Editorial: A woman with a Mjolnir tattoo raises hundreds of thousands after calling a child a slur. Heathens need to act.
By Eric O. Scott | May 11, 2025
Author’s note: Karl E.H. Seigfried contributed to reporting for this editorial.
Shiloh Hendrix has thrust herself into the public spotlight by raising more than three-quarters of a million dollars since May 1st, and all she had to do was call a five-year-old the N-word.
Hendrix, of Rochester, Minnesota, a city of 122,000 40 minutes north of the Iowa border, began to go viral a few days before on April 28th, when a video of a confrontation between her and another adult at a playground began to circulate on social media sites like TikTok. The person taking the video calls out to Hendrix, who is holding her young child, and asks whether she called another child by the racial slur. Hendrix not only confirms that she did call the child by the slur, but also calls the person taking the video by the same term (and then repeats it a few more times for sport.) When the speaker asks her why she would call a five-year-old such a thing, she replies that he deserved it because the child was supposedly attempting to steal something from her child. “So that gives you the right to call the child, a five-year-old, the N-word?” he asks. “If that’s what he’s gonna act like,” says Hendrix.
After the video began to spread, Hendrix took to the crowdfunding site GoSendMe and created a campaign called “Help Me Protect My Family.” In it, she describes her situation like so: “My name is Shiloh and I have been put into a very dire situation. I recently had a kid steal from my 18month old sons diaper bag at a park. I called the kid out for what he was.”
Hendrix goes on to claim that her personal information had been leaked and that she needed the money to protect her family and potentially to relocate. “We cannot, and will not live in fear!” she writes in conclusion.
The GoSendMe campaign went even more viral than the original video – especially among people of a certain political bent. Hundreds of thousands of dollars started to pour in, many of them contributed by anonymous accounts who used pseudonyms like “White Lives Matter” and other names more vulgarly racist than that.
GoSendMe has since eliminated the ability for donors to leave comments on this campaign, but on May 2nd, I observed a number of comments that made it clear that many donors were explicitly supporting Hendrix because they shared in her racism and especially her anti-Blackness. Some of the donations appeared to come from known white supremacist organizations.
One comment I saw was simply the infamous “14 words,” the white supremacist credo coined by David Lane, member of the terrorist organization called The Order and founder of Wotansvolk, a virulently racist form of Heathenry.
Hendrix herself appears to have a Thor’s Hammer tattoo on the back of her hand in the photograph used in the GoSendMe. While Hendrix has shut down most of her personal social media, The Wild Hunt has found what appears to be Hendrix’s Pinterest profile, which also includes considerable material related with Norse mythology and Viking imagery. This does not necessarily mean that Hendrix considers herself a religious Heathen, though she does appear to at least have an interest in Heathen iconography.
Whether or not Hendrix considers herself a Heathen, her cause has been taken up by some members of white supremacist and far-right sections of Heathenry. The Anti-Defamation League published an investigation into donors and noted that Chris Pohlhaus, leader of the Wotanist neo-Nazi organization Blood Tribe, donated to her GoSendMe; some Folkish Heathens on social media lauded her. “An Abrahamic would instantly apologize,” wrote one on X. “Almost all would back down after pressure. Shiloh has the courage of a Valkyrie in her.”
Since the video and the subsequent crowdfunding campaign went viral, there has been plenty of commentary about what this situation has to say about the state of race relations in America. The Free Press claims this is all the fault of the “excesses of the woke era”; Reason says everybody, including the five-year-old, is in the wrong and we should all acknowledge that “it’s just all bad!” I think it’s easy to get distracted by trying to figure out how this situation fits into the ongoing grievances of the terminally online.
Instead, we – and here I mean my fellow Heathens – need to face the bare facts of what’s happened here: a woman with a Thor’s Hammer on her hand called a five-year-old a slur and has been rewarded handsomely for it. Many people who I acknowledge as both my co-religionists and my bitter enemies cheered her for it, and even took out their wallets for her.
I think it’s sometimes easy to think that overly racist parts of Heathenry – and for that matter of the rest of the modern Pagan movement – are marginal elements of the whole, not worth consideration. I know that I, at least, have an instinctive response to minimize their presence in our community, a desire to reassure non-Pagans that those folks aren’t really a major factor in how most of us experience our religion. But if the Shiloh Hendrix story tells us anything, it’s that overt white racism, clad in Thor’s Hammers and bindrune tattoos, is not only a continuing concern, but one that’s emboldened in the Trump era. I can’t imagine an antiracist Heathen action that would raise $770,000 in less than two weeks.
It’s not just that they’re racist; it’s not just that they aren’t afraid to say so out loud. Now they might actually profit off of it.
Those of us who believe in an antiracist Heathenry can’t ignore this. Whether we like it or not, we are already in a fight for the heart of our faith; our symbols and our vision of the world are being pulled away from us daily by racist extremists. The more we pretend racism isn’t still a major component of American Heathenry, the more we cede it to our enemies.
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