
PHOTO: Spencer Sunshine discusses his new book about the influence of Jame's Mason's Neo-Nazi manual "Siege" at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education Thuesday, Nov. 14, 2024. Sunshine's research found that supporters of Neo-Nazism were able to freely move in Portland cultural circle throughout the 1980s and 90s. (Rockne Roll/The Jewish Review)
By ROCKNE ROLL
The Jewish Review
Antisemitic political violence is, sadly, nothing new. In the world, in America, in Portland.
While Oregon is noted for its history as a haven for antisemitic extremists, that support looks to have run even deeper than previously imagined. It’s still a threat today, in some ways. Just as professionals are hard at work to protect the Jewish community from these threats, there are also those who are working to stop the next generation of violence before it springs up.
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Much of Portland’s history with racially motivated political violence is seen through the lens of the skinheads of the 1980s – a movement that burst into the spotlight in 1988 with the murder of Ethiopian student Mulugeta Seraw by a trio of members of East Side White Pride, Kenneth Mieske, Kyle Brewster and Steven Strasser. But there was another cadre of extremists beginning to take root in the area. There were no protest marches for these folks – far from it.
“The story involves a number of counterculturalists who lived in Portland and had a had a part in promoting, directly and indirectly, Neo-Nazi terrorism, and who were in turn, feted and defended by numerous sycophants, collaborators and apologists in Portland,” author and sociologist Spencer Sunshine said at a book talk with Steve Wasserstrom at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education Thursday, Nov. 14, 2024. “This all allowed these fascist counterculturalists to function openly in the city, to become popular figures and to have a much greater influence than they could have ever had without this help.”
Sunshine has been documenting far-right movements in America since 2005. His latest book is “Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege.” “Siege” is a fascist political treatise and guide for right-wing terrorism, advocating the abandonment of political processes and the embrace of violence to accelerate the development of an American fascist state. Sunshine covers the influence that Mason’s work had on those connected to it. Many of them were right here in Portland.
“People know that there are these open Neo-Nazis in Portland and I think part of why what I’m doing is so different is that these are people who weren’t open Neo-Nazis,” Sunshine told The Jewish Review. “These are people who had access to the cultural mainstream.”
Sunshine’s book is built from Mason’s archive of personal correspondence, which is held by the University of Kansas, with a wide variety of individuals of the era, including Charles Manson. One of them is Michael Moynihan. A vocalist for the band Blood Axis, Moynihan also corresponded extensively with Mason, encouraging to assemble the collection of his writings that would become “Siege,” wrote its introduction and promoted the book after its release, including an interview in which he claimed that it was “probably a gross exaggeration” that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
By 1999, Moynihan was on a Southern Poverty Law Center list of leading figures in American Neo-Nazism. The next year, he was the subject of the cover story of Willamette Week’s Aug. 16, 2000, issue, titled “Lord of Chaos.” Within, reporter Zach Dundas wrote “That Moynihan has some unusual ideas and interests is clear.”
The piece quotes Moynihan denouncing consumerism as more dangerous than fascism, saying “Everyone buys the same clothes at the mall no matter what their heritage is. That’s a far more immediate threat to racial justice or identity than anything emanating from Neo-Nazis.”
No mention is made of Moynihan’s involvement in the publication of “Siege,” though his quote from the book’s promotional tour is dismissed by Dundas as “general misanthropy rather than specific bigotry” and the Coalition for Human Dignity, in which Wasserstrom was instrumental, is described as waging a “jihad” against Moynihan.
Before Moynihan founded his own publishing company, he worked for Feral House, founded in Portland by Adam Parfrey.
“I knew many people who knew [Parfrey],” Sunshine told the audience at OJMCHE. “He was the kind of guy who was everything to everyone; that is to say he was a pathological liar. This came in very handy to him, as he denied his Neo-Nazi connections throughout his life.”
Parfrey’s 1986 book “Apocalypse Culture” included pieces by Mason. His company published works by Manson, Joseph Goebbels, and Timothy McVeigh, one of the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City federal building bombing. Parfrey also once wrote for White Aryan Resistance, managed by former Ku Klux Klan leader Tom Metzger, who was found civilly liable in Seraw’s death after lawyers for the family proved that Seraw’s killers has been inspired by Metzger.
“I read probably thousands of pages of letters to Mason from all kinds of people, and Parfrey’s were by far the most racist and antisemitic,” Sunshine said at his book talk.
This information did not make its way into coverage of Parfrey’s works around Portland. It did not factor into Willamette Week reporter Audrey VanBuskirk’s coverage of his appearance at Powell’s Books on Mar. 13, 1992, (“Readings from the Apocalypse,” Mar. 19, 1992, page 19) other than to give him space to brush off the actions of his friend Boyd Rice, a fascist with connections to Mason, Metzger, and Moynihan. When Parfrey died in 2018, Willamette Week’s Aaron Mesh gave more consideration to mentions of self-castration in “Apocalypse Culture” than to his associations with Neo-Nazis.
“While the Willie Week was promoting him,” Sunshine said of Parfrey, using a nickname for Willamette Week, “he was encouraging Mason, and Mason was encouraging his readers to commit racist and antisemitic murders.”
Mesh’s obituary quoted Jim Redden, a former Willamette Week writer who went on to found PDXS, a competitor to Willamette Week, before joining the Portland Tribune, describing “Apocalypse Culture” as “a mix of really wacko conspiracy theories.” Sunshine explained that, in a 1994 story about an art show in Seattle that involved Moynihan, Parfrey and Mason, PDXS described “Siege,” Mason’s book, as “one of the better written and more interesting books on political theory I have read in a long time.”
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Those theories live on.
“We have approximately a dozen known white nationalist groups that operate in Oregon and southern Washington,” explained Jessica Anderson, Portland’s Regional Security Director through Secure Communities Network and the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland. “In the past 10 years, we’ve seen a continued uptick in far-right activity in ebbs and flows. There are periods of time where we see up ticks and other times where it remains fairly static.”
While specifically neo-Nazi viewpoints were in vogue in the 1990s, Anderson characterized the far-right activity of today as mostly “generalized white nationalism.”
The threat of antisemitic violence doesn’t purely come from the right, though. Left-leaning antisemitism has taken on greater prominence and can also be dangerous.
“What I also see is that the small segments of the far-left are willing to engage in property damage and vandalism, and while the argument has been made that that’s not dangerous because they’re not carrying guns, it still creates a feeling of a lack of safety,” Anderson said. “There are a number of ways in which that can create situations that still make people feel very unsafe, even if there are not guns visible.”
While organized, publicly active hate groups can be concerning, the most dangerous threat remains from individual actors who do not announce themselves – like the murders of Ricky Best and Taliesin Namkai-Meche by Jeremy Christian on a light rail trail in 2017 or the truck ramming attack on New Year’s Day in New Orleans. Anderson, her colleagues at SCN, and the local law enforcement agencies she coordinates with are continually monitoring for potential signs of such activity to hopefully head off disaster before it strikes.
“The biggest threat is lone actors who are motivated by an ideology and who believe so strongly in it, who have gone so far down that rabbit hole that they think they need to take action,” Anderson said. “Thankfully, that activity is still very rare.”
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Keeping it rare is the challenge of our time. It’s where folks like Sarah Rohr come in.
Rohr works with Cure:PNW, a group that works to address political and ideologically driven violence through a public health approach. This includes workshops for community organizations on de-escalation, creating space for individuals across ideological lines to feel seen and heard and providing mechanisms to stop potential incidents before they happen. It’s an offshoot of Cure Violence Global, which was founded in 1995 by Dr. Gary Slutkin, a former senior executive at the World Health Organization, to reduce violence in the West Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago, then one of the most violent neighborhoods in the city. After a year, CVG’s work had reduced the number of shootings in the neighborhood by 67 percent, and the approach spread to some of the most violent places on earth, including post-invasion Iraq, cartel-dominated areas of Mexico, and in Kenya’s Rift Valley.
“Gary became concerned in 2020, seeing what was happening, and targeted the Pacific Northwest because of how our communities host a considerable number of white nationalists,” Rohr said.
Cure:PNW’s team includes folks from across the ideological spectrum – from Antifa and Black Block activists to conservative pastors with connections to participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Their intervention work is based on the idea of “credible messengers;” that de-escalation is most effective when it’s done by people who a potentially violent individual can identify with and connect to. What it turned out that group was missing was an understanding of Jewish experience.
“Part of the reason I was hired is because when [Portland Association of Teachers] got specific about their desire to support the Palestinian sovereignty movement, that’s when my colleagues got wise to the fact that there was actually a lot of antisemitism operating,” Rohr said. “They were looking for specifically a Jewish voice to speak to that, to give them grounding in that.”
Rohr brought a pair of the pastors that are involved with Cure:PNW to an event hosted by the Anti-Defamation League, which left a distinct impression.
“They were like, ‘whoa. Your community is in a lot of pain and people are understandably scared,’” Rohr explained, “and they became credible messengers for us. That was my intent of bringing them in. Now we have credible messengers in these Christian communities who can speak more soundly.”
Cure:PNW was initially funded through a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, funds which they have been able to pass on through their own grant making process, including to Tisch PDX and Co/Lab to bridge divisions within the Jewish community.
“We did a conflict resilience training, and a lot of the people came into the room, I didn’t know this, but they didn’t really want to be there,” Rohr said. “Some of them even said it to me afterwards, ‘I didn’t really want to be here. This was great. Can we do it again?’”
Conversations like these are not about convincing anyone of anything other than the human dignity of those sitting around the table – those they disagree with.
“It’s really trying to rehumanize because it’s so easy to cancel, so easy to dehumanize, but that’s pretty much the playbook of authoritarianism: get people isolated, get people siloed and get people not talking to each other in hard situations,” Rohr said.
Outside of a mediated workshop environment, the credible messenger model doesn’t hinge on convincing those you disagree with of your humanity, but upholding the humanity of those you disagree with to those you agree with.
“The way to reach them is by finding the shared issues. Talking about their fears, talking to the misinformation and disinformation continuums that are on all sides. Doing tacit teaching and implicit teaching,” Rohr said. “Sometimes our work is couched in just getting a cup of coffee with someone.”
It’s not for the faint of heart.
“I really think of it as is that love for my fellow human beings, even the ones that I can’t stand their particular viewpoints,” Rohr explained. “And I think that is actually really rooted in my Jewish tradition.”
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Learn more about Cure:PNW’s work online at cure-pnw.org.
Sunshine’s book, “Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege,” can be found at Powell’s Books, on Amazon, or through its publisher, Routledge. Learn more about Sunshine’s work at spencersunshine.com.
If you have any safety or security concerns, please reach out to Anderson via email or cell, at janderson@securecommunitynetwork.org or 872-273-9214.
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