Color me surprised, right? The terrorist who walked into a Sikh temple and started executing people was a white supremacist active in white-power "hate rock" circles. Not everyone who commits a hate crime falls into a neat little box, but this
August 7, 2012

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Color me surprised, right? The terrorist who walked into a Sikh temple and started executing people was a white supremacist active in white-power "hate rock" circles. Not everyone who commits a hate crime falls into a neat little box, but this guy does, and Potok estimates there are 200,000 people in America like him:

The gunman who allegedly attacked a Sikh temple in southern Wisconsin, killing six people and wounding four, was a “white supremacist skinhead” and “frustrated neo-Nazi” who led a white power punk and metal band, groups that track extremism said Monday.

Wade Michael Page, 40, was the founder of End Apathy, according to Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. In a blog post about Page, Potok cited an April 2010 interview that the alleged gunman gave to the “Uprise Direct” music website about the band’s work.

[...] Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research for the Anti-Defamation League, said Page was a mem­ber of the Ham­mer­skins, "one of the oldest and largest hardcore racist skinhead groups," and iden­ti­fied him­self as a North­ern Ham­mer­skin, part of the group’s upper Mid­west branch.

End Apa­thy had been a fea­tured band in recent years at many Hammerskin-organized white power music con­certs, such as the August 2010 “Meet & Greet BBQ & Bands” in North Car­olina, the Ham­mer­skins’ St. Patty’s Day Show in March 2011 in Orlando, Fla., and Ham­mer­fest 2011 last Octo­ber in Orlando, Pitcavage noted in a blog post, in which he described Page as a "white supremacist skinhead."

“We had identified Page several years ago as someone who was prominent in the white-power music scene,” he told NBC News. He said Page also used a pseudonym, “Jack Boot,” an apparent reference to the high military boots worn by members of dictatorial regimes such as Nazi Germany.

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