James Nolan Mason (born July 25, 1952) is an American neo-Nazi. Mason is the author of the newsletter and later the book, Siege, which has been influential on neo-Nazis. After growing disillusioned with the mass movement approach of neo-Nazi movements, he began advocating for a white supremacist revolution through terrorism. The newsletter Siege ran in the 1980s, with the book collecting it first published in 1992 by Michael J. Moynihan. After the publication of the book, Mason was convicted of assault and weapons charges, as well as charged with sexual exploitation and possession of pornographic images of a minor.
After the resulting prison sentence in the 1990s, Mason fell into obscurity and spent several years writing and self-publishing books. Siege was rediscovered by the neo-Nazi forum Iron March in 2015, which resulted in a surge in popularity of the book and a rise in the influence of Mason among neo-Nazis. Mason became an ideologue and influence on the neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division. In 2021, Mason was one of only two individuals sanctioned by the Canadian Government on its list of terror-related entities.[1][2][3]
Early life
James Nolan Mason[4] was born July 25, 1952[5] and grew up in Chillicothe, Ohio.[6] He recalled having admiration for his black classmates in his youth for their opposition to the status quo.[7] He became interested in neo-Nazism as a young teen. After seeing news reports about George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party (ANP), he became interested in them.[6] He became a neo-Nazi by age 14.[8]
One of Mason's classmates was in contact with the party and had already received their materials; he shared with Mason a copy of the book Extremism U.S.A., which contained the group's address and a picture of ANP member Allen Vincent. In 1966, when Mason was 14 years old, he mailed Vincent and joined the ANP's youth movement. He was then one of their youngest members.[6][8]
Mason attended Chillicothe High School.[11] He was regularly in trouble at school, in part due to chronic truancy, and was warned he may be sent to juvenile prison.[5][7] In December 1968, he decided to murder several members of the school staff. He instead decided to call the leaders of the NSWPP. William Pierce suggested he instead move to Arlington, Virginia, to the party's headquarters, which he did. Mason credited Pierce's intervention with saving the lives of several.[5][12] Pierce was concerned about bringing someone so young on and so refused to document Mason's involvement on paper, paying for his involvement himself.[12] Mason dropped out of high school but had obtained a GED by the age of 26.[11]
On his 18th birthday, Mason was sworn in as a full member of the party by Matt Koehl, who succeeded Rockwell as leader following his assassination. Mason then returned to Ohio.[5][12] When Pierce was removed from the party in 1970 in a dispute with its leader Matt Koehl, Mason lost his faith in the party, and said he only stayed because he "didn’t know what else to do."[13] In July 1974, Mason accompanied Koehl on an interview during his visit to their local branch of the NSWPP.[14]
National Socialist Movement
On October 3, 1973, aged 21 and while still a member of the NSWPP, Mason was arrested and charged for spraying a 14-year-old black girl in the face with mace. He was convicted of assault on November 2 and sentenced to a $200 fine and six months of work in the Cincinnati Work House, the maximum sentence for the crime. He was freed on bond by his parents.[15][16][17] An accomplice, Greg Hurles, also an NSWPP member, was also convicted.[18]
After several failed appeals, including to the state supreme court, Mason began serving his workhouse sentence in October 1974.[18] Shortly before entering prison, he was exposed by fellow neo-Nazi Robert Brennan to the magazine Siege, written by National Socialist Liberation Front leader Joseph Tommasi. Mason became fascinated by Tommasi's revolutionary ideology, and while in prison, immersed himself in it completely. He spent the months in jail planning a "fresh revolutionary type of national socialism".[19] Mason was released from the work house on March 8, 1975. Mason, Hurles, and Brennan then immediately created a group called the National Socialist Movement (NSM; distinct from the identically named National Socialist Movement). Mason chose the "most generic and the least pretentious label possible", and chose the word movement in order to "avoid the term party at all costs".[20] Brennan had been expelled from the NSWPP both locally and nationwide the previous year.[19] The group was based heavily off of Tommasi's ideology, and became heavily intertwined in organizational structure with the NSLF. Mason started writing Tommasi, but exchanged just a few letters with him before he was murdered.[21]
Mason resigned from the NSWPP in October 1976, after he had formed the NSM.[22] His NSM then produced a booklet that baselessly accused Koehl of being gay.[22] As a member of the NSM, in 1977, he rallied to support Larry Flynt, the publisher of the porn magazine Hustler, who was then facing obscenity charges; he said that "without a free press I'd be out of business".[23] In 1975, longtime NSWPP member Allen Vincent split from Koehl, and formed his own group. He called his group the "National Socialist White Worker's Party"; Mason soon affiliated with him and by 1977 his party and Vincent's party were intertwined. Mason edited the group's magazine, Stormer.[24] In 1979, a Jewish group mailed him a bomb, part of a wider campaign targeting Nazi sympathizers in Ohio.[11]
Universal Order and Siege
Logo of the Universal Order
Mason's writings are considered influential among radical right-wing and neo-Nazi movements.[25][26] In 1980, Mason revived Siege, the newsletter of the NSLF. He continued publishing until 1986. In the newsletter, Mason paid tribute to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Tommasi, Charles Manson, and Savitri Devi. It was later edited into a book.[27] In 1980, he declared his support for neo-Nazi serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin, a former member of the NSWPP, who he claimed to have known personally.[28]
In the early 1980s, Mason began corresponding with Sandra Good and Lynette Fromme, two followers of Charles Manson. In 1982, along with Manson, Mason founded Universal Order, an organization that encouraged terror with notoriety, similar to that achieved by the Manson Family.[9][27]
In this correspondence with Manson's associates, Mason began to venerate the work of Charles Manson. This obsession was inspired by "the Manson Family's attempt to start a race war which they would wait out in the desert; their leader's racism, antisemitism, and female following; and his popularity among rebellious young people, whom Mason hoped to recruit."[29] Manson also designed the logo of the Universal Order.[30]
In the late 1980s, Mason's began to get attention outside of the neo-Nazi subculture. In February 1987, he was interviewed by Brian King and Ken Swezey, which was later excerpted in the documentary Charles Manson Superstar. Mason's posters were included in Adam Parfrey and George Petros's Exit magazine, and he contributed to its sixth issue; he was thanked in Parfrey's 1988 book Apocalypse Culture. That same year, Mason's work got its first reprinting in the book The Manson File, which had a section on Mason.[31] In 1991, Mason appeared with Michael J. Moynihan and Boyd Rice on the Christian radio show Talk-Back.[31]
With the ending of the Siege newsletter, Moynihan encouraged Mason to create an anthology of sorts that included his earlier works.[32] After years of struggling to find someone who would publish the book, Moynihan formed the Storm Books imprint (created solely to publish Siege), and it was published it in 1992, entitled SIEGE: The Collected Writings of James Mason.[33][34][35]Siege explicitly advocated lone wolf terrorism, as opposed to group terrorism,[36] and adheres to what it describes as terroristic National Socialism; Mason describes Hitler as "the greatest personality in all of history" and "the LAST CHANCE for the revival of Western Civilization".[37]
1990s imprisonment
In 1988 and 1991 his home was raided, and he was arrested for "illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material", for which he was sentenced to a $500 fine and a suspended sentence.[38] In May 1994, Mason was arrested and charged with two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor and two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. His relationship with the 15-year-old girl began after his book release in 1993.[39] He was connected to this girl in December of 1993, having met her father through his neo-Nazi affiliations in 1977.[39] He chronicled the dispute with the girl in neo-Nazi periodicals that he wrote for. This and his devotion to Charles Manson did not help Mason's reputation with other contemporary neo-Nazis, who thought him immoral.[40] The relationship ended with Mason's arrest in March of 1994.[39] He then threatened his ex-girlfriend, who was then 16 years old, and a Latino man whom she had been dating, with a firearm.[38] Initially, the case against him was more severe but after several turns in the case – Mason was found to have a less substantial child porn collection than was initially reported and the victim sued the lead investigator in the case for sexual harassment (claiming that she had also been abused by him throughout the whole case) – Mason struck a plea bargain and was convicted of weapons charges alone.[38]
While in prison, his neo-Nazi writings continued, then centering on what can be described as "racist UFO-Christian spiritual beliefs" until 2004. Mason was published by the Resistance in spring of 1995 while in prison. He subsequently wrote 24 articles for WAR from 1995 to 1997, a neo-Nazi organization founded by Tom Metzger. One of Mason's supporters ultimately created a website Universal Order to consolidate his writings and display them on the internet in 1997.[41] Mason recounted his time in prison as follows: "Basically I had a good time because the Colorado prison system is one of the most advanced in the country. You can meet quite a few interesting people."[42] He was released from prison in 1997, only to be returned to prison in 1999. He was free by 2000.[43]
After release
After his release from prison, Mason entered a period of obscurity except to insiders in the neo-Nazi movement (though Siege was republished and spread online in the 2000s); he mostly spent the next decade writing and self-publishing books, while working as head of security at several Kmart locations.[42] With his release in 2000, Mason self-published the several books he had written in prison, publishing One Verse Charlies, The Robert Burns Collection (Volume 1), The Theocrat, When We Were All Jews, and Revisiting Revelation that year.[42] Also that year, he contributed two entries to the Encyclopedia of White Power, a publication edited by scholar Jeffrey Kaplan.[42][44] His two chapters were on the NSLF,[45] and one on the Universal Order.[46] His chapters were some of a few entries written by far-righters, with most written by Kaplan; Kaplan approached contributors with the requirement that the authors do so in an unbiased manner.[47] In a review of that book, scholar Kathleen M. Blee said while some of the far-righters' contributions were informative, Mason's were "self-aggrandizing".[48] The book contains an entry on Mason himself, written by Kaplan.[49]
Mason published the second volume of his Robert Burns collection in 2002, and an anthology of his articles for WAR in 2003, and Articles and Interviews, an assortment of articles and interviews involving or about him.[42] A second edition of Siege was released in 2003 by Ryan Schuster's Black Sun Publications.[50][51] He also finished a manuscript on his time in prison, entitled Out of the Dust, though this was not published for over a decade.[52] He continued to put out new books and new editions of his old books until about 2010. He also made several CDs of old American Nazi Party material.[52]
Rediscovery
Mason was rediscovered by the neo-Nazi forum Iron March in 2015. The forum popularized the book among neo-Nazis, and with it this came celebrity for Mason among this demographic.[53]
Atomwaffen Division
Mason's writings in Siege have been credited with forming a large part of the Atomwaffen Division's ideological foundation.[25] Mason is an ideologue for the group.[54][55] In an interview with Frontline, Mason claimed he was approached by members of Atomwaffen who wished to recruit him as an ideological advisor, to which he obliged. He asserted that he had no role in orchestrating plots connected to the group, but simultaneously refused to condemn attacks linked to them.[56] Mason would later mention in a separate interview with MSNBC that members have often disclosed to him their intentions to commit acts of violence, including Sam Woodward, who was later charged with the murder of Blaze Bernstein.[57]
As of 2019 Mason was reportedly living in government housing and spotted eating at soup kitchens in the Denver, Colorado area.[58] On being questioned about his involvement with Atomwaffen-related murders by a KUSA reporter, Mason responded by saying: "If they were acting on my words they wouldn't be doing the things they're doing. Throwing their lives away.... I say don't do it but if you're going to do it, for god's sake do it right."[59] He expressed that the election of Donald Trump gave him hope, commenting that "in order to Make America Great Again, you have to make it White again".[56][60] James Mason adheres to Christian Identity and is an ordained CI minister.[61][62]
On March 14, 2020, Mason claimed that the Atomwaffen Division had disbanded. However, the group was believed to be on the cusp of being designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the State Department, and the Anti-Defamation League concluded "the move is designed to give members breathing room rather than actually end their militant activities".[63][64] According to SITE Intelligence Group, Atomwaffen and its offshoots remained clandestinely active.[65][66][67]
Mason has also been known to receive foreign admirers in his Denver home, including members of the Nordic Resistance Movement, a proscribed Finnish terrorist organization, and the affiliated neo-Nazi music collective Bolt of Ukko.[68] On June 25, 2021, Mason was added to the entities designated as terrorist by Canada. Mason is only the second individual to be specifically added to the list.[1][2][3]
Sunshine, Spencer (2024). Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege. Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right. New York: Routledge. ISBN978-0-429-57601-0.
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