https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/holden-matthews-varg-wikernes-norwegian-black-metal-lords-of-chaos-820995/
"Did a Norwegian Black Metal Band Inspire the Louisiana Church Burnings?
Holden Matthews, a 21-year-old aspiring black metal musician, has been arrested in connection with three historically black church fires in Louisiana
ON WEDNESDAY EVENING, it was reported that Holden Matthews, the 21-year-old son of a Louisiana sheriff’s deputy, had been arrested in connection with a series of church fires in Louisiana’s St. Landry Parish. Matthews has been charged with three counts of arson of a religious building, which carry a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison per charge.
Although police have yet to reveal a motive, all three of the fires were at historically black churches, which led the NAACP to classify them as hate crimes earlier this week. Matthews’ Facebook page also provides some clues as to what his motive may have been: according to the Daily Beast, he was an aspiring black metal musician and a fan of a number of black metal and pagan pages. In a press conference, Louisiana Fire Marshal Butch Browning confirmed that Matthews had a “relationship” with the black metal community, which had an “association” with church burnings.
To be clear, Matthews’ musical taste in and of itself does not necessarily indicate what his political leanings were. While there is a subset of the black metal community called National Socialist Black Metal, which combines neo-ideology with ethnic white European pagan views, “that is just one part of the black metal community. It’s not indicative of the entire community. That’s a really important distinction to make,” says Keegan Henkes, senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s intelligence project, which tracks far-right extremist, hate and anti-government groups. Indeed, many of the pages Matthews commented on actively forbade the expression of racist or anti-Semitic views.
Nonetheless, there is some overlap between the black metal community and extremist views, as evidenced in part by the fact that Matthews commented on memes featuring Norwegian black metal musician Varg Vikernes, a major figurehead in both the Norwegian black metal community and the neo-Nazi movement. The former bassist for the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, Vikernes boasted about burning churches in Norway with other black metal musicians called the “black circle,” which he attributed to his desire to"
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