“Counterculture and Neo-Nazi Terrorism: How the Neofolk, Industrial, and Black Metal Subcultures Helped Spawn Today’s Most Infamous Terrorist Manifesto”
Sunday, June 29, 6 PM
Fuzzy Cactus
221 W. Brookland Park Blvd
Richmond, Virginia

James Mason’s book Siege—which praises terrorism, serial killers, and Charles Manson—has become the go-to text for today’s aspiring neo-Nazi terrorist. These adherents see things like the 2017 Unite the Right rally as too mainstream and tepid, and at least a dozen murders can be connected to circles based on the book’s ideas. This talk will trace the origins of his ideas, and how members of the 1980s and ’90s counterculture were responsible for their spread.

The talk will explain how Mason developed his ideas after a terrorist wing emerged out of a slew of 1970s neo-Nazi micro-parties that splintered out of Alexandria, Virginia’s American Nazi Party/NSWPP. But in the next couple decades he was discovered and promoted by a clique of four 1980s and ‘90s counterculturalists: industrial musician Boyd Rice; neofolk musician and Lords of Chaos author Michael Moynihan; Radio Werewolf’s Nikolas Schreck; and Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey. Together, they spent nine years selling Mason and his ideas to their countercultural circles, giving Siege a new life and a new audience.

We’ll also ask about how the 1980s and ’90s counterculture became complicit in this. What enabled the situation to arise? How were these four able to obscure their background, continue to function in the underground scene, and remain unaccountable? And what can be done differently in the future?