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ATS: Interview with Robert N. Taylor

Attack the System
Interview with Robert N. Taylor

November 11, 2012

Keith Preston interviews musician and former activist Robert N. Taylor on Taylor’s vivid experiences with the revolutionary, anti-communist, Minutemen organization of the ’60s and ’70s, and his later work with the folk band Changes.

Topics discussed:

  • Taylor’s background
  • The type of people who made up the Minutemen organization
  • Robert DePugh
  • COINTELPRO and its infiltration of both left- and right-wing organizations
  • Some of the techniques used by agitators during supposedly “spontaneous” protests
  • How problems that existed in the 60s have continued to develop and evolve
  • How former radical leftists and communists of the 60s went on to become the currrent “establishment”
  • Taylor’s move away from politics and toward folk music and folk religion

Robert N. Taylor has played an active and influential role on the outsider Right for decades. In the 1960s, he was closely involved with The Minutemen, a grassroots anti-communist group headed by Robert Bolivar DePugh. Due to a variety of factors, including pressure from the FBI and other organizations, the paramilitary group widely known for its “Traitors Beware!” stickers eventually disbanded; but a template for many future militia groups had been formed. After leaving The Minutemen, Taylor turned to other interests and founded the first incarnation of his folk band Changes with cousin Nicholas Tesluk. In the ’70s, Taylor helped pioneer the growing Odinist/Ásatrú movement and remains involved with various organizations. In the late ’90s, Michael Moynihan—an editor of the radical traditionalist journal TyrTYR—rediscovered Changes and worked to release old and new material by the duo. Taylor continues to record and tour.

79:48 / 279 words

Email Keith:
kppgarv@mindspring.com

4 replies »

  1. This interview with Robert N. Taylor has been hands down one of the most insightful and well spoken dialogues I have heard in many,many moons.As Taylor has eloquently and consistently displayed in his vast catalog of work,music and art ,here to he rises to the occasion,rather painlessly ,as a true champion of America and her children who have been denied a voice in the ever declining deterioration of what was once a profoundly beautiful dream.I for one would love to hear more from Mr.Taylor and I am sure I speak for thousands of others out here.Great job !

  2. This interview with Robert N. Taylor has been hands down one of the most insightful and well spoken dialogues I have heard in many,many moons.As Taylor has eloquently and consistently displayed in his vast catalog of work,music and art ,here to he rises to the occasion,rather painlessly ,as a true champion of America and her children who have been denied a voice in the ever declining deterioration of what was once a profoundly beautiful dream.I for one would love to hear more from Mr.Taylor and I am sure I speak for thousands of others out here.Great job !

  3. “There can be no doubt of it: chivalry is now thoroughly dead. Our one preoccupation is to be safe. We don’t know what we love, and if we do we don’t dare mention it. We are willing to become anything, to be turned into any sort of worm, by the will of the majority. We are afraid of starving, of standing alone; above all we are afraid of having to fight. And when nevertheless we are forced to fight, we do so without chivalry. We do not talk of justice, but of interests. We have become very numerous, we have established a great many industries, we have encouraged a great many peoples to wish themselves very rich. All this has to be maintained, it has a great momentum, which we cannot resist. And we need our neighbour’s land and markets and colonies; at least we need a strip along their borders, so as to be able to expand a little, and to breathe. For as it is, we are dreadfully crowded and insecure and unhappy; as if it made any essential difference whether 20 million more people read the same newspaper, and thought and said the same thing at the same moment. Is there in this megalomania a remnant of imitation of religious propaganda? Is it for the salvation of foreigners’ souls that we wish to annex and to standardise them? Is it to prevent those who are unlike ourselves from being eternally damned that we long to exterminate them?

    Meantime our society has lost its own soul.”

    George Santayana, Dominations and Powers, 1951

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