Charles McLaughlin runs Brotherhood of Light Recordings, a label that promotes and distributes Neo-Nazi and fascist music from Poland to Korea. For years, he has operated out of an apartment in a small Tenderloin supportive housing building.
Since 2009, Brotherhood of Light Recordings has pushed out hundreds of records that use Nazi symbols and ideas. McLaughlin also makes his own music under the names Panzerjager, Sunchariot, and Svetovid, among others. In this capacity, he has joined forces on a number of albums with other Neo-Nazi and far-right artists and labels that platform white supremacist speech and violent rhetoric.
McLaughlin’s identity and work was revealed last month by Bay161, a group of anonymous anti-fascist researchers who document evidence of far-right extremism in the Bay Area. Gazetteer SF reached out to McLaughlin via his email address on the Brotherhood of Light Recordings site, and visited his purported address in the Tenderloin. This reporter was not allowed access to his unit due to the building’s visitor policy, but a staff member confirmed that McLaughlin lives there.
In an email, McLaughlin said he owns Brotherhood of Light Recordings but claimed that he “restarted” the brand in 2017 to be a “non-political label that releases various kinds of music.” The SF native also said he is a “hermit” who lives with “little to no socialization” outside of his family.
“I release various bands with various sorts of ideals and political views, but all political views of these bands are not of the label. Brotherhood of Light Recordings is not a political label and does not promote any specific ideology, despite how it may be perceived currently,” he claimed.
However, Brotherhood of Light Recordings is a clear and key player in the far-right underground metal, industrial, and noise music scenes. This extremist subculture relies heavily on a DIY approach to publishing, with independent distributors like McLaughlin sourcing and/or creating a variety of cassettes, CDs, vinyl records, and merchandise. McLaughlin currently sells Neo-Nazi art from around the world, including the US, Argentina, Austria, Finland, and France.
Genres in this underground scene include National Socialist Black Metal, racist and anti-Semitic “Rock Against Communism,” and “Neo-folk” music that veils fascist ideology in Norse, pagan, and historical pastoral imagery. Defenders of these genres often claim that offensive lyrics and imagery are used for shock value, rather than as a true expression of beliefs. However, McLaughlin’s history and collaborations explicitly reference Neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology.
Brotherhood of Light Recordings’ recent discography includes the band Brahmastra’s “SS Tibet” (a reference to a 1930s Nazi expedition) and music from the group 1389, whose name echoes the same year that hundreds of Jews were massacred in a pogrom in Prague. Some acts promoted by McLaughlin are far less subtle, like the band Rassenschande — the word for the Nazi party’s anti-race-mixing program — who dropped a 2021 track named “Nazis in Your Neighborhood.”
McLaughlin’s own music, meanwhile, also leans into similar Nazi references. His band Panzerjager is named after the Wehrmacht’s anti-tank vehicle and uses historical Nazi imagery. McLaughlin’s other band Sunchariot features lyrics mourning the “death of western light” and lauding the “banner of the 12-armed sun,” a specific nod to the “Black Sun” hate symbol frequently used by Neo-Nazi groups. He has released his music through companies like Winter Solace Productions, Defeat Never Victory Forever Records, and the far-right Polish label Werewolf Promotion, all of which promote Neo-Nazi materials. McLaughlin also promotes graphic artists such as H8 Propagand Art, which specializes in Nazi and “Neo-folk” imagery.
An anonymous researcher with Bay161 told Gazetteer over email that the group initially learned of Brotherhood of Light Recordings in 2023, after the Southern Poverty Law Center listed the label as a hate-music project. They connected the label to McLaughlin by trawling online metal music forums and the Metal Archives compendium for any identity details of “C.R.G.,” the initials used by McLaughlin in his professional email and on forums.
“The white nationalist and Neo-Nazi movement have always used musical subcultures to organize, recruit, and radicalize,” the researcher explained.
Music and art can serve as a pipeline to violence and “genocidal organizing,” they said, noting examples like mass shooter Wade Michael Page, who was a member of multiple Neo-Nazi bands and killed six Sikh worshippers at a Wisconsin temple in 2012. They added that the Bay Area, in particular, has a history of fomenting white supremacist movements: American Front, the first major US Nazi skinhead organization, was born in San Francisco and later attempted to host a white-power “Aryan Woodstock” in Napa in 1989. (It was blocked by a judge.)
McLaughlin, in his email, said that he does “not represent any danger to anyone.” The researcher, however, observed the label owner is effectively promoting “ethnic intimidation” by continually spreading Nazi propaganda with “genocidal themes.”
“We want to give community members a head’s up. Etched and painted swastikas have been found on businesses around the neighborhood, and he lives a hundred-odd feet away from a children’s playground,” they said.
