[Free Society Satanists][Buzzsprout]

Jack and Cris sit down to talk with Spencer Sunshine about Neo Nazi and Far Right Extremist influence in Satanism, and the rest of the world. Spencer is the author of “Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege“, and “40 Ways To Fight Fascists: Street Legal Tactics For Community Activists.” Spencer also travels the country giving talks on the dangers of Neo-Nazis and The Far Right, a topic he has spent the past two decades researching. We also say goodbye to our friend Cris, who will be stepping down from the co-host chair at ASP Studios.. We are gonna miss him. Hawaiian Shirt Friday will not be the same without the Grand Inquisitor!

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Jack Violently: Welcome back to the Ave Satanas podcast. My name is Jack Violently. I’ll be your host today. The Ave Satanas podcast is a presentation of the Free Society Satanists. We are a worldwide collective of anarchistic Satanists under the banner of the Global Order of Satan .

For more information and how to join us on Discord, check the links in the show notes below. We’ve also added a “support the show” tab in the show notes where you can directly donate to our fundraising efforts. All proceeds made from that tab will go to our fundraisers.

So, we have an extremely important episode for you guys today. It is going to be an information-dense episode. So, strap in.

And here to help me navigate the waters is my friend and yours, Cris. Cris, what’s going on, dude?

Cris Svartur: It’s going pretty good, man. It’s a beautiful day out here in Georgia. So, it’s a beautiful day to talk about Nazis, huh?

Jack: Sure is. So, not only do we have you to help us here to keep us company, we are also joined by our very special guest, author of “Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege” and also “40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street Legal Tactics for Community Activists”.

When he isn’t writing great books, he can be found traveling the world, giving talks on far-right extremism, terrorism, and sometimes even Satanism. Tie into these worlds there.

So, if this didn’t already make him a pretty cool dude, he has also spent the better part of two decades infiltrating, investigating, and bringing this dirt to the light of scrutiny.

Spencer Sunshine, it is an honor, good sir. How are you today?

Spencer Sunshine: Thank you. I always listen to these intros and I go, “This sounds like a really interesting guy.” I was just-

Jack: “Who are they talking about?”

Spencer: “They have a lot to talk about.” [laughs]

Jack: So, it’s wild. I found out about you from— or we found out about you from “Into the Stewniverse”, the podcast that you just recently did.

Queer Satanic posted about that and kind of brought it into our view. We basically hung out in the same backyard, just kind of minus five years. That’s freaking crazy.

Spencer: In Georgia? Are both of you from Georgia?

Jack: Yes, sir. Yep.

Cris: Yeah. But both from kind of central Georgia. Yep. So…

Spencer: I always say I was from north Georgia, but at least I wasn’t from south Georgia. So…

Jack: You’re right.

So, as we joked about in the emails, I am from Milledgeville, Georgia, and you had kind of made the same joke that I have heard most of my life.

After high school and a little bit afterwards, I went into the military. So, I was in the Navy, in Great Lakes, Illinois. And part of bootcamp was, you had to stand up, sound off, and say where you’re from. So, I stood up and I was like, “Recruit Jackson, Division 206. Sir, I’m from Milledgeville, Georgia.” And all the way to Illinois, the guy was like, “Are you crazy?” And I was like, “What do you mean?” And it didn’t dawn on me that he was making a mental, you know, mental hospital joke.

Spencer: Ohhhh, is that where the-

Jack: Milledgeville is known for where the quote unquote state hospital [Central State Hospital]. But, so, this episode during the inception of the Ave Satanas podcast so I’ve always grown up a SHARP skinhead [SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice], and I know “Into the Stewiniverse”, you were kind of talking about like the different delineations of like skinhead culture, and we can go into it a little bit today if time permits, but everything that I’ve always known about skinhead culture was unity and inclusion. It wasn’t until I started going to shows, like, in Atlanta where I started seeing the hateful side of it.

And… early on in the Ave Satanas podcast, I was talking to Cris about my love of Oi! music, my love of the SHARP culture, and I was like, “Man, I wonder if there are satanic skinheads?” And sure enough, my little thumbs went to Googling and I hated what I found. So, this is theoretically because, like I said, I—

Spencer: Did you find a group or did you find a band? Is it a band or a label?

Jack: It wasn’t a band. We more found the Order of Nine Angles, and we also found more just kind of the the groups that a satanic skinhead would would find if they were searching those two words together. So that’s kind of what-

Spencer: There was a group in the ’80s called the “Satanic Skinheads”. Gavin Baddeley says that, although I haven’t found much information otherwise. So that’s why I wasn’t sure if you’re referring to that specific group.

Jack: And I would probably imagine they’re not the fun all-inclusive satanic skinheads. They probably skew the other.

Spencer: I don’t think they were SHARP. I don’t think they were SHARP skins.

Jack: God dang it.

Cris: Yeah. And it’s crazy ‘cuz I’ve been having this general idea for an episode like this for a long time and I’ve worked and I’ve tried to research, and every time I got close to what I thought was going to be an outline of a script, I would always find something more.

You know, I didn’t realize how deeply all of this stuff goes. So when Queer Satanic did post about that podcast you’re on, and I listened to it, I was like, “Holy crap.” So I immediately went out and bought your book, and then then all of a sudden we’ve got you on the show.

So I’m really excited for this and let’s give Jack a break right quick for his migraine’s sake, and just dive right into it, if you don’t mind.

Spencer: Sure, let’s do it.

Cris: So I guess my first question and kind of to bring everybody into it:

How was it that you first got into an interest of studying far-right politics, the neo-Nazis and tangentially then the satanic side of things? How did all that work out for you?

Spencer: Well, Georgia, of course, I grew up in Lawrenceville, Georgia, which is- was a small town in the ’70s. It’s sort of suburbs now. In the ’70s it was a small town, like, maybe 10,000 people between Athens and Atlanta. I always said, “And maybe you stopped there for gas, if that.”

In the ’70s and ’80s they had a very picturesque courthouse and there were Klan rallies there pretty periodically. I found out later there’s an irony is that the original courthouse was actually burned down by the first Klan to destroy the records in it.

It was a very very conservative area.

The president— I started studying the John Birch Society later on, this far-right group that was established in the late ’50s. Like, you know, anti-Communist when “anti-Communist”— and I asked my dad, I was like. “I’m familiar with all this stuff. Is there Bircher literature in our community?” And he’s like, “No, no, no.” And then I learned that the president of the John Birch Society was our congressional representative. So it was this kind of place.

And then it was in 1988 that the Nazi skinhead movement really exploded in the United States. And so I was in high school in ’88. And I was in high school with all these Nazi skinheads. And I was in the punk scene, and we drive to Atlanta and at the time.

In the Atlanta metro area there were like half dozen neo-Nazi groups, largely skinhead groups, some Klan groups. There was a major early neo-Nazi leader — leaders — who still lived I think in Marietta [Georgia] who are in the National States Rights Party [1958-1987]. Ed Fields and J.B. Stoner, who was a convicted church bomber, and they were networking with the skinheads. And so all of this kind of stuff.

I ended up meeting up with an adult group of people doing grassroots counter-organizing against these people. It’s always funny now because I think of them as these “older adults”, but they’re younger than I am now.

And they’d come into contact with me and some other punk rockers and skinheads and sort of put us together. And so we formed an anti-racist — in the parlance then, antifascist now — group inside the punk scene in Atlanta to push back against the Nazi domination—

There were no other groups inside the punk scene. There were a lot of people not happy with it, but there was no other organized groups pushing back against it. So at the time we were the only one.

I don’t know. I think we did have some some success in letting people know that there was organized opposition.

But so much later on I got into leftwing activities. Many years did all kinds of stuff. We’ll just say in 2005 I was writing my dissertation, which is about the structure of post-1960 anarchist theory in the United States. And I was still looking at different factions, and I found this basically cryptofascist group that was cross-recruiting who were called “National Anarchists”. They were an outgrowth of the British National Front, and I started looking at them and then writing about them. I wrote a couple articles about them and then it sort of spiraled. I got more and more interested in, like, antisemitism and these stranger forms of fascism and Red-Brown movements that combine the left and right.

Eventually I ended up working at a think-tank when I was done with- or working. I was a fellow at a think-tank when I was done with grad school and then I went freelance. And I’ve been doing this full-time for the last 10 years.

But another, like, 10 years before that, as part of other research and activism.

So yeah, that’s my weird trajectory. And you know—

Cris: That’s quite a story.

Spencer: Probably our age, it’s very common for people to have gotten into the antifascist work through the conflict with Nazi skinheads or the presence of Nazi skinheads. And now it’s a kind of esoteric thing, right? I mean, for us, I grew up in a small town in Georgia and we hated Nazi skins. Very normal thing in the ’90s. Now people are like, “Oh, wow. That’s a really weird background. I went to grad school and was studying the Internet and toxic politics and 4chan.”

Jack: You know, it’s kind of wild because like me with the SHARP upbringing, and I would go to shows at the Star Bar, Little Five Points but this was like ’96-’97 where I think you probably got out of it around ’91-’92 or probably left Atlanta about that time.

Spencer: I left Atlanta and went to college in, yeah, ’92. Early in ’92.

Jack: So it’s wild, like, the kind of groups and circles that I probably ran with, you — to some degree — probably had a hand in in kind of creating a bit. So…

Spencer: Well I mean, I hope so. That would be nice. Were you there when CrimeThinc had— or the proto-CrimeThinc project had arisen?

Jack: I believe so. That was largely around the Little Five in the downtown scene, if I remember correctly.

Spencer: Did you know “Adolf & the Piss Artists”?

Jack: That was a lot of beers ago. [laughter] I’m trying to— That was a lot of Mickey’s ago, and I apologize about that.

Spencer: Oh, Mickey’s. It’s been a long time. Yeah. Some of the people I worked with, I think most of the people I worked with, stayed in the area for a while, and some of them still live there.

Yeah. I mean, it’s Georgia. A lot of people don’t leave Georgia, right?

Jack: Right.

Spencer: You said you joined the military. Again, a somewhat unusual thing, I think for a lot of people, but in the South, the South has a very heavy military— that is a very common thing, even for someone left-leaning, to go join the military. And other people just never leave, right?

Georgia really like a lot of people I went to high school with, even very liberal people, queer people— like, maybe they moved into Atlanta, but that was the extent of their, like, leaving the area.

Jack: Yeah, it was wild.

Spencer: Me I GTFO’ed as soon as I fucking could.

Jack: Well, I mean when you’re a 16-, 17-year-old kid and you live in Milledgeville, Georgia, you’re like, “How am I going to get out of here?”

It’s a factory town. Like, Grumman [aircraft engineering corporation] is there. So unless you’re working at a factory, what are you gonna do?

So I looked at the military as kind of, like, my ticket out of here. Realized early on, I’m not a “yes sir, no sir” kind of guy. So me and Uncle Sam butted heads quite a bit, and I got out sooner than I probably should have with my enlistment. But yeah, that that was my way out of Milledgeville. It worked in the end. But there were easier ways to leave Milledgeville.

Spencer: Yeah. You grew up in these small towns, I think, especially in the South, and you can’t— even though you could just move to a big city, another big city, you can’t see the options. You don’t know people who’ve done it. It really— it’s just not in your vision.

I’ve realized that more as I’ve gotten older that you have to put the options in front of people or they just go with what’s around their community. Like, you can’t even think that you could go move if you were a young queer man.

And I mean, you couldn’t be “out” in my community. It was super, super dangerous. You know, that you couldn’t just get up and move to San Francisco or New York. That it wasn’t a big deal. You know what I mean? That concept wasn’t there. Even if you kind of knew there was a gay community in these places.

Cris: Yeah. And like I grew up in kind of a western central Georgia small town, right? And I really didn’t venture into Atlanta for like concerts and stuff like that until around about 2002, right?

So, my exposure to the racism comes from the Christian Identity Right.

Yeah, my grandfather was relatively high placed in the local KKK, also very involved with the Georgia militia as was another important figure in my early childhood. So there was a bunch of talk about “Ruby Ridge” and “Timothy McVeigh” and all of all of that crowd, and breaking out of that was quite an endeavor. But when I started getting into the music scene, I’m more into the Industrial and Death Metal scenes, that’s kind of my wheelhouse. And when I started getting into there, I started also seeing both sides of those. And we can talk about the countercultural neo-Nazi problem in the music scenes later, but it brought it all into really stark contrast. But I mean, I admit I still live in smalltown Georgia. You know, it’s got to got his own gravitational field, somehow.

Spencer: It does. It does. Well, I mean, you know, Satan, bless you. I’m sure your your presence is doing— I’m sure your presence is doing good in that community. I mean, people always like, “Oh, you should stay in these small communities and and fight or whatever.” And I’m like, “You should, I’m out of here.”

Cris: It gets interesting when I wear the big Baphomet T-shirt to the local grocery store.

I did purchase your book, the “Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism” book, and I really, really, really enjoyed it.

Our listeners, please go out and buy the book. It is information-dense.

Spencer: I do have to say, it took me five years to write it.

Cris: Yeah. And it shows. It’s a well-written book that lays out everything in the way I think it should be.

I admit, I have not gotten through most of the first part, but I have re-read the the latter parts about neo-Nazi Satanism several times.

And I wanted to try to get into some of that if you if we can. Perhaps some of the— a little bit of a high-level overview about… where modern Satanism and far-right politics came in with each other.

I think it’s a well-known fact at this point that Anton LaVey famously lifted major parts of “The Satanic Bible” from Ragnar Redbeard’s “Might Is Right”. But there’s other ties as well in there that, you know, I gleaned from your book and had already known from other research. You know, things like James Mason’s “Siege”, James Madole and the National Renaissance Party, and things like that. So perhaps we could get like a— if you can just a high-level overview of how all of those things kind of tied in.

Spencer: Sure. I’ll do my best, and I’ll just plug now for the future. I wrote a much longer article. It’s called “The short history of Nazi Satanism” for the Journal of Right-Wing Studies. It’s being reviewed right now. Hopefully it’ll be out at the end of the year or early next year.

I’ll put it on my social media when it comes out. And I’ve been giving talks based on this. So, if you’re in a Satanist or other lefthand-path group and you’d like to me to give a talk to your group over video, unless you want to bring me there and pay for the transit, I’m willing to do that because I’m trying to talk to Satanists in particular because at this point, we all see that there are Nazi skinheads or you all see. I’m on the edges of that scene. We- people can see that they’re there. It’s well-known that they’re there with with O9A or “Order of Nine Angles” and some other groups, but a lot of people don’t.

And I had to reconstruct it see that this is a a current and almost a current within Satanism that’s been there since very near the beginning. So I read— in writing this article, I read every academic book on Satanism. There’s about 10 of them, and most of them downplay this as well.

So I think I really want to up-play it, not because it’s a major current, it’s a minor current, although a very visible one within Satanists in general, but it’s an important one. So everybody agrees there are precursors.

If people are interested in this about modern Satanism, there’s a literary movement in the 1800s, and then there’s a few groups that sort of arise and fall. They’re local groups in the late 1800s, early 1900s. But modern Satanism begins with Anton LaVey’s establishment of the Church of Satan in 1966 in San Francisco and he writes “The Satanic Bible” in ‘ 69.

“The Satanic Bible” the part of it is directly plagiarized from Ragnar Redbeard’s “Might Is Right”— LaVey talks about this in the introduction to Shane Bugbee’s edition of “Might Is Right” that he wrote in late ’96 right before his death. LaVey dies in ’97.

And so this is a an ugly Social Darwinist text. You know, “nature’s red in tooth and claw,” but also it’s super- it’s this old-school white supremacism from the late 1800s.

It’s really really misogynistic. There’s classical antisemitism like the “Jews control everything in the media,” blah blah blah. Something that certain people like Lucien Greaves have a hard time getting their head around that this is classic antisemitism.

So this is already in there in the individualist thrust of this. He’s an atheist Satanist, right? Are you guys atheist or theists?

Jack: We are—

Cris: We’re atheistic mostly. Yes. Atheistic satanist.

Spencer: I assume, but just checking.

Jack: Yeah.

Spencer: Were you in TST or is this or did you come by this honestly?

Jack: We came from another group that will not be named. A large part of us came from TST, though, myself not included, but basically everybody else kind of had their toes in TST to some degree. Sure.

Spencer: Okay. So the Church of Satan is atheist Satanists. They’re highly individualistic. Typical for Satanists, not all of them, I think, especially as we get into these leftwing, antifascist Satanists. Lately, people are moving away from the hardcore individual, libertarian style individualism. LaVey in “The Satanic Bible” specifically welcomes LGBTQ people. He’s specific about it.

As well as says that Satanism has no racial component or class component, so on and so on. It’s not one thing.

Now, very quickly internally, the Church is not like that. People are reporting that people, like, they go to rituals and people are dressed in Klan and Nazi uniforms and they’re told it’s a joke and then they talk to them. I think Isaac Bonewits was the guy who wrote about this, talked to them privately and they weren’t joking at all.

Around the mid-70s, Michael Aquino who writes his history of the Church of Satan, he splits from— Aquino from LaVey in ’75 to form the Temple of Set, another important theistic Satanist group. [Aquino] finds that some Church of Satan people have formed and joined a Nazi Satanist group called the “Order of the Black Ram” in Detroit. And he brings this up with LaVey and he says, “What the fuck?” and he has a discussion and LaVey reveals that he has been in contact with a guy named James Madole who led an occult fascist group. He’s sort of a crypto-Nazi. They didn’t use, like, swastikas in public and such, but he [Madole] was a National Socialist who was involved— interested in a bunch of different occult forms, but also in Satanism.

And LaVey had been in contact with Madole, and Madole even gave him a membership card. They think this is like an honorary card, but LaVey kept it. LaVey said, “It’s fine. It’s fine if neo-Nazis are the church.” And also in this passage in Aquino’s book is overlooked, that the Church created a reciprocal relationship with the Order of the Black Ram, recognized them as a like a brother Satanist group, which they rarely did with other groups. And it was because this group acknowledged that their ideas were based on LaVey and gave him credit.

At the same time, around 1973, it’s a little unclear, but some scholars point to this in Britain the Order of the Nine Angles is developed by Dave— David Myatt. This is the origins of the group are really shrouded in sort of mystery. Even Myatt has claimed he’s not the known founder, Anton Long, although everyone pretty much agrees he is.

And he was a neo-Nazi starting in the late ’60s, a really militant neo-Nazi. And so he founds this, depending on who you ask, version of Nazi Satanism in ’73.

So it’s right at this period, it’s interesting that we see this less than 10 years after modern Satanism is initiated that we have full-on Nazi Satanists. I should also say Church of Satan and probably other groups use a lot of Nazi imagery separately.

There’s the whole Social Darwinist thing. LaVey starts to talk about there being a satanic master race that’s genetic. And believes in a hierarchical society is very focused on eugenics, which is a very— it doesn’t really make any sense to me about why a highly individualistic doctrine would be interested in eugenics. Especially one—but whatever they think they’re on, they think they’re the elite of this new hierarchy. He starts talking about how, later on, “if fascism makes men like look like men and women look like women then he’s all for it,” which is— it becomes a far cry from the early— from “The Satanic Bible” where he’s like “queer people are welcome into it.” So Aquino, as I said splits, off in ’75, forms a major group called the Temple of Set. He is— he has an unhealthy fascination with the Nazis.

Even though they say they’re not a neo-Nazi group. There are some people who are involved in fascist politics who are hanging around it, like Kerry Bolton and Nikolas Schreck and Zeena [LaVey], Anton’s daughter who broke with him.

Aquino does stuff like on his recommended reading list about World War II says you should read that he’s got a pro-Nazi, neutral, and anti-Nazi historians— and the “neutral” one is David Irving, who is a Holocaust denier. So, you can see where he’s kind of coming from. There’s all kinds of weird stuff like this.

Cris: That’s quite the curve.

Spencer: Yeah, man.

So, he goes to Wewelsburg Castle, which was Himmler’s castle. This, if you’ve seen the Black Sun images all the Nazis used, it’s like a marble inlay in the castle and does a working there, and this becomes an important Church document or Temple [of Set] document.

So there’s all kinds of weird stuff going on. They eventually have to purge Order of Nine Angles members in the early ’90s. I found this reading— I even told an ex-Temple of Set person this in ’92. They have to purge 09A people because the problem had gotten out of hand.

So this is in ’75. He starts to do this. A lot of Satanist groups have broken off the Church or been inspired by the Church. Now its people are interpreting it in different directions. When the Satanic Panic happens in the ’80s— I’m sure your listeners are familiar with this.

It’s interesting because it ends up coinciding with the Nazi skinhead thing in the states. It starts earlier in Britain.

It comes to the states. The first group’s ’85, but it only the first national group’s ’87 and only explodes in ’88.

So we have Nazi skinheads running alongside the Satanic Panic. And there becomes some crossover as there must be some level of crossover between these sort of very anti-mainstream society traditions.

It’s at this point that we get— or a little earlier the involvement of Church of Satan members with the Abraxas Foundation and James Mason.

So, James Mason is today’s preeminent neo-Nazi terrorist ideologue. He wrote a book called “Siege” which I wrote a book— It’s technically about “Siege” but it’s really about the people around Mason.

It’s about Mason, but it’s about ’70s neo-Nazism, and it’s about this group of people I’ll talk about.

In 1986, they contact Mason. It’s four— it ends up being four people. It’s the industrial musician Boyd Rice, well-known for accusations of being a neo-Nazi, but with limited evidence previously, that— concrete, but limited evidence.He’s always pooh-poohed and says he’s being smeared.

Adam Parfrey, who ran a very important underground press called “Feral House”, who sold hundreds of thousands of books. His books have been made into movies. Published within this neo-Nazis and white supremacists always pooh-poohed again. [Parfrey] said he was just “investigating extremes” or “exposing them for their ideas”. and Nikolas Schreck, who was a Satanist also a musician in a band called “Radio Werewolf” married Zeena, Lavey’s daughter— sorry Anton LaVey’s daughter Zeena, and then eventually Michael Moynihan who was an industrial musician who moved to playing neofolk under the name “Blood Axis”, and he ended up becoming the most important figure in this. So basically Boyd Rice was fascinated by Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler. He got this fascination, I think through— or Kevin Coogan says through Genesis P-Orridge of the ur-industrial band “Throbbing Gristle” who they were close with.

Rice opened the last Throbbing Gristle gig in England.

Cris: I did not know that.

Spencer: Yeah. And then they played two in the United States and a friend of mine who was in the early punk scene in the Bay Area was like, “Oh, I saw Throbbing Gristle.” And I was like, “Dude, that was their last show.”

And he’s like, “Okay, I don’t know.” I think Flipper—Flipper opened the last show until they [Throbbing Gristle] got back together…

So Rice contacts Mason. He introduces him [Mason] to both Adam Parfrey and then Michael Moynihan. But what happens is that Rice joins the Church of Satan the next year, in 1987, becomes very close to Anton LaVey, ends up going all the way up the food chain to “the Council of Nine”, which is the advisory body. So he’s a priest and then Council of Nine is an advisory body to Anton LaVey.

Michael Moynihan joins the group as a member and eventually becomes a priest. He also introduces LaVey to Thomas Thorn, a musician who was in “My Life with The Thrill Kill Kult” and then founded the “Electric Hellfire Club”. Also later on, he was made a member by LaVey in person.

Schreck has made a member. He’s hanging out with Zeena. He’s made a member and then he’s a Satanist. He’s a— I interviewed him recently. He said he’s— after the book came out — he [Schreck] says he’s a theistic Satanist. And him and Zeena would go — him, Zeena and Rice — would all go during the Satanic Panic and represent the Church in public. Zeena was the official Church [of Satan] spokesperson. And then Anton Lavey also introduced to— Anton LaVey— I just—

My words go in different directions.

Adam Parfrey, the Feral House publisher, also meets LaVey and becomes his main publisher. After a certain point, he publishes all of— I think starting in ’89 he publishes all of LaVey’s books, the new ones.

“The Satanic Bible” stays on a major press— stays in print on a major press and he publishes two or three of LaVey’s books and then Blanche Barton’s autobiography [of LaVey].

Jack: So I got a question for you. You had mentioned “My Life with a Thrill Kill Cult” and “The Electric Hellfire Club”. They were kind of in the shitty side of things here?

Spencer: Well, “My Life with a Thrill Kill Kult” not so much. They used a lot of satanic imagery, but they for— I asked them about this for a there was a tour— one tour— Thomas Thorn joined them.

Now, Thorn had been in a band called “Slave State” who looked looked every bit of a neo-Nazi band. I mean like really.

And they were like, “Oh we’re kind of just joking.” But, like, were they? Were they joking at the time? And if they were, they weren’t later.

As Thorn became close to James Mason— In fact, on one of their EPs, they thank Mason.

They reprint the stuff by James Mason that Mason had published about Charles Manson. They title a song after a line from James Mason, the “Night of the Buck Knives.” So, Thorn’s tight with him.

And then he forms the Electric Hellfire Club, and this is his vehicle.
It’s his band. I actually saw Rice and Electric Hellfire Club once in Albuquerque, and it was such a weird billing because Electric Hellfire Club are this sort of more dancy, sleazy, sexy band, and Rice was playing this like a tonal, loud, noisy industrial music.

It was very strange, but now I realize they were friends and they’re both friends with these guys.

Jack: I had come across— [crosstalk] I had come across the Electric Hellfire Club just like, you know, Spotify will recommend you more bands. “If you like this, check this out.” And I’ve been a fan of like “Ministry” and I liked “My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult” and they just came up tangentially in my music search and I was like— they had a song called, like, I forget the name of it. He just basically chants, “Hell.” Like, “hell hell, hell,” and I’m like that’s catchy enough.

It’s kind of poppy and dancy in that early ’80s, like mid-80s way. And so to hear like— now I’m not a big fan of Electric Hellfire Club, but it’s just weird that, like, hearing them and now knowing the backstory just kind of makes it real fucking creepy.

Spencer: It does. I liked Electric Hellfire Club. They were like a Cleopatra band that was the big goth label.

Jack: Yeah.

Spencer: So basically these guys contact [James] Mason. Mason’s ideas are that he had gone through all these neo-Nazi groups in the ’70s as they splintered into smaller and smaller groups, so it became a “party of one” cranking out this newsletter in his basement that was literally mimeographed and never made more than 100 copies.

He advocated random attacks, single-actor attacks, serial killings, massacres, civil unrest, and he said, “If people are going to go do these things, don’t just sort of— don’t just get angry and go shoot some people up. Do it very publicly and with a lot of panache, very stylistically.” And this became very influential later on.

Mason ended up in being the main inspiration for this wave of neo-Nazi terrorist groups we’ve seen in the last 10 years, starting with the “Atomwaffen Division” and it splintered into other groups like the “Feuerkrieg Creek Division” and the “Sonnenkrieg division” and The Base… And then eventually this shifting set of Telegram channels, the “Terrorgram” and now into this weird combination— we can talk about this.

The FBI created a term for it called “NVE” – Nihilistic Violent Extremism which is a mix of Order of Nine Angles-Satanists, neo-Nazi accelerationists, this name for these people advocating terrorism, “764”, a child abuse cult, and people fetishizing and encouraging school shooters. And it’s all become mixed together.

So this is part of the legacy of James Mason and why he’s important. So we’re seeing all these Church of Satan people around Mason working with him.

They spend like nine years trying to sell him to the underground, putting him, you know, for the first time outside of his little cloistered, neo-Nazi circles, in these these underground magazines and then a book. He’s in the famous anthology, “Apocalypse Culture”, still in print, meaning that that Feral House is still making money off of James Mason.

Some documentaries, Nicholas Schreck put him in the movie “Charles Manson Superstar”. Then eventually Michael Moynihan edits all these newsletters that Mason had published in the ’80s into this book “Siege”, which comes out in ’93, eventually So these people are all in the Church of Satan.

LaVey basically gives his blessing to the book. And Gilmore is really excited, too. Peter Gilmore is the future head of the Church of Satan. He’s publishing the official periodical called “The Black Flame” at the Church publication and he promotes “Siege” in Black Flame. He’s writing these fawning letters to both Moynihan and James Mason about how much he likes their work.

There’s a glowing review in The Black Flame. I mean, what does a neo-Nazi book advocating terrorism have to do with Satanism?

At the time, there’s also a debate inside the Church of Satan because the presence of neo-Nazis, these guys and others, has become very visible about if Satanism and fascism are compatible. And these these arguments are printed in Black Flame.

I helped digitize all the issues of Black Flame. They’re available online probably through Queer Satanic. I know they’ve put them up in some places [The.Satanic.Wiki].

I found that the early ones which were not available, I had to get them from an archive.

We’re in the process of trying to dig through the early Church of Satan stuff and make it— they kind of made it unavailable, their early publications and such, to see how they developed over the years politically.

And so and they start reviewing Gilmore’s publication starts reviewing other fascist stuff and— fascist stuff until it ends. Around ’96, I think it ends.

So you’ll find all these reviews. There’s stuff like Jared Taylor, who’s this racist intellectual, being reviewed and you’re like, “What does Jared Taylor have to do with Satanism at all?”

LaVey had moved to the right, and Gilmore is just like this far-right dude. I mean, if you read his books he just sounds like some like cranky old Boomer listening to Fox.

So all these Church of Satan people are involved in this creation of this neo-Nazi terrorist book, and the Church has given its blessing to it. LaVey, after the first edition comes out, sends James Mason a copy, a signed copy, of “The Satanic Bible”. James Mason goes and visits Peter Gilmore when he’s in New York City. They take pictures together. So it’s a very close relationship.

And then these guys all remain in the Church of Satan— remain in the Church a long time except Nikolas Schreck who splits out. So it’s interesting because the atheist Satanism is tied to neo-Nazi terrorism at this point, and then later it becomes theistic Satanism. So the Order of Nine Angles is in Britain, they produce a huge amount of the theological documents.

They have this elaborate— these elaborate views, basically, they’re very heathen-influenced, and they say that, “We live in a essentially heathen— European society is, essentially, like pagan, but it’s been perverted by the supposed Jewish conspiracy which has affected all of our social and political worlds. We have to engage in these heretical acts to somehow burst— that burst that Jewish-controlled world and then to move us into the next the next stage of humanity.”

There’s weird stuff, like people are going to go and colonize space. Like, I can’t even— I can’t even get into different things. They also advocate murdering people under the name “culling” and doing something called taking an “insight role,” which is where you’re supposed to join an extremist movement, the opposite of your beliefs, usually Islamism or neo-Nazism, as a kind of weird, bizarre self-help growth project. But what we found, and this is important recently, is that neo-Nazis become Nazi Satanists.

Cris: Yeah.

Spencer: So, this is what’s happening a lot. There’s there’s other groups like the “Joy of Satan”, which we could talk about.

I know you have an interest in them. The whole Nazi Satanist thing is very contentious, though. A lot of neo-Nazis hate it. A lot of Satanists don’t like it. At one point in the ’80s, there’s a crossover between heathens and Satanists. And this, everybody hates everybody in this. People start being kicked out of groups like Steven Edward Flowers, who’s a famous translator, gets kicked out of his heathen group for being a member of the Temple of Set for example. So it’s a very schismatic current within Satanism.

Cris: That’s the thing that really struck me especially reading in your book.

There’s not very many degrees of separation between neo-Nazi Satanism, far-right politics, and even the Christian identity and the Christian nationalist side of things going on right now in America. Like, I recognized quite a few names in your book that I connected to the the Christian identity and the Christian nationalist side of things. And it— I think it was—

Spencer: Like [Robert] Miles and [Richard] Butler?

Cris: Yeah. And I think, wasn’t it Moynihan that had done a review on a Dinesh D’Souza thing and then—

Spencer: Yeah. There there’s a review in the Black Flame of it.

Cris: And then Trump recently pardoned Dinesh D’Souza. And he’s a terrible human being.

Spencer: Yeah.

Cris: Like it’s— they’re so closely aligned, and I think it’s funny but also hair-raising that there is so much animosity between the two, but they’re so, so connected. I found that to be very interesting. Have you have you noticed any other connections kind of like that, perhaps?

Spencer: With other movements?

Cris: Yeah, maybe with other movements, but maybe somebody running— I wouldn’t necessarily say as an intermediary between like the Nazi Satanism side and the Christian nationalist side. Maybe some somebody that our our listening public may know in media or something that have connections between the two.

Spencer: They tend to hate each other. But, and this actually is a point of conflict inside of neo-Nazism, James Mason though is working with all these people in the Church of Satan and he converts to Christianity and is still in contact with them.

So this would be a point. He at one point writes to Swift’s— Rev. [Wesley A.] Swift, the main, probably the largest Christian Identity figure in the US, too, as [Swift’s] widow as he’s [Mason’s] developing this his own strange brand of UFO antisemitic neo-Nazi Christianity… based in part by Eric von Däniken’s “Chariot of the Gods”.

I went to find this book about how the Bible is— “Really, you know, all these ancient cultures are really like have knowledge of the aliens coming” or “The aliens came and the Bible describes an alien spaceship or whatever.” I went back and read it. I always heard about it.

Actually looked around in used-book stores till I could find a little yellowing paperback that was specifically what I wanted for $2 until I actually found it in this little town in the South. Of course.

Cris: That’s crazy.

Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. Go read Däniken and then—

Cris: Actually, the thing is I have read Charity of the Gods. That was a piece of literature that was in my house as a child. [laughs]

Spencer: Yeah. It used to be a really big book.

Which is strange. I mean. I saw all these Christian stores, but in the South, a lot of Christians were into some really odd stuff. It was like you had to be a Christian in most communities.

And so you went through that even if your actual interest was something else. If you weren’t in that, you know, you had to justify it in some way as a Christian.

Cris: Wow.

Spencer: So, no, but I think people switch between them. I mean, spiritual people will often move— go through a Satanist period, and then go into Christianity. Or go through a Christian period or whatever. That’s not uncommon.

If you’re a spiritual person, you’ll often explore different untraditional— spiritual person, you’ll often explore different spiritual traditions.

Cris: Absolutely.

Spencer: So like Kerry Bolton, a very important Nazi-fascist occult writer in New Zealand, who went through Satanist periods, has I think ended up as a Christian more recently. He’s been around for decades. So I mean, one goes through these things.

There’s an Order of Nine Angles guy in Eastern Europe who was O9A and then became some sort of priest, I think, eventually in an Eastern Orthodox Church. There’s a real question about whether he’s “doing an insight role” or if he changed his views or if somehow— you know, there become these dualistic Christians, Gnostic-style Christians, which embrace like the good and evil in the world. And so there can be a combination.

The Process Church is this famous group sometimes considered a Satanist group in the US in the founded in the ’60s, and they have elements of both. They’re not Satanists, but they do have elements of both.

Cris: And that’s the thing. I always find it so suspect when somebody goes from quote unquote one extreme to the other cuz, like, especially during the Satanic Panic, you you had multiple people that claimed to be, like, a “satanic priest turned to Christian” and pushing the Satanic Panic crap. There was a famous like VHS tape called “The Prophecy Club” where the guy, I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he claimed to be like an ex-Satanic priest, and then all of a sudden he was talking about how Magic the Gathering was a portal to the devil. It’s on YouTube if you want to find it.

It is, looking at it through those eyes, hilarious. But—

Jack: Was he also the guy who said that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures were satanic as well? Was he the guy basically just going through his kid’s toy box and just pulling out shit and saying, “This is satanic because…” and then giving some random-ass explanation for it?

Was that that dude?

Cris: Probably. I wish I could remember his name. I’m not going to look it up right now. But so you talked a bit about 09A. that would as far as the common quote unquote common knowledge of, like, problematic Satanism, let’s call it.

That’s probably like the largest group that people know. you know, the Church of Satan does a lot of leg work every day to cover up a lot of their very problem problematic parts.

But online especially if somebody is getting approached by the idea of far-right Satanism, and it usually enters a topic, like, I know that there’s been a couple of instances where O9A members or affiliates have have perpetrated violent acts or attempted to. Ethan Melzer being one of them. I’m sure you’re familiar with him.

As I understand it — maybe you can provide some more context. Ethan [Phelan] Melzer was a US serviceman that was arrested, and he pleaded guilty in 2023 to three counts aiding and abetting the attempt to murder US service members.

From what I what I understand, he was basically trying to give information to set up an ambush on a unit, on his unit.

So I know there’s others.

Do you any information on others people can maybe look up and see what they’ve done or whatever?

Spencer: Sure. So, briefly talk about 09A and its importance today. It was, as I said, it was established by this neo-Nazi, like violent neo-Nazi. They actually were super obscure. Like, people said they had one or two members throughout the Aughts until the— as, often, scholars say this.

David Myatt, the founder, got attention in England because, in 1999, someone who was he was tied to was a nail-bomber in London and killed three people and injured like 150 more.

They got rediscovered when Atomwaffen forms around 2015. People had been starting to promote them in particular “Nexion”, what they called their local groups run by a guy named Joseph Caleb Sutter who was a neo-Nazi kind of the “Tempel ov Blood”, and the Tempel ov Blood became tied to this new wave of neo-Nazi accelerationism and particularly the Atomwaffen Division finally, finally it turned out Jacob Sutter was a FBI informant, but he took all this FBI money and promoted his doctrines, which has spread throughout the world. So he’s really playing both sides. And there are now— so what’s happened as this this neo-Nazi accelerationist tendency has has grown and morphed, it’s very deeply tied to the Order of Nine Angles. When these guys got arrested, get arrested— there’s dozens and dozens of arrests. Atomwaffen itself was tied to five murders.

It’s really hard to tell who is actually an Order of Nine Angles member and who isn’t because you got about a 50/50 chance, right?

And so we were talking about you were talking about Melzer— So I’m just going to say I was trying to track some of the stuff, and I just got overwhelmed. There’s a Wikipedia entry about violence by Order of Nine Angles members, and it is really, really long. There are murders there— murders by some 09A people are not neo-Nazis or, I mean, I think the doctrine is, but they themselves don’t see it that way. They’ve committed a number of murders.

Separate— a lot of people are neo-Nazis, have been arrested for child abuse and terrorism charges, and all kinds of stuff. Dozens and dozens and dozens of people. Ethan Melzer was in the army. As you said, he was trying to arrange a massacre, an ambush of his own unit, which is a pretty sinister thing. I mean, sometimes like if you’re going to be a Satanist, like go all the way, right? [laughs] So, I mean, don’t don’t go all the way. But—

Cris: He didn’t pull half measures. I’ll give him that. But nothing else.

Spencer: Yeah, he was trying to send the information to al-Qaeda who was of course like an FBI agent. so he was also tied to neo-Nazi circles to “Rapewaffen”, this super, you might guess, super-misogynistic offshoot of this accelerationist.

There was a guy who did a somewhat similar thing, arrested the year before in 2019, a private in the army, Jarret William Smith. He was tied to the Feuerkrieg Division, another member of these groups. He was passing around bomb-making information. He was going to go attack antifa members or people he thought were— I think in Georgia? I don’t remember. Or maybe that was— there’s so many of these guys, it’s hard to remember who was attacking who or wanted to attack who. And so, as I said, there are many many more ones like the Atomwaffen Division’s founder— the second leader was deeply tied to Order of Nine Angles it became it became common inside the organization and, again, created splits inside of it because Christian Identity people wanted nothing to do with that, and after Atomwaffen folded, and there were splinter groups, and the splinter groups would split with each other over it— so there’s groups that came out like the “Satanic Front” who were supposedly part of the Order, the original, Tempel ov Blood, as well as the National Socialist Order of Nine Angles who are explicitly Satanist group— and they pop up and down.

It’s so hard to see whether they’re existing or not or what’s a group these days it can just be like a Telegram group, right? People don’t meet you know like how do you you give somebody a name and a title and they’re invited to your- to your group or whatever, right?

Cris: And I think that’s what’s like so insidious about it because they don’t have a centralization they don’t have— They’re very transient, especially online. It like it’s hard to nail everything down. And I think that’s what made like when I was trying to research to do my own episode about this. It made it so difficult to nail down exactly what I wanted to talk about, you know.

Spencer: Right. And they even flip through platforms. So they might be like on Twitter, Telegram, you know, [Discord], like Roblox, like, they’re not even in one place often. You only find this when people are arrested.

And so tracking them can be— I mean, you have to spend as much of your life as they are to really, like, track them sometimes, right? It can become overwhelming.

Cris: One of the things that I did read about O9A is like they really try to focus on the the militaristic training aspect, and I have to imagine a large part of that is about OpSec to make themselves so difficult to track down and to pinpoint.

Would you think so?

Spencer: Well, there isn’t a central point of 09A anymore, right?

So, like who who is 09A? Anyone who declares themselves to be 09A, right? Individuals can be, you can have a local group— It becomes hard to tell who’s just using some of the imagery and who isn’t. Which doesn’t mean that if they’re using some of the imagery, they’re not influenced by some of the ideas, but then you get a question of how committed people are.

Like, there’s a new group called the “Maniacs Murder Cult”. Yeah. MKY, which is the Cyrillic [Маньяки: культ убийства] because they’re Eastern European in origin. And they basically are just trying to get people to commit violent attacks, and often record them and put them online, which really does seem to be like the dumbest OpSec thing you could possibly think of, right?

Cris: Yeah.

Spencer: So, and they’re involved in O9A, but it’s always, it’s— there generally is agreement that their adherence to these ideas are pretty thin, but everybody ends up in the same place. If you’re just committing random violence because you’re a neo-Nazi accelerationist, because you’re an Order of Nine Angles person, wanting to commit, like, heretical actions because you just want to do a school shooting because you just want to be “the ultimate nihilist”, you end up doing the same things, right? And they all sort of combine together.

So, it’s very difficult to pick these people out with 09A now being very decentralized off of Myatt and the other people creating canonical documents. Anyone can do it. They are making jokes in their stuff, too. Other people are making jokes. It’s hard to tell who’s serious or not, which doctrines are really ones you should follow or not. There’s contradictory things.

So, you know, it’s all over the place. Everyone faces this problem now if you’re dealing with really toxic actors of, like, how do you nail them down as they hop platforms and are you know, and and they’re using every niche they can to go recruit. This is a very common thing amongst, you know, neo-Nazis. Like they’re very young, tend to be young and tech-savvy, Internet savvy, and they’re like looking for anywhere they can get their claws in.

You know, as we say, Nazis ruin everything. They get into every fucking subculture. They get into every religious current. They get into, you know, tabletop gaming. You can’t— anything you want, there’s Nazis there.

And I also want to say for listeners, I don’t know if you have non-satanist listeners or whatever, like—

Cris: We probably do.

Spencer: Okay. Well, it’s not surprising, and it shouldn’t be a shock that there are Nazi Satanists, right? It would be more of a shock if there weren’t because you can find these fucking people in everything. Heathens have a much bigger problem with this than Satanists do. Satanists do have an ongoing problem, but heathens have a bigger problem. Christians, as you mentioned, there’s Christian Identity. They can be found in everything.

So, you should be vigilant. Satanists should be vigilant especially I would say because that current goes back so far I mean we’re at 50 years from 1975, right? And Satanism is is only less than 60 years old, modern Satanism, so it’s a permanent thing there. But it’s in all other kinds of parts of our society, too. National Socialism has been around for over a hundred years now, right? Nineteen-nineteen, I think, is when Hitler joined the German Workers Party, the first group in the US was, I think, 1922.

So this is a permanent political strain in our societies and Western societies, and we just we need to be aware of this. We need to be aware these people are in our, our— the different places we’ll be, and I think particularly in these non-mainstream religions and subcultures and they’ll use and stuff. Like they will they will be there and we need to just be aware of that and take counter-measures against them.

Cris: I’m glad you brought that up because I am on Reddit. I’m barely on any other social media except for, like, Bluesky now, but in the r/Satanism subreddit, the TST subreddit, I’ve actually been reached out to via PM on a couple of different occasions by people with brand-new accounts pushing “Joy of Satan ministries” links and literature.

So I you, know, if you’re in these spaces, it is something to be aware of and, you know, trying not to fall into that because if it’s anything that I’ve noticed people with those particular views are very good at social media and social engineering people into those views.

Spencer: Yeah. A lot of people join. Joy of Satan is very good at outreach. A lot of people say it’s the first group they go through, this theistic Satanist group. They produce a lot of introductory materials, which, I think, a lot of groups kind of skip over.

And yeah, they seem to want to proselytize. Their leader, the founder, Maxine Dietrich, was married to the emeritus leader of what, at the time in the ’90s, was the biggest neo-Nazi party in the United States. This caused big schisms inside both the Joy of Satan and the party, “the National Socialist Movement”. So yeah, they’ll be around. I’m sure people will come doing their recruiting pitches, you know Nazis and other, you know, modern white supremacists are very good about and very focused on proselytization, you know.

Cris: Yeah.

Spencer: and I think a lot of people are still young. There there are a fair amount of very young people involved in Satanism. The demographics changed a lot. I’m sure you guys could see. It used to be like young teenagers. Originally, it was like in the ’60s, it was a swinging ’60s. It was like guys in their ’30s, almost all men.

And the Satanic Panic, it ended up being a lot of very young, teenage, you know, boys, men, male teenagers. And then now, especially with TST, we have a lot of people more of all ages, a lot of, you know, more people in their 20s to 40s or 50s or whatever. A lot more feminists and queer people and trans people.

As much as TST has problems, I think they’ve done a great service in changing the demographics and the political temperature of modern Satanism, right? It has brought a lot more and a lot of different kinds of people into it and that’s a good thing.

Cris: Absolutely.

Jack: So, you know, you were talking about the Joy of Satan and and these people were reaching out to you online, and you know, how would we you know, two questions here. Number one, how do you defend against it? Or also like, you know, do you have any advice for people within Satanic spaces who are getting into Satanism but maybe don’t know where to look originally, and then they kind of stumble upon these people honestly or whatever? Do you have any advice on people advice for people to how to navigate their search for Satanic spaces? And also, how do you defend against it once you are in and you are getting hit up by groups that you traditionally wouldn’t want to be associated with.

Spencer: Right. Well, in general, I wrote a guide called “40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street Legal Tactics for Community Activists.”

It’s available on my website, which is “SpencerSunshine.com“. There’s printable PDFs and online stuff. It’s in other languages, if you want to read it in Spanish and German. There’s a Canadian, a special Canadian version. And this gives some of the general— it’s more about IRL [in real life] organizing but some of the general stuff. And the first thing there is, as I say, is to learn about the Far Right know about the groups and know about the symbols and stuff.

And Satanists should do that with Nazi Satanism. I would say the first thing that you do, But you should do that because it’ll help you recognize them. It help you recognize talking points and symbols and other kinds of things. Where you should look and how you should respond. But I’m going to throw this back to to you guys because, you know, I’m not that deeply involved in Satanist circles, but it always has always been our philosophy, especially coming out of this punk and adjacent skinhead and goth and industrial. In Georgia, we were multiculturalists, I always say.

So people like “Are you a goth or blah blah blah?” I’m like, “A little bit of everything,” you know. There’s cool things in all kinds of different subcultures. I think that our philosophy has always been because we deal with people with a lot of different subcultures, and Christians and other mainstream people— that you all know the best.

That you two— not just you two. People like you are going to know the niche the best, the language the best, their recruiting strategies the best, the symbols the best.

And it’s people like me, it’s our job to support you because you’re in the ideal place. Like, I couldn’t tell you what what the the best place to move for a non-fascist introductory materials are, their exact recruiting pitches at this moment.

So I’m going to throw that back to you, like, should be the ones because because you’re in it, right? I’m not in it to a be able to answer these questions more more directly because also I couldn’t answer it for every every niche thing, right? That’s just not possible for me.

Jack: And I would say, we were in a group a while back, once again name redacted, who would throw up Ben Shapiro articles “just for thought process” and then Jordan Peterson articles “just to get the conversation started”.

And both Cris and myself, like kind of independently of each other, were sending messages back and forth going, “What the fuck is going on here?” Like, “What what what are we looking at right now?” Once again, name redacted. We’re not going to— it’s not that type of show.

But once I started seeing Ben Shapiro articles “just for thought exercises”—

Cris: Yeah, there was a lot of the the quote unquote devil’s advocate type of talk, and I see that across a lot of satanic spaces.”

I would say like we in our Nine Principles [for Free Society Satanists], we specifically say, “We do not proselytize”. If somebody has questions, we’re going to answer them, but we don’t— this podcast is pretty much the the limit of our outreach, I suppose?

We do have a website. All of that’s in the show notes. I’m just going to go ahead and plug that one.

Jack: Go ahead. Yeah.

Cris: But as far as like the times that I’ve been approached by Joy of Satan propaganda stuff, introductory stuff, you know, I immediately take a screenshot of that like in Discord, and post a thread in whatever, subreddit I was in, whether it be r/Satanism, which is ostensibly the Church of Satan subreddit or the TST subreddit or any of the other Satan-adjacent subreddits. I’ll post a link to, like, the message I got, and then put in about what Joy of Satan is or whatever, and put it in the most negative light that I possibly can so that maybe the right person at some point in time gets their eyes on that post that I made clues in so that, “Oh? Okay,” you know I think that’s probably one of the better ways is sharing what we know in the same spaces where other people who might just be first getting into it or interested in it can can be exposed to that, right?

I see the same in, like, with the Christian Nationalists, the hard far-right, you know, there’s stepping stones. Nobody goes from zero to 100, right?

So, when the Norse revisionism started a few years back, I started seeing a bunch of people start getting into, like, the stepping stones towards the far right Norse heathenism stuff. I would try to talk to them and say, “Hey, look, the black sun is a made-up rune. Here’s where it comes from.”

So, I think that’s probably one of the better ways that we as Satanists can help to dissuade that type of thing. But “dissuade” is probably not the right word, but to stop in the tracks.

Jack: To steer. Steer it away from.

Spencer: Yeah. I 100 percent agree with that. I talk about this in “40 Ways” because we don’t debate Nazis. You have a no-platform perspective, but that doesn’t mean we won’t put somewhere online information rebutting what they’re saying because we do want people as they’re becoming exposed to this propaganda or maybe sort of playing with entering the movement like they can be convinced away from it. You know, they’re like, “Oh, well, I don’t I’m not a Nazi, but I agree white people are discriminated against or whatever.”

But they’re still in a fluid space, right? And it’s good. I mean, I think you’re doing absolutely the right thing to to to expose this stuff and show critique it and show the alternatives, show what’s going on, and try to push people towards positive, you know, positive places you should go. I mean, I really like the “Satan Not Hatin’” campaign of the Global Order of Satan.

It’s important to have a presence. Even having an anti-racist presence informs people that there are racists because if there weren’t racists, you wouldn’t need an anti-racist presence, right?

But that’s always how you can tell.

Sometimes we’d be looking at if there was I think one point before Trump looking at if there was Nazi infiltration in the vegan scene, and we saw so many vegan antifascists that we knew there were vegan fascists, right? Tell by the opposite.

Cris: That is a good litmus test. I hadn’t thought about it that way. That is a really interesting way to to see other groups, like, perhaps our the listener who happened upon this episode isn’t even interested in Satanism. maybe in their own spaces they start seeing that and put those two together. That’s that’s really interesting.

Spencer: Or go to those people and then ask them what’s going on and why they have felt they need to do that. I did that and people are like, “Oh yeah, it’s this guy and this guy and this guy.” You know, you’re like, “Okay, well now I know. I wouldn’t have found those guys otherwise, but like now I understand what’s going on. So…

Cris: Very cool. Well, we’re we’re coming up just a little bit past an hour. There is so much more that we could talk about. the the part of your book about neo-Nazi and fascism in music, industrial and black metal especially, struck my fancy because like I said, I’m very much so in the industrial and black metal scene. You know, the well-known touch points are people like Varg from “Burzum”, yada yada yada, Boyd Rice, the— there’s so much.

Spencer: Did you read the Varg chapter at the end?

Cris: I did. I did. That was Yeah, that’s that- that’s some some info.

Spencer: TLDR for listeners: Varg was in direct contact with James Mason via Michael Moynihan gave him a copy of “Siege” in jail, and that Varg wrote Mason.

Cris: Yeah. And Varg has not been quiet about his views, especially after getting out of jail. So and and it’s interesting, too, because I’m in, like, some of the Black Metal subreddits and every now and again, well not even every now and, again, about every other day somebody will come up talking about “Burzum” or something and you’ll have the occasional person in there saying, “Well, I don’t care about his views. He makes good music.” I was like, “His views are part of his music.”

Spencer: So, it’s like people who are like, “Well, I just like Skrewdriver’s music.” You know, the big Nazi skinhead band. You’re like, they— I mean I’m going to admit musically they’re not, you know, like they’re not terrible but there are 50 other bands that are better than them.

Cris: Absolutely.

Spencer: I mean, “Burzum” you may like their music. There are other Black Metal bands that are just as good and better than “Burzum”. You are choosing to pick— to listen to them.

Jack: Yeah. And I was kind of thinking about this too, especially with like the bands and everything. Like, so let’s say a person who may be looking into Satanism, who likes metal, who likes Black Metal, who likes punk, whatever.

They hear all these bands espousing, kind of in the Satan sphere, but they’re espousing like hard-right neo-Nazi imagery.

So somebody is thinking, “Oh, this is just what Satanism is.” So they’re going— like, the music is shaping their opinion of Satanism and they’re just carrying that along, thus making the music kind of be like a virus that’s just spreading that to more people, and it’s more solidifying itself into the satanic sphere. What would you- I mean, does that kind of comport with what you’ve seen? Like, a lot of people who are making this music and having these views. Satanists hear it and then they’re attaching themselves to it because they like it, and then they’re comporting those ideas into their Satanism.

Spencer: Right. Well, there’s two things here.

One — and this is what we saw in the industrial scene with these guys like Boyd Rice — is that there was so much Nazi imagery used in that. Now, some of it was like mocking it. Some of it was critique. Some of it was like a kind of weird fascination. Some of it was real adherence, but you couldn’t tell who, especially in the ’80s. It was before the internet.

So, you’d get these records and there’d be like a Nazi symbol on it, but you were like, “What is it?” There’d be no lyric sheet. Maybe it was made in Britain, you know, so…

And within that, most of these bands weren’t Nazis. And when it came, I found in my research, the people who were were exactly who everyone thought they were. You know, it was, like, Boyd Rice and Michael Moynihan with Adam Parfrey on the side. And like, you know, “Death in June” to some extent, this neofolk band, although lesser than people think, but tied in.

So this — and I talk about this a lot — a cultural scene that uses the imagery and references of a political movement, even if they’re not really serious, will allow people in that movement will be attracted to it, and people will see all this stuff and become interested in it.

This works in different ways. just worked with anarchism and punk rock. “The Sex Pistols” were not political anarchists at all, but they put this idea out there and eventually they did develop real anarchists in the scene and people became became used to anarchist imagery and you know I’m sure at some point you know people were like, “Well, what is this? I’d like to learn more about it.” Same thing happens with Nazi kind of stuff. And even if nine people are just using it to be transgressive and scary, like, a tenth isn’t, and nine people will affect the bigger pool of people, and some of those will develop an interest in National Socialism to a greater extent.

It can act like a funnel.

Cris: Absolutely.

Spencer: And this is the second part: It’s important to have explicit antifascist industrial musicians and black metal musicians in particular. And there are some antifascist black metal bands and leftwing bands like RABM, Red Anarchist Black Metal.

Cris: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that because I was actually going to bring up RABM.

Spencer: Yeah. That’s important, too, to show that it’s a what we call contested terrain.

Let’s just say in a subculture of left and right elements, and they are dueling for influence and and even supremacy within it, it’s important to push back to show that there are people who don’t accept it to show that, “Oh everybody just uses Nazi imagery. They’re not serious,” or blah blah blah to be like, “No, it’s not okay other people who are in our subculture, who are our colleagues, in a sense, do not think it’s OK.”

And so this is what we did when we formed this punk antifascist group in Atlanta to just have people be openly, explicitly be like, not just unsettled by it, to be publicly, “This is not okay, you should not do this. There are big problems with this. Like, this shit needs to get out,” even if you are the minority.

But like I think that’s important because it got to start somewhere.

Cris: Yeah.

Jack: One of the most important times in my life was an older punk gave me a copy of the Trojan Records sampler, and that’s what kind of comported my views on skinhead music.

Trojan Records, Jamaican record label, kind of the birthplace of skinhead culture. And it was through that that I really kind of deep-dived and listened to what they were bringing out with ska with Dancehall with reggae. And then you start hearing bands like “The Clash”, kind of, you know, bringing in the Dancehall and the reggae as well. “Rancid” would do the same. And it’s something that I do in our group quite often. I try to post a song from the Trojan Records sampler once a month, once every couple of weeks, and I’m like, “Hey man, some good skinhead music here. Check this shit out.” And if you click the link, it does not sound like Oi! at all. It sounds like reggae.

And so I’ve played quite a few from the Trojan Records sampler And I’m just trying to get that out there that, yes, when you hear like not to soften the word “skinhead” cuz I mean it’s not going to be but also to kind of be like hey man you know like this is also where it came from more often than not.

Cris: Yeah.

Spencer: This, the skinhead thing, is interesting because it’s one of the only subcultures that’s a music subculture that has gone attached itself to different genres at different points in time.

So first from ska, Rocksteady into Oi! into metal- metal skins, you know, and other New York hardcore is not Oi!, and there are industrial music skinheads.

The other thing — and sort of a side note — recently, there’s been some, I don’t know if they’re actual anthologies are just online counterposing Jamaican reggae and early punk that incorporates it. So, and this becomes very prominent a few years later, not just The Clash, a good example.

There’s a dub song on the Sex Pistols, right? Sub-marine? Submission?

Jack: Submission, yeah.

Spencer: But it’s like a very strongly dub-influenced song.

There’s a lot of talk about, like, in early punk in Britain, they would play dub between the sets. But there are quite a number of punk and post-punk, largely, bands from the very early 80s that have have that stuff in it or have songs very influenced by it.

It was very interesting to watch them side-by-side. So, I think it’s always important to show that these genre— because sometimes fascists will come in and be like, “This is a white genre,” and to show that they’re not. To show a lot of the influences are not. To show a lot of the people, like, “You may think these bands are white, but a lot of them aren’t.” Or, you know, I mean Dead Kennedys had a black drummer and you know Poly Styrene of the “X-Ray Spex” — who are one of my favorite bands — she’s mixed-race background.

That lot of these bands aren’t— aren’t all-white. Where the music comes from isn’t all-white. There was an attempt amongst the neo-Nazis like Tom Metzger and others to claim that Oi! music was not rock music because rock music, of course, has its origins in Black music, and instead to claim it was purely from British football chants.

Jack: Oh god.

Spencer: Which, you can see the influence?

But if you trace Oi! back, like, The real thing before it is this sort of bubblegum-rock that comes out. Right before it like “Slade” and stuff, right? And you’re like, “Oh, that’s Oi.” With the heavy drums and everything, right? And chanted vocals, like “Sweet” and “Slide”.

So you’re like, “No, no, not not football chant.”

Cris: Like, fascists, if anything, are good at mental gymnastics.

Jack: Right.

Spencer: They are. They are. Yeah.

Well, there’s like there’s a Nazi dub band that was from Sweden. And in Europe, in Germany in particular, is Nazi hiphop. Very common.

So, but now they can just say it’s “ironic”. I mean, this is the thing.

They’ve gotten beyond the fact of trying to hide what it is. “We’re just saying it’s pragmatic”. Now, they just hide behind the irony of it.

Cris: And that that is problematic, especially, in the industrial scene because there are so many groups that play around with the gray areas. Like,

Spencer: No it just makes it sometimes almost impossible — In the old days impossible — to tell.

Cris: Oh yeah, absolutely.

You know my favorite band of all time is “KMFDM” [Kein Mehreit Für Die Mitleid]. So, fortunately, they have been very consistent in their left-wing political stance. But recently I had a kind of a “oh fuck” moment where there was a guy that they worked with, Tim Skold, back in the early 2000s.

Tim Skold also worked with [Marilyn] Manson through like the Golden Age Grotesque era. He has had his own band called “Not My God”, and Tim Skold, his solo project— I have followed Tim Skold’s work for a long time in the industrial electronic music space, and just recently, like a couple of weeks ago, had a photo with Kanye West. West wearing a Tim’s gold piece of merch and under the you could just barely see through the zipper of Tim’s jacket, what looked like a Nazi eagle on his shirt.

That shirt ultimately was traced back—

Spencer: Fabulous.

Cris: Yeah, that shirt was ultimately traced back to a brand called “Boy London”. So, but even then, plays in that gray area. And when I was reading your book, there was a section that mentioned “Triumph of the Will”, the 1937 film.

And there’s a song off of one of Skold’s albums, the first song of the album.

It’s called “Triumph of the Will”. So, I had to really start thinking about my music fandom, of Tim’s Skold, a couple of weeks ago, and it kind of hurt, you know?

Spencer: I know some people have an unhealthy fascination, at best. And who knows? But who knows how far that goes down.

Jack: And then, I think one of my favorite was “The Misfits”.

And you know, Glenn Danzig aside, we’ll take him out of the picture entirely. But their second lead-singer, Michale Graves, would later become a Proud Boy. And you know—

Spencer: Oh, wait. Have you seen the T-shirt that that Danzig released on his last tour with a big black sun? Few months ago.

Jack: I have not. No.

Spencer: Yep. Yep.

Cris: Wow.

Jack: Fuck. Fuck.

Spencer: So, like mask off for that. I mean, nobody thought Danzig was anything but some right-wing terrible guy, right?

No. But I mean, this is no surprise, but this was like, “Oh, that guy knows exactly what this stuff is.” Yeah, it was a tour T-shirt.

Jack: And it sucks because like, there’s the Black Sun shirt. There’s the Proud Boy. And now we have Jerry Only, who just sucks.

Like there’s no iteration of the Misfits that’s good. Like I mean, let alone “Where Eagles Dare”. The gift of hindsight always kind of kills The Misfits. Before you knew that, “hey great songs!” Until you hear it, and then you can’t unhear it. You can’t unring that bell.

So yeah, Danzig and Michale Graves can both kick rocks and Jerry Only just sucks.

I don’t know.

Spencer: Unfortunately, I only like the early seven inches.

So I deal… [laughs] Once I get into the metal thing, the “Earth A.D.”, I’m— a big cut off for me, right? But that’s just happenstance that I don’t like too many Nazis. I mean, I feel blessed that rarely this happens to me.

Although there are good— I mean, Just because you’re a fascist does not mean you can’t create great art. “Triumph of the will”. Leni (I always forget how you say her last name) Riefenstahl is a great example.

But there are writers like [Louis-Ferdinand] Céline and [Yukio] Mishima who are like far-right writers. Céline is just a terrible antisemitic misogynist. But brilliant, brilliant writer.

Mishima, Japanese fascist. He’s the same.

Cris: And that’s the one thing like for as much as I vehemently hate Varg [Vikernes], I cannot but help to admit that he is a good musician, right? And it it sucks that it just has to be Varg, right?

So I think we’re kind of getting towards the end and something that we always like to do on our episodes is talk about, perhaps, a music recommendation, something that you’ve been kind of into recently, we like to do that and then, after that, if you got any pluggables, as they say, we can do that and sign off. How’s that feel?

Spencer: Sure. But I’m not going to have any kind of recent recommendation. And I have to…

Cris: Oh, it doesn’t have to be recent at all.

Spencer: I’m gonna be a punk rock fundamentalist. I was like, someone’s like, “Oh, I made this set list and it has all these bands.” I’m like, “Are there bands after 1983?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “Nope, you misunderstand. You misunderstand.”

Jack: You and I are in the same boat. The the show before last, I was referencing a band from the ’90s. I was referencing “TAD”. So, yeah.

Absolutely. If there’s anything you’ve been—

Spencer: Oh, TAD. Wow.

Jack: Yeah.

Spencer: Memories flood back.

Jack: So yeah, “Helmet”, TAD. I’m one of those guys.

Spencer: I’m going to recommend something that people largely haven’t heard of, especially if you’re into rock music, which is there’s a whole series of sometimes they’re called the “New Composers” starting in the ’50s and ’60s and running into the like ’90s.

Most famous, maybe, is John Cage or Philip Glass. They’re sort of on both ends of starting and ending. But I like Terry Riley a lot from the early ’60s— ’60s and early ’70s. It’s this droney music, but it doesn’t it doesn’t really sound… it’s like proto-electronic. I’m using really electronics… And I wrote a lot of the book actually to Terry Riley.

And this is sort of soothing, driving kind of stuff. I like that. Also, people might want if you like The Velvet Underground— and maybe this is not not for you guys. If you like The Velvet Underground, listen to another composer called “La Monte Young”. And you can hear — and it’s a really interesting story to me — Young was into this sort of a ’60s again composer into this sort of droney music he took from Indian music.

And so it has these… it’s not like a Western chord-progression. It has these sharp sounds to it. And his student, one of his students, was John Cale. And that’s why in the Velvet Underground, you hear these, this, like, the violins playing this, you know, Kind of sharp sound that Cale’s known for is from La Monte Young, which is actually from Indian music.

Jack: Oh, cool.

Cris: Very interesting.

Spencer: If you like the Velvets, listen to it and you’ll be like, “Oh, yeah. Aha! I see where that comes from.”

Cris: I’ll give them a listen. That’s interesting.

Jack: So, I’ve been jamming on this band. It’s a new band, female-fronted post-grunge I’d spoken about last show about “Rocket” by “Take Your Aim”. There’s another band I found called “Scowl”, and they have a song called “Not Heaven, Not Hell”, and it once again goes back to those like “L7”, “The Breeders”, the female-fronted girl-grunge music that’s just really fucking kickass. They do it very faithfully. And Scowl’s been a band that’s been on my radar for the past two weeks now. I’ve been jamming and doing a deep dive on them.

Cris: I recently I put it [another band] in the Discord music channel and had some had some reactions about the name, but there’s a there’s a band called “Pupil Slicer”. It’s a name.

It’s a choice.

Jack: That’s a fucking decision.

Cris: But it’s very hard into the hardcore black— I wouldn’t say necessarily “black metal”. I think they they classify themselves as, like, “math metal”, “math-core” or something like that. But female-fronted.

They’re out of the UK. Wonderful stuff, if you like that sort of thing.

Their album “Blossom” from 2023 was, like, fully concept-album. It’s awesome.

So… cannot recommend them enough, if you’re into like the the metal scene of things.

Spencer: I’m going to recommend one more band. We’ve been talking about black metal. Unfortunately just broke up, but a British band called “Dawn Ray’d”, who I’ve seen who are really good. I mean, they’re like, you know, fucking good black metal band who are explicitly antifascist and anarchist.

Jack: Nice.

Spencer: Like we said, there are anti-fascist black metal bands.

Cris: Absolutely.

Spencer: Dawn Ray’d I like a lot. I gave a talk on Nazi Satanism and I met a friend who I knew online for the first time. He had again his zipper just a little bit out and I was like, “That’s a Dawn Ray’d T-shirt.” because I have the same shirt.

Jack: Well, well well Spencer, man, I appreciate you coming on. I appreciate you sharing your wealth of knowledge.

And I guess for the listeners out here, we’ll also have these in the show notes, but if you want to plug anything, your books, speaking engagements, where we can follow you, anything like that, please go ahead.

Spencer: Yeah, sure. We we’re talking about my book, “Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Counter-cultural Fascism”. You can buy it through Rutledge, the publisher.

If you’ve got to buy it through Bezos, you can. There may or may not be pirated copies floating around. [coughs] I said nothing about this. Funny story, someone actually leaked a PDF of the book three weeks before it was published.

Cris: Really?

Spencer: There’s some crazy stuff like that in publishing. Yeah, I actually heard another person who had a book that got pulled from publication.

And there were problems. And later on, years later, someone printed a copy of this book that had been withdrawn before it was published. Someone leaked the PDF and printed it… Anyway, you can, as we mentioned, “40 Ways to Fight Fascists.” My— It’s a short, very practical guide. It’s on my website, SpencerSunshine.com.

I have a Patreon. (Nobody supports me.) I’m not not a professor. Don’t work at a think-tank. And it’s it’s Spencer Sunshine. For as little as $2 a month, you can get exclusive content and get a warm fuzzy feeling of supporting antifascist research.

And I’m kind of, my speaking tours have been sort of winding down. I am doing talks about my book and about “Nazi Satanism”. I will be speaking in Richmond, Virginia, in a few weeks. It’s not… I think in three weeks [June 29, 2025] from tomorrow. It’s not announced, but you can contact me and I’ll tell you where it is. And I’m on I’m on all the socials. Twitter, Bluesky most active, Mastodon, Instagram, Facebook, blah blah blah. So, you can find me pretty easily. I have a YouTube channel. I put content up there, occasionally.

I made a Boyd Rice video if people are interested in that, through his history, his history going with James Mason. I got all his letters, so I show his letters. We have the video footage. And I wrote an article a few weeks ago for The Quietus, the music platform, going through as brief summary of the countercultural part of the book. If someone doesn’t want to read a 450 page book about Rice and Parfrey and Schreck and Moynihan and the others and their involvement with neo-Nazi terrorist doctrines.

Cris: Wonderful.

Jack: Well, I can’t thank you enough because quite literally, like we said at the beginning of the episode, we have been trying to figure out how to do this specific episode for six, seven months. It was one of the first ideas we had originally when we started the podcast, and Cris and I have just been beating our heads against a wall, a trying to figure out the best way to disseminate the information, but also make it make sense.

And having an expert like yourself has definitely — you definitely helped us out. So, from the bottom of my heart, I do appreciate you coming on and and sharing your wealth of knowledge. And I’ll luck on this side.

Spencer: I’m more than happy to do this. I mean, it’s— I really appreciate you having me on the show. I really want to talk to people who are Satanists and other left-hand path practitioners.

So, yeah, I sort of learned this as a journalist because I’m used to doing a lot of research for articles and stuff, and someone is like, “Just go and ask experts. You don’t need to do this stuff. They’re they’re the ones who know.” Reaching out to people who are already fighting back against fascists in your scene. You should reach out to people who know who know more than you. It’s much easier than having to recreate the wheel yourself.

But thank you so much. It’s been great. I’ve really enjoyed it. And, yeah, as fellow Georgians, you know, we can all all be together here. Right.

Jack: Awesome. Awesome. Cris, do you have any final thoughts?

Cris: No, I don’t think so. This was such a great episode.

Thank you again. I don’t want to echo everything that Jack said, but I do— I hope that you have a great rest of your day, and thanks for being with us.

Spencer: Thanks you! “Ave Satanas”.

Jack: So, from all of us here at the Ave Satanas Podcast, we’re going to have all of Spencer’s links in the show-notes as well, so you can click those and follow along the very important work that Spencer’s doing. But until next time, guys, hail Satan and hail thyself.