On May 1, 1988, the traditional socialist holiday of May Day, skinheads held a White Workers March on Haight Street. Rather than being an invasion of outside agitators, this gathering was homegrown: The American Front, the group that organized the march, was formed in San Francisco as an explicitly white supremacist outgrowth of a violent but not outwardly racist skinhead group called SF Skins.
Bob “Blitz” Heick (also known as Nazi Bob), was the founder of American Front. He favored a high-and-tight military-style ‘do to match his skinny ties, epauletted shortsleeve workshirts, and black boots with white laces, his affiliations right in your face.
In 1988, Heick was a 20-year-old SF native who’d attended Herbert Hoover Middle School. He lived in an Arts and Crafts-style house at 312 Parnassus St. on the border of Cole Valley, and had already made a name for himself as a violent street punk. In 1985, he and his affiliates kicked in the window of Bound Together, the anarchist bookstore at 1369 Haight St., taking credit for it with a flyer signed “American Front.”
Three years later, the American Front was stomping its way down Haight Street with about fifty Nazi skinheads, a mix of provocation and performance art. According to reports in the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee newsletter, they were heckled, one person wearing a “homemade ‘Fuck White Power’ T-shirt.”
San Francisco can be seen as a testing ground for many of the techniques now used nationwide by a white supremacist movement operating out-loud in the streets and online. In some instances, via President Donald Trump’s administration-run social channels, white supremacist memes are used to recruit people for ICE or silence critics.
One example of many is a video posted by DHS in October that included the “moon man” meme, popular among alt-right white supremacists in the 2010s. Derived from an appropriation of McDonald’s “Mac Tonight” commercial, it has become a racist dog whistle.
When confronted by these references, officials wink, lie, and deny, an approach that calls to mind a clique of 1980s countercultural figures who fused their creative work with the most violent wing of the neo-Nazi movement while framing it in the inverted commas of irony. Musicians and publishers Boyd Rice, Adam Parfrey, Nikolas Schreck, and others spent many years in direct contact with neo-Nazis like Heick, James Mason, and Tom Metzger.
As with so many cultural movements of the last century, much of this was born in San Francisco.
By the mid-1980s, the Bay Area’s punk scene brought together musicians, writers, artists, and filmmakers, many of whom plumbed extremity for its own sake. Nothing was off limits: serial killers, necrophilia, cults, Charles Manson, or Adolf Hitler.
San Francisco can be seen as a testing ground for many of the techniques now used nationwide by a white supremacist movement operating out-loud in the streets and online.
Boyd Rice could be found at the center of a Venn diagram of the above obsessions. A high school dropout from Southern California, Rice lived in San Francisco in the 1980s, working part time for a burglar alarm company and making atonal industrial music under the name NON. Rice established himself as a charismatic scenester, a trend detector, and consummate collaborator who teamed up with everyone from RE/Search books to the Church of Satan.
By 1986, Rice became entranced by neo-Nazism, as I report in my 2024 book, Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism. At that time, he was traveling north of the city to San Quentin prison to visit Manson. Rice learned that longtime neo-Nazi propagandist James Mason had proclaimed Manson — an avowed racist who famously etched a swastika between his eyebrows — his movement’s new leader after Hitler.
Rice wanted to know more. In April 1986, he wrote Mason a gushing letter from his apartment at 555 Jones St. The connection forged between the edgy, ironic hipster and the dyed in the brown shirt supremacist reverberates to this day.
A veteran of many neo-Nazi groups, Mason had soured on his movement holding small marches by tiny parties led by mini-Führers. In 1980, Mason began publishing SIEGE, a newsletter that advocated a campaign of random violence including bombings, massacres, mass racial unrest, and serial killings in hopes of destabilizing “The System.” Partly inspired by Manson’s concept of “Helter Skelter,” Mason thought neo-Nazis could hide out during the ensuing chaos before swooping in to seize power.
Mason’s ideas were too extreme even for his neo-Nazi audience. SIEGE’s press run never exceeded a hundred. It ceased publication in 1986.
As Rice’s exploration into neo-Nazism deepened, the musician started adorning his letters to Mason with swastikas, and he talked about reading “awesome” books like White Power, a posthumously published tome by George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party. Rice also introduced Mason to a friend, underground publisher Adam Parfrey.
Parfrey, the son of character actor Woodrow Parfrey, was raised in Los Angeles and lived in San Francisco at the beginning of the 1980s. He would later found Feral House, an indie publisher best known for books about conspiracy theories and extreme topics.
Parfrey reprinted Mason’s work in Apocalypse Culture, the proto-4chan anthology of “extreme beliefs,” and offered to publish a book by him when the time was right. (Parfrey died in 2018, a New York Times obituary describing him as a “publisher of the provocative.” It did not mention Mason.)
Another of Rice’s and Parfrey’s collaborators was Nikolas Schreck, a musician and avowed Satanist who’d moved to San Francisco in 1988. Schreck had also fallen deeply under Manson’s spell, calling him “a sort of shaman, or spiritual spokesman, for the Western and white consciousness.”
As Rice, Parfrey, and Schreck started collaborating, they established connections with Tom Metzger, leader of neo-Nazi group W.A.R. (White Aryan Resistance) and put together a fascist/satanic performance in SF called 8-8-88.
Named for not just its date (August 8, 1988), but as a dog whistle to anyone who knew that ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet and ‘88’ is neo-Nazi slang for “Heil Hitler.” Held at the Strand Theater at 1127 Market St., 8-8-88 brought together two cultural trends, then in full bloom.
One was the Satanic Panic, a staple of tabloid television that posited ritual abuse of children by supposed worshippers of satan, including an alleged 1987 incident at a day care facility at the Presidio. The panic brought renewed attention to Anton LaVey, the SF-based founder of the Church of Satan, a friend of Rice’s, and an author later published by Parfrey.
The other cultural force 8-8-88 tapped into was neo-Nazism, then bleeding into the mainstream with skinheads appearing on Oprah Winfrey’s syndicated talk show in February 1988. ((Later that year, several skins, including Heick, appeared on Geraldo Rivera’s show and broke into a fight during which the host’s nose was broken.)
8-8-88 brought together Rice, Schreck, Parfrey, and LaVey’s daughter Zeena. A video of the event shows it was nothing to write home about musically, but it’s best remembered because of snippets appearing on Rivera’s two-hour TV special Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground watched by almost 20 million people.
While 8-8-88’s political intent was intentionally ambiguous, the affiliations of those present were anything but.
In a photo from the event, Heick can be seen posing with Rice, Parfrey, Schreck and Zeena, along with Nick Bougas, creator (under the pseudonym A. Wyatt Mann) of antisemitic and racist images like “happy merchant” that are still shared regularly among white supremacists. Another photo showed most of them seig-heiling.
In the months that followed 8-8-88, Heick became the the snarling babyface of the rising skinhead subculture: He was profiled (by Parfrey) in Hustler, featured in Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and Sassy (with Rice). He also appeared on that infamous Geraldo episode, clips of which can still be found on YouTube.
Despite his unapologetic fondness for swastikas and his occasional ‘seig heil’ pose, Rice remained a key player in SF’s underground arts and culture scene.
Confronted with his own words and actions over the years, Rice has dodged all labels: For years he publicly identified as a “fascist,” but later said he was not a “political fascist,” and finally claiming “I’m the least fascistic person you will ever meet.” He has also claimed he can’t possibly be a “Nazi” because that term only referred to Hitler’s Nazi Party. (I reached out to Rice while working on my book and he did not get back to me.)
Appearing in an American Front uniform and holding a knife beside Heick in the March 1989 issue of Sassy may have finally been too much even in notoriously tolerant SF: By the end of the year, Rice fled for Denver. There he continued to release music and contribute his writing to hate zines like ANSWER Me! for which he wrote a “defense” of rape.
One project that Rice was less keen to admit publicly was the way he and Parfrey contributed to bringing SEIGE, one of the most notorious terrorist manuals of the 20th century, to a new generation of racists.
After seeing a copy of a 1993 anthology of the newsletter, Parfrey told Mason, “I’m bowled over by the SIEGE book” and that “it’s better than good: it’s definitive!” When the second edition was being prepared, Mason gave Parfrey’s phone number to his publisher, saying his old friend “would be most happy to talk with you, offering any advice he may have that you might need.”
For the new generation of young neo-Nazis, SIEGE is required reading. One of the shooters at the Islamic Center in San Diego in May cited Mason six times in a manifesto. Groups like the Atomwaffen Division (whose members and affiliates murdered five people) and the Feuerkrieg Division, and The Base, consider Mason’s book an instruction manual.
But the counterculturalists who helped keep SEIGE out there didn’t take credit or responsibility for supporting and normalizing Mason’s work or for the fact that it’s even still known.
This approach, more than anything else, was picked up in Trump’s first term by members of the alt-right who were both irony-poisoned edgelords and fascist shock troops kicking in the Overton Window.
And so, as with the neo-Nazism-as-performance art of SF in the 1980s, it has become almost impossible to know who’s joking and who isn’t while the country moves closer to autocracy every day.
Rice still lives in Denver, sought out by podcasters and writers who interview him about satanism, music, and Tiny Tim. He posts trolling images on Instagram and professes his sincere love for President Trump.
He can also be found downplaying his past — the swastikas, rape jokes, white supremacist friends, and all — painting himself as the victim of “new McCarthyism” whose “agenda is to annihilate anything that doesn’t march in lock step with its liberal humanist dogma,” as he told one interviewer in 1993.
He now claims he barely knew Heick in their SF days, accusing his critics of being so “stupid and one-dimensional that they think [I’m] as much of a cartoon as they are.” In a 2024 Instagram post about SF, he wrote, “Can’t imagine ever setting foot in that city again.”
Before his 2018 death, Parfrey played the same tune, whining to one zine that he, too, was a victim of McCarthyism, “ultra-feminists” who wanted to “silence anyone who doesn’t hew to their views.” Parfrey later explained away 8-8-88 as “a way of making people anxious.”
In 1989, Heick tried to organize an “Aryan Woodstock” event in Napa County that barely got off the ground. He left the Bay Area around 1990 and has mostly laid low, occasionally releasing music under the name Robert X. Patriot. If he has thoughts on the world he helped create, he hasn’t put them on record.
Unlike the others, Schreck admits he was serious about his views back then, although noting that by 1990, he and Zeena broke with her father, Anton, and the neo-Nazis that had gathered around them.
Today, Schreck lives in Berlin and told me in a recent interview that he does not promote any kind of politics, although as a personal philosophy he is opposed to miscegenation and is “a Eurocentrist.” At least he is an honest one.
Today’s hipster haters have friends in high places who retweet their racist messages and in some cases hire them.
SF’s cadre of skinheads and hipsters are obvious relatives to today’s alt-right, their DNA baked into so many edgy memes. There’s no doubt that like the current cohort, the SF crew of the 1980s employed outrage, irony, and denial to get across their messages of hate and exploited the platforms of their day to attract likeminded followers.
What the current crop has over the 20th century SF crew, though, is clout.
Where Rice, Heick, Parfrey, Shreck, et. al. operated in the fringes of the fringe, today’s hipster haters have friends in high places who retweet their racist messages and in some cases hire them.
When confronted about the moon man meme, a DHS spokesperson said, “Loving hot, tasty, McDonald’s does not make you a Nazi.”
Sure. Except when it does.
A version of this story first ran in print in Gazetteer San Francisco Issue 3.
