Wisconsin shooting: how racist bands recruit for white supremacists (+video)

Heidi Beirich, director of research at the Southern Poverty Law Center, described the “hate music” community as sophisticated and operating in much the same way as the mainstream music industry: Its bands tour the country and abroad, listeners are engaged via website videos and social media outlets, and grass-roots promotional outreach includes T-shirts, CDs, posters, video games, and other merchandise.

Ms. Beirich says bands with the same group of musicians change their names often to make it appear as if the scene is growing. Most labels, such as Tightrope Records and Resistance Records, are associated with major white supremacist groups. Their target, she says, are young people, to get them involved in the movement.

“It’s a great recruiting tool for these organizations and they know it’s a great recruiting tool,” she says.

The most notable example is “Project Schoolyard USA,” organized by Panzerfaust Records, a now-defunct white supremacist label in Minneapolis that in 2004 distributed 10,000 free copies of a mixed CD of its bands to schoolchildren across the US. The group’s website carries the slogan, “we don’t just entertain racist kids: we create them.”

In the online interview, Page said his band played Hammerfest 2000, which Beirich describes as the “equivalent of Lollapalooza but in the hate world.” Hammerskin Nation, considered one of the best-organized neo-Nazi skinhead groups in the United States, organizes the festival.

Often the record labels are disorganized, are not necessarily motivated by profit, and are operated by just a handful of people, says Christian Picciolini, a former white supremacist in Chicago who left the movement to cofound Life After Hate, a nonprofit that provides educational programs about tolerance to schools.

Mr. Piccolini played in the white supremacist band White American Youth between 1990 and 1993, and later became leader of the Northern Hammerskins. “The band members were like marketers of the organization,” he says, because music is such an inherently powerful tool to impress, and eventually hook, young teenagers.

“The most dangerous thing is the music. It’s not the organization; it’s the message in the music,” he says. “Music in general can create an emotional impulse, and the skinheads understood that really well.”

Picciolini did not know Page or his bands. He says the educational work he does today in schools is designed to reach young people with the message that kindness and compassion are stronger than hate.

“If Wade had been shown kindness 20 years ago, chances are maybe he wouldn’t have gone down that path,” he says. 

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