In November 2015, three individuals with connections to Asatru were arrested in conjunction with a plot to ignite a race war.
A free man now, Facebook posts from 2015 suggest Michaely is back at work with the Wolves. One member of Virginia’s neo-pagan white nationalist group the Wolves of Vinland, Maurice Michaely, spent more than two years in prison for burning down a black church in 2012. But it’s actually been tied up with specific acts of violence and terrorism. To the outside world, the far-right’s association with ancient gods and magic might seem absurd. Recently, two Heathens and former members of the National Socialist Party purchased 44 acres of land in Tennessee to begin construction on a private religious community where they can "practice religion freely" among "other culturally and spiritually similar people." These racist Pagan groups are very much active. Unfortunately, Charlottesville was just the tip of the iceberg. One notorious Pagan present was Stephen McNallen, the founder of the Asatru Folk Assembly, a far-right group fixated on "the survival and welfare of the Ethnic European Folk as a cultural and biological group." The rally also featured aspiring Pagan politician Augustus Sol Invictus, a an alt-right leader Richard Spencer credited with writing the first draft of the "Charlottesville Statement." Among other repugnant things, that infamous screed framed the refugee crisis as a religious war and promoted the concept of a white ethnostate. White power's embrace of Paganism was on full display at the tragic Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. Similar groups have adopted Odinist phrases like "Faith, Family, and Folk." And while the Third Reich did embrace the Othala rune in their time, the symbol is far less inflammatory or recognizable than the Swastika in the United States, enabling these groups to fly under the radar. Today, one of the largest white nationalist organizations in the US, the National Socialist Movement, has traded in their Swastikas and Totenkopfs for Pagan symbols like the Othala rune.
For racists, the faith and its offshoots serve as both a cover and a recruiting tool. But with the recent rise of right-wing extremism in America, we've seen a co-mingling of racism and Paganism that has alarmed experts, activists, and Pagans themselves. Although the leaders of Nazi Germany were obsessed with Paganism and the occult, it has largely been associated with multiculturalism here in the United States.
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