[seabj0rn]

But isn't this the case with any religion? You could say the same thing about the Westboro Baptist Church to Christianity and Radical Islamist Extremism to Islam. Every religion I can think of has instances of groups co-opting the religion for evil means. All major world religions have multiple instances of this happening throughout history. One could say that you don't have a legitimate religion if there isn't a group of crazies trying to use the religion for evil means.

[the_af]

Any religion can be used as an excuse for right-wing extremism and hate, but I think Norse-related religions are particularly attractive to neonazis because of the specific attention the Nazis and the SS paid to their symbology, and to their (bullshit) notion of superior Aryan and Norse "races". The Nazis were obsessed with this. That their mythology was also mostly bullshit is less relevant; it doesn't matter whether it was "authentic" Norse religion, what matters is that the Nazis and later day neonazis thought it was.

[yellowapple]

There's also the even-lower-hanging fruit: Vikings were "badass" and "hardcore" and stereotypically too busy raping and pillaging to care about silly things like "women's rights" or "minority welfare" or "climate change". They also happened to be white, unlike the similarly-stereotyped Mongols and Huns further east.

Those two factors lend themselves to white supremacists wanting to model themselves on those stereotypes, never mind that reality was much more nuanced than those stereotypes (which developed specifically from the English complaining about their invaders rather than from any actual understanding of Scandinavian culture/society) or that hardly any of these white supremacists would make much of a Viking warrior (stereotypical or otherwise) anyway.