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News
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A Story for Our Students (and Those Who Care About Them) |
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Written by Administrator
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Wednesday, 15 October 2008 |
Now that another school year in underway, we thought we’d address the issue of white power music and other recruitment efforts popping up in schools – specifically, what to do if you see signs of hate groups in your school. As we’ve said in the past, music is the single strongest recruitment vehicle for new, young membership. If you’re seeing a white power band advertised on someone at your school, in essence, you’re seeing a new recruit. Read the basics we’ve outlined below, pass this link along to any students you think should see it, and feel free to email us with any comments, questions, or aspects of the issue you think we may have missed.
And please note: this is not about turning students against one another. If someone has joined a hate group, they’ve already turned themselves against the vast majority of their school community. Additionally, this has become an issue of school safety – yours, your classmates, and everyone else in the building. If someone in your school is flying the flags of racist hatred, it can change the school’s entire climate. It can lead – and has in many instances – to acts of vandalism, harassment and violence. This isn’t one of those situations where a student should sit and wonder if it’s okay to tell. It’s okay to tell. You’ll not only be fighting hate in your everyday life; you’ll potentially be keeping your school and everyone in it safer.
What to look for
The first signs you might see of an increasing white power presence include patches, pins, t-shirts or fliers for white power bands or organizations. High schools have also reported finding recruitment fliers – often printed directly from the ‘youth outreach’ sections of a number of white nationalist organizations – in students’ possession and around the school. These materials, both for bands and organizations, often have recognizable hate symbols on them. While the swastika is the most obvious symbol, it is by far not the only one commonly used. Take a look at the Anti-Defamation League’s page titled Hate On Display: A Visual Database of Extremist Symbols, Logos and Tattoos for a quick rundown of some of the most common graphic indicators of a hate group. We’ll provide the link at the end of this article.
But you should also know the difference between punk and hatecore, and between the nonracist skinhead subculture and white power skinheads. A kid in a pair of boots with a shaved head is not automatically a racist. In a lot of areas, there are large numbers of nonracist and antiracist skinheads. Boots don’t make a bonehead; politics do. So check out the patches and pins on his or her jacket. You might be looking at somebody who’s on the exact same side of the issue as you are.
What to do
While this might sound a bit like every cautionary public service announcement you’ve ever heard, your best ally is an adult you can trust. Don’t go to the administrator who overreacts to every little thing. Don’t go to the teacher who will have no idea what you’re talking about. Think of the teacher that you know is a big music fan, or the one you know holds strong antiracist personal politics. Tell them what you saw. Show them this story, or link them to www.turnitdown.com so they can see more about what you’re trying to tell them.
If you don’t feel comfortable going right to an adult in the school, talk to a few friends or classmates whom you know would be concerned. Or talk to one of your parents or an older sibling, if you think that would go more smoothly. But talk to somebody. Don’t sit around and wait for it to get worse.
Avoid telling too many people, though. You don’t want to create a panic or encourage violence against any student. Situations like that get really bad, really fast. This isn’t something you want to feed to the school rumor mill. Get an adult involved as quickly as you can, so that the problem can be resolved without incident.
You have every right to ask the adults at your school to keep your name out of the situation. If they’re halfway decent at their jobs, they’ll understand why you want to stay anonymous. They’ll also realize that you’re talking to them for the good of your school and everyone in it, and that you’re alerting them to something they wouldn’t have seen themselves. Some schools might not want to see or admit that they have a growing problem. That’s where physical evidence comes in: show them the ADL list of symbols, and show them which ones you’ve seen.
We’ve heard from schools in which an entire recruitment effort was caught because one person recognized the name of a white power band on a t-shirt, or saw a racist symbol on someone’s jacket. It sometimes takes a couple of tries to get people to listen, but we’ve seen schools successfully nip a hate group problem in the bud without creating additional problems and without infringing on anyone’s constitutional rights, either.
The rights and wrongs
Now that we mention it, you should know that students do not have the free speech right to display hate symbols in school. Every school we’ve ever known of maintains some kind of completely legal policy against hate group activity. In some schools, hate symbols fall under gang activity rules; in others, a more general ‘disruptive to the educational process’ rule is invoked. Either way, know that these symbols aren’t allowed. If by some oversight of basic common sense, your school doesn’t have a policy against stuff like this, contact us, and we’ll help you demand a policy change.
We hope you never have to deal with the issue of hate in your school. But if you do see it rearing its ugly head, we wanted you to know that you can do something about it. And you should. Just like our music scenes are ours to keep free from hate, so are our schools. Nobody should have to sit in class everyday next to somebody advertising organized hate.
Let us know if we can help in any way if you ever find yourself dealing with any of this. And if your school has faced problems with hate groups, we want to know how it went. Email us anytime at
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
. Also, please see Chapter 2 of our Turn It Down Resource Kit at www.turnitdown.com for more suggestions about keeping your school free of organized bigotry. The Resource Kit contains tips for working with fellow students, talking to adults in the building, and organizing against hate in your school.
Link to ADL Database: http://www.adl.org/hate_symbols/default_graphics.asp
Link to Resource Kit, Table of Contents: http://turnitdown.newcomm.org/content/view/73/30/ |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 20 October 2008 )
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Racist Groups Using Hip-hop to Spread Hate |
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Written by Administrator
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Friday, 15 August 2008 |
Recently, Turn It Down was asked to contribute an article to a magazine overseas regarding the existence and potential of white power hip-hop here in the United States. Several European nations are seeing a sharp rise in racist and nationalist hip-hop, and our sister organizations wondered if America is seeing a similar cultural absurdity, particularly since America is essentially the birthplace and epicenter of hip-hop.
A large portion of membership and participation in the Turn It Down Campaign comes from bands and fans within the punk and metal genres, along with indie, alt.country, and other subgenres of rock. This may be due to the fact that these genres are the ones most often hijacked by white nationalist music. Additionally, or perhaps as a reason for this tendency, white nationalists find their most fertile recruiting grounds among the fans of these predominantly white music subcultures.
But hip-hop?!
Whether or not you’re a fan of the genre, it seems common cultural knowledge that hip-hop emerged from the black and Puerto Rican communities, initially in New York and soon after in Chicago, Los Angeles, and across the nation. The notion that hip-hop could ever find validation within our nation’s enclaves of white nationalism seems ludicrous.
But believe it or not, there is white power hip-hop out there.
You may have heard of Woodpile. They were a blip on the controversy radar a couple of years ago when they were signed to West Coast Mafia Records, run by well-known black rapper C-BO. The band and the label have staunchly maintained that Woodpile, who market their music to incarcerated white listeners and often pay homage to ‘the Woods,’ a white racist prison gang, are not in any way racist. They admit that they encourage ‘white pride,’ but their lyrics stop there. If anything, we’ve concluded that Woodpile is a bit silly, but not explicitly racist.
Politiko, however, is less ambiguous. Politiko emerged as part of the brief ‘Ron Paul Rap’ trend, in which artists created and posted tracks endorsing Ron Paul all over the internet. Politiko’s track was fairly benign, but his follow-up work spelled out where he stands:
“I’m a conservationist
Conserve America, ‘cause the white man created it
Other races are defacing it
Soon they’ll be renaming it to Aztlan...
This is how every civilization has fallen.”
--Politiko, “NotSee”
Here we have one example of what most culturally literate Americans would consider unthinkable – a white artist using hip-hop to spread racist hate. (Go ahead. Take a moment to get your mind around it. We needed to do so ourselves.) But if you think WE find it hard to stomach, you should read the chatter among white racists on the subject.
Messageboards across the white power online community contain heated debates around the question of whether or not the white power movement should acknowledge and use the power and popularity of hip-hop to further their cause. Some admit that it would be an undeniably effective tool in reaching alienated white youth, as white youth are the single largest consumer group of hip-hop music. Other hardliners refuse the possibility of having anything to do with a decidedly minority form of music; they feel that to use hip-hop, even for the purposes of recruitment and propaganda, would be to sink to the level of one of the groups they hate most.
We can’t say for sure if white power hip-hop has a chance to taking off in the United States. Our gut and sense of cultural history both say it’s impossible, but our research forces us to acknowledge at least a shred of possibility. We also can see that the white power movement is actively considering it – only the latest of many calculated possible efforts, directly aimed at recruiting new membership by infiltrating another music subculture.
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Apparently, there’s enough hate to go around |
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Written by Administrator
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Sunday, 15 June 2008 |
While the Turn It Down Campaign focuses on white power music and the presence of white power groups in music subcultures, we would be remiss not to mention a new avenue of hate music, brought to us by many of the same bands producing racist hate music around the world today.
Smashing Rainbows features violently anti-gay tracks by relatively well-known white power bands like Angry Aryans, Empire Falls and Chaos 88, as well as eighteen other bands from the U.S. and eight other countries. Song titles include “Smear the Queer,” “Killer of Faggots” and “Torture and Humiliation.” The cover art for the compilation shows a man’s face, twisted up in anger, and his fist is toward the viewer as though he is throwing a punch. One catalog writeup for the album claims Smashing Rainbows is “defending straight people everywhere.” Those track titles aren’t “defensive.” They are overtly hostile and seem to be calling for violence against the gay community.
Released in February, this compilation is a product of a newer white power label called Fetch the Rope. (Subtle, we know.) Fetch the Rope Records claims close alliance with virtually every major producer and distributor of white power music and propaganda in existence today, including Stormfront, NSM88 and Final Stand Records. Fetch the Rope’s website claims, “Our purpose is to disseminate White Power music as widely as possible around the World. We are an introductory stepping stone for White people who are discovering the White Nationalist movement for the first time....especially our White youth.”
Fetch the Rope plainly states that the label exists to infiltrate our youth’s music subcultures and indoctrinate young people into the white power movement. They are using homophobia as one avenue to do so, as part of the white power movement’s efforts to expand the list of fears and hostilities from which they draw new membership.
June is commonly regarded as “Pride Month” by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered community. Turn It Down will be in touch with GLAAD and other organizations devoted to protecting human rights in the gay community, but our June news update seemed a good time and place to inform people involved with our campaign about this detestable new approach to recruiting for the white power movement. Smashing Rainbows is pathetic in every sense; hate is hate, and we should definitely Turn It Down. |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 20 June 2008 )
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Written by Administrator
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Thursday, 15 May 2008 |
This Memorial Day Weekend, the Imperial Klans of America will host NordicFest 2008 in Dawson Springs, Kentucky. The weekend-long event is billed as "one of the premier social events for the white nationalist commnity" on the IKA website. The weekend will include a cross and swastika lighting, as well as a children's playground, bands, speakers and vendors.
Even promotional materials for the event admit that, in recent years, fights have been dangerously out of control at this event. One year, rival white power factions started a veritable riot. The groups who both plan and attend this weekender -- the KKK, Vinlanders, National Socialist Movement and Outlaw Hammerskins, to name just a few -- all have long track records of violence against minorities and those they believe stand in the way of their 'movement.'
Dawson Springs is home to the headquarters of the Imperial Klans of America. The IKA are the subject of an upcoming lawsuit filed by Southern Poverty Law Center over a brutal attack on a teenage boy of Latin American descent; members of the IKA allegedly attacked the boy because they believed he was an illegal immigrant. The attack took place not far from where last year's NordicFest took place, and only weeks after white power bands called on their NordicFest audience to show "no mercy" to "spics."
To learn more about the Imperial Klans of America and their involvement in the attack on an innocent teenager, watch this video by the SPLC: http://youtube.com/watch?v=n28NGMuhyQM |
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Unwanted Attention: Bands' names and fame used to recruit youth |
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Written by Administrator
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Thursday, 15 May 2008 |
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There is such a thing as bad publicity, and it comes in the form of unwelcome endorsements from white power labels and bands. In the process of updating our database of bands, record labels and distribution companies, Turn It Down keeps seeing bands we KNOW aren't white power -- cited on white power label sites as 'friends,' depicted in photo galleries next to shots of well-known white power bands, or, in one case, as a bootlegged live DVD among a label's catalog of white power music. |
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 15 May 2008 )
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Volksfront “North American Althing” |
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Written by Administrator
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Tuesday, 15 April 2008 |
Volksfront will be hosting a three-day “family friendly weekend” an hour outside of St. Louis from August 29th through September 1st (Labor Day Weekend). The exact location is not disclosed, and personal references from members of white power organizations are required to RSVP. Bands scheduled to play include Blood in the Face, Frontline, and The Rolling Sevens, with more to be added later. Speakers include ‘Pastor Drew’ and ‘VF Pastor Mike L’. Several record labels are also slated as official vendors.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 30 April 2008 )
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Read more...
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Annual Hitler Birthday Concert Announced |
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Written by Administrator
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Tuesday, 06 July 2004 |
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The annual Hitler birthday concert will be happening again in Detroit on April 12, 2003 (one week early due to Easter). The line-up includes Max Resist, Intimidation One, Final War, and three more. For the past 2 years this concert has been held without opposition (3/10/03). |
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Micetrap Distribution Head Joins National Alliance, Exhorts Other To Do The Same |
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Written by Administrator
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Tuesday, 06 July 2004 |
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The head of Micetrap Distribution, a long time white power record label and distributor based in Maple Shade, New Jersey, recently urged his supporters to join the National Alliance after doing so himself. "I have never been much of a follower, but I believe that the National Alliance is a GREAT [emphasis in original] organization that consists of numerous intelligent White folks who are working together for the common goal of White Victory [sic]. I look forward to seeing you join the one organization that can make a difference." (January 2000).
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Nordland Records Forms U.S. Division |
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Written by Administrator
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Tuesday, 06 July 2004 |
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Nordland Records Forms U.S. Division: Based in southern California, Nordland Records, Sweden's leading white power record label, has formed Vinland Records as its U.S. sister label. Despite the recent sale of Nordland CD stock and band contracts to Resistance Records, Vinland offers a variety of European white power compact discs and other paraphernalia through its San Diego post office box (January 2000). |
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