Arno Michaelis Photo: Supplied
By the age of 16 Arno Michaelis was a full-blown alcoholic and a violent racist covered in swastika tattoos.
Michaelis spent seven years active in the US's mid-west white suprermacy movement and was the lead singer in a hate-metal band.
It was when he became a single parent, at 24, that he began to distance himself from his racist beliefs. He stopped drinking, and in 2007 he wrote a memoir Life After Hate.
Today, he is a speaker, author, and works with Serve2Unite, an organisation that engages young people of all backgrounds as peacemakers.
There was something in his personality that drew him to white nationalism as a child, he told Nine to Noon.
"I've always been very rebellious and questioning authority and a bit antisocial and combining that with trauma I went through growing up through dysfunction in my household, really is what kind of set me on that path."
The portal into that world was his love of punk, he said.
"I heard a white power skinhead band from the UK and it really made the hair of the back of my neck stand up and it gave me a rush, because I knew how repulsive the lyrics were to civil society.
"And that was the attraction for me, not necessarily the ideology itself, just the fact that the ideology was so despised by the rest of society and I was already in a position where I wanted to offend people and shock people. And nothing offends people or shocks people like a swastika does."
Soon he was in his own white power band, "a magnet for every pissed off white kid in Wisconsin" and had developed a drinking problem.
"I got into the white power skinhead scene when I was 16, and by that time I was already a full-blown alcoholic. So, the entire seven years that I spent as a white nationalist that were just rife with drinking."
That in turn lead him to violence which fed his adrenaline-seeking personality, he said.
"It didn't matter if I won or lost the fight, I still experienced the thrill of violence."
All extremist groups are addicted to hating others, he said.
"People get addicted to the sensation of hating someone else, they get addicted to this feeling of fighting against depression, they get addicted to the irresponsibility of blaming everything wrong in your life on some other person or some other group of people."
Tapping into this sense of grievance is a powerful recruiting tool for such groups, he said. His ideal target, back in his white supremacist days, was Joe the Pissed off White Kid.
"Joe Pissed Off White Kid would tell me that he's angry because he doesn't have a girlfriend, eight times out of 10, that's typically what the problem would be."
Rather than tell Joe to tidy up his act and get more acquainted with the shower, he would feed his grievances, Michaelis said.
"I would tell him that the reason why he doesn't have a girlfriend is because Jews are corrupting the minds of white women by putting non-white athletes all over the TV and magazines to make them think they're the ideal man instead of Joe Pissed Off White Kid."
This absurd narrative would play well, he said.
"When you're a 16-year-old, who's angry and has trauma in your background and you come from a rough, broken home where there's dysfunction going on, and you're angry, you don't have a girlfriend, it's much easier to blame it on Jews than it is to look inward and do the very difficult work to make yourself a more attractive person."
He now spends his life trying to turn Pissed off White Kids towards the light, but it took the birth of his daughter and the embrace of the bourgeoning rave scene to turn his own life around in the early 1990s, he said.
"Shortly after becoming a single parent, after a concert my band had played, a second friend of mine was murdered in a street fight. And at that point, I lost count of how many friends had been incarcerated.
"So, it finally hit me that if I didn't change my ways, death or prison was going to take me from my daughter. That's when I made the decision to leave white nationalism."
After leaving the white supremacy movement he moved to Chicago, he said.
"I found myself in the rave scene on the south side of Chicago. And here I am at four in the morning on Sunday, shaking my ass to house music with 3000 people of every possible ethnicity, socio-economic background, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity and loving every minute of it."
The dance scene helped heal him, he said.
"Here I am about 18 months removed from being a person who attacked people who didn't look like me, or anybody I remotely suspected was gay on sight.
"And now I'm going to these all night all dance parties that are really rooted in LGBT and Afro American culture. And I made friends with all sorts of people that I would have attacked years earlier."
Now with his work though Serve2Unite he aims to help heal other young people drawn to extremism of all kinds.
"And if we can do that, for people who are under the influence of hateful ideologies of any sort, I fully believe that it's possible for those people to not only turn their lives around, but maybe someday even become someone who can help somebody else."
