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In addition to being a white supremacist, Wisconsin shooter Wade Michael Page was also a musician who was a member of a few different bands in the music genre known as hatecore. In April, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit civil rights advocate group, reported the number of right wing militias and white power organizations firmly increased after Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Experts and movement leaders, however, claim these groups are more fragmented than ever.

Some reformed white supremacists claim to have been originally won over by hatecore music. As it turns out, hate groups don’t have rally cries as much as they do have rally songs. In the underground world of hatecore music, bands with names like Blue Eyed Devils and Intimidation One spew their own brand of anger and animosity for a specific group where their message can be spread much farther than a white power leader at a podium.

WEIGH IN:

Have you ever heard hatecore music? How does music amp up a message even if that message is hate and intolerance?

Guests:

Marilyn Mayo, co-director of the Anti Defamation League’s Center on Extremism

Steven Cuevas, KPCC‘s Inland Empire reporter

Christian Picciolini, former skinhead; author of “Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead” (to be published later this year) and the co-founder of LifeAfterHate, and advocacy and outreach group focused on the ideals of basic human goodness