Former neo-nazi teen singers distance themselves from their Prussian Blue past: "My sister and I are pretty liberal now"
Their looks were disarming: teenage twin girls with long blond hair, bright blue eyes, sweetly singing in their pop-folk band Prussian Blue. But their songs-with lyrics praising skinheads and racism-fueled plenty of outrage.
Lynx and Lamb Gaede landed in the limelight after appearing on ABC Primetime in October 2005. In the interview-interspersed with clips of the duo playing at pro-White conferences, being home schooled by their mom, and hanging out at their grandfather's Swastika-branded cattle ranch-the girls deny the Holocaust and explain why they're happy to sing about White Separatism.
"We're proud of being white, we want to keep being white," then 12-year-old Lynx told ABC. "We want our people to stay white... we don't want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race."
Their mom, April, defended what she taught her daughters. "All children pretty much espouse their parents attitudes. If they were Christians, they would be maybe singing Christian rock songs," she said in the interview. "But we're not. We're White Nationalists. And so of course that's a part of our life and I share that part of my life with my children."
But Lamb and Lynx are 19 now, and in an interview with The Daily they say they've put their racist past behind them.
"I'm not a white nationalist anymore," Lamb says. "My sister and I are pretty liberal now."
Lynx agrees. "Personally, I love diversity," she says. "I'm stoked that we have so many different cultures. I think it's amazing and it makes me proud of humanity every day that we have so many different places and people."
After being steeped in racist propaganda for most of their lives, what caused such a radical change? According to The Daily, the girls "simply no longer believed what they'd been taught."
Concerned that their community in Bakersfield, California, "was not white enough," April Gaedes moved her to Kalispell, Montana, in 2006, after a bitter custody battle with Lamb and Lynx's father, who had renounced White Separatism. Their songs became less about racial rhetoric and more about boys and broken hearts; a 2007 documentary, "Nazi Pop Twins," shows them becoming disenchanted with their mother, who yells at and insults them on camera for not following her directions. "There are some songs we wish we didn't sing, because now we disagree with it, concerts now we wish we never went to," the girls tell the filmmaker when their mom isn't in the room. "I wouldn't even consider myself, like, a White Nationalist, like my mom."
After graduating from public school and facing a host of medical issues, including cancer, the 19-year-olds are now focused on healing, painting, and making pot legal in all 50 states. ("I have to say, marijuana saved my life," Lynx, who discovered medical marijuana's positive effect on nausea while recovering form her cancer treatments, told The Daily. "I would probably be dead if I didn't have it.")
These two teens have had some pretty strong-and contradictory-worldviews in their young lives already. Can a kid really make such a radical change? Their mom, who is still working to establish an "intentional" all-white community, is betting against it.
"They're 19," she said. "I think when they have children of their own, they'll come to the same conclusions I have."
Also on Shine:
