At the age of 11, blonde-haired, blue-eyed twins Lamb and Lynx Gaede formed a band and saw themselves as the new faces of pop music.
But instead, the girls from Bakersfield, California, would soon be labelled the 'new faces of hate'.
Not surprising when you consider the group they created in 2003 was a neo-Nazi outfit called Prussian Blue - named after a by-product of the poison used to gas millions of Jews in the Holocaust - at the suggestion of White Nationalist leader William Pierce.
Now however, at the age of 20, the twins have radically transformed themselves from hate-spouting extremists to peace-loving hippies.
And the reason for their change? Marijuana.
The girls, who once wore smiley-face Hitler T-shirts, both now have medical marijuana cards, consider themselves 'healers' and say they are 'pretty liberal now'.
'I’m stoked that we have so many different cultures,' Lynx said. 'I think it’s amazing and it makes me proud of humanity every day that we have so many different places and people.'
Lynx was diagnosed with cancer during her freshman year of high school, when doctors removed a tumour from her shoulder.
She was prescribed OxyContin and morphine to deal with the pain. She also suffers from a rare condition called cyclic vomiting syndrome.
About two years ago, she began smoking to ease withdrawal symptoms and nausea.
'I have to say, marijuana saved my life,' she said. 'I would probably be dead if I didn’t have it.'
Lamb, who suffers from scoliosis and chronic back pain, leading to emotional stress, soon acquired a medical marijuana card of her own.
They said the drug has reignited their creativity, which they now channel in other ways, such as painting.
'We just want to come from a place of love and light,' Lamb said, adding, 'I think we’re meant to do something more - we’re healers. We just want to exert the most love and positivity we can.'
'I'm glad we were in a band, but I think we should have been pushed toward something a little more mainstream and easier for us to handle than being front-men for a belief system that we didn't completely understand at the time,' Lynx told the Daily Mirror.
It is certainly a change of philosophy for the girls who were raised in a redneck community, where they were indoctrinated in extremist principles.
Their grandfather, Bill Gaede, had a swastika on his belt buckle, painted it on his truck and even branded his cattle with the Nazi symbol.
But they blame his daughter, their mother April, for being the main influence on their skewed perspective.
As a member of racist fringe groups such as the National Alliance and the National Vanguard, she had a powerful hold over her children.
By the time the twins were 13, in 2006, they had recorded a roster of songs that were infuriating the nation, with titles including Aryan Man Awake and Hate For Hate: Lamb Near The Lane, co-written by David Lane - the late member of terrorist group The Order and Lamb's then pen-pal.
Lane was then serving 190 years in prison for his involvement in the murder of Jewish talk show host Alan Berg in 1984.
Soon after the song's release, the girls were labelled by the media 'the new faces of hate', fuelling the firestorm with their angelic faces and smiley-faced Hitler T-shirts.
'Adolf Hitler was a great man who was only trying to preserve his own race in his own country,' Lamb said at the time.
The young teen Lynx added: 'Lots of things were exaggerated about the Second World War. We don't believe that 6million Jews were executed. I mean, there were not even that many Jews alive then.
'We know there were concentration camps but they had swimming pools and tennis courts - that's not how you would treat people if you were getting ready to kill them.'
In 2005, they donated money to victims of Hurricane Katrina but insisted it go to whites only.
Such was their notoriety that they featured in a Louis Theroux documentary about Nazis in 2003.
The sisters now say, however, they simply didn't know better.
Lynx, a painter and furniture restorer who still lives at home with her mother, said: 'My sister and I were home-schooled. We were these country bumpkins. We spent most of our days up on the hill playing with our goats.'
Lamb, now a hotel maid who lives nearby, echoed: 'I was just spouting a lot of knowledge that I had no idea what I was saying.
Their mother, however, still defends encouraging the extremist side project.
'I thought it would just be a little fun thing to do,' she said, adding, 'I didn’t expect it to get as big as it did. If the girls feel regretful about it, I guess I would have to as well.'
Lamb and Lynx said enrolling in public school and moving to northwest Montana has helped them become more open-minded.
However, they said their mother still has dreams of forming an 'intentional' white community in Montana, called Pioneer Little Europe.
But they are reluctant to follow her lead. 'I’m not a white nationalist anymore,' Lamb said. 'My sister and I are pretty liberal now.'
The sisters closed the door with Prussian Blue following the band's 2006 European tour, and have spent the last few years 'lying low and trying to live a normal life,' Lamb said.
They do worry about a backlash from their former fans.
'There are dangerous people in White Nationalism that don’t give a f***, and they would do awful things to people who they think betrayed the movement,' Lamb said, adding, 'We’re stepping on eggshells.'
The sisters are not completely reformed, however.
Asked whether the Holocaust happened, Lynx replied, 'I think certain things happened. I think a lot of the stories got misconstrued. I mean, yeah, Hitler wasn't the best, but Stalin wasn't, Churchill wasn't. I disagree with everybody at that time.'
Lamb added: 'I just think everyone needs to frickin' get over it. That's what I think.'
Well, this ain't relevant, I believe, but it's curious at least. I don't blame marijuana for their political change, though. They were raised by a white-nationalist mom who brainwashed them into believing such things and as they said, there are dangerous people in the white-nationalist underground. Honestly, what leads a mother to raise her kids like this?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ppies.html
