Bad Wolves frontman Tommy Vext made headlines earlier this year when he shared a since-deleted video outlining a global conspiracy relating to secret organizations, elites and media companies being behind the Black Lives Matter movement in a bid to profit and further their own agendas off of inciting racial unrest. While that alone set off a firestorm that led him to later issue this clarification, Vext also drew heat for his views on racism in America. In the original video mentioned above he stated:
“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…”
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Following a wave of backlash, Vext would later make a follow-up post, stating:
“…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.”
In a newly shared appearance on the High Notes podcast, which focuses on the journey of musicians through addiction and recovery, Vext spoke candidly about being bulled for both his weight and race while growing up. He said in part of his troubled early years:
“I was a fat kid and I used to get teased and made fun of for being fat and I grew up—I’m also mixed race and it was not socially acceptable in the ’90s and early 2000s to be mixed race—so I got bullied until I grew into my body. I used to get picked on. I used to get held down and kids would burn me with cigarettes and lighters and call me the n-word. I never forgot any of that.
Most of those people, I got… When I was sixteen I joined the gym and met some guys and they taught me how to work out and I basically kept tabs and beat the shit out of anybody that ever fucked with me as a kid—and pretty violently, I broke some people’s faces… Anger has always been a pretty dark passenger that I struggled with until I got into recovery.”
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