Total Life Reform

At each step along the way, Waggener has monetized his growing audience, never missing a chance to launch a new product or business. While his project mimics multi-level marketing—a sort of Amway for ethno-nationalists—Waggener draws his customers towards violent fascism by laundering in far-right ideas.

The Odinic Wolf Cult

The Wolves of Vinland began in the early-to-mid-2000s^[2] as an outlet for Waggener and his brother Matthias, who as teens were neonazi skinheads in Cheyenne, Wyoming.^[3] The brothers’ goal was to flesh out their type of Ásatrú: a racially-specific form of Nordic neopaganism. While most self-described heathens—people reviving pre-Christian Germanic religions—eschew racist politics, a substantial minority see heathenry as intended for people of Northern European descent alone.^[4] Waggener eventually became “Grandmaster” of the Galdraguild, a heathen mystic organization focused on runes.^[5] Despite his position, he saw the mystical elements of heathenism in metaphorical terms, more about creating discipline, mental focus, and physical transformation than supernatural magic.^[6] Dissatisfied with other racist heathen groups, such as the Asatru Folk Assembly (which lacked Waggener’s focus on fitness and personal success), he envisioned the Wolves as a more radical organization, emphasizing ecstatic rituals and pushing members to self-improvement and fight training.

In 2014, Jack Donovan, who would go on to become a significant far-right author and thought leader, traveled to Ulfheim, the Wolves’ compound near Lynchburg, Virginia, to write a profile of the group.^[7] He was so impressed by their ritual “Baldr’s funeral” (where members get drunk and set a ship on fire), that he joined the group, which shared many of his ideas about masculinity and the need for identity-based male “tribe[s].”^[8] The emerging ideology amounted to what Matthew N. Lyons calls “gang masculinity,” wherein men use extreme fraternalization—building bonds through extreme behaviors such as violence—to exclude women and reinforce toxic masculinity.^[9] Donovan cut ties with the Alt Right after the deadly Unite the Right gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and parted ways with the Wolves the following year; he now says he wishes “White Nationalists would burn my books and stop following me.”^[10] But his time with the group nonetheless left a permanent imprint.^[11]

The Wolves’ folkish politics—namely, that only White people were allowed to join—were firm, but not advertised. They viewed race as an essential ingredient to building tribal alliances, but rejected the rhetoric of pan-European collaboration and activism found in much of modern White nationalism. Instead they were fond of saying they were “Wolves nationalist”: loyal to members of their specific organization rather than all people of European descent.^[12] Despite this rhetorical sleight of hand, their views were clear.

“They hate Black people,” said Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart editor who dated Alt Right leader and Wolves member Kevin DeAnna. According to McHugh, who publicly renounced the Alt Right in 2019,^[13] the Wolves regularly use racial slurs internally, including calling Black people “Unters,” short for the Nazi term Untermensch, or sub-human.^[14] Waggener had played and sung in the National Socialist Black Metal band Valhalla Saints in Cheyenne, doing split records with other neonazis and singing songs about skinhead attacks.^[15] And as he would argue on the masculinist podcast The Pressure Project, he saw tribalism, including xenophobic racialism, as an inherent piece of the human psyche:

Like many folkish heathens, the Waggeners consider the Wolves’ racial tribalism a positive alternative to the street violence of their skinhead roots. The Waggeners’ ideology is inspired by the traditionalism and belief in male supremacy of fascist philosophers like Julius Evola, who saw the modern world as a degenerated mess that had lost its natural spiritual hierarchies, gender roles, and warrior ethic. Waggener’s goal is to return men to identity segregated tribal groups.^[17] They were also inspired by the European New Right’s identitarian ideas, particularly Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism, which proposed recreating an archaic image of tribal cultures inside a modern technological setting.

Much of the Wolves’ racial rhetoric follows a popular thread on the Alt Right opposing global “mono-culture,” suggesting those in power want to meld cultures to make people easily controlled consumers. “The mono-culture we refer to is the idea that we, as people, are all the same, no matter what our backgrounds, race, or culture. The reason this is dangerous at the present time is not so much the philosophy as much as it is who is pushing it on us and why,” Matthias said in a 2013 interview with Hunter Yoder, a folk artist who runs the website The Hex Factory.^[18] This rhetoric has a certain currency because it tries to echo an anti-capitalist, anti-globalization talking point about the destruction of indigenous cultures, while avoiding explicitly racist language. Like Donovan, the Wolves claim to offer an alternative to what they call the “Empire of Nothing”—the global culture of capitalism—inspired by Evola’s position of refusing to engage in contemporary politics.^[19] While they frame this as apolitical, it’s actually an intentional strategy in post-war fascist circles to recontextualize far-right politics as cultural, artistic, or meta-political^[20]—a means of influencing culture and identity more than immediate politics, with the hopes of changing politics further down the line.^[21]

Apolitical?

In reality, the claims of apoliticism are a smokescreen. Kevin DeAnna was an early Wolves member who joined Waggener’s group while he was organizing the far-right campus organization Youth for Western Civilization (YWC). DeAnna also worked at the Leadership Institute, a major conservative movement organization and the primary training ground for young right-wing activists, as well as a staff writer of the conspiracy-laden World Net Daily.

DeAnna also wrote commentary pieces for Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal, the White nationalist publisher Counter-Currents, the “race realist” organization American Renaissance, and the virulently anti-immigrant webzine VDARE. And from these perches, DeAnna sometimes promoted the ideas surrounding the Wolves. Writing for Radix under the pseudonym “Gregory Hood,” Deanna argued that the Wolves could help Whites reclaim a tribal identity in a vapid world.^[22]

DeAnna got other Alt Right figures involved, too, including Devin Saucier, an American Renaissance staffer, and Scott Greer, a contributor with The Daily Caller.^[24] A group of them lived in an Arlington, Virginia, apartment they dubbed “the Hate House,” which became a center of Alt Right activity and Jack Donovan’s home base when visiting the Washington, D.C., area.^[25] Amanda Prevette also became a member of the Wolves while working at World Net Daily.^[26] While the Wolves maintained a public persona of political neutrality, they had become a social center for the growing Alt Right and were openly welcoming active racialist leaders.

As the Alt Right became increasingly supportive of the Wolves, the Waggeners were invited to speak on White nationalist podcasts and radio at outlets like Red Ice Radio, Millennial Woes and Counter-Currents Radio.^[27] The publicity helped them raise $3,000 to build a meeting hall at their Ulfheim compound, and they even received support from Counter-Currents publisher Greg Johnson.^[28] Brad Griffin from Occidental Dissent also voiced his admiration for the group, suggesting he had been up to Ulfheim to see what they had built.^[29] Swedish nationalist and bodybuilder Marcus Follin, known as the Golden One on YouTube,^[30] met and trained with the group when he came to the U.S. to speak at American Renaissance.^[31]

When Donovan created the Wolves’ “Cascadia” chapter in 2015,^[32] the group began holding events on property owned by folkish heathen and anti-feminist author Juleigh Howard-Hobson.^[33] Juleigh and her husband David had caught the ire of Portland activists when they tried to attend a 2009 event with Holocaust denier David Irving, and were also allegedly members of European Americans United.^[34] All of which is to say that, while Paul may present the Wolves as outside of contemporary politics, they are centered directly at the heart of White nationalism.

The Birth of Operation Werewolf

In 2013, Waggener published a YouTube video of him and DeAnna working out by lifting car parts in a scrap yard.^[35] The ad hoc exercise tape marked the birth of Operation Werewolf^[36]—a synthesis of Waggener’s training regimen and his ideas about tribalism, “militant strength culture,”^[37] and “rewild[ing],” which he began expressing in the zines Iron and Blood and Rewildyourlife.^[38] The Wolves had developed away from the traditionalist heathenry seen in many racial Ásatrú groups, and now focused more on paganism’s mystical underpinnings, which Waggener taught were tools men could use to be successful. The “Odinic path,” in his teachings, was more about modeling your life on the “Germanic hero aesthetic,” where a man aspires to physical excellence through training and discipline.^[39] With Operation Werewolf, he would train men to build their own Wolves-like tribes. Following his tribalism for all peoples approach, he included non-White followers in a decision that seemed equal parts ideology and business acumen.^[40]

Operation Werewolf became a clearinghouse for his writing, but also a business. This began by selling his introductory zines and book On Magic, which boiled down his years in esoteric Germanic groups. He designed clothing based on the same rough aesthetic he was cultivating, mixing pagan symbolism with the junkyard appeal of biker gangs. Slogans like “only the inferior strive for equality” were emblazoned online,^[41] though he avoided clear-cut White nationalist rhetoric.

Since around 2015, Waggener has built a growing spiderweb of businesses, most drawing on his existing fanbase. He became a personal trainer, created workout programs (such as the powerlifting program Barbaric Rites), and released new music in several genres: country music marketed under his own name; neofolk under the band name Totenwolf (a combination of the “Death’s Head” symbol worn by the Nazi Schutzstaffel or SS with werewolf imagery); his band The Pale Riders,^[42] which adopted the basement aesthetic of Nazi black metal bands in Eastern Europe; another black metal band called Hunter’s Ground; and his new fashwave project A Neon Funeral.^[43] His label, Wolf’s Head Records, publishes some his music,^[44] as well as other artists like the guitarist David Lee Archer,^[45] and a Youtube channel called Anarchist Films hosts some of his music videos.

In 2020, he started the Werewolf Elite Program: a self-help scheme targeted at fans who had started their own tribes on the Operation Werewolf model. For around $250-$400 per year, Elite members can access a message board, some spurious investment advice, and five weekly posts from Waggener that amount to a spiritually-infused physical and mental training program.^[46]

Operation Werewolf encourages the use of initiation rituals, based on Waggener’s readings of esoteric traditionalism, so that recruits must advance through different color-coded rankings, similar to belt levels in martial arts.^[47] Advancing to each stage requires paying additional fees,^[48] attending the Wolves’ “Conclave” in Lynchburg,^[49] and rigid tests of one’s physical fitness and achievements in learning various fighting styles, runic spiritual practices, and financial accomplishments, like business creation and micro-investing.^[50]

These hierarchies, which Waggener regards as both natural and reflective of individual achievement,^[51] also help reinforce the sense that the Werewolf Elite program is worth the time, energy, and money involved. What he’s offering followers who buy into his Total Life Reform program is an “alchemical process” wherein men transform body and mind through suffering, and become heroes of their stories.^[52] As he writes in the primer to the Elite program, It’s Not Enough:

The different “tribal” groups inspired by the Wolves of Vinland and Operation Werewolf are seemingly independent, bound together only by an informal network and common aspiration, but Waggener’s example looms large.

And their numbers are growing. Operation Werewolf is able to maintain its credibility thanks to the inability (or unwillingness) of tech companies to de-platform them. Although various Werewolf accounts have been suspended, including at Instagram,^[54] PayPal,^[55] Venmo, Stripe, and video sites including Vimeo,^[56] they have a currently active YouTube channel, under Waggener’s name, with over 12,000 subscribers as of this writing. Waggener’s Instagram functions as a primary center of propaganda, where he regularly promotes his brand. The group’s Telegram channel is an active recruiting ground. They wanted to move people to a private, subscription-based message board system where it is harder to deplatform, which is one reason why the Werewolf Elite forums were created. Waggener’s appeal can also be seen in a more recent attempt at crowdfunding (which netted over $19,000), where he complains they’ve been “targeted in cowardly digital attacks by the enemies of free speech and strength” that shut down their social media pages.^[57]

Open for Business

Along with these programs, Waggener sells branded content, including ten self-published books of his writing and a branded notebook, called Master Logs, where you track your progress in his programs.^[58]

Much of Waggener’s advice is about becoming independent from the “modern world,” including through self-employment. Waggener offers himself as a heroic archetype to emulate, both physically— his website and social media feature idealized images of him shirtless and covered in tattoos—and financially, as a self-made man unbeholden to corporate bosses. The problem, though, is that his model of financial independence comes directly from extracting money from his followers. Through his multiple businesses, Waggener seems able to patch together a reasonable living. The community he’s cultivated has also created a series of businesses, from powerlifting gyms to clothing brands, yet there’s little evidence they are successful beyond attracting other Operation Werewolf adherents. As with most pyramid schemes, Waggener is marketing a program promising to make other men as financially and socially successful as he is, while his financial success depends entirely on his followers’ willingness to give him money.

Waggener also runs a copywriting and branding company, the Berkano Initiative, which offers advertising services and branding training. In one presentation, he explains how he built customer loyalty among Operation Werewolf members by cultivating an aesthetic that evokes the “branding archetype of the Outlaw,” and much of Waggener’s advice amounts to emulating the marketing techniques of companies like Levi’s and Harley-Davidson. This reveals the intentions behind Operation Werewolf, where tone and style are a means of selling a product. The Elite program bills itself as spiritual self-improvement, but ends up as a small business seminar.^[59]

While tightlipped about who hires the Berkano Initiative and its associated ad agency, Rogue Advertising, Waggener claims he’s provided support to financial businesses and has done copy work for Joy of the Trade, a high-risk investment training program run by trading guru Jeff Zananiri.^[60] Mostly, though, his work is about selling the principles that gained him Operation Werewolf recruits back to the men who have followed him as a sage.

“We will hit the pavement to back alleys and fly to distant locales in order to bring you directly into the room with copywriters and convicts, power brokers and pimps, branding experts and black metal maniacs,” reads the Berkano Initiative’s initial contact email. A digital copy of the Berkano Initiative’s Brand Builder’s Bible will run you $47 (on sale).^[61] More recently, Waggener has announced a new project, the Virtuous Circle Artist Collective, in which members pay $50 a month to access what is essentially an art-focused Facebook group.^[62]

Like many far-right grifters, Waggener has also focused on alternative medicine. Drawing on a family connection through a brother who works for a CBD company in Colorado,^[63] Waggener has hawked CBD products to his followers.^[64] And following an obsession with gender roles^[65] common within Operation Werewolf, Waggener has also urged his followers to consider testosterone therapy.^[66] Waggener takes a more pragmatic approach, saying that it doesn’t really matter if falling testosterone is intentionally caused by some nefarious actor or “just a product of living in the modern world.”^[67] Arguing that testosterone governs men’s ideology, Waggener has said, “If your test levels are crashed you are perceiving the world like a fucking female.”^[68] Operation Werewolf has also argued that recruits should get their testosterone levels checked and consider getting on Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT) to maintain “maximum high” levels of the hormone.^[69] The group has also promoted a Colorado provider, Brian Komleske, working with a clinic called Sculpted Med, which Waggener says he coordinated with to get his supporters on testosterone, suggesting he gets some type of financial support for doing this.^[70] (Komleske did not respond to requests for comment.)

Infecting Subcultures

Waggener’s reach has been profound in several intersecting subcultures where his brand of toxic tribalism has gained currency, including weight-lifting, martial arts, and pagan circles. The #OperationWerewolf hashtag has been used around 25,000 times on Instagram.^[71]

One such subculture is among the followers of Greg Walsh, a weight trainer^[72] who has worked with Operation Werewolf.^[73] His fitness company, Wolf Brigade, has provided private workshops for attendees of Operation Werewolf’s Conclave events, along with other fitness and athletic companies, including Norse Fitness (known for adding Nordic pagan symbolism to their workout clothing).^[74]Another example is Vengeance Strength Kvlt, a Nashville gym that matches Operation Werewolf’s style, branding, and rhetoric, and the owner of which has worked directly with both Paul and Matthias Waggener. In 2017, the gym gained notoriety when it posted a message to its website that seemed to echo Alt Right ideology: “Instead of becoming victims to life’s circumstances, join the rebellion against the world’s complacency and sloth. Take the Profane Oath to do battle against that force which degrades humankind into the disgusting, diseased, incapable, grey masses that you see before yourself.”^[75] (Former Wolves member Jack Donovan also tried to establish a presence in the power lifting community by setting up a tattoo studio in a popular weight lifting gym in Portland, Oregon, called Kabuki Strength Lab.^[76])

In the martial arts world, former skinhead and Atlanta-area Jiu Jitsu instructor Joshua Buckley has become a high-profile supporter of Operation Werewolf. Buckley is known for his work with frequent American Renaissance author and speaker Sam Dickson in manipulating tax liens for financial gain.^[77] He’s also authored books on folkish paganism in collaboration with Michael Moynihan, editor of the 1993 book Siege: The Collected Writings of James Mason, which inspired the accelerationist terrorist organization Atomwaffen Division.^[78] The Waggeners themselves have been influential in martial arts circles, and own their own Jiu Jitsu gym in Lynchberg called Devotion Jiu-Jitsu.

Pagan circles have also been influenced by Operation Werewolf, partially because of Waggener’s complex esotericism. The Wolves’ offerings in terms of heathen magic, runework, ritual, and “ecstatic rites” are attractive to many men alienated by more conventional pagan organizations, which they dismiss as “historical re-enactment” groups lacking real vitality. Well-known occultist Craig Williams, of Anathema Publishing, joined Operation Werewolf and had Waggener write a foreword for his book on gnosticism.^[79] This caused enough controversy that a campaign to remove Williams and another Operation Werewolf associate from the lineup of a Montreal occult festival forced the entire event’s cancelation.^[80]

Radicalizing Men and the Wolf-Nazi Pipeline

While Waggener is profiting off the radicalization of his fans, and his militant rhetoric at times seems like just another extension of his branding mentality, his relative consistency in interviews and his writing suggests he’s still a true believer. But either way, whether Waggener’s ultimate aim is ideological or financial, he is cultivating an apocalyptic us vs. them mentality among his followers. Matthias Waggener suggests they are an “Odinic Wolfcult”^[81]; members see themselves as the resurrection of an ancient ideal: sitting at the edge of civilization to protect it, and thus unbeholden to the morality and strictures of contemporary society.^[82] Within this model Operation Werewolf adherents are encouraged to ready themselves for revolutionary situations, when the outside world tries to interfere with their tribe—a message that can both radicalize some associates while providing cover to those already embracing White nationalism.

The Wolves’ rhetoric is about turning inward and creating a revolutionary counter-culture, a dual-power situation where participants retreat from the world. This perspective, echoed by Evola, where spiritual, anti-modern men stand apart from the world, waiting to inherit a new world when the current order collapses.^[83]

But while part of the TLR program celebrates male stoicism, it simultaneously cultivates male violence. Recruits are required to undergo combat training, and are encouraged to own and train with firearms. Building on Jack Donovan’s essay “Violence is Golden,”^[84] Waggener argues that violence is the essential force by which men apply their will to situations to determine human events and that men should be prepared for violence from anyone from state authorities to antiracist activists.^[85] His work has included guides to improvisational weapons, including how to hurt people with Maglites, loose change, bottles, and pens.^[86] “Why do we humans feel that we can demand equal treatment with mewling words? We must obtain respect with our actions, not as a right, but with a cold fury…we have to be prepared to fight for our place in this world, to kill for it, if necessary,” writes Waggener.^[87]

Although Waggener has made efforts to sanitize his rising professional profile, the Wolves’ rhetoric has continued to be radical. Recently Waggener has discussed rehabilitating the memory of Charles Manson as more spiritual outlaw or “shaman” than serial killer—an argument similar to that used by neonazi accelerationist groups like Atomwaffen Division.^[88] (One Wolves member sells art and clothing adorned with apocalyptic war imagery, images of guns, and Charles Manson’s picture through a project called Wolfchild A.D., and recorded a YouTube video with Waggener.^[89])

Waggener’s various brands have also become a catch-all for White nationalists looking for a more publicly acceptable presentation. The American Front, historically one of the most violent skinhead gangs, tied to numerous murders and acts of terrorism,^[90] has started promoting Operation Werewolf. Two high-profile American Front neonazis from Oregon, the brothers Jake and Gabriel Laskey (at least one involved in desecrating a synagogue^[91]), began flying the Operation Werewolf banner on social media; they also worked out of a weapons store outside Eugene, Oregon, called Wolfclan Armory, owned by their parents, using the werewolf aesthetic.^[92] A founding member of Ravensblood Kindred, an Atlanta heathen group that’s openly supportive of White nationalism, has been photographed wearing Operation Werewolf apparel.^[93] The group is affiliated with both the folkish heathen Asatru Folk Assembly and the neonazi Wotan Network and its members attended Richard Spencer’s 2017 speaking event at Auburn University.^[94] Waggener also promotes Wandervögel, a loose U.S. organization named after the volkisch German nature group, which focuses on blood and soil rhetoric.^[95]

This August, Waggener announced that Operation Werewolf will shut down as an entity at the end of 2020,^[96] having previously shown some dissatisfaction^[97] with his lack of control over those flying the Operation Werewolf flag. But in his announcement, he also clarified he is just shifting his attention to other enterprises, and intends to bring his network of followers with him as he focuses on his other companies, which purvey the same message. He’s maintaining the pay-for-play online community centered around the Virtuous Circle, where artists from the Operation Werewolf network can pay $50 a month to be a part of a Facebook Group.^[98] In other words, this particular name may be retiring, but what it represents will live on, as Waggener continues to profit off his position as a sage to his community, to mobilize men to follow his example, and to seed his philosophy, including White and male supremacism.