ABSTRACT
On 4 August 2012, Wade Michael Page went on a rampage at a Sikh temple outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, killing six people and wounding four others before taking his own life. Although his precise motivation remains unclear, his racist beliefs clearly played a leading role. For more than a decade, Page had embraced core elements of white supremacy. He was also an active, even visible, member of the white power music scene. In 2005, he founded the group End Apathy. Fed up with what he saw as social pathologies, he hoped the band would encourage whites to better see the world around them and act to make it a better place. Importantly, Page put race at the center of his vision, using the divisive discourse of white power to identify both problems and solutions. As his description of the band highlights:
End Apathy began in 2005 […] to figure out what it would take to actually accomplish positive results in society and what is holding us back. A lot of what I realized at the time was that if we could figure out how to end peoples apathetic ways it would be the start towards moving forward.[…] But I didn’t want to just point the finger at what other people should do, but also I was willing to point out some of my faults on how I was holding myself back. And that is how I wrote the song ‘Self Destruct’. (Blood)
