Born out of an atavistic defiance of modernity and rationalism, present-day neo-Völkisch, or Folkish, adherents and groups are organized around ethnocentricity and archaic notions of gender.
Top Takeaways
Neo-Völkisch groups rely on a romanticized Viking aesthetic and mythos — imagery they use to perpetuate their belief in white racial superiority, which they spread online through anti-Black, antisemitic, anti-immigrant, and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. This adaptable and covert messaging, anchored by a nationwide network of “kindreds,” has allowed these groups to grow in recent years.
The overall number of active neo-Völkisch groups in 2025 appears largely static compared with the previous year. The Asatru Folk Assembly (AFA) remains the dominant force in this space, adding two new kindreds in Delaware and Vermont even as formerly active kindreds in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Mississippi have gone quiet. Education and family-focused outreach continue to be central pillars for the AFA’s long-term strategy. Its Asatru Academy school program offers K-6 education and is actively enrolling, framing itself as a “traditional” alternative to public education while embedding ethnonationalist narratives into children’s religious instruction. At the same time, the group is celebrating its 30th anniversary by ramping up recruitment of new “folkbuilders,” who function as regional organizers and the backbone of its expanding kindred network.
Economic and lifestyle initiatives continue to play an important role across the neo-Völkisch ecosystem. Businesses like Hearth and Helm’s Above Time Coffee Roasters maintain a visible online presence and cater to white nationalist and neo-Völkisch consumers, reinforcing a self-contained subculture that blends commerce, ideology and community-building.1
Key Moments
The AFA marked significant milestones in 2025 that underscore its ambitions as a national and international church for “folkish” heathens. In May 2025, the organization announced that it had paid off Njordshof, its “hof” (or headquarter building) in White Springs, Florida, cementing its long-term foothold in the Southeast.2 It has continued fundraising for Sigrheim in Tennessee and its planned fifth hof, Freyshof, in Austintown, Ohio, which officially opened in early December 3
On the organizing front, the Wolves of Vinland appear to have fully consolidated their operations in Virginia while gradually pulling back their previously visible presence in South Carolina. Leader Paul Waggener has remained active at white nationalist events and expanded his online reach through social media and podcasts, using initiatives like Operation Werewolf to blend white supremacy, Asatru-inspired aesthetics and hyper-masculine fitness culture into an influential lifestyle brand.4
Other neo-Völkisch actors also continued to refine their profiles. Raven Folk United remains highly active, organizing regular meetings and sustaining a significant online presence that positions it as a smaller but increasingly coherent alternative to the AFA.5 The Pacific Northwest Wolfpack has maintained its activity, particularly on Telegram, where it has used raffles and similar efforts to raise funds and keep supporters engaged.6 Women for Aryan Unity revamped its website for the first time in years, signaling a renewed attempt to present a modernized face to potential female recruits within the broader white supremacist milieu.7
What’s Ahead
Given the relatively stable number of groups and the continued investment in property, education and online media, neo-Völkisch organizing is poised to maintain its current footprint in 2026. The AFA is likely to remain the central hub, continuing to recruit folkbuilders, grow its K-6 Asatru Academy enrollment and channel donations toward Sigrheim in Tennessee and Freyshof in Ohio, while using its fully paid-off Njordshof and other hofs as showcases for its vision of a “folkish” religious infrastructure.
Raven Folk United and the Pacific Northwest Wolfpack will continue leveraging social media, encrypted platforms and online fundraising tools to sustain member engagement and attract new adherents. Businesses and lifestyle projects such as Above Time Coffee Roasters and Waggener’s Operation Werewolf are expected to keep reinforcing neo-Völkisch and adjacent white nationalist identities, ensuring that even without major numeric growth, these groups continue to punch above their size in shaping a distinct, culturally embedded far-right subculture.
Background
Neo-Völkisch adherents base their spirituality on the survival of those descended from white Europeans and the preservation of what they claim are dead or dying cultures. Such individuals and groups use a variety of terms to describe their spirituality, such as Odinism or Wotanism, but sometimes they co-opt other nonracist denominations such as heathenism, Asatru or paganism. Qualifiers like “Norse tradition,” “Germanic” or “proto-Germanic” are sometimes attached to those terms. These categorizations can be confusing, as no form of paganism is inherently bigoted.
Some believers actively distance their religion from neo-Völkisch dogma. Neo-Völkisch groups in the U.S. that embrace racial, ethnic and/or cultural essentialism generally identify themselves and their groups as “Folkish” and/or “Folk”-rooted, English translations of the German words “Völkisch” and “Völk,” respectively. While some neo-Völkisch groups attempt to cloak their ethnic exclusivity in claims centering on the victimization of white people, other groups overtly promote racial supremacy.
Folkish ideals and myths are derived from the Völkisch movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, which coalesced in present-day Austria and Germany. The movement grounded German ethnicity in an amalgam of geography, race and esoteric spirituality. Just as the original Völkisch movement can be understood as one of esoteric and ethnocentric nationalism, the neo-Völkisch iteration is a movement of esoteric and ethnocentric tribalism.
Present-day Folkish adherents also couch their bigotry in baseless claims of bloodlines grounding the superiority of one’s white identity. At the intersection of hypermasculinity and ethnocentricity, this movement seeks to defend against the unfounded threats of the extermination of white people.
A late-2017 Instagram post by the Asatru Folk Assembly, this country’s largest neo-Völkisch hate group, exemplifies how Folkish adherents profess their urgency for preserving Folkish ways. The post’s caption, drawing on a popular racist meme, reads: “In these mixed-up times it is important to remember not only that it is OK to be white but also that we owe to our descendants the same sturdy roots from which we ourselves have grown.”
Origins of the Neo-Völkisch Ideology
While neo-Völkisch hate groups romanticize pre-Christian Viking culture in slick, stylized manners, the foundations of the ideology emerged in the mid-19th century.
Two of the foremost thinkers in these ideological groundings were Austrian nationals Guido Karl Anton List and Adolf Josef Lanz. The pair are better known by their pseudonyms, Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, respectively. Aggrieved by the acceleration of societal change during their lifetimes — particularly stemming from the Industrial Revolution and a perceived lack of ethnic cohesion exacerbated by foreign influences such as Catholicism — these men recoiled from times they felt were further dividing their people.
Von List and others promoted notions that visible biological differences determine one’s intellect and worth. Their ideas intersected popular concepts at the time, such as “social Darwinism,” which applied the biological competition for survival to economics, politics and social power. Von List capitalized on the popularity of such concepts to argue that those of Germanic descent have always been superior. Such notions guided his development of “Armanism” (also known as “Ariosophy”), a belief system premised on pseudoscientific notions of Aryan purity and the mystical indivisibility of spirit and body. Von List presented such ideas in his text from 1910, The Religion of the Aryo-Germanic Folk: Esoteric and Exoteric.
Arriving on a crest of von List’s work, von Liebenfels later developed his own popular theory within Ariosophy. Liebenfels’ Theozoology developed into a quasi-religious doctrine intermingled with sciences like biology and zoology to classify humans into a racial hierarchy.
With similar beliefs bound to genetic essentialism, Ariosophists relied on occultism to bolster the myth of Ariosophy and Aryan peoples within influential social circles. Some of those circles were crucial in cultivating and helping propel the National Socialist German Workers’ Party to power under Adolf Hitler during the 1920s and into the 1930s.
Figureheads
Neo-Völkisch ideology debuted in the United States in the late 1960s and gained traction through the early 1970s with help from Stephen McNallen and Danish immigrant Else Christensen. In 1969, McNallen created the Asatru Free Assembly in Northern California, the precursor to the present-day Asatru Folk Assembly. At the same time, Christensen founded the Odinist Fellowship in Crystal River, Florida.
McNallen remains a seminal figure in the Folkish community. His idea that religion and genetic inheritance are intrinsically tied is fundamental to the argument that Folkishness should be practiced only by white people of European descent. “We are thus a religion not for all of humanity, but rather one that calls only its own,” McNallen asserts in his 1985 essay “Metagenetics.” Pernicious notions of heredity underpin his “dogma,” despite his occasional past protestations to the contrary.
Despite McNallen’s explicitly racist ideas, some neo-Völkisch contemporaries have criticized him as a race traitor due to their perception that he has failed to consistently support white supremacy. Most notable among those critics were David and Katja Lane. Along with Ron McVan, the couple founded another significant Folkish group in the 1990s, Wotansvolk.
David Lane was a member of the neo-Nazi terror cell The Order, which rose to prominence in 1984 after waging a campaign of hate that included murder, the bombing of a synagogue, counterfeiting and a series of robberies. Lane is credited with authoring the “14 Words” slogan and the “88 Precepts,” a series of white nationalist tenets that many Folkish devotees use to guide their life choices. In his own writings, Lane, who was more straightforward than McNallen, believed that “the White race cannot share Gods, religion, technology, food, women, territory or anything of value with another race” and that the tribal, ethnocentric, Wotanist society he envisioned would be attainable only after a period of oppressive dictatorship.
More recently, McNallen disposed of pretenses, particularly in a video monologue on race in which he quotes Lane’s “14 Words” verbatim. Titled “What I Really Think About Race” and posted to Alt-Right.com in 2017, McNallen states: “We need to change our attitude. We need to say … ‘I will defend my race.’ I will fight for my race, primarily with words and ideas, but I will fight more literally if I have to.”
Similarly, in an effort to justify AFA’s views after the Southern Poverty Law Center listed it as a hate group in 2018, Matt Flavel defended his group, describing it to the Appeal-Democrat newspaper as a “folkish religion, as opposed to a universal religion.” He continued, “So, we believe each ethnic group has a right to their belief and to the divine.”
The Neo-Völkisch Ideology and the Radical Right
In line with rhetoric adopted by much of the far right, Folkish devotees veil their ethnocentric beliefs in arguments for the necessity of microsocieties, or tribes, to preserve their ethnicity and combat alleged white genocide. Despite their rebuke of modernity, leaders have embraced various social media platforms to spread Folkish ideology.
While outward-facing violence rarely erupts from the Folkish movement, it is premised on an ethnically or racially charged warrior pathos. This mentality further entrenches the asymmetry of power and agency between men and women. Fetishized images of hypermasculinity, juxtaposed with nurturing femininity, reinforce misogyny and rigid gender roles within Folkish spheres. This objectification is conflated with notions of cherishing women as keepers of the home and bearers of life. However, this pseudo-pedestal forces women into subdued and regulated roles, a trend that undergirds the far right.
Since the movement’s inception, Völkisch adherents explain away this sexism with intricate narratives. In von List’s Aryo-Germanic Folk, he claimed, “They held women and marriage in such high, divine reverence and issued such strict laws against mixed marriages and bastardization, since they also recognized that the strength of the race was founded only on its unity and purity.” Casting the female body as a vessel for purity and genetic unity is a manifestation of patriarchal violence with implications reaching far beyond the immediate misogyny.
As the neo-Völkisch ideology coalesced in the U.S., Lane sought to substantiate its tenets through extensive writings. His most well-known phrase, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” echoes throughout the white supremacist movement. At its core, this concept necessitates control over women’s bodies and reproductive functions. More in-depth essays by Lane claim that “males are designed to capture females,” a pursuit he contends women amicably indulge because “nothing makes a woman happier than to be desired by a great warrior.”
Given these ruminations on gender, feminism is approached with contempt and accused of undermining the so-called natural order. These rigid gender roles continue to bolster Folkish groups, as evidenced by Flavel’s August 2017 Facebook post: “Today we are bombarded with confusion and messages contrary to the values of our ancestors and our folk. The AFA would like to make clear that we believe gender is not a social construct, it is a beautiful gift from the holy powers and from our ancestors. The AFA celebrates our feminine ladies, our masculine gentlemen and, above all, our beautiful white children.”
2025 Neo-Völkisch Hate Groups
* — Asterisk denotes headquarters.
Ásatrú Folk Assembly
Alabama
Arizona
Arkansas
Brownsville, California
Colorado
Delaware
White Springs, Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Cuyahoga County, Ohio (North)
Hamilton County, Ohio (South)
Oregon
Pennsylvania
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Dakota Prairie Ásatrú
Hettinger, North Dakota
Easter Tidings/Carolyn Emerick
Rochester, New York
Hearth & Helm LLC
Nashville, Indiana
Order of the Black Sun, The
Mesa, Arizona
Pacific Northwest Wolfpack Kindred
Washington
Raven Folk United
Missouri
Wolves of Vinland
South Carolina
*Lynchburg, Virginia
Women for Aryan Unity
Wisconsin
Citations
1 Heath and Helm, Above Time Coffee Roasters, Telegram post, 2025.
2 Asatru Folk Assembly- Florida, Social media, 2025.
3 Asatru Folk Assembly Tennessee and Ohio, Social media, 2025.
4 RavenFolk United, website, 2025.
5 Pacific Northwest Wolf Pack, Telegram, 2025.
6 Women For Aryan Unity, Website, 2025.
7 Wolves of Vinland, Virginia, 2025.