Alleged Sikh temple gunman was involved in white-power punk band

Among the many sad details coming to light about Wade Michael Page, the suspected shooter in the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting, is a deep involvement with a repellent strain of white-power punk music.

The 40-year-old Wade played in a fascist hard-core group called End Apathy. According to an interview that he gave to the website for the Label 56 recording label (Slate’s Dave Weigel has excerpts), Page also was affiliated with a number of negligible white-power bands with names like Celtic Warrior, Max Resist and Blue Eyed Devils, whose music can still occasionally be found on YouTube. End Apathy’s music is more generically anti-authoritarian, but other projects, such as Blued Eyed Devils, more explicitly advocate for racial hatred.

It’s all a uniformly cringe-inducing listen not recommended for anyone. He reportedly started performing in racist punk acts after attending Hammerfest, a festival of neo-Nazi rock acts put on by the hate group Hammerskin in Georgia for a number of years.

Although many of the groups operate at the farthest-right fringes of fascist punk and hate-group culture, the subculture still rears its head often enough to occasionally be a problem in rural and small-town punk scenes.

Early punk scenes and musicians such as Sid Vicious sometimes flirted with Nazi imagery for shock value, and in England the white-nationalist group National Front briefly organized a punk scene around its ideas in the late ‘70s. Many leftist and anti-racist groups such as Dead Kennedys openly opposed them and largely drove the movement into fringe terrain.

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