Heavy Metal music
neo nazi use to recruit
eg an 12 23
Revealed: Florida judge’s son is a neo-Nazi patron
:{Supporters of ultra nationalist party Golden Dawn hold party flag and Greek flag as they demonstrate on February 1, 2014 in Athens, Greece. (Photo by Milos Bicanski/
andRaw Story
December 18, 2023
A 24-year-old man who is the son of a Florida judge purchased a T-shirt supporting a Greek neo-Nazi political party, according to a Raw Story analysis of data leaked from an online store that distributes racist music.
Stephen Whyte of Bradenton, Fla., confirmed to Raw Story that he purchased a Golden Dawn shirt from the online store Midgård in October 2020. The purchase was made only weeks after a Greek court convicted high-ranking members of the neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn, of attempted murder and other crimes.
Stephen Whyte’s father, Matt Whyte, is a circuit court judge in Manatee County, on Florida’s west coast south of Tampa. The leaked customer registry indicates that Stephen Whyte used his parents’ home address to order the T-shirt.
“This is his son. I ordered the T-shirt in 2020,” Stephen Whyte confirmed in a phone text message to Raw Story.
ALSO READ: Nazis bullied a conservative Tennessee town. Locals punched back. Trump should be worried.
After confirming that he bought the Golden Dawn T-shirt in a phone text to Raw Story, Stephen Whyte did not respond to subsequent voicemails and texts seeking an explanation for the purchase.
Matt Whyte, who hears felony criminal cases in Manatee County, declined to comment through a court spokesperson.
“As a general practice, no judge answers questions about anything because someone will find it and say, ‘You can’t preside over this case because you’re biased,’” said Donna Rhodes, the public information officer for the 12th Judicial Circuit Court, which includes Manatee County. “Judges need to remain neutral. Because they’re neutral, no one should know their opinion on anything…. The less somebody knows about judges, the better it is. Nobody can say they’re biased.”
Whyte was appointed to the bench in 2019 by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and ran unopposed in a nonpartisan election to keep his position in 2022.
The leak last week by AFA Sweden, an anonymous anti-fascist group, made public the names, addresses and phone numbers of thousands of customers of the online shop Midgård, which is based in Sweden.
ALSO READ: Neo-Nazi leader says he's banned from U.S. military bases
The manifest includes thousands of customers in the United States who mostly bought recordings of racist bands that play hardcore punk and NSBM, or national socialist black metal. At least one customer purchased an English-language edition of Mein Kampf, the autobiographical manifesto of Adolf Hitler.
The blue Golden Dawn T-shirt displayed on the Midgård website advertises the item as a way to show support for the neo-Nazi group while pledging that profits from the T-shirt sales go “directly to Golden Dawn in Greece.”
Stephen Whyte bought the shirt on Oct. 14, 2020, according to the leaked information. His purchase came a week after NPR and other news organizations reported that Golden Dawn was declared to be a criminal organization by a Greek court, and that 68 party members were convicted of crimes that included murder and attempted murder.
The neo-Nazi party took third place in Greece’s parliamentary elections in 2015 by riding a wave of discontent over the government’s handling of the 2008 global financial crisis.
But by 2019, revelations about its track record of atrocities, including a near-fatal assault on Egyptian fishermen by Golden Dawn members, and the murder of Pavlos Fyssas — a rapper, hip-hop promoter and antiracist campaigner who performed under the name Killah P — caught up with Golden Dawn. Voters roundly rejected the party in 2019, and during the following year, party leaders found themselves facing long prison sentences.
It’s not clear whether Whyte is involved in neo-Nazi activity beyond his apparent support for Golden Dawn, and it is also not clear whether he still lives with his parents. According to his Facebook page, he enrolled at State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota, in 2017, but it’s unknown whether he was awarded a degree.
Beginning in December 2019, his Facebook page lists his occupation as “professional poker player,” and a social media post shows him working in his grandparents’ Greek restaurant in December 2020. The restaurant closed last year.
---
nugent?
see heavy metal http://www.metalinsider.net/columns/top-5/metal-insiders-top-five-republican-rockers/2
uber1
https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-1975
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/how-a-music-genre-known-as-black-metal-came-to-be-related-to-church-burnings
When three historically African American churches were burned down recently in southern Louisiana, it evoked memories of the violence of the civil rights era.
A 21-year-old white male, Holden Matthews, was later arrested on charges of arson. As media reports noted, Holden may have been influenced by a subgenre of heavy metal music – black metal. The Daily Beast reported that a Facebook page “that appeared to belong to Matthews showed he was active in pagan and black metal pages.”
The church burnings are still under investigation. But as a scholar who studies religion’s connection with several genres of popular music, including heavy metal, I know that a small subset of black metal came to be linked to sensational violence in its early days.
History of metal
Heavy metal has its roots in the 1960s. To early bands and listeners it provided what musicologist Robert Walser called “a ‘harder’ sort of hard rock.”
The rock genre of metal distinguished itself from other genres through its dark worldly outlook. Many of its lyrics dealt with themes of demonology and death that contrasted with the popular music of the times.
Some early bands like Black Sabbath explored Satanic imagery in their songs and reveled in the controversy that they generated. Many parents were concerned that young listeners would be seduced into evil with such songs.
By the 1980s, metal as a genre had become commercially successful in Europe and North America. Around that time, other bands also emerged that believed metal should shock listeners rather than seek only commercial success.
One such band was England’s Venom. Scholar Titus Hjelm has argued that the band’s 1982 album “Black Metal” was the starting point of black metal as a subgenre.
Obsessed with Satanic imagery, Venom’s noisy and aggressive style became the musical template for subsequent bands.
The bands following Venom often combined extravagant theatricality, such as makeup and props like pentagrams or inverted crosses, with fiercely anti-Christian lyrics.
Black metal
Among some black metal bands that sprang up in the mid-1980s, reliance on Satanic imagery was often replaced by an interest in alternate religious themes that were opposed to Christianity. These ideas took hold most deeply in Scandinavia.
Many of the younger Scandinavian black metal bands believed that the “purity” of their ancient Norse culture had been diluted by the influence of Judeo-Christian religions. Many of these musicians publicly embraced religions like Asatru, which worships the old Norse gods that predated the arrival of Christianity in Scandinavia. They professed admiration for Viking resistance to Christianization and for the strength of Norse deities like Thor.
Some bands also called for purging metal of the influences of American rock. What they emphasized was shifting to a purely European musical form that expressed their reverence for their culture.
But beyond aggressive song lyrics, there were no links to violence until this period.
Ideas spread in Norway
In early 1990s, these ideas caught on with a small group of Norwegian musicians. These young men often gathered at Oslo’s record shop Helvete, meaning Hell, for conversation and music.
They were attracted to the ideas of self-reliance and personal strength found in the writings of 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
More importantly, as scholar Kennet Granholm writes, they embraced the idea that strength and nonconformity thrived in Scandinavia’s pre-Christian past, which “provided legitimacy both by being outside the mainstream and part of a perceived ‘authenticnative culture.’” They began to contrast “heathen” culture with what they called the weak outsider religion of Christianity.
To demonstrate their idea of religious irreverence, the black metal bands emerging from this scene painted their faces to look like corpses, wore spiked gauntlets and bandoliers, and sometimes performed with animals’ blood onstage.
Black metal’s violence
In the early 1990s, a small number of the musicians who regularly gathered at Helvete began plotting ways to demonstrate their desire to crush what they saw as weakness and impurity.
This took several forms, ranging from murder to grave desecration. One of these men, for example, murdered a homosexual man because the musician was revolted at being propositioned while walking in a park known to be a place where gay males met for sex.
Black metal’s opposition to Christianity also led to a series of church arsons. In various Norwegian cities in 1992, several black metal musicians burned eight separate churches, some many centuries old. Arsons continued in both Norway and Sweden through 1995.
Since this period of great violence and controversy, black metal continued to thrive in the form of multiple subgenres. It is important to note, however, that most black metal musicians and fans then and now criticized physical violence.
Racist ideology
In the mid- to late-1990s, however, some black metal bands expressed the belief that fierce racist and anti-immigrant positions were integral to their music. Borrowing from Nazi ideology, a small number of Norwegian musicians believed that people of European descent should return to Aryan racial identity. These ideas found a home with a small but virulent subset of U.S. black metal bands and fans.
In time, such views led to the emergence of a small subgenre of black metal: national socialist black metal, the variant of black metal that most explicitly espoused racial separatism and extreme violence. In countries like Australia, Poland, Greece and the United States, National Socialist Black Metal has maintained a steady, if highly marginal, existence.
While most people involved in black metal rejected these views explicitly, the genre’s sometime emphasis on ethnic and cultural purity was interpreted by extremists as having a racial implication.
Many of these ideas were also be embraced by the American Nazi Party of the mid-20th century, which in turn had drawn on Odinism, an explicitly racist brand of Norse paganism begun by a Norwegian Nazi sympathizer.
Fun and cathartic for most fans
Swedish heavy metal band Ghost B.C. performing in Baltimore.
To be clear, heavy metal in general is as inclusive and nonviolent as the majority of rock genres. Some of the more aggressive variants of metal have actually been linked by psychologists to joyful attitudes.
And today, most fans of black metal enjoy the music in conventional ways, finding it fun and cathartic. There are also variants of black metal that promote environmental consciousness and even Christianity.
Jason C. Bivins, Professor, North Carolina State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
==
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/11/calls-probe-white-supremacy-and-domestic-terrorism-after-arrest-arson-attacks-black
Civil rights advocates on Thursday called for a serious examination of racist hate crimes and domestic terrorism in the wake of arson attacks on three black churches in Louisiana.
Authorities announced that they had arrested Holden Matthews, a 21-year-old suspect accused of setting fire to three historically black churches in southern Louisiana over the course of 10 days. Matthews, who is white and the son of the deputy sheriff of St. Landry Parish, was charged with three counts of arson.
The NAACP argued that the church burnings, which are reminiscent of several similar incidents which took place throughout the South in the civil rights era, should be investigated as a racist hate crime.
"This is the same domestic terrorism that has been the hammer and chisel used to chip away at the humanity of Black Americans and the suppression of our political power," the group said in a statement.
The group noted that crimes linked to white supremacy have been on the rise since President Donald Trump took office and called on the federal government to lead in the fight against domestic terror attacks:
Since Trump has taken office, we've seen a rise in white supremacy and hate crimes—so much so that we issued letters to push both the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees of the House of Representatives to hold hearings for the resurgence of hate and raced based crimes that are overcoming the nation. Change must come from the top and we will continue to push Congress for additional hearings and concrete next steps to thwart acts of terrorism against communities of color.
Local officials in Louisiana noted publicly that Matthews had beeninterested in "black metal" music, which has beenlinked to white supremacist groups which burned churches in Norway in the 1990s. As Daily Beast reported:
A Facebook page that appeared to belong to Matthews showed he was active in pagan and black metal pages, and that he commented on two memes about far-right former neo-Nazi metal musician Varg Vikernes, who served 15 years in prison for killing a fellow metal musician and burning churches in Norway.
Some on social media cautioned the news media not to suggest that the suspect was simply influenced by an anti-religion philosophy, noting that a potential connection to racism should be investigated seriously.
...twts
ref or ref?
https://www.thedailybeast.com/neo-folk-music-folks-futuristic-cousin-has-a-nazi-problem
The music was good, if you could overlook some artists’ fixation on Nazi death skulls.
That was the dilemma facing listeners like Shane Burley, a writer covering far-right extremism. “I like neo-folk,” Burley said. “I want to go to neo-folk shows.”
But neo-folk music—along with a handful of other genres like black metal, industrial music, and some spheres of the punk scene—has a white supremacist problem. None of the genres are inherently political; neo-folk artists are more likely to sing about nature than Nazis. Still, the communities have become organizing hubs for the far right, some of whom adopt Nazi imagery. And as far-right violence soars in the U.S., with recent incidents including a massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue and a car attack at a white supremacist rally, some music fans on the left are looking for ways to save their scenes from the people they can’t stand.
For Burley, author of the book Fascism Today, that meant launching the anti-fascist neo-folk website A Blaze Ansuz late last month.
“We want a romantic art form that’s our own,” he said of the left’s claim to neo-folk. “We have the right to heavy metal, we have the right to neo-folk, and industrial, and those genres. The far right doesn’t own them in any real way.”
Neo-folk, which mixes traditional music with industrial and gothic influences, can be wildly experimental, a space for reinventing old genres and telling sweeping stories. But some of the genre’s founding bands, like Death in June, traffic heavily in fascist iconography.
The group has released multiple albums with Nazi imagery on the covers and takes its name from the Night of the Long Knives, a 1934 Nazi purge to eliminate possible rivals to Adolf Hitler. And while the band and others in its circles have dismissed their Nazi references as harmless provocation, anti-fascists argue the musicians are trying to build a safe space for true extremists.
Spencer Sunshine, a neo-folk fan and researcher focusing on the far right, said the imagery can be tightly interwoven with the scene.
“I'm not sure that any music scenes are ‘inherently’ political,” Sunshine said. “But if they were, neo-folk might qualify, since it almost entirely originates with a single band, Death in June, who it appears crafted their aesthetic approach specifically based on fascist political themes. Neo-folk has always had a far-right presence, with almost no left-wing one, until more recently.”
The problem is older than neo-folk and neo-Nazis. Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, traced the battle over fascist music to the movement’s beginnings, in early 20th century Europe.
“There were fascist and anti-fascist songs from the beginning, which played an important part in resistance during the ’20s and ’30s, and during the war,” Bray said, pointing to the Spanish Civil War songs that served as anthems for anti-fascists. On the other side, Nazis sang songs glorifying street-fighting brownshirts during their rise to power, and eventually made folk music an integral part of the Hitler Youth curriculum.
After the war, a bedraggled British fascist movement looked for a new face. “You get the development of different fascist parties in Britain right after the war that, by the ’60s and ’70s, are looking for new ways to recruit and infiltrate different forms of youth sociability,” Bray said. “One of them becomes a white powerskinhead movement, the original skinhead movement being an inter-cultural blending of Jamaican and British musical styles and fashion.”
Conservatism isn't something you tend to associate with the hard core rockers of history. However, this Republican rock stars list is a sampling of the most conservative rock bands in the world and might just change the way you think of them. Look no further for a full list of conservative rock bands and rock stars, complete with photos. Right wing rock stars and conservative metal bands can all be found here, from Elvis Presley to Alice Cooper - you're sure to find a few surprising names!
With the likes of Lee Ving and Lynyrd Skynrd on this list, it just goes to show that you can't judge a book by its cover. Some of the most notorious rock names are on this list. Who knew that underneath the raging metal sound and aggressive vocals of Avenged Sevenfold was a declared set of Republican beliefs?
This list includes people or groups who have declared themselves to be full-fledged republican rockers, as well as republican rock bands and musicians, all of whom have at one point publicly supported a Republican candidate or candidates. slideshow http://www.ranker.com/list/republican-rockers-_-conservative-rock-stars/famous-conservatives
The GOP has been trying to court fundamentalist Christians and conservatives. How do heavy-metal rock 'n rollers fit into this picture?
David Mustaine, the front man for Megadeath (one of those folksy Christian lite-rock groups) recently made news by saying he believed Obama wasn't a U.S. Citizen and moreover that he was going to support far-right Christian candidate Rick Santorum.
This might sound like an isolated incident, except that Heavy Metal Rocker Ted Nugent recently went on stage and suggested that he would like to machine gun the President to death and make Hillary Clinton suck on his machine gun. Tasteful.
What is up with this? Rock and Roll was always the music of youth and rebellion. Today it is the music of conformity and fiscal policy? Perhaps not. I think other things are at stake here.
1. The music business is dead. The fact that these rock-and-roll fossils are still performing today, when they were popularwhen I was a kid is startling. Their music has aged and the demographic has aged. So Rock and Roll is no longer about rebellion but about Metamucil.
2. Rock Stars Make Money - and they don't like to pay taxes. So when a clown comes into town promising them lower taxes, they bite on it. They are "rich" but not rich enough to pay the Mitt Romney tax rate (Capital Gains) but rather the 35% earned income rate.
3. It's Just Music - Political values and music don't always match up. Rock and Rollers might be perceived as liberal, but many are not. Just as you might thing Frank Zappa smoked a lot of pot, but in reality he was against drugs. Not all rockers are drug-addled boozers.
4. The Connection with Skinheads - Hard metal is popular with the very, very far right - neo-Nazis and skinheads, gun-nuts, KKK followers, and white supremacists. On the rock spectrum, heavy metal is, well, the GOP wing.
5. The Connection with Military- a lot of young guys in the military are into heavy metal (the young white guys, anyway) and being anti-Hillary is sort of a requirement, in a macho environment. So this is sort of posturing to the crowd, to be conservative, to some extent.
The interesting thing, to me, is that Rock and Roll is indeed truly dead. Rock and Roll was the music of the anti-establishment, of the lower classes, of the outlaws and the disadvantaged. It was black music, not GOP country club waltzes played by an orchestra.
But over the years, this has been changed, morphing into Pop, Disco, and basically the background elevator music we hear every day. It is not surprising that it has become the music of ignorance, violence and hate. That was just the next step.
But then again, maybe we put too much faith in Rock and Roll. It was a product, sold to us by record companies and record promoters, hoping to "cash in" on the youth market. And we bought it all - good and bad. The Beatles and Grand Funk Railroad. We bought it all.
And today, it is just marketing for a different demographic. And it seems odd that a musician practicing in a genre created by blacks would denounce the first black President.
And it is odd that, at one time, the GOP was spearheading efforts to "censor" Rock and Roll lyrics, including (especially) Heavy Metal lyrics. They have backed away from this in recent years. But Rick Santorum has pledged to stamp out porn. Could naughty words be next?
And it seems odd that someone who works in an industry which promotes satanic messages, in a band called "Megadeath" would be getting all gooey inside over a squeaky-clean sweater-vest wearer like Rick Santorum.
Maybe he's just messing with our minds. Maybe he did too many drugs. Maybe these rock musicians are just really, really stupid.
I think the latter.
POSTED BY ROBERT PLATT BELLAT 4:15 PM
==