Sunshine grew up in rural Georgia in the 1970s and 1980s,where he was threatened for having a Jewish father. [3] In the late 1980s he began participating in the punk rock scene,where he became involved in anarchist politics. [6] He earned a doctorate in Sociology from the City University of New York,writing his dissertation on post-1960s American anarchism. [3] [7] [8] He describes himself as a libertarian socialist [9] and anti-fascist activist. [10] Sunshine has received death threats and does not publicly disclose where he lives. [3] He co-organized a YIVO conference on Yiddish Anarchism in 2019. [11] After the January 6 United States Capitol attack he was the subject of a right-wing conspiracy theory tying him to the QAnon Shaman. [12]
Research on Siege
Sunshine's book Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism:The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege was published by Routledge in 2024. [10] He describes it as written from "an antifascist perspective". It was researched using Mason's archival letters and periodicals from a collection at the University of Kansas. [13] It discusses the origins and reception of Mason's book Siege ,which has inspired several terrorist groups and attacks. [14] [13]
The book is divided into two parts:a history of American neo-Nazism in the 1960s and 1970s,followed by an exploration of Mason's countercultural music and publishing connections (centered on Adam Parfrey,Boyd Rice,and Michael J. Moynihan),which Sunshine calls the "Abraxas Clique". [10] [13] There is also an appendix that discusses the individuals who were influenced by the book. [13] It was well-reviewed. [13] John P. Hendry praised it as meticulously researched and said there was "no finer resource for scholars of the contemporary neo-Nazi movement". He noted its structure as unusual and said it felt like three books in one;Hendry wrote that this could feel disconcerting but was minimized by the chapters being effectively self-contained. [13] Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books ,Jordan S. Carroll called it "a brilliant account of the contemporary Far Right’s evolution". [14]
