What do Charles Manson, a three decades old Nazi newsletter and an apocalyptic, paramilitary white supremacist cult have to do with the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting?

Maybe nothing and maybe everything, according to Reid Beatty, a Tennessee-based researcher who maps and studies fascist movements and organizations.

Within minutes of the Republic of Florida’s Jordan Jereb claiming the shooter, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, as one of the organization’s own and then backing away from that claim, Beatty was drawing parallels between the Valentine’s Day shootings, one of the world’s most deadly school massacres in history, and the SIEGE philosophy that has been embraced by groups such as the Republic of Florida and Atomwaffen.

While the debate about how to end such acts of violence are capturing mainstream news headlines with talk of gun control, toxic masculinity, bullying and mental health care, few seem to be talking about SIEGE. This is despite the Southern Poverty Law Center linking young adherents of this philosophy, including Dylann Roof, to more than 13 violent acts over the last four years. Roof, who was recently sentenced to death, murdered nine African-American churchgoers in a mass shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. in 2015.

The philosophy of SIEGE promotes just such acts of “lone wolf” violence.

Perhaps most troubling to Beatty is that while the FBI and other law enforcement agencies tighten their focus on black identity, antifa and anarchist groups, there seems to be little concern about or investigation into how SIEGE may have influenced white supremacists to commit some of the most horrific domestic terrorism acts of recent years.

One of the SIEGE-influenced groups Beatty tracks is Vanguard America. James Alex Fields, the 20-year-old man who drove his vehicle into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, Va. on Aug. 12, 2017, murdering Heather Heyer and injuring scores of others, had marched with Vanguard America just a few hours before during the Unite the Right Rally.

Among the individual members of Vanguard America that Beatty follows, he says many are high school students, and no one is doing anything to stop white supremacists from preying on these impressionable teenagers, bringing them into these dangerous organizations, and preparing them to commit acts of mass violence.

Beatty tells of one young man who had been influenced by Nazi ideology and white supremacist groups. The researcher tried to find an organization or agency that could help the young man find his way out. There was nothing out there.

SIEGE

A neo-Nazi named James Mason, now aged 65, began publishing SIEGE as a newsletter of the National Socialist Liberation Front (which dissolved in the mid-1980s) in 1980. Once a member of the National Socialist White People’s Party (which became the American Nazi Party), Mason had become frustrated with both organizations’ lack of relevance in national and international politics.

When he reached out to Charles Manson, imprisoned in Vacaville, Calif. in 1980, Mason found a new way, an apocalyptic way, forward for his white supremacist ideology. With Manson’s influence, Mason left the National Socialist Liberation Front in 1981, forging a new organization. The name Universal Order was suggested by, and the logo — a swastika over the scales of justice — was designed by, none other than Charles Manson himself.

Mason embraced Manson’s ideas that there were no political answers, and he found truth in Manson’s mass murder sprees to bring about what they saw as an inevitable apocalyptic race war. Universal Order recognized the lineage that allowed it to come into existence as including Adolf Hitler, George Lincoln Rockwell and Manson. The philosophy of Universal Order, promoted through SIEGE, advocated leaderless resistance and autonomous acts of violence by individuals to create the chaos that would allow the current systems to collapse and a white tribalism to emerge.

Continuing to publish until 1986, SIEGE promoted Manson’s ideas as the next evolution in Hitler’s philosophies. And then we fast forward. And that is when, about 2015, “some of these Atomwaffen kids found” Mason and rediscovered SEIGE, according to Beatty.

Within the last year, Atomwaffen began publishing the newsletter again.

On its “Join Us” page at its website, the group has a PDF download available of Mason’s collected SIEGE writings.

In 1992, Michael Jenkins Moynihan edited and published a collection of the writings into a book titled Siege: The Collected Writings of James Mason.

The SIEGE philosophy, Beatty says, “revels in the chaos of mass violence. The modern day acolytes of SIEGE try to turn the seemingly random violence and confusion of mass shootings into a political praxis.

“What says more about rebelling against the modern world than celebrating a massacre? The philosophy feeds off self-destruction and self-destructive individuals with little espoused regard for individual safety.”

Iron March

The SIEGE philosophy was promoted by a website called Iron March (ironmarch.org has been down since late 2017) and out of it came organizations like Republic of Florida, Vanguard America and Atomwaffen.The fascist social network was launched by the son of a Russian oligarch, according to Beatty, named Alexander Slavros.

The homepage of the Iron March site used the slogan: “Gas the kikes, race war now, 1488 boots on the ground!” Beatty says these slogans, along with skull masks, Charles Manson fetishsizing and “Day of the Rope” references are now signs of an Atomwaffen presence.

SIEGE culture has loose connections to Satanism and a particular interest in the occult and heavy metal music.

“It is the most radical tendency that exists in the white supremacy movement,” Beatty said, celebrating events like school shootings and bombings as a step toward the apocalypse that will destroy the system and bring them into their ideal post-state world.

“The political action they encourage revels in chaos, like a school shooting, that will start the race war …

“They are sick, violent people who have found a way to politicize that. Even other Nazis condemn them, but law enforcement and the government is doing nothing to address it.”

The SIEGE-culture really thrives on mental illness, Beaty said.

Infamous white supremacist Matthew Heimbach, chairman of the Traditionalist Worker Party, has said the Atomwaffen members are “either federal informats or crazy.”

Beatty identifies three organizations in particular as growing out of the SIEGE-influenced Iron March website, though there are likely more as the very ideology of the movement encourages small leaderless cells and individual acts of violence.

The first is Vanguard America. This organization may have members with “strong SIEGE” tendencies, he said. Vanguard America is a member of the Nationalist Front, a white supremacist alliance that includes the National Socialist Movement, Traditionalist Workers Party and League of the South.

Vanguard America claims to have more than 200 members in 20 different states, including Arizona, California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Washington. But, a review of Vanguard America’s online presence quickly reveals how tame its rhetoric is in comparison to the other two groups named by Beatty: Republic of Florida and Atomwaffen.

Republic of Florida, which is probably no more than five to 10 members, according to Beatty, came out immediately after the Stoneman Douglas shooting and claimed the killer as a member, but then stepped back from that statement. The local sheriff said there was no evidence that Cruz was connected to the organization, but days later it was revealed there were swastikas engraved on the magazines of the rifles he used to carry out the massacre.

The Republic of Florida’s ultimate goal is to see Florida secede from the rest of the country and create a whites-only ethnostate.

An organizational chart for the Republic of Florida, posted just weeks before the Parkland shooting, shows a flow of “clandestine cells” that lead to “lone wolf activists.”

If there were any doubt about whether SIEGE influenced the group, a photo of Jereb’s tactical gear includes a patch that states, “READ SIEGE.”

And then there’s perhaps the most blatantly violent of all and which makes its embrace of the SIEGE ideology part of its core philosophy: Atomwaffen, which already has a trail of murders in its short history.

Atomwaffen’s website states: “We are currently not recruiting. Recruits will be brought in by invite only.”

Beatty estimates the group has about 80 members. It describes itself as: “a Revolutionary National Socialist organization centered around political activism and the practice of an autonomous Fascist lifestyle.”

Aiming for a violent overthrow of the United States government by use of terrorism and guerrilla warfare tactics to allow for the creation of a National Socialist State, Atomwaffen has been connected to five murders in the last year.

VIOLENCE

So was Cruz’s massacre influenced by SIEGE? There’s no clear answer.

There were those magazines with the swastika engravings and three classmates who, according to ABC, said he had trained with the Republic of Florida. Regardless of whether he did or did not, the violent massacre was seen as something Republic of Florida wanted to claim because it fit with the “lone wolf” activist that SIEGE encourages.

Jereb said, before backing away from his claim that Cruz was part of his organization, that the shooter “probably used his training with [the Republic of Florida] to do what he did.”

Was Dylann Roof’s massacre of people attending a prayer service influenced by SIEGE? We don’t know for sure. We do know those within the SIEGE culture celebrate his act of terrorism, just as they celebrate the actions of Timothy McVeigh and the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing.

We know that the Twitter handle SIEGECulture shared out a 60 minutes clip with the words “EXCELLENT!” that records Roof’s response to a former white supremacist seeking to find remorse in the young man for his actions. Roof’s letter in response stated: “”I hope you know that you are 100 times worse than the Jews you’ve surrounded yourself with.”

There are SIEGE-inspired mass shooting plans, acts of domestic terrorism and murder that require no speculation to draw a connection.

Three people who were members of IronMarch were arrested before being able to carry out their planned shooting sprees on Valentine’s Day, February 2015, at a shopping mall in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Plans to bomb synagogues, nuclear power plants and other buildings are among the list for Atomwaffen.

But that list also includes the stabbing to death of a gay, Jewish college student, the murder of two roommates and a fellow Atomwaffen member, and a 17-year-old member who shot and killed his girlfriend’s parents when they told her should could no longer date a Nazi.

Beatty says that while many of the white supremacists organizations are trying to create a new world, such as white ethnostates and returns to traditionalism, the SIEGE-inspired organizations have a vision in which they destroy the world, allowing for a new tribalism to emerge.

“Their vision is really for a post-state world.”