BLACK METAL

Nadine Taylor, a native Texan, is twenty-three and a senior at the University of Texas in Austin. She comes across as personally grounded and positive in outlook.

Since I was a teenager, I have always been into metal, the music. I’ve always liked the sound of it and everything else. I especially like black metal. Black metal is a segment of the underground, as we call it, where the bands are more obscure and a little more artistic. They have a big heathen and pagan element, and they are concerned with expressing old European ways, like a lot of old Viking ways. There is a pretty strong anti-Judeo-Christian message in black metal.

I really like the idea that the guys in the bands are very big and strong and tall. They look capable. They look like warriors. And whatever band you are talking about, Danzig or whatever, the front man is very outspoken. I am really drawn to that because that means they aren’t just passively consuming what they see. They are trying to apply some sort of critical eye to the world. I like seeing men who are actually self-reliant and not kind of wimpy and ready to just cower in front of someone. I think being against homosexuality as they are is good because homosexuality is promoted as this experimental happy thing that we are all supposed to go through.

Also, I like the slant on history and cultural traditions in the music. Way before I was comfortable with the idea of race, I liked hearing about all these noble and great things that the English or the Germans did. I was very inspired by the idea of greatness, historical greatness, that individuals, actual figures, can rise to greatness, produce art and lead nations and things like that. I appreciate all the emphasis in black metal on responsibility and being noble and courageous and stuff like that.

I was always a pretty quiet girl growing up and I didn’t express a lot of things, and so when I saw these guys in bands and that they had a sort of righteous anger, I thought there was really something to that. It was a good outlet for me. I was finally real grateful to see white kids be very defiant, to stand up for themselves and be very combative. I thought how great that was. White kids don’t have much of a place. They don’t have things they can turn to. It is starting to be that they are passive and just want do the hip-hop thing. I really liked that a band was standing against that.

When I was about thirteen I started listening to one band, Pantera. They are from Texas, actually. They have managed to become a really big band without MTV or radio airplay. I had a couple of best friends who were sisters. They were a year apart in age. They both got into the aggression of the music. They also thought the lead singer of the band, Philip, was so cool. They thought he was the best looking guy and whatever. I think that is because he was strong and he was good looking, he was. Actually, I met him. I had a big crush on his best friend, and that’s how I got to be friends with Phil himself. Both Phil and his friend are very good people. They have their flaws, of course. Like a lot of musicians, they live kind of chaotic lives and have a lot of trouble and whatnot. But they are really good people, warm and affectionate, and, yeah, I liked hanging out with them. This is when I was sixteen and seventeen.

At sixteen I started reading [the late-nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich] Nietzsche, and he became my favorite author and probably still is. Nietszsche has had a very big influence on me—the concept of overcoming, the concept that power and being very aggressive in war and everything is not an evil thing, or if it is an evil thing, then evil is actually of highest value. Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra is so neat because every time you go back to it there are more and more layers to it. You can uncover more. I’m still not done figuring out all the things he throws in.

When I was younger, it was the standard American deal of watching a lot of TV. I was really hooked on TV talk shows. The talk shows sent a kind of flippant message about race. Here’s this Mexican gal. Her Mexican boyfriend just got her pregnant and isn’t it funny and interesting, like the drama that they go through. Then they would show just regular white people acting trashy too. What I took from that was everyone is pretty much going through the same struggle. At that time, it wasn’t occurring to me that there might be constitutional traits and things that differentiate people a lot. I was thinking, how can we be different when we are all going through the drama of love and all this back-and-forth relationship stuff?

As for my racial consciousness in those years, it would be the deal where at school all the kids who were into metal were white, so there was that. I was feeling all these great things from the music, but if someone had turned around and said, “Are you a racist?” I would have said, “Oh, no!” But it’s true I had a disdain for rap, and when they tried to mix rock and metal with rap, I thought that was just terrible. I thought that was the most lame thing in the world. And if I was someplace where I didn’t know people, like in a mall or something, I would go toward people that looked like me. But basically I was pretty much in line with all the other kids in that I thought anyone who was kind of down on blacks or whatever was just a stodgy old conservative and they’re not cool.

Actually, my mom would say stuff to me. She was, like, “I can talk to black people, I can have a civil conversation with them, but I wouldn’t want them in my house and I wouldn’t want to be friends with them and I certainly wouldn’t want to date one,” and I remember I would just berate her for that. I thought she was closed-minded and whatnot.

But really I was fairly neutral to whatever—you know, it didn’t concern me much. When me and my girlfriend Carrie were sitting around, she confessed to me, “You know, maybe it’s not the right thing to say or whatever, but I don’t like the Mexican gangs. I don’t like the black gangs.” I’m like, “Yeah, I hear you.” It was no big deal to me.

When I was about eighteen, there was a girl named Casey I was friends with. Casey was a troubled girl. Her mom was an alcoholic— on the wagon and off the wagon—and her dad was in prison for something or another. Casey had gotten into a big fight and was kicked out of her house, and so me and my mom gave her a place to stay kind of the fly, you know. My mom being a normal and very cautious type person, she said, “Casey cannot stay here more than three or four nights, because we can’t house a young girl.” I said, “I understand.” And so I was trying to figure out what this girl Casey was going to do next.

The next day, I went up to a community college—I was taking an extra class there my last year of high school—’cause I had to turn in something. I brought Casey along. We were trying to figure out where she was going to go. She had nowhere to go. I told her, “My mom, who puts a roof over my head, is telling me that you have to have something figured out by tonight.”

When we got to the college, Casey started talking to this carload of black guys. Casey was white. She had kind of light brown hair and was a petite girl. She asked these black guys where they thought a motel was. I told Casey, “I’ll take you wherever you want to go and drop you off.”

Casey had a problem with drugs, which kind of figures in her family, her mom being addicted to alcohol and everything. She made the mistake of putting her drug addiction before any sort of sense, and she decided she wanted to go off with these black guys to try to find some drugs.

At the time I couldn’t think of anything objectionable to say about these guys because they were dressed sharp and I felt so constricted because, Lord knows, I didn’t want to be branded as a racist. I didn’t want to say anything negative against these guys, so I said, “Well, I don’t know them from a hole in the wall, I just don’t know.” And Casey went off with these black guys.

A long story short, Casey got raped by one of the guys in the car. It took her a whole another year to deal with the court and everything. I helped her out being a witness telling what I remembered. It never went to trial. It was a bad deal.

From that experience, it wasn’t that I learned that all blacks are bad. What I learned is that this culture and the media and everything inhibit your instincts and your common sense to where you don’t want to say, “No Casey, going off with a carload of black guys is not a good idea.” It gets you to where you are inhibited from even saying that.

About this same time, I was going to online discussion groups to see what black metal bands people were talking about. I was just there to get information on bands, but I got drawn into what a couple of people who were into black metal had to say against the one world-one race project they said was going on. I would read arguments that said how the Jews have an interest in promoting everyone to kind of melt together. At first that grated on me because, well, I wasn’t used to seeing the word Jew used at all, really. I had seen Schindler’s List and everything, so when I read the word “Jew,” I thought, “Oh man, this guy is coming from left field. I can’t believe that he is saying this, because this means that he is anti-Semitic.” It took a while for me to get past that. But I could tell this guy was really well read for one thing, and he was really educated in philosophy. I was impressed with that. Then I started thinking there’s a reason that these black metal bands are celebrating a heathen or pagan tradition and why they often rail against the Jews and have such aggression and talk warlike.

I never found out who this guy was that was posting exactly, but he would get into these ideological arguments and he would just basically argue all the leftists and multicultural-type people totally into the ground. At the end of each of his little posts, he would have a link to both the National Alliance and the World Church of the Creator, and one other organization I think. At first, I was a little skeptical. I thought, “Well, he seems to mention the Jews a lot,” and I thought maybe he is just some sort of reactionary person that I shouldn’t be listening to. But the more I listened to him, he was so reasoned and thought out that probably the eightieth time I saw his name up there, I finally followed a link to the National Alliance and that’s when I got more interested in racial concerns. I think the National Alliance was the first of the three links that he always included, so I went to that web site first.

I wasn’t immediately struck with the notion that I needed to be a member of the National Alliance, but it got me to where I would visit the site and I started to know who Dr. [William] Pierce was. So then when on different places on the Internet people would post articles or broadcasts that Dr Pierce had written or quotes that he had said, there was that name recognition and I thought, “Oh, that’s that guy.” I was still a little cautious, though, ’cause I wasn’t used to the idea of being associated with anything that people would call right wing and stuff. But more and more I would read the things that Dr. Pierce said and I thought they made a heck of a lot of sense.

Then eventually I was corresponding online with a guy from Detroit. He was into a lot of the music and everything I was, and he was a racial guy as well, even more so than I would have claimed to be at the time. In our e-mails back and forth, one day I said, “I may look into this group called the National Alliance because I think they have a unit around where I live and I want to see what they are about.” He e-mailed me back and said, “That’s funny you mention that because I’m a member myself.” So this Internet friend I had could pretty much vouch that the National Alliance was a good organization and very sharp-minded and all that. So from that I decided, well, then yeah, I’ll definitely check it out.

So I went to a local National Alliance unit meeting here. I was really impressed with the people. That’s really what did it for me. The ideas, I knew I agreed with most everything. I was going to try to check out the people and I was really impressed with them. A lot of white women, when they think of anything racial like the Alliance that says be proud of your race, be proud of who you are, immediately think of skinheads, just getting drunk and “sieg heiling,” and that has a lot to do with the movies they have been watching and everything else. And maybe they have been programmed to think that strong white men are brutish and evil and they just need a soft sensitive wimp or something like that. So they never get to meet the kind of people I met. I joined after the first meeting. It just took me a while to get my paperwork in and whatnot.

My first year at college at the University of Texas, I remember walking through the main mall area and there were always different groups protesting the mistreatment of somebody or another. And there was the black coalition of engineers and the Pakistani young nurses association and all that. I remember thinking that there is nothing for just regular white people and so I felt pretty alienated. I looked at all these little booths and I didn’t want to get involved with any of it. I didn’t see anything that appealed to me. The only group that was mostly white kids was the university skeptics society and I just thought they were a bunch of cynical losers, basically, and I didn’t like their vibe. So I was pretty turned off by the whole deal. What I got from that was that other races were exalted, but if you are white there is not that actual place for you.

The past couple of years, I have come to know the German poet, Friedrich Hölderlin. He wrote in the 1800s and Nietzsche was influenced by him. I took a graduate class last year and I wrote a term paper showing that Hölderlin was a nationalist but his nationalism was rooted in the folk, the volk. He didn’t touch upon the political in his work. It was always very connected to the earth and ancient traditions and the communal spirit. I’m glad I came across Hölderlin. He’s a pretty great poet.

In a literature class last semester, the professor had us read a book by Ronald Wright called Stolen Continents: The Americas Through Indian Eyes Since 1492. It was about how the avaricious white man had plundered and pillaged and was hell-bent on killing everyone and getting rich—that was the orientation all whites had coming to the New World. I remember there was one statement in the book that the achievements of the Europeans were technological and not social. I felt that deep down the professor knew, as I did, how ridiculous that statement was and how much of a hatred toward Western civilization that kind of statement promoted, but he didn’t criticize it. It made me frustrated. I was sitting there in class and I just looked down in my notebook and started doodling. I was pretty disappointed.

The professor had us write an essay and I basically said that the book was painting whites as evil and that the author had added all sorts of nasty things and I could tell it was personal for him. I got an A on the paper. The next essay I wrote for that course was on the Founding Fathers. I said I thought that Jefferson and Hamilton when they were laying the groundwork for everything, that they may not have anticipated the peculiar racial admixture that would be in the country later. When I turned that paper in the professor wrote on it in red letters, “See me.” And I was, like, “Oh boy.”

So I went to his office, and he just asked me what I meant by the peculiar admixtures of cultures and races. I said that with increasing pluralism comes increasing problems, and then I mentioned how first northern Europeans had immigrated to the New World, and then after that African slaves were freed, and then southern Europeans came, and now, these days, there are immigrants from Asia and Mexico. But I said it in such a civil manner that he said, “OK, I was just trying to...”—well, actually he didn’t say anything; he just let me out and gave me an A.

Even though he didn’t really challenge me, I took him calling me into the office to mean that you maybe are skating on thin ice, so to speak. I felt he was kind of trying to put the brakes on what he felt might be going in too extreme a direction. When he saw the second essay and I still was bringing up a racial thing that could be construed as pro-white, I think he was trying to tell me there is a certain point I shouldn’t go past or there are certain things I shouldn’t say. I thought that was a possibility of what he was trying to do. It was a little ambiguous.

This incident was different for me than it would have been two years ago. Now, with me being more aware of things and more secure in what I believe, when I followed him to his office, I was pretty calm. I sat in his office and kind of adopted my super friendly exterior. I asked him what classes he was teaching next semester and everything. When I was sitting there, I did feel grilled, but I had expected it, which for me is very helpful in being able to calm myself down.

I would definitely call myself a white nationalist now. I want to preserve my race and my heritage. I think it is important to follow nature’s dictums, and that means staying within my own race. I believe the white race has done the most impressive world historical things and that we shouldn’t dilute ourselves biologically or culturally. Basically, to me, “us” is white people in the United States, but I think of the white people in Europe fighting for the cause as us too. I really like the idea of actually sacrificing for my people. The notion of sacrifice is very noble. People are just these little atoms and don’t have a concept of anything higher or greater than their own individual lives. I don’t want to live like that.

I go to [National] Alliance meetings once a month. The unit coordinator and his wife have become like my best friends. Goodness, it helps to find good people. They are probably a couple of the best people I have ever met. Really, what has happened to me is that I have been so busy meeting neat people in the white power movement and in white nationalism, whether it is the Alliance or kids on the street who listen to resistance music, that I’m so busy with that why would I even want to hang out with people outside my race?

My dad has some land in Oklahoma. I’ve noticed that when I go out to there now, I’m a lot more interested than I used to be just hearing about what good white folks have to say. When I was in high school, I could never be bothered with that. So I think I’ve become a lot more able to connect with people, feel good will toward people. Before, I might have said, “Oh gosh, there’s some young rural couple with twenty kids!” or whatever, and, “Oh, isn’t that terrible, that’s so unsophisticated!” Now I look at it and I’m like, “Wow, that’s great!” I admire the discipline and what it takes to be able to raise your kids and to have a lot of kids, ’cause they are pretty neat.

I’d like to help white people recover the arts in a sense. When I go around my school and look at who’s in the art department, it’s all these, like, really frail, pasty, gay people, gay guys, and it’s these very leftist and communist-type people. A lot of postmodernism, whether it is in the art world or literary criticism, I think is so harmful. It keeps breaking down white people’s consciousness, but it is looked at as cool. I want to help develop something that is cool for white kids. I help out with Resistance, both the magazine and the web site [www.resistance.com]. I wrote a couple reviews of CDs for the magazine. With my interest in music, I think it is real important for the young kids who are real vulnerable these days to have there be a very cool, a very sharp, look, like a style? Because, you know, these rap kids have their ridiculous style and the baggy pants and everything. I’d like to help show and popularize that being a strong healthy white person is really a beautiful and cool thing, ’cause kids really want to go off on what’s cool.

I definitely would like a family. I don’t want one quite yet, though, even though a real close friend of mine has done a great job of having a family pretty early. She is just a year older than I am and has a little boy and a little girl. One of the things I find out about a guy now is if he eventually wants a family. A future husband will definitely have to share my racial views. Right now, what I’m going to do in terms of a job and things like that, I’m pretty confused. I’ve taken a big interest in photography and the visual arts. I don’t know whether I want to do something artistic or go to graduate school in literature or psychology. But I feel as if I have come a long way personally and in overcoming personal obstacles and, on a larger scale, just finding the right way to look at things that helps me have a good outlook on life and contribute to something that will outlast me.