Siege by James Mason
A Paranoid's History of the United States #6
In 1986, experimental musician and provocateur Boyd Rice wrote a fan letter that would have devastating consequences. The recipient wasn't a fellow artist, but James Mason — the author of an obscure neo-Nazi newsletter whose violent ideas would soon become known around the world.
This episode traces how Mason's newsletter and book Siege evolved from fringe extremist literature into a modern blueprint for terrorism. We explore Mason's journey from teenage American Nazi Party member to Charles Manson devotee, and how his concept of “leaderless resistance” — advocating lone wolf terrorist attacks — became the strategic foundation for contemporary white supremacist violence.
GUEST: Spencer Sunshine, antifascist researcher and author of Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege
FURTHER INFORMATION
PBS Frontline: Documenting Hate:
SOCIAL MEDIA
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TRANSCRIPT
Lenny Flatley: I’m Joseph L. Flatley. And from Amphibian Media, this is A PARANOID’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. Each week, I explore America’s true conspiracies and crackpot theories, bringing untold stories to light and challenging what we think we know about our nation’s history.
ARCHIVAL: “White supremacist violence”
REPORTER:“Let me ask you a question. Why do you still hold these Nazi ideals?”
MASON: “You got any better ones?”
REPORTER: “You believe the U.S government should be overthrown, yet you're relying on the charity of others and potentially the charity of taxpayers.”
MASON: “This is guerrilla warfare, man! You gotta take what you have to get what you need.”
Lenny Flatley: That’s James Mason, author of a popular neo-Nazi terror manual. The former sign painter and K-Mart greeter is justifying his use of a local soup kitchen.
ARCHIVAL: “Documenting Hate”
A.C. THOMPSON: “Atomwaffen's ideology draws from the writings of an obscure neo-Nazi named James Mason, who published a newsletter in the 1980s called SIEGE. Atomwaffen has made SIEGE required reading for all of its members.”
Lenny Flatley: In 1986, Boyd Rice — an experimental musician and right-wing provocateur — wrote a fan letter. But he wasn't writing to another artist or musician. This letter went to James Mason, who published a newsletter called SIEGE. Through their partnership, Mason’s violent ideas would emerge from the fringes of extremist literature to become something far more dangerous: a modern blueprint for terrorism.
Rice was captivated by the newsletters — which managed to be both explicitly neo-Nazi and deeply intertwined with the figure of Charles Manson.
"I find it difficult to breathe within the confines of more mainstream National Socialism,” he wrote, “which seems to be made up of people who lack any inner vision & are still thinking in terms as small as those who they oppose."
Rice was actively seeking a way to connect with Manson. He felt quote, "closer to him than anyone" and "at one with his thought."
The resulting book, also called SIEGE, is a collection of Mason’s newsletters, filled with his thoughts on revolution, violence, and racial warfare. Before Rice discovered it, the newsletter was obscure even for the most radical neo-Nazis. But through the effort of Rice and his colleagues, Mason’s calls for “leaderless resistance” — his term for lone-wolf terrorism — would find a new audience.
The consequences of this artistic fascination would prove devastating. As SIEGE found new life through these alternative cultural channels, it began attracting readers far beyond its original audience. The book became a manual for terror, inspiring numerous acts of violence and serving as a foundational text for modern terrorists and neo-Nazi groups like Atomwaffen Division.
This is a story about what happens when transgressive art meets violent ideology. It’s about James Mason, the man who wrote SIEGE!, and the strange journey his work took from obscurity to influence — a journey that began with a fan letter and ended with real-world violence that continues to this day.
We’ll be right back.
PART 1
ARCHIVAL
GEORGE LINCOLN ROCKWELL: “I see some white people have finally gathered together, and you see that we're in spirit — at least we're unified. I say to you ladies and gentlemen, that if you will stick together that's the key. If you will cut out scrabbling with each other, stick together, stop quarreling about names, we can have our country once again free. We can have it once again white, we can have it once again Christian, and above all ladies and gentlemen, we can have it once again a Christian American Republic with a wholesome atmosphere that every American can be proud of.”
Lenny Flatley: That’s George Lincoln Rockwell, who founded the American Nazi Party in 1959.
In 1966, at just 14 years old, James Mason joined the organization. He would later describe his teenage years as a time of intense radicalization, distributing Nazi propaganda in his hometown of Chillicothe, Ohio.
The young Mason absorbed the theatrical style of the party. Rockwell was provocative, staging public demonstrations while dressed in full Nazi regalia, complete with swastika armbands and storm trooper uniforms. He called this strategy “Phase One” — a period of shocking publicity stunts designed to attract media attention and build name recognition for the movement.
THIS WEEK’S GUEST
Lenny Flatley: Spencer Sunshine is a sociologist who studies the far-right. He is the author of the book NEO-NAZI TERRORISM AND COUNTERCULTURAL FASCISM.
Spencer Sunshine: They were the original group, if you're talking about that was quite small. It had maybe maximum 200 members at its height, maybe quite lower than that. It was this was a period where we hadn't seen, they were innovative, because they were the first sort of open neo Nazi Party in the post war. US people had not seen people marching in the street with swastika flags since before the war, right? And it was a big shock, even though there were other these crypto Nazi parties running around, of course, groups like the Ku Klux Klan, who were active killing people in the civil rights movement. But the Nazi thing was something different. They had very limited influence on anything. I think people around them were probably a little bit older. Were probably in their maybe 20s. It was a lot of very fringe people.
Lenny Flatley: Rockwell was assassinated in a laundromat in 1967, when Mason was fifteen years old. Despite the death of his leader, Mason stayed with the movement, eventually becoming disillusioned with the theatrical approach of his peers. Where they believed in public demonstrations and media attention, Mason saw this as a distraction from what he believed should be the movement’s true goal: the violent overthrow of American society.
ESOTERIC HITLERISM
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“We're on the trail of a European woman who came here in the 1930s on a kind of spiritual journey. She learned Indian languages, took an Indian name, married a brahman and made India her home.”
“But she wasn't on some hippie quest for enlightenment and good hash.”
“Savitri was here to mourn the fall of the Third Reich and fortify her faith that National Socialism would rise again.”
Lenny Flatley: As time went on, Mason began to seek out more extreme influences, finding them in unexpected places. One of his earliest discoveries was Savitri Devi, a woman whose story was as unusual as her ideas. Born Maximiani Portas in France, Devi had traveled to India in the 1930s, where she developed a peculiar fusion of Hindu mysticism and Nazi ideology.
Her writings introduced Mason to the concept of “esoteric Hitlerism,” a belief system that presented Adolf Hitler not merely as a political leader, but as a divine figure — an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. She argued that Nazism was the culmination of an ancient Aryan tradition.
This spiritual dimension resonated deeply with Mason, who began to view Nazism not merely as a political movement, but as a religion.
Spencer Sunshine: He's a very contentious figure. And basically he gets locked out, and other people win and he loses, and then he he moves through groups, and he has more and more fallings out with people, basically. And so through this, through being part of a bigger movement, you know, going into splinter groups, he essentially, by 1982 let's say, becomes a party of one, where he is doing this, but he's not just a lone person reading stuff and writing by himself, like he's going through this whole movement with a bunch of other people, like in the in the in the early 70s, that party is like maybe 1000-2000 people, right? And then through the fracturing, sort of sometimes in the on the left, people call this like working on your own theory or something, right? He's coming up with his own ideas. And this is important, because his ideas are some of the answers to the questions that came up in the 70s about how to neo-Nazis win and create a national socialist country. So yes, he does end up like this, but he ends up like this through a process. And it is through this process of alienation that he starts. He these groups always had a the groups he was involved in how to focus on recruiting and writing prisoners. And he it is through his practice of writing prisoners that he runs into the Manson family and then into Charles Manson.
ARCHIVAL
HOST: “People look at you today, 20 years later, and they still have no idea what you're about. Tell me in a sentence who you are.”
MANSON: “Nobody. I’m a bum, a hobo. I’m a boxcar and a jug of wine. And a straight razor if you get too close to me.”
Lenny Flatley: That’s right — we’re talking about Charles Manson, whose cult killed at least nine people in Los Angeles in 1969. Mason must have been desperate to look at this guy and think: “this is my new mentor.”
Spencer Sunshine: So it's actually through the political practice of writing prisoners that he does end up with Charles Manson, and it's because his own — Mason's own — alienation that this is one thing that very radical groups do. When they can't find allies to work with or programs to launch, they'll turn to prisoners, because you can always write prisoners, and prisoners will respond to you. It's actually a not uncommon tactic. And so through it was through this political process that he intersects with Manson, who then becomes a cultural opening, right?
Lenny Flatley: Mason’s connection to Manson began with a letter he wrote to the imprisoned cult leader in 1974. Where the rest of the world saw a murderous manipulator, Mason saw something else entirely. In Manson’s rambling statements about an upcoming race war — what he called “Helter Skelter” — Mason found confirmation of his own apocalyptic beliefs.
The relationship between Mason and Manson would develop over years of correspondence. Manson’s belief that society was inevitably heading toward a catastrophic race war aligned perfectly with Mason’s own increasingly extreme worldview. But where Manson’s ideas were often incoherent and contradictory, Mason worked to systematize them into a comprehensive ideology of terror.
This synthesis of influences — Rockwell's propaganda techniques, Devi's mysticism, and Manson's apocalyptic visions — came together in SIEGE, which he began publishing in the early 1980s. These writings laid out a vision where Mason called for the complete destruction of modern society through acts of individual terrorism.
LONE WOLF TERROR
ARCHIVAL:
“Imagine a person who plans and executes a violent attack all by themselves without any direct orders or support from a group or organization this is what we call a lone wolf terrorist these individuals are unique because they act alone yet their actions can have significant and devastating impact”
Lenny Flatley: Central to Mason’s ideology was the concept of “leaderless resistance.” This wasn’t entirely his creation — the idea had been floating around far-right circles since the 1960s. But Mason developed it into a comprehensive strategy of terror. The concept was simple: rather than forming traditional hierarchical organizations that could be infiltrated or disrupted by law enforcement, Mason called for individuals to act alone, carrying out attacks without central coordination.
This strategy was designed to be virtually impossible to stop. Without a formal structure, there would be nothing for law enforcement to dismantle. Instead, Mason advocated for lone individuals to carry out acts of violence on their own initiative, guided only by his writings and general principles. He provided both the philosophical justification and the practical guidelines for terrorist action, detailing methods of attack, strategies for avoiding detection, and ways to maximize the psychological impact of violence.
Of course, we don’t want to be in the business of platforming James Mason, but it’s important to get a sense of this material. Here is a passage from SIEGE! where he justifies his approach.
ARCHIVAL
“Who is a terrorist? When considering the hundreds of thousands of elderly Whites who are frightened to death inside and outside their homes on an unending basis because the System coddles and protects the criminal element officially, is that not terrorism? Brainwash and taste-making aside, when any individual knows clearly in his or her own mind that to buck the Jewish-liberal inspired consensus on everything from race to sex habits will lead to public ostracism and loss of employment, if not outright legal prosecution, is that not terrorism? Kids brutalized and intimidated on a daily basis, year in and year out, because of savages they are forced into school buildings with because of government policy — is that not terrorism? Millions of White workers struggling against losing odds with taxes and inflation, facing loss of homes and all forms of security, oftentimes wondering where food is going to come from or where the winter heat will come from because of the official Jewish-Capitalist economy and the Mafia style Internal Revenue Service — is this not terrorism? Yes, it most definitely IS terrorism and on a monumental scale!”
Lenny Flatley: Mason’s teachings went beyond mere tactical advice. He developed a complete worldview that combined elements from all his influences. From Rockwell, he learned the power of propaganda, though he preferred written words to public spectacle. From Devi, he adopted the idea of Nazism as a religious movement, giving his violent ideology a spiritual dimension. And from Manson, he embraced the notion of apocalyptic race war as both inevitable and desirable.
What made Mason’s ideas particularly dangerous was their adaptability. He wasn’t calling for complex political strategies or organized resistance. Instead, he promoted a form of accelerationism — the belief that the best way to bring about radical change is to actively speed up the collapse of existing systems. In practice, this meant encouraging his followers to commit acts of violence whenever and wherever they could.
The resulting ideology was uniquely suited to the impending social media age. By promoting individual action over organized resistance, Mason had created the template for modern domestic terrorism. His ideas would prove particularly effective in the era of social media and online radicalization, where individuals could find his writings, absorb his philosophy, and act on it without ever making direct contact with other extremists.
PARANOID’S HISTORY continues in a moment.
PART 2
Lenny Flatley: I'm curious where this kind of confluence of industrial music or art and Charles Manson, just kind of that, like, edgelord thing, if you have any insight into that, where that came from?
Spencer Sunshine: Well, I think some of the origins of this stuff are in the avant garde art traditions. And they're like, really the 20th century fascination of avant garde art with transgression. Some of the specific things come out of the industrial music scene, out of Throbbing Gristle, this British industrial act, they started as a artist collective called com transmissions, and did some really wild, I mean, they were coming out of ‘60s stuff, and did these really wild performances where they would self flagellate on stage, and Genesis P-Orridge, the singer would, like, you know, cut himself and have they'd have sex in front of people, like, really, just mining extremes for their own sake. Around 1975 76 basically the the artist collective started playing music and rebranded themselves as Throbbing Gristle, playing her sort of the ur- industrial noise band. And then this, the this, the first wave of industrial music was like a kind of sometimes called an atonal no chord music. It was really pretty striking when you heard it back then, or when I heard it even in the late 80s or early 90s now, it sounds a little more tepid. We're so used to so much of atonal kind of things without traditional like chord structures. But they were fascinated. Gen in particular, was fascinated with both Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler, like they were really just into extremes for their own sake. That whole scene, a whole scene broke out of them amongst the industrial music scene, and they were very interested in pushing these boundaries in a very ambiguous way. It was more intellectual than like edge lords are. There's something kind of childish about today's online edge lords, and there's a playfulness that wasn't exactly there in the industrial scene. I think some of this, this two faced playfulness came, came later, like there's not a lot of play and thriving crystal, but there's a lot of ambiguity. So there's all this Nazi imagery, for example, but you can't tell, is this a critique? Is this an endorsement? Is this like, you know, what is it? What is it there for? And so at least in I want to say that these other impulses of dabbling with extremes don't exist elsewhere in society, because they must, right? They're always just who want to go to the wall. But for this particular scene, I think it comes out of this. It comes out of this industrial music scene, and then around it develops something that that I call in the book. It's what we call it at the time. I haven't really seen it in in newer books, or there's all this kind of academic scholarship on on the on the countercultures. Now we call it the extreme culture scene, and just people wanting to it was a sort of branch off, or an extension of punk rock where, but people were a little older, they were a little more sophisticated. They were like writers. Writers. There were visual artists or filmmakers or publishers, right? It wasn't just like 18 year old kids playing hardcore and it included industrial music, but included all these other kinds of things too. So people making this avant garde underground art, some of it in San Francisco and LA and London and stuff.
ABRAXAS FOUNDATION
Lenny Flatley: In the late 1980s, a strange group called the Abraxas Foundation emerged from San Francisco's underground scene. They called themselves an "occult-fascist think tank," though some saw it as more of a provocative art project than a real organization. Founded by musician Boyd Rice, the group brought together an unlikely mix of characters: publisher Adam Parfrey, Satanist Nicholas Schreck, and writer Michael Moynihan. These guys were already known in underground circles – Schreck was the director of a pro-Charles Manson documentary, and Parfrey published books that mainstream publishers wouldn't touch.
I should mention that although Adam Parfrey died in 2018, his publishing company is still around. They published my book NEW AGE GRIFTER in 2021.
The Abraxas crowd mixed Social Darwinist ideas with occult philosophy, walking a line between extreme-right politics and dark spirituality. This wasn't entirely new – Schreck had already founded something called the Werewolf Order, which he dubbed a "magical resistance unit." He even made a documentary about Manson, with Rice conducting the prison interview.
Spencer Sunshine: So the Abraxas clique was these four guys who were belong to a paper organization called the Abraxas Foundation, which dubbed itself as an occult fascist Think Tank, really driven as a project of by Boyd rice, the industrial musician. It also included Michael Moynihan, who was a later became better known as a neo- folk musician and author of a book called The Lords of Chaos about Norwegian black metal. Uh, Adam Parfrey, the publisher of Feral House press, and Nicholas Schrek, who was a Satanist, who was a pretty bad musician, and later married Anton Lavey’s daughter, Xena. And so these guys worked together. Moynihan joined a little later, aided each other, published each other, and ended up creating the nucleus of the circle that they ended up bringing other people around into became a few dozen people, I think, by the end of the 90s and but it was centrally fixated on their interest in Charles Manson, in Anton Lavey and in James Mason.
Lenny Flatley: The collective’s most significant contribution came through its connection to various underground scenes. It operated at the intersection of several subcultures: the industrial music scene, the occult underground, the extreme right, and the emerging “chaos magic” movement. Through these networks, they were able to introduce Mason’s ideas to audiences who might never have encountered them otherwise.
SIEGE (THE BOOK)
Lenny Flatley: Michael Moynihan published the first edition of SIEGE (the book) in 1992. While physical copies of the original edition are rare, it has been republished multiple times, and has spread widely in digital form.
The internet opened up new channels for SIEGE to reach a wider audience. The text began circulating as PDFs and e-books that could be easily shared online. Audio versions eventually appeared too, popping up on platforms like YouTube. What had once been an obscure collection of newsletters could now be found through a simple Google search, spread across forums, or downloaded from sites like the Internet Archive.
The consequences of this digital preservation and promotion would prove far-reaching. As SIEGE spread online, it began to find new audiences — not just among artists and occultists, but among actual extremists who took Mason’s calls for violence literally. The book that the Abraxas collective had treated as a mix of transgressive art and dark spirituality became a practical manual for terror.
We’ll be right back.
CONCLUSION
ARCHIVAL
ANCHOR: “The trial began today for a Newport Beach man who allegedly killed a former High School classmate because he was gay and Jewish.”
ANCHOR: “In opening statements Deputy District Attorney Jennifer Walker says Woodward Now 26 was heavily involved in the Neo-Nazi terrorist Network called Atomwaffen, even writing a test she says to ensure new members understand SIEGE!”
DA: “And what was SIEGE!? Well, it was their bible, a book written by James Mason who they revered just like Hitler and in that book he talks about all the principles of SIEGE, which are getting rid of people that are not desirable taking down the the government.”
Lenny Flatley: On January 2nd, 2018, in Orange County, California, nineteen-year-old Blaze Bernstein was stabbed to death. His body was found buried in a shallow grave. The accused killer, Samuel Woodward, was a member of Atomwaffen Division. In Woodward’s bedroom, investigators found a copy of SIEGE, alongside Nazi paraphernalia and combat knives.
Bernstein’s murder wasn’t an isolated incident. Between 2017 and 2019, Atomwaffen members were linked to at least five murders across the United States. The group recruited on college campuses, trained with firearms in the desert, and plotted attacks on nuclear facilities and synagogues. Their propaganda videos showed members in skull masks, conducting paramilitary drills and burning the Constitution, all while quoting directly from SIEGE!
ATOMWAFFEN
Lenny Flatley: The now-defunct Atomwaffen — German for “atomic weapons” — represents one of Mason’s most prominent followings. The group’s members didn't just read SIEGE, they lived it. They maintained direct contact with Mason himself, who they treated as a spiritual leader. Their cells operated across multiple states, combining Mason’s call for leaderless resistance with social media savvy.
But Atomwaffen was just the most visible manifestation of Mason’s influence. His ideas have inspired numerous lone wolves — individuals acting without formal organization, just as Mason prescribed. The 2019 Poway, California synagogue shooter referenced SIEGE! in his manifesto. The El Paso Walmart shooter’s screed echoed Mason’s accelerationist themes. Both attacked soft targets, aiming to spark the race war that Mason had prophesied.
These attacks follow a pattern Mason laid out decades ago: individual actors, striking without warning, choosing targets for maximum psychological impact. The killers often share similar profiles — young men, radicalized online, who found in Mason’s writings a permission structure for violence. They saw themselves as soldiers in Mason’s apocalyptic war, even if they never met another member of his movement.
But beyond these direct acts of violence, Mason’s influence can be seen in the broader ecosystem of right-wing extremism. His concept of “leaderless resistance” has been adopted by groups ranging from eco-fascists to accelerationist collectives. His writing style — mixing tactical advice with mystical racism — has been widely imitated in extremist literature.
The Order of Nine Angles, a secretive neo-Nazi occult group, incorporates many of Mason's ideas. The Base, another terror group, heavily draws from Mason's violent philosophy of acceleration and white revolution. Mason's influence extends throughout far-right extremist circles. His belief that society is beyond saving, that acceleration toward collapse is the only solution, has become a common thread in modern extremist thought.
Spencer Sunshine: Well, you know, right now, as we record this, the trial for former atomwaffen leader Brandon Russell has started in Baltimore. He was planning on attacking the Baltimore power grid with his girlfriend or something, who just got 18 years. he was the first leader of the atomwaffen division. [...] Its members have been and affiliates have been connected to five murders. And everyone in Atomwaffen had to read siege. That was their their hashtag, read siege. All members had to read the book. There was apparently a test they had to take on it. Out of atom and other groups, it became a slew of groups developed around the world who followed what they called siege culture, which was basically the ideas in Siege. And then this expanded and turned into a number of shifting telegram channels called dubbed terrorgram, run by, or primarily run by, a group called the terrorgram Collective, who are now being banned, kind of banned in the US, banned in Britain. Two of the members have been arrested here, and this, these have all followed the ideas and siege this idea called accelerationism, which is the idea that there's no point in doing legal, political, white supremacist work or organizing, and instead, we should sow chaos through dramatic acts of of violence in public. You know, whichever which have generally taken the form of single these single actor massacres, ideally like Brendan Terrence action in Christchurch New Zealand is the is the Uber one for them that he filmed it while he was doing it and wrote slogans on the guns and put a manifesto out online on social media. That's the sort of template that that everyone wants to follow. And so Mason has inspired this whole now international accelerationist milieu.
Lenny Flatley: This brings us back to the role of the Abraxas Foundation. The repackaging of Mason’s work created a cultural pipeline through which his ideas could reach new audiences. They made his violent ideology seem sophisticated, wrapping it in layers of artistic and occult significance. This aesthetic treatment helped SIEGE spread beyond traditional neo-Nazi circles, finding readers who might have otherwise rejected such explicit extremism.
In today’s conspiratorial landscape, Mason occupies a unique position. Unlike many conspiracy theorists who spin elaborate tales of hidden powers, Mason offers something more direct: a call to action. His writings don’t just describe what’s wrong with society — they provide a manual for destroying it. This combination of conspiracy theory and tactical guidance makes SIEGE particularly dangerous in our digital age.
ARCHIVAL
HOST: “You know all of those records that you have down in your basement, strange records by groups like The Chipmunks for example [...] these are records that you listened to maybe once or maybe 30,000 times but it was all 30 years ago? Well there's a growing interest in this discarded music.”
Lenny Flatley: Figures like Boyd Rice are able to sort of slide under the radar for a couple reasons. Their status as avant garde artists creates a smokescreen — are they really fascists, or are they creating art that comments on fascism?
And you can’t discount the job that the news media plays in keeping this smokescreen going. I’m talking about the kind of unserious reporters who platform Rice as a kind of weird “man about town” in his home city of Denver, the guy who plays kooky records at a local dive bar.
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HOST: “And what are his favorite records from the archive?”
BOYD RICE: “Jack Palance [...] there's one song he wrote called the meanest man that ever lived. Nancy Walker her first and last record called ‘I Hate Men.’ Mexican bands from the ‘60s singing British kind of hit rock and roll songs and they do it phonetically so sometimes they're singing things that aren't even words.”
Lenny Flatley: The lasting influence of SIEGE! serves as a warning about how fringe ideas can become deadly weapons. What began as a series of newsletters was transformed by artists into provocative content, which continues to inspire violence today. From Atomwaffen to lone wolves, from online forums to real-world attacks, Mason’s ideas continue to find new adherents, each convinced they’re soldiers in his apocalyptic war.
Join me next time as we uncover another hidden chapter in American history. This is A PARANOID’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. I’m Joseph L Flatley.