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If the 2017 tiki-torch march in Charlottesville, Virginia, seemed like a one-off organized by a handful of antisemitic kooks, Spencer Sunshine has bad news for you. 

Sunshine, a sociologist, writer and activist, has monitored America’s far right for decades. In his 2024 book “Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s ‘Siege,’” Sunshine draws a straight line from the American Nazi Party of the 1960s to the “very fine people” — as then-President Donald Trump called them — chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville.

Today, Sunshine said, the far right, which includes neo-Nazis, is stronger than ever.

It’s an extremist faction that, as chronicled in his book, has built up considerable organizational infrastructure. It is still on the march and still on the rise. 

“The connection with neo-Nazis and white supremacists cannot be separated from the rest of the far right,” he told J. recently. “It’s the most radical wing, but they’re all in this context.”

Sunshine centered his latest book on James Mason, who isn’t exactly a household name unless you’re in extremist circles. Sunshine describes Mason as a neo-Nazi leader who has provided the intellectual ballast for a domestic terror movement for more than five decades. Mason, who is 72 and lives in Denver, has written extensively, first largely through a 1980s newsletter called “Siege.” 

A 1993 compilation of Mason’s columns in book form, also titled “Siege,” became the neo-Nazi equivalent of Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book.”

“Siege” is a viciously racist and antisemitic manifesto that has remained popular among extremist circles ever since its publication. In Sunshine’s book, the author examines Mason and his extremist colleagues, their internecine battles, their fascination with Satanism and their predilection for violence. 

In short, Mason is the guiding light for a death cult.

Oddly enough, Mason and some of the other figures profiled in Sunshine’s book come off as highly intellectual, if repulsive, movement philosophers.

“Some of these guys are quite smart,” Sunshine said. 

William Pierce, the late author of the influential racist novel “The Turner Diaries,” had a Ph.D. And the late California neo-Nazi Tom Metzger was a “very good political thinker, with some fairly sophisticated analyses. European fascist intellectuals are quite sharp,” Sunshine said. “So it’s not uncommon to find intellectual people in the alt-right. Any leader has to be sophisticated.”

Sophisticated, perhaps, but genocidal when it comes to Jews and people of color — and enchanted with murder in general. Not only do Mason and his colleagues revere Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, they lionize garden-variety serial killers. They also admire Charles Manson, the notorious cult leader who lived for a time in the Bay Area, and Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco in the mid-1960s. 

Mason corresponded and met with both Manson and LaVey before their deaths in 2017 and 1997, respectively. Mason also had a habit of having sex with and collecting nude photos of underage girls, according to Sunshine’s book. Mason has been convicted of assault, possession of lewd photographs of a minor and felony menacing. He served three years in prison in the late 1990s for the latter conviction.

“He spent a long time thinking about serial killers and mass murderers,” Sunshine said of Mason, “and even today he praises all these massacres. He’s a pedophile, which is common on the far right. How does he justify that? He says we live in a corrupt world.”

Over the decades, the Bay Area has dealt with neo-Nazi activity, some of which shows up in Sunshine’s book. 

The National Socialist White Workers Party was a local neo-Nazi group led by Allen Vincent in the 1970s and 1980s. Its San Francisco building and bookstore, which opened across the street from Congregation B’nai Emunah in the Sunset District, was attacked and torched by local Jews in 1977. Mason was a member of the National Socialist White Workers Party and edited its publications. There was also neo-Nazi bookstore in Berkeley, which shut down after two months of operation in 1981, according to Sunshine.

Boyd Rice, a self-described fascist and neo-Nazi collaborator in the racist skinhead punk rock scene, lived in San Francisco during the 1980s, Sunshine said. Rice helped organize a neo-Nazi/Satanist concert dubbed 8/8/88 (code for “Heil Hitler”) in August 1988 at the city’s Strand Theater. The show was filmed and later featured in a Geraldo Rivera talk-show special that explored Satanism in the U.S.

For his research, Sunshine depended largely on the collected papers of Mason, which are housed at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. But most of the key players in the neo-Nazi movement are already familiar to him. His interest in studying the far right stretches back to his early years growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in small-town Georgia, where he was physically threatened for being Jewish. The child of a Jewish father, Sunshine acknowledges his heritage though he doesn’t practice the religion.

“When I was 14, I went to school with Nazi skinheads,” said Sunshine, who is 51. “In my town, KKK rallies were a normal thing. I later found out our congressional representative was president of the John Birch Society,” a far-right extremist group.

While earning his doctorate in sociology, Sunshine began writing and publishing articles about the far right. But he didn’t hide in an ivory tower. He got up close, attending far-right rallies, including the 2017 march in Charlottesville. He was in the crowd when a neo-Nazi drove his car into counterprotesters, injuring many and killing Heather Heyer. Sunshine dedicated his book to her.

Sunshine has also found himself surrounded by members of the fascist paramilitary group, the Proud Boys, who physically intimidated him. He has received many antisemitic tweets and death threats over the years, which is why he doesn’t disclose where he lives. But Sunshine believes his work is important, especially as emboldened far-right extremists have committed racist, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ mass murders in recent years, including at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018, and a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019. 

“I want to educate,” Sunshine said. “How did we come to this point that Nazis are committing massacres? How did we get here? This is a discrete political movement, and I want people to be identified and held accountable.”

Today, one of the most notorious and active American neo-Nazi groups, the Goyim Defense League/Goyim TV, traces its roots to the Bay Area. Its founder, Jon Minadeo Jr., attended Novato High School in Marin County and later lived in Petaluma before moving to Florida. Now in his 40s, Minadeo orchestrates flyer campaigns across the country that trumpet antisemitic conspiracy theories and earns a living as a live-streamer in the dark corners of the internet, spreading pro-Nazi propaganda.

Sunshine deliberately avoids labeling Mason and other far-right figures with psychological diagnoses, though he concedes there are “legitimate questions” as to their mental health.

“I think some of them are sociopaths,” he said. “Mason probably is, too. He clearly has no sense of empathy for innocent people being killed. I’m not a therapist. I can’t diagnose him. The problem is that murder is alluring to some people, even mass murder.”

Given the tense political climate during this election season, Sunshine worries that the far right is gearing up for big things, especially because many extremists, rightly or wrongly, see Republican presidential nominee Trump as an ally. Sunshine is adamant that right-wing groups such as the Oathkeepers and Proud Boys and the majority of adherents to Donald Trump’s MAGA movement are not neo-Nazis, but there is political and ideological overlap among them.

If Trump is re-elected, Sunshine fears that “extra-paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys will have a green light to attack their enemies and evade punishment.”

“There will be violence if Trump wins,” he added, “and violence if he loses.”

“Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s ‘Siege’”

Spencer Sunshine (Routledge, 484 pages)