple books that he sold on Ama­zon and oth­er online mar­ket­places, the books ranged in top­ics but some focused on the polit­i­cal divi­sions he referred to in the video where he showed off the decap­i­tat­ed head of his father.

    On a now-removed Face­book author page that VICE News viewed when it was active, his lat­est pub­li­ca­tion was an essay called “Amer­i­ca’s Com­ing Bloody Rev­o­lu­tion.” He pur­port­ed to be the author of sev­en books one of which was enti­tled “The Sec­ond Mes­si­ah, King of Earth”. In a 2017 book enti­tled “The Rev­o­lu­tion Leader’s Sur­vival Guide,” Mohn wrote a let­ter to Don­ald Trump in which he promised to lead a “ peace­ful rev­o­lu­tion.”

    Mohn also had an account on Spo­ti­fy where he host­ed sev­er­al albums, one of the albums was called “Justin’s Stalk­ers” and is still cur­rent­ly avail­able online.

    Mohn also was seem­ing­ly involved in sev­er­al law­suits with the gov­ern­ment that focused on affir­ma­tive action. In the law­suit, which was dis­missed, Mohn states that the gov­ern­ment caused him harm by allow­ing him to take out stu­dent loans and that affir­ma­tive action made it so he couldn’t get work. In the video where he bran­dish­es his father’s decap­i­tat­ed head, Mohn men­tions the judge who dis­missed his law­suit by name, gives out his address, and calls for a $100,000 boun­ty on the “heads of all fed­er­al judges.”

    ...

    ————-

    “Man Post­ed YouTube Video With Father’s Sev­ered Head While Rant­i­ng About Joe Biden” by Mack Lam­oureux and Tess Owen; Vice; 01/31/2024

    The grue­some video racked up more than 5,000 views before YouTube removed it for vio­lat­ing its poli­cies on graph­ic vio­lence and vio­lent extrem­ism. Like many oth­er videos that fea­ture muti­la­tions and death, the video of show­ing his fathers head ini­tial­ly went viral on Twit­ter (now called X) where it was shared wide­ly by “ver­i­fied” users. X is now send­ing any­one search­ing for key­words relat­ing to the video to a blank page. ”

    it was­n’t just a dis­turb­ing graph­ic pro­pa­gan­da video. It was a behead­ing video that was allowed to go viral on YouTube and Twit­ter. A suc­cess­ful graph­ic pro­pa­gan­da video, in that sense. Justin Mohn’s call to arms for mili­tias to engage in some sort of mass mur­der of all fed­er­al employ­ees may not have suc­ceed­ed in ral­ly­ing that response. But he did suc­ceed to issu­ing a mass call to arms for mass mur­der. It rais­es the ques­tion as to how long these videos call­ing for the mass mur­der of fed­er­al employ­ees would have stayed up on social media had they not graph­i­cal­ly includ­ed the sev­ered head of Mohn’s father, along with the ques­tion of how viral would the videos have got­ten with­out that sev­ered head:

    ...
    Mohn, who appeared to be read­ing from a script, deliv­ered a con­spir­a­cy-laden speech that would not be out of place on wide­ly-watched, far-right broad­casts.

    “The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment has declared war on America’s cit­i­zens and the Amer­i­can states,” he said. “Amer­i­ca is rot­ting from the inside, as far-left woke mobs rav­age our once pros­per­ous coun­try.”

    He rant­ed about “the glob­al­ist, com­mu­nist takeover of Amer­i­ca” and “bribed mem­bers of the deep state.” He went on against “fifth col­umn” groups, which he said includes undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants, the LGBTQ com­mu­ni­ty, Black Lives Mat­ter and antifa, who are work­ing in con­cert with the “trai­tor­ous” fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to destroy the U.S.

    In the video Mohn declared him­self the “the com­man­der of Amer­i­ca’s nation­al net­work of mili­tias” and issued a call to “patri­ots and mili­tia mem­bers” for vio­lence.

    “All fed­er­al employ­ees are to be killed on site,” he said. “All FBI, IRS and oth­er fed­er­al law enforce­ment offices, as well as fed­er­al cour­t­hous­es, are to be sieged around the coun­try. All fed­er­al agents, U.S. mar­shals, fed­er­al judges and bor­der patrol are to be killed or else cap­tured, tor­tured for infor­ma­tion, and pub­licly exe­cut­ed for betray­ing their coun­try. Earn your place in heav­en by send­ing a trai­tor to hell ear­ly.”

    He also went on about a num­ber of oth­er ral­ly­ing points, ones often spo­ken about by main­stream right-wing politi­cians and media fig­ures, includ­ing “legit­i­mate” elec­tion results and return­ing to Judeo-Chris­t­ian roots.

    ...

    Mohn also was seem­ing­ly involved in sev­er­al law­suits with the gov­ern­ment that focused on affir­ma­tive action. In the law­suit, which was dis­missed, Mohn states that the gov­ern­ment caused him harm by allow­ing him to take out stu­dent loans and that affir­ma­tive action made it so he couldn’t get work. In the video where he bran­dish­es his father’s decap­i­tat­ed head, Mohn men­tions the judge who dis­missed his law­suit by name, gives out his address, and calls for a $100,000 boun­ty on the “heads of all fed­er­al judges.”
    ...

    But then we get to what is arguably the most dis­turb­ing set of ques­tions about this sto­ry: was Mohn tru­ly oper­at­ing com­plete­ly inde­pen­dent­ly when he com­mit­ted this act, or was he in con­tact with a larg­er net­work of mili­tia mem­bers and expect­ing some sort of response to his ral­ly­ing cry? The guy self-pub­lished books about vio­lent rev­o­lu­tion, after all. Sure­ly he’s been in con­tact with oth­er vio­lent extrem­ists. It would be easy to assume Mohn is pure­ly a lone nut had he not been appre­hend­ed at a Nation­al Guard Train­ing Facil­i­ty. Why did Mohn go there, of all the places, after killing his father and releas­ing that video?

    ...
    Mohn fled the scene in his father’s car and was lat­er appre­hend­ed 100 miles away by offi­cers from the Fort Indiantown Gap Police Depart­ment. He’d jumped a fence sur­round­ing a Nation­al Guard Train­ing Facil­i­ty there. Police tracked him by ping­ing his cell­phone.

    Mohn’s sim­mer­ing anti-gov­ern­ment hos­til­i­ties and mes­sian­ic delu­sions are some­thing that shined through the man’s robust online foot­print. Mohn has self-pub­lished mul­ti­ple books that he sold on Ama­zon and oth­er online mar­ket­places, the books ranged in top­ics but some focused on the polit­i­cal divi­sions he referred to in the video where he showed off the decap­i­tat­ed head of his father.

    On a now-removed Face­book author page that VICE News viewed when it was active, his lat­est pub­li­ca­tion was an essay called “Amer­i­ca’s Com­ing Bloody Rev­o­lu­tion.” He pur­port­ed to be the author of sev­en books one of which was enti­tled “The Sec­ond Mes­si­ah, King of Earth”. In a 2017 book enti­tled “The Rev­o­lu­tion Leader’s Sur­vival Guide,” Mohn wrote a let­ter to Don­ald Trump in which he promised to lead a “ peace­ful rev­o­lu­tion.”

    Mohn also had an account on Spo­ti­fy where he host­ed sev­er­al albums, one of the albums was called “Justin’s Stalk­ers” and is still cur­rent­ly avail­able online.
    ...

    And as the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, when Mohn was even­tu­al­ly appre­hend­ed at the Lebanon Coun­ty Nation­al Guard Train­ing Cen­ter, he was found with a gun and yet tak­en into cus­tody with­out inci­dent. Was any­one else at the facil­i­ty? And did Mohn man­aged to enter the build­ings there and just find an unse­cured gun lay­ing around? Or did he bring the gun with him? And why did­n’t he shoot at author­i­ties instead of giv­ing up with­out an inci­dent? It’s a puz­zling case for a num­ber of rea­sons:

    WGAL

    Decap­i­ta­tion sus­pect hopped fence at Fort Indiantown Gap before being cap­tured, police say

    Tom Lehman
    Reporter
    Updat­ed: 6:51 PM EST Jan 31, 2024

    FORT INDIANTOWN GAP, Pa. —

    A man accused of decap­i­tat­ing his father and then post­ing a video on YouTube about it was arrest­ed after hop­ping a fence at Fort Indiantown Gap.

    Author­i­ties at the Lebanon Coun­ty Nation­al Guard Train­ing Cen­ter said Justin Mohn, 32, was tak­en into cus­tody after they learned he was inside the base. Police said he had a gun.

    Mid­dle­town Town­ship Police had already been ping­ing Mohn’s phone after his father, Michael Mohn, 68, was found decap­i­tat­ed inside a Bucks Coun­ty home ear­li­er in the day.

    The base is about two hours away from the crime scene on Upper Orchard Dri­ve (see video below).

    It’s not yet clear why Justin Mohn drove to the base in his father’s 2009 Toy­ota Corol­la. The vehi­cle was found out­side the base perime­ter.

    Fort Indiantown Gap police, with the assis­tance of Penn­syl­va­nia State Police, took Justin Mohn into cus­tody with­out inci­dent.

    ...

    ———–

    “Decap­i­ta­tion sus­pect hopped fence at Fort Indiantown Gap before being cap­tured, police say” by Tom Lehman; WGAL; 01/31/2024

    “Author­i­ties at the Lebanon Coun­ty Nation­al Guard Train­ing Cen­ter said Justin Mohn, 32, was tak­en into cus­tody after they learned he was inside the base. Police said he had a gun.”

    So after post­ing that video with his father’s sev­ered head and calls for the mass mur­der of all fed­er­al employ­ees, Mohn was found at a nation­al guard train­ing facil­i­ty with a gun and gave him­self up to police. It’s an odd end­ing to this sto­ry. It’s like a mur­der mys­tery where the biggest mys­tery is why there was­n’t more mur­der.

    And, as we should expect by now, the inter­net has answers to these mys­ter­ies: it was all deep state plot designed to cre­ate sup­port for a pair of bills work­ing through Con­gress designed to lim­it the activ­i­ties of mili­tias. At least that’s the spin tak­ing on on the far right. But it’s not just fringe inter­net fig­ures push­ing this meme. Lau­ra Loomer, a fig­ures increas­ing­ly close to the Trump cam­paign, has been quite vocal about her sus­pi­cions. As Loomer put it, “Justin Mohn sure looks like the per­fect Demo­c­rat Pat­sy for the sake of... get­ting sup­port to ban militias...Just anoth­er ‘coin­ci­dence.’ ”:

    Newsweek

    Justin Mohn Video Sparks ‘Anti-Mili­tia Bill’ Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ries

    By Aleks Phillips
    U.S. News Reporter
    Pub­lished Jan 31, 2024 at 11:49 AM EST
    Updat­ed Jan 31, 2024 at 11:49 AM EST

    The arrest of Justin Mohn, a Penn­syl­va­nia man who alleged­ly video­taped him­self decap­i­tat­ing his father and post­ed the footage online, has sparked con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries that the inci­dent was a false flag oper­a­tion designed to add weight to a recent­ly intro­duced bill to inhib­it mili­tias.

    ...

    In a pam­phlet titled “Amer­i­ca’s Com­ing Bloody Rev­o­lu­tion,” he said “Amer­i­cans will have to weigh what is worse—allowing them­selves to lose free­dom and inde­pen­dence or killing their own fam­i­ly mem­bers, teach­ers, cowork­ers, boss­es, judges, elect­ed lead­ers, and oth­er old­er gen­er­a­tions” because they may be “trai­tors” who “wish to take away the free­dom and inde­pen­dence that comes with Amer­i­ca, democ­ra­cy, and free mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism.”

    The pam­phlet was pub­lished on Ama­zon and includ­ed chap­ters called “Why a Vio­lent Rev­o­lu­tion is Inevitable” and “How Rev­o­lu­tion Can Be Suc­cess­ful.”

    The inci­dent has prompt­ed unver­i­fied and unev­i­denced claims that Mohn’s alleged actions were part of a coor­di­nat­ed attempt to jus­ti­fy two bills intro­duced to the House and Senate—on Jan­u­ary 11 and 16, respectively—that are designed to lim­it the actions mem­bers of a mili­tia can under­take.

    “This is VERY SUSPICIOUS tim­ing as Con­gress is try­ing to push Sen­ate Bill 3589—the anti-mili­tia bill,” one per­son wrote on X, for­mer­ly Twit­ter, on Tues­day evening in a post that has been viewed over half a mil­lion times.

    They added: “Major FF [false flag] warn­ing.”

    “Justin Mohn sure looks like the per­fect Demo­c­rat Pat­sy for the sake of... get­ting sup­port to ban mili­tias,” Lau­ra Loomer, a con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal activist, said in a tweet ref­er­enc­ing the Sen­ate bill that has since been viewed near­ly 620,000 times. “Just anoth­er ‘coin­ci­dence.’ ”

    “Kind of odd tim­ing that Justin Mohn decid­ed to behead his father & called for mili­tias to tar­get gov­ern­ment employ­ees while at the same time HR.6981 and s.3589 are in the hop­per,” anoth­er X account said in a post viewed over 55,000 times.

    Oth­er X users went fur­ther, claim­ing Mohn’s actions and the bills were “a mas­sive ploy to elim­i­nate a con­sti­tu­tion­al right,” a “psy­op,” and that the gov­ern­ment had “orchestrate[d] an event to make peo­ple think their rad­i­cal pol­i­cy is nec­es­sary.”

    ...

    HR.6981 and S.3589 both con­tain draft pro­vi­sions that make it an offense to engage in cer­tain para­mil­i­tary activ­i­ty, includ­ing inter­fer­ing with gov­ern­ment pro­ceed­ings with a dan­ger­ous weapon, assum­ing the role of a law enforce­ment offi­cer, and trav­el­ing across a state or nation­al bor­der to do so.

    Con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries alleg­ing fed­er­al involve­ment in major inci­dents are not uncom­mon. Ques­tions have lin­gered over the Las Vegas mass shoot­ing in 2017 after fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tors were unable to deter­mine why the gun­man, Stephen Pad­dock, opened fire on a music fes­ti­val, killing 60 and injur­ing a fur­ther 867.

    “Psy­op” is a port­man­teau of “psy­cho­log­i­cal oper­a­tions” and refers to plans con­struct­ed by the mil­i­tary and CIA to influ­ence a tar­get audi­ence to act in a spe­cif­ic way to meet a gov­ern­ment objec­tive.

    ———–

    “Justin Mohn Video Sparks ‘Anti-Mili­tia Bill’ Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ries” By Aleks Phillips; Newsweek; 01/31/2024

    ““Justin Mohn sure looks like the per­fect Demo­c­rat Pat­sy for the sake of... get­ting sup­port to ban mili­tias,” “Lau­ra Loomer, a con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal activist, said in a tweet ref­er­enc­ing the Sen­ate bill that has since been viewed near­ly 620,000 times. “Just anoth­er ‘coin­ci­dence.’ ”

    It would be nice to think of Lau­ra Loomer just a ran­dom fringe per­son­al­i­ty. But tru­ly fringe per­son­al­i­ties don’t have hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple view­ing their tweets. And Loomer was­n’t coy about her line of spec­u­la­tion. She was quite clear that this was all part of some sort of psy­op designed to cre­ate sup­port for restric­tions on mili­tias.

    Now, if this actu­al­ly was part of some sort of deep state ‘op’ designed to increase sup­port for these mili­tia bills, it’s hard to see it as any­thing but an incred­i­bly poor­ly planned op. A sin­gle lunatic call­ing on mili­tias to mili­tias to mass mur­der peo­ple — with no mil­tias answer­ing the call — isn’t exact­ly a com­pelling psy­op.

    But it’s also worth com­par­ing this inci­dent to, for exam­ple, the 2017 Las Vegas mas­sacre, an event that has also long been char­ac­ter­ized by the far right as a deep state op. And yet, as we’ve seen, the evi­dence in that case sug­gests Pad­dock was him­self inspired by far right ‘Sov­er­eign Cit­i­zen’ sen­ti­ments and even expressed fears of mass gun seizures by the gov­ern­ment and FEMA camps. Pad­dock also report­ed­ly expressed a desire for some­thing that would ‘wake up’ the Amer­i­can pub­lic. And yet, to this day, the motive remains offi­cial­ly unknown and that event is fre­quent­ly described on the right to be some sort of deep state op. It’s both an exam­ple of a pat­tern we’re see­ing play­ing out with the case of Justin Mohn, but also a reminder of the long-term costs of allow­ing these kinds of inves­ti­ga­tions to just get dropped with­out any real clo­sure or expla­na­tion:

    ...
    HR.6981 and S.3589 both con­tain draft pro­vi­sions that make it an offense to engage in cer­tain para­mil­i­tary activ­i­ty, includ­ing inter­fer­ing with gov­ern­ment pro­ceed­ings with a dan­ger­ous weapon, assum­ing the role of a law enforce­ment offi­cer, and trav­el­ing across a state or nation­al bor­der to do so.

    Con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries alleg­ing fed­er­al involve­ment in major inci­dents are not uncom­mon. Ques­tions have lin­gered over the Las Vegas mass shoot­ing in 2017 after fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tors were unable to deter­mine why the gun­man, Stephen Pad­dock, opened fire on a music fes­ti­val, killing 60 and injur­ing a fur­ther 867.

    “Psy­op” is a port­man­teau of “psy­cho­log­i­cal oper­a­tions” and refers to plans con­struct­ed by the mil­i­tary and CIA to influ­ence a tar­get audi­ence to act in a spe­cif­ic way to meet a gov­ern­ment objec­tive.
    ...

    It’s going to be inter­est­ing to see how much more this ‘Mohn is a psy­op’ nar­ra­tive takes hold as inves­ti­ga­tion plays out. But with Lau­ra Loomer hav­ing already tak­en up this cause, it’s just a mat­ter of time before we see that nar­ra­tive echoed by the Trump cam­paign. Or at least that’s prob­a­bly the con­cern being felt by Trump cam­paign insid­ers right now based on the fol­low­ing report about Trump’s increas­ing open enthu­si­asm for Loomer. Not only does Don­ald Trump have a pat­tern of pro­mot­ing Loomer’s videos on social media, but he even asked cam­paign aides to hire her for the cam­paign last year. She was nev­er hired, and Loomer has sub­se­quent­ly attacked Trump cam­paign man­ag­er Bri­an Jack from being a “mole”. Despite all that, Trump still seems to be a big Loomer fan. So much so that mul­ti­ple anony­mous Trump cam­paign staffers decid­ed to speak to NBC to share their con­cerns that Trump’s rela­tion­ship with Loomer is only going to get clos­er as this cam­paign plays out:

    NBC News

    Trump’s embrace of far-right activist Lau­ra Loomer wor­ries his allies

    One Trump ally told NBC News that Loomer, who has a his­to­ry of mak­ing anti-Mus­lim remarks, is wide­ly seen as a “lia­bil­i­ty” by peo­ple who work for the for­mer pres­i­dent.

    By Allan Smith, Kather­ine Doyle and Vaughn Hill­yard
    Jan. 14, 2024, 4:15 PM CST / Updat­ed Jan. 15, 2024, 8:03 AM CST

    When Flori­da Gov. Ron DeSan­tis entered a hotel in Iowa on Fri­day, he was imme­di­ate­ly ambushed by a woman who pep­pered him with ques­tions about when he would “drop out” of the race and whether he’s “already wast­ed enough of people’s mon­ey” as she fol­lowed him with a cam­era.

    After­ward, the encounter found its way to social media. The woman — far-right social media influ­encer Lau­ra Loomer — cut a scene in which she said DeSan­tis “looked pet­ri­fied,” adding she believed “his soul left his body when he saw me.”

    “He’s going to lose,” Loomer, a twice-failed con­gres­sion­al can­di­date and self-described “proud Islam­o­phobe” said in a clip filmed out­side the hotel. “Pres­i­dent Trump is going to kick his a– on Mon­day, Jan. 15. And that’s it for Ron. You killed your polit­i­cal career and I hope you’re hap­py. You just got Loomered, b—-.”

    Per­haps more notable than the encounter, though, was which of Loomer’s biggest fans quick­ly pro­mot­ed it on social media; for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump plugged the video on his Truth Social account on Sat­ur­day.

    It was just the lat­est in a series of pro­mo­tions and praise Trump has offered Loomer dur­ing the cam­paign, and it has some allies and advis­ers wor­ried that he’s giv­ing a fig­ure they see as a fringe, far-right activist too close of an embrace — one that could come back to bite him dur­ing a gen­er­al elec­tion cam­paign.

    “Every­one who works for him thinks she’s a lia­bil­i­ty,” one Trump ally said.

    Ear­li­er this month, Loomer, who has pro­mot­ed con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capi­tol and sev­er­al mass shoot­ings, rode with Trump aboard his plane on a trip to Iowa, and she has sug­gest­ed she would like to serve as Trump’s press sec­re­tary dur­ing a sec­ond term.

    Onstage at his pre-cau­cus event on Sun­day, Trump gave Loomer a shoutout, say­ing, “You want her on your side.”

    This sum­mer, he appeared with Loomer in a video at his Bed­min­ster, New Jer­sey, golf club in which he described her as “real­ly very spe­cial.” And, as The New York Times report­ed in April, Trump called on cam­paign aides to hire Loomer for an offi­cial role on the cam­paign, only for a high-rank­ing cam­paign offi­cial to shut down the hir­ing after the sto­ry was pub­lished.

    Last month, Trump pro­mot­ed a video on his Truth Social account of Loomer telling an inter­view­er she once told a for­mer roman­tic part­ner who thought she was too focused on Trump that they need­ed to under­stand that Trump was her first pri­or­i­ty.

    “And if you think that you’re more impor­tant than Pres­i­dent Trump, then you have some kind of, like, delu­sion­al per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­der,” she said in the video. “I have to say that was the end of that rela­tion­ship. Pres­i­dent Trump’s my num­ber-one pri­or­i­ty right now.”

    “Thank you, Lau­ra!” Trump wrote.

    Trump has long embraced some of the more fringe fig­ures on the right who have lav­ished him with praise. He has asked peo­ple around him what they think of Loomer and views her as some­one who is unafraid of speak­ing uncom­fort­able truths, a source famil­iar with dis­cus­sions said.

    “And he likes what she did with DeSan­tis,” the per­son added.

    ...

    With­in the past few days, Loomer has post­ed about being removed from DeSan­tis and Nik­ki Haley events in Iowa. Although she and busi­ness­man Vivek Ramaswamy, who has tied him­self close­ly to Trump, had got­ten along bet­ter, she began blast­ing the upstart can­di­date after Trump and his advis­ers start­ed call­ing him a “fraud” on Sat­ur­day. With bru­tal weath­er clos­ing in on the Hawk­eye State ahead of Monday’s cau­cus­es, Loomer even claimed that friends of Haley’s were lit­er­al­ly manip­u­lat­ing the weath­er.

    After her ambush of DeSan­tis on Fri­day, Will Cham­ber­lain, a con­ser­v­a­tive attor­ney who for­mer­ly worked on DeSan­tis’ cam­paign, tweet­ed that “there’s a name for peo­ple who, after being kicked out of a pri­vate event, fol­low the fea­tured speak­er at that event back to their hotel to harass them in the lob­by. It’s called a stalk­er.”

    With­in an hour, Loomer wrote: “Haters call me a stalk­er.”

    “But, they wish they had some­one who loved them as much as I love Don­ald Trump,” she said.

    “All my ene­mies secret­ly wish I was their street fight­er. NEVER BACK DOWN, BABY!”

    Some fear Loomer’s prox­im­i­ty to Trump could fuel Demo­c­ra­t­ic attacks against him as he piv­ots to the gen­er­al elec­tion, which may prompt those advis­ing him to lim­it his expo­sure to her — a move that could anger Trump.

    “He’s going to get pissed,” said the per­son famil­iar with Trump’s dis­cus­sions about Loomer.

    Mul­ti­ple Trump allies told NBC News there is frus­tra­tion over her close­ness to him despite these repeat­ed attacks because Loomer has also tak­en her online cud­gel to the hip of Trump’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tion: Bri­an Jack, the polit­i­cal direc­tor of his 2024 cam­paign. This spring, she repeat­ed­ly attacked Jack online, call­ing him a “mole” in the cam­paign, after claim­ing that he sought to under­cut her last con­gres­sion­al bid.

    “Bri­an Jack is prob­a­bly one of the biggest par­a­sites in Trump World,” Loomer wrote in June. “He needs to be fired.”

    Since he launched his lat­est pres­i­den­tial bid, Trump’s cur­rent cam­paign brass has del­i­cate­ly bal­anced main­tain­ing a tight-knit and loy­al inner cir­cle while not alien­at­ing sup­port­ive out­side voic­es, like Loomer’s, or cut­ting off their access to him.

    ...

    Loomer gained promi­nence dur­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion when her anti-Mus­lim posts online got her banned from a series of social media, ride-shar­ing and pay­ment apps. In 2018, she hand­cuffed her­self to Twitter’s New York City head­quar­ters for about two hours to protest her ban from the plat­form.

    She ran for a House seat in Flori­da with Trump’s back­ing in 2020, los­ing to Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep. Lois Frankel by about 20 per­cent­age points. In 2022, she lost a GOP House pri­ma­ry in anoth­er Flori­da dis­trict to Rep. Daniel Web­ster. After her defeat in that race, Loomer addressed sup­port­ers through tears and refused to con­cede the elec­tion, alleg­ing vot­er fraud and say­ing, “We do not live in a free coun­try.”

    Mul­ti­ple Trump cam­paign offi­cials, as well as the DeSan­tis cam­paign, did not respond to a request for com­ment, either. A Haley cam­paign offi­cial declined to com­ment.

    One of Trump’s most promi­nent right-wing allies has already pub­licly offered a harsh con­dem­na­tion of Loomer after The New York Times report­ed on the poten­tial for the cam­paign to hire her. Rep. Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene, R‑Ga., wrote at the time that Loomer was “men­tal­ly unsta­ble and a doc­u­ment­ed liar” and “can not be trust­ed.”

    “Nev­er hire or do busi­ness with a liar,” Greene, whose office did not respond to a request for com­ment, added. “Liars are tox­ic and poi­so­nous to every­thing they touch. I’ll make sure [Trump] knows.”

    Loomer her­self hasn’t shied away from tak­ing on some of Trump’s clos­est polit­i­cal allies, includ­ing Greene and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R‑Fla., writ­ing in Octo­ber: “Matt Gaetz is all about Matt Gaetz. Dis­loy­al, unre­li­able, & more than hap­py to sell MAGA out for per­son­al gain.”

    “I don’t know who she gets along with real­ly — she’s so fringe,” a sec­ond Trump ally said, adding, “You could label her total fringe of the MAGA.”

    “This is so bad for Trump to be around her,” this per­son con­tin­ued. “This is not a good look.”

    ————

    “Trump’s embrace of far-right activist Lau­ra Loomer wor­ries his allies” By Allan Smith, Kather­ine Doyle and Vaughn Hill­yard; NBC News; 01/14/2024

    “Trump has long embraced some of the more fringe fig­ures on the right who have lav­ished him with praise. He has asked peo­ple around him what they think of Loomer and views her as some­one who is unafraid of speak­ing uncom­fort­able truths, a source famil­iar with dis­cus­sions said.

    Trump clear­ly wants per­mis­sion to include Loomer in more his his cam­paign. He likes what he’s seen from Loomer dur­ing this pri­ma­ry sea­son, despite his cam­paign staff’s pal­pa­ble con­cerns over how asso­ci­a­tions with Loomer might play out dur­ing the gen­er­al elec­tion:

    ...
    Per­haps more notable than the encounter, though, was which of Loomer’s biggest fans quick­ly pro­mot­ed it on social media; for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump plugged the video on his Truth Social account on Sat­ur­day.

    It was just the lat­est in a series of pro­mo­tions and praise Trump has offered Loomer dur­ing the cam­paign, and it has some allies and advis­ers wor­ried that he’s giv­ing a fig­ure they see as a fringe, far-right activist too close of an embrace — one that could come back to bite him dur­ing a gen­er­al elec­tion cam­paign.

    ...

    Ear­li­er this month, Loomer, who has pro­mot­ed con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capi­tol and sev­er­al mass shoot­ings, rode with Trump aboard his plane on a trip to Iowa, and she has sug­gest­ed she would like to serve as Trump’s press sec­re­tary dur­ing a sec­ond term.

    Onstage at his pre-cau­cus event on Sun­day, Trump gave Loomer a shoutout, say­ing, “You want her on your side.”
    ...

    Trump even report­ed­ly asked his cam­paign aides to hire Loomer for a cam­paign role back in April. At the same time, Loomer has been attack­ing Trump’s cam­paign man­ag­er Bri­an Jack, call­ing him a “mole”. It’s a sign of the esteem Loomer holds in Trump’s eye: she can repeat­ed­ly attack his cam­paign man­ag­er and he’s still enam­ored with her:

    ...
    This sum­mer, he appeared with Loomer in a video at his Bed­min­ster, New Jer­sey, golf club in which he described her as “real­ly very spe­cial.” And, as The New York Times report­ed in April, Trump called on cam­paign aides to hire Loomer for an offi­cial role on the cam­paign, only for a high-rank­ing cam­paign offi­cial to shut down the hir­ing after the sto­ry was pub­lished.

    ...

    Some fear Loomer’s prox­im­i­ty to Trump could fuel Demo­c­ra­t­ic attacks against him as he piv­ots to the gen­er­al elec­tion, which may prompt those advis­ing him to lim­it his expo­sure to her — a move that could anger Trump.

    “He’s going to get pissed,” said the per­son famil­iar with Trump’s dis­cus­sions about Loomer.

    Mul­ti­ple Trump allies told NBC News there is frus­tra­tion over her close­ness to him despite these repeat­ed attacks because Loomer has also tak­en her online cud­gel to the hip of Trump’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tion: Bri­an Jack, the polit­i­cal direc­tor of his 2024 cam­paign. This spring, she repeat­ed­ly attacked Jack online, call­ing him a “mole” in the cam­paign, after claim­ing that he sought to under­cut her last con­gres­sion­al bid.

    “Bri­an Jack is prob­a­bly one of the biggest par­a­sites in Trump World,” Loomer wrote in June. “He needs to be fired.”
    ...

    Who has more of Trump’s sup­port at this point? Bri­an Jack or Lau­ra Loomer? Per­haps more impor­tant­ly, how will Trump’s atti­tude toward Jack and Loomer going to shift should he find him­self behind in the polls as the gen­er­al elec­tion unfolds? Because let’s not kid our­selves: Trump’s 2024 cam­paign is only going to remain a ‘cam­paign’ as long as he’s close or ahead in the polls. Should he start falling behind and look­ing like he’s going to lose, that cam­paign is going to rapid­ly turn into a plan­ning group for the next insur­rec­tion. A very large plan­ning group that will include any ran­dom MAGA lunatic itch­ing for vio­lence. We’ve seen this movie before. In oth­er words, Justin Mohn’s mili­tia rev­o­lu­tion would have prob­a­bly had a lot more suc­cess had he wait­ed until after Don­ald Trump declares war on the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment lat­er this year. There would have at least been a lot more fel­low trav­el­ers on the same ‘mass purge of the feds’ page.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 1, 2024, 4:34 pm

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