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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.
What a sad little man.
Rhetorical question: what does contemporary America have in common with Europe in the 30’s, that drives people toward extremism ?
Even neo-Nazis are human beings. Page’s biological mother died when he was a child. His father divorced twice while Page was a child. Page was kicked out of the Army, couldn’t hold a job, his house was foreclosed on, and his girlfriend left him. Every aspect of his life was a failure. Little wonder that he chose to end it — which is what he did, suicide-by-cop.
Of course. The men who gravitate toward the white supremacist movement tend to be from very dysfunctional backgrounds. I can feel for them as individuals, while hating their response.
Dan Lynch, it’s a tad more complicated than that. What freaks these “white power” racists out is the fact that by 2050 whites in America will be in the minority. Page was a Psyops (propaganda) warrior in the military. He was stationed at Ft. Bragg, N.C. and Ft. Bliss, Texas. Both of these bases housed and trained the worst racists in the army. Here’s a question Dan Lynch, if you want to occupy a country and kill the people in that country in great numbers who do you send to get that job done? Racists. Page is the product of a military system gone nuts.