Wyatt Kaldenberg

Early life

Kaldenberg was born in a working-class Mormon family in a small California town in the Mojave Desert. As a teenager he was associated with the Young Socialist Alliance, a Trotskyite organization. He "was active in the Radical Left".

Enrolling in a Job Corps training programme in Salt Lake City in the 1970s, Kaldenberg became "aware of racial realities" after having fights with blacks and Muslims. After having been active in the radical left and the writings of Malcolm X and the National of Islam, this got him "thinking about what my heritage was and what religion my ancestors practiced before the Christian invasion of Europe."

White Aryan Resistance

In the early 1970s Kaldenberg joined Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance. He was the managing editor of their paper WAR until 1989 and Metzger's bodyguard.

In the 1980s Kaldenberg was present in the audience during a Geraldo Rivera show and broke Rivera's nose on live television by throwing a chair at him.

SPLC lawsuit

In October 1990, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League won a civil judgement against Metzger and WAR on behalf of the family of Mulugeta Seraw, who was murdered by white power skinheads associated with the group. Metzger then encouraged his supporters to send donations to Kaldenberg rather than to him or to WAR, in order to avoid paying the judgement. Kaldenberg was the subject of a court order freezing his funds, pending court review. In January 1991, Kaldenberg began withdrawing money from the frozen account just hours after the order was issued. He was ordered by a San Diego municipal judge to return it. Kaldenberg refused to obey the order and was jailed for 10 days for contempt of court.

Afterwards

In 1995 Kaldenberg praised the Stormfront white nationalist website.

In 2004 Metzger still was friendly with Kaldenberg. However, after rejecting neo-Nazism and leaving WAR, Metzger has stated in 2010 that Kaldenberg has attacked him.

Odinism

During the 1970s Kaldenberg started to learn about the Nation of Islam and became inspired to search for a racial religion of his own. After having been active in the radical left and the writings of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, this got him "thinking about what my heritage was and what religion my ancestors practiced before the Christian invasion of Europe... I knew there was another religion before Christianity, but I didn’t know much about it. My ancestors came from the Celtic and Germanic tribes of Northwestern Europe, so I went to the downtown library in Salt Lake City and read everything I could find about Celtic and Germanic culture and religion. I didn’t know what the Germanic religion was back then, but I knew it was the religion in my soul."

After seeing an ad in Soldier of Fortune'" magazine, he came into contact with the American Odinist Fellowship, and the Ásatrú Free Assembly, which he joined in the late 1970s. He has stated that, "That summer when I was living in Colorado, a friend of mine showed me an ad in the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine for The Handbooks of the Religion of Odin. The book had a list of addresses at the back and from there I contacted the Odinist Fellowship and joined."

Kaldenberg was briefly involved with Stephen A. McNallen's Ásatrú Free Assembly but left when McNallen ejected Nazis from that organization. Kaldenberg and other "Aryanists" who left the AFA at that time went on to found the Greater Los Angeles area chapter of the Odinist Fellowship.

After leaving the AFA, Kaldenberg developed a distinct variety of Odinism. He devalues spirituality and ceremony and rejects Judeo-Christianity. According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Kaldenberg's version of the ideology is "chiefly a cult of aristocracy, power and the propagation of the white race."

Kaldenberg began publishing Pagan Review in the 1990s which was described as "a voice of Eurocentric polytheistic communities."

Written works