MILWAUKEE (SPECTRUM NEWS) - The Southern Poverty Law Center lists 15 active hate groups in Wisconsin, as of 2018.  48-year-old Arno Michaelis knows what it’s like to be in one of them.

Watch Part 1: Tracking Domestic Terror in Wisconsin

“I’ve committed horrific acts of violence,” says Michaelis.  “The worst of it are the ones that haunt me every night.

He says he remembers every day of the seven years he spent as a white supremacist in Milwaukee.

“The first time I heard white supremacist skinhead music, I felt like a warrior who was fighting for my country,” Michaelis recalls.  “We started a white-power skinhead group which was a magnet for all the disgruntled white kids in Milwaukee to join and in 1991, we had about 150 members.”

Michaelis says alcohol in his home at a young age was the catalyst for him to choose a life of hate.

“Alcoholism in the house made my mother’s life very difficult and I lashed out at other kids because I was hurting,” he says.

In 1994, an unexpected miracle happened.

“I found myself a single father to my 18-month-old daughter,” says Michaelis.  “Someone got killed about an hour after my band played and I had lost count of how many of my friends were in prison, so I realized death and destruction were going to take me from my daughter and that’s how I got out in 1994.”

Today, Michaelis is a full-time public speaker.  He leads inspirational talks across the world, educating others about tolerance.  He has written two published books titled My Life After Hate and The Gift of Our Wounds.  He wrote the second book with a Sikh from Wisconsin, Pardeep Singh Kaleka. 

“My father and five others were killed at the Sikh temple shootings in Wisconsin,” says Kaleka, during an interview Spectrum News did with he and Michealis in December of 2018.

“His father was the last person killed on August 5th, 2012 by a white supremacist gunman who came from the same group I helped to start,” says Michealis.

The two are now close friends.

“Pardeep reached out to me in October of 2012 and we hit it off right away,” says Michealis.  “We felt like long lost brothers.”

Michaelis and Kaleka started an organization together called Serve2Unite.  It began in 2013 and is geared towards educating community members, especially youth, about inclusion and acceptance.

How can you keep your family safe against hate groups? Watch part 1: Tracking Domestic Terror in Wisconsin.