In the late 80s and early 90s, Picciolini had performed in Final Solution and White American Youth, two of the most popular white power bands of the era. “It didn’t even dawn on me until I was done reading them that those were my lyrics,” Picciolini told me. “My heart sank. It’s absolutely still influencing people. I planted all these seeds of hate so long ago, and I’m still pulling out the weeds from them. Some of them, like the music, are going to live forever.”

Picciolini left the white supremacist movement in 1996 for a number of reasons, including, he says, the guilt he felt over his involvement in the gang-beating of a young black man. In 2009, he cofounded Life After Hate, an organization for those who used to subscribe to far-right violent extremism that works to deradicalize people in those movements. (He left Life After Hate in the middle of 2017 to go help build a global extremism-prevention network.) However, his musical footprint remains. What was once a major recruitment tool for the white power movement through concerts and brick-and-mortar record stores is still drawing people in through its proliferation on online platforms. YouTube in particular has become a major site of what’s called passive recruitment through the widespread availability of white power music and its messages. According to a 2012 study by the Anti-Defamation League, passive recruitment works because “of all the people who encounter it, some will be interested enough to look into white power music, and of those people, a certain amount will find the white supremacist movement itself attractive.”