If you somehow missed it, Bad Wolves frontman Tommy Vext recently shared this video on social media that generated numerous headlines. In it he floated a conspiracy theory alleging that various elites, powerful puppet masters and media organizations are secretly behind the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States in a bid to push their agendas and profit off of the ensuing racial unrest.
Earlier today, June 11th, he issued the below post on the matter, addressing the accusations of being a conspiracy theorist and further clarifying his own personal experiences with racism:
“Conspiracy Theory by definition is “an idea that some covert but influential organization is responsible for a circumstance or event” on Monday I shared a diagram of a theoretical scenario that was explained to me which has been widely misunderstood as my beliefs and opinion.
As per usual people failed to read the disclaimer that “I am in no way a political scientist or sociologist and have no authority on the subject. And that I am not claiming anything I expressed as truth.”
Predictably certain media outlets misquoted and misrepresented my inquiries as opinions and lambasted me to serve their own purposes making the video go viral.
Much like Drew Breeze I never imagined offending anyone one as I stated the disclaimer “I’m not a professional I just found this on the internet isn’t it interesting”
After several conversations with fellow artist/ thought leaders in the African American community I can see the insensitive timing of sharing such theories.
And As I DID STATE in the video systemic racism IS indeed a very real pandemic that effects the judicial, economic, healthcare, housing & education systems in underserved black communities. However my personal experience of White Americans and “white culture” over the past 20 years has not been one of hateful bigotry but unilateral acceptance. Maybe thats just “Heavy Metal Privilege” as our music community has a long history of condemning racism & fascism.
I know It has been very hard time for everyone in this country. I spent my own time with thousands of volunteers cleaning up after the riots. We all can see across the globe that things are wrong but we are all struggling to make sense of it. It’s probably time to turn our attention to our families, our friends and communities so we can rebuild ourselves and get back on with our normal lives again.
Love you all and can’t wait to see you when concerts start up again and may God Bless you and keep you till then ~ T”
Outside of the conspiracy theorist concerns, considerable discussion over Vext‘s own personal experiences with racism emerged following his post. While Vext did assert that he believes systemic racism is real in that original post, he also had the following to say about his own experiences with racism in general within it:
“There’s a huge fucking problem going on where we have turned into citizens policing other citizens over a veil of racism that doesn’t exist. I’m African American, I’m 38-years-old. I’ve grown up in this country and I have not experienced actual racism. I’ve spent twenty years traveling through 48 states and, how many countries? I don’t know, lets say 50 countries all over the world. We don’t have a problem with race here. It’s all manufactured…”
While Vext‘s latest statement finds him adding more clarity and a time period of the past 20 years to his own experiences, it would seem that he was a victim of racism during his childhood. In the wake of his post earlier this week, his 2016 interview on ‘The Ex-Man Podcast‘ (see below) with his now Bad Wolves bandmate Doc Coyle began to resurface .
During that discussion, Vext touched on his childhood and past mindset and how it negatively impacted his time with Dino Cazares in Divine Heresy:
“…Me being somebody who grew up with a father not present, and grew up selling drugs to get by, and grew up fist fighting in the street. My childhood was brutalized because of a lot of racism that I had to deal with, and so I have an idea mentally to resist authoritative figures and so we had a personality clash.”
Vext‘s involvement in Divine Heresy came to an end in 2008 after a physical altercation erupted following behind-the-scenes tensions between him and Cazares.
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