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ausetkmt · 1 year ago

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White Nationalist ‘Active Clubs’ Are Who ‘Proud Boys Wanted to Be’ – Rolling Stone

This ‘Violence-Ready’ Militia Is Hiding in Plain Sight

White supremacist Active Clubs are growing exponentially — "They’re Who The Proud Boys Wanted To Be," one researcher says

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There’s a new power player on America’s extremist scene. White nationalist “Active Clubs” are growing explosively, and filling a void created by the prosecutions that decimated the leadership of Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. “The Active Clubs are who the Proud Boys thought they were,” says Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “They’re who the Proud Boys wanted to be.”

Active Clubs mix white supremacy and violence, training in kickboxing, among other combat sports. But — at least the moment — they’re not seeking to intimidate the public with swastikas and face tattoos, common to other groups of racist brawlers. Instead, Active Clubs have put forward a slicker, more presentable aesthetic — recruiting new members by touting physical fitness, self-improvement, and “white unity.”

The Active Clubs are flying below the radar of law enforcement. But as described in a new 50-page report from the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), the network is evolving into a dangerous “stand-by militia” of well-trained, white-nationalist fighters “who can be activated when the need for coordinated violent action on a larger scale arises.”

Here’s what you need to know:

Where Did Active Clubs Come From?

Active Clubs are the creation of Robert Rundo, a white supremacist who operated out of Orange County, California. They’re his second attempt to launch an extremist network. Starting in 2017, Rundo built the “Rise Above Movement” or RAM, which sought to spark the “warrior spirit” in white men and billed itself as the “premier MMA club of the Alt-Right.”

But the violent street brawling of Rundo and his compatriots quickly invited a crackdown. Rundo and others were charged in 2019 with federal conspiracy to riot for violent California confrontations in places like Huntington Beach and Berkeley, where Rundo and his fighters decked themselves out in “goggles, mouth guards, athletic tape around their wrists, and black face masks with white skeleton designs,” according to the indictment.

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Those charges were tossed out for a time — due to a dispute over the constitutionality of the criminal statute. By the time they were reinstated in 2021, Rundo was in the wind, living in Serbia and other parts of Eastern Europe, where he was picking up new tricks from local hooligans and crafting a vision for what he bills “White Supremacy 3.0.”

What is White Supremacy 3.0?

This is Rundo’s shorthand for a reboot of tactics and aesthetics among white nationalists. In this rubric, White Supremacy 1.0 refers to the skinheads — flamboyant, scary, in your-face, but self-limiting in building broad appeal. 2.0 was the “Alt-Right” — cleaner cut, far more presentable, but terminally online (Rundo derides them as “keyboard warriors”) and beset by infighting among disparate groups over priorities and tactics.

White Supremacy 3.0 in this context seeks to achieve a mix of publicly-presentable aesthetics, real-world activism, and white-power solidarity. The Active Clubs reflect these ideas in their slogans, including, “Make fascism fun,” “White unity at every opportunity,” and “Being handsome and jacked is more important than being right when it comes to politics.”

How Are Active Clubs Organized?

Active Clubs do not have a top-down hierarchy. They operate instead as an “open network” of locally run cells that all share the same ethos. According to the CEP report, “Active Clubs are supposed to connect and cooperate but stay operationally independent.” The logic behind the distributed power structure is that “infiltrations and arrests of leadership figures, or even the shutdown of an Active Club, should have little if any effect on the Active Club network itself.”

In May 2022, Rundo celebrated the network’s resilience, insisting “the Active Clubs run on their own. They don´t need me anymore.” In fact, Active Clubs are growing exponentially, even with the group’s founder now in jail. Rundo was caught in Romania in March 2023 and extradited to the U.S. in August to face charges. His trial is set for December.

What do Active Clubs Look Like?

The Active Clubs present themselves as groups of gym bros who pursue mixed martial arts — and just happen to dabble in white power. “They are specifically asked not to talk about ‘The Jews’ when recruiting, but to focus on positive things like brotherhood, community and so on,” says Alexander Ritzmann, the Berlin-based researcher who authored the CEP report. This follows Rundo’s belief that: “A group of strong white men is a fascist statement in itself.”

Embracing the socially-acceptable violence of MMA culture allows active clubs to avoid the attention of law enforcement, who at first glance, Ritzmann says, would encounter what appears to be just “sporty white men — not much to see here.”

But beneath the surface, Active Clubs represent gangs of young white supremacists who are all about the “glorification of brutal violence,” Ritzmann insists. Lewis, the GW extremism researcher, warns that Active Clubs have “truly become the tip of the fascist spear.”

How Do Active Clubs Gain New Members?

The Active Clubs recruit with narratives of white victimhood, an approach that justifies violence in seeking the supposed restoration of white greatness. The Active Clubs, according to the CEP report, recruit at gyms, motocross events, NASCAR races, and perhaps most disturbing, at high schools. “When there’s an increase in violence at a high school,” Ritzmann says, “the recommendation is to show up to provide protection and training for the white male students.”

The strategy is “tribe and train” — to group off in small, locally run groups that solicit new members and build up their capacity as street fighters.

How Many Active Clubs Are There?

Since their founding in late 2020, the Active Clubs have grown explosively. There are now nearly 50 active clubs across 34 states, according to the CEP research. The network is also active in Canada, where there are a dozen clubs, and in Europe where 46 clubs can be found across 14 different countries.

In the U.S., the groups are now taking leadership cues from Rundo’s home club, SoCal Active Club. Other prominent cells include the Tennessee Active Club, the Great Lakes Active Club, the Southern Sons Active Club, and the Evergreen Active Club. A typical Active Club ranges from five to 25 members. But they have a broader reach through social media. The Telegram channels of the most popular clubs have hundreds — and as many as thousands — of subscribers.

Most clubs adopt a similar white-power logo, a cross inside a circle. “This is a use — or abuse — of the Celtic cross, and then they put their local spin on it,” Ritzmann says. Despite supposed prohibitions on Nazi symbolism, some clubs have drifted into more overt anti-semitism and racism. The Southern Sons Active Club logo, for example, features SS lightning bolts and a sonnenrad instead of a Celtic cross.

Do the Active Clubs Join Together?

While the clubs largely act alone, Active Clubs have for the past two years, hosted an MMA tournament, with representatives from Active Clubs across America joining in for the fights. The tournament this past August, in Huntington Beach warehouse, also featured participation by members of the the group Patriot Front.

Active Clubs do operate independently, says Morgan Lynn Moon, an investigative researcher at the ADL’s Center on Extremism. But she insists that they “see themselves as part of a connected brotherhood,” adding that “if one Active Club is targeted by a perceived enemy, the entire network feels this need to stand up in solidarity and support.”

Moon points to a late-June clash outside Portland, between local Proud Boys and members an Active Club affiliate called the Rose City Nationalists. Both groups had shown up to menace an LGBTQ Pride event, but wound up scruffling with each other. The conflict was the result of a personal beef, Moon says. “But what I found significant was how Active Clubs across the nation were coming out in solidarity — saying that they were going to start fighting the Proud Boys.”

How Are Active Clubs Financed?

The funding of the Active Clubs is opaque. But at least part of the money comes from sales of a lifestyle apparel brand founded by Rundo called Will2Rise, which sells “militant active wear.” The slick store site not only sells “Active Club” track jackets and hoodies, it also serves as recruitment propaganda and a reinforcer of the aesthetics Rundo wants to model for the network.

From the outside, the network appears flush. “They travel a lot,” Ritzmann says. “Rundo was offering a French Active Club to pay for their travel so they can attend some of their fight nights. So where does that money come from? It is this shop.”

What’s the End Game?

The Active Clubs’ primary actions — consisting of covert banner drops, graffiti tagging, and posting Active Club recruitment or “Free Rundo” stickers — may appear relatively innocuous. But this is also training with a nefarious edge. As the CEP report describes it, such actions build “operational and logistical capacities such as scouting target locations, transportation, and avoiding law enforcement.”

Ritzmann also describes that Active Clubs that have been bragging about “tactical casualty care training” — something he notes has nothing to do with kickboxing or MMA fighting. “This is for shooting events,” he says. “Where you need to evacuate wounded people from the area of violence.”

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For now, Active Clubs are in startup mode, pursuing growth. “They want to fill up the tank with as many white men as they can train,” says Ritzmann. The darker purpose, he insists, is to prepare “for the Day-X scenario.” Think: a replay of Jan. 6 or something more dangerous, “when there’s national leadership that needs… a network of violence-ready individuals to serve as a stand-by army.”

When discussing Active Clubs, Rundo himself has invoked the American Revolution, comparing the network to the Minutemen militias. “They will lose some [members] once they then get very political,” Ritzmann predicts. “But if Active Clubs are allowed to continue to operate and multiply, it increases the likelihood for targeted political violence and terrorism.”

#active clubs #White Nationalist ‘Active Clubs’ Are Who ‘Proud Boys Wanted to Be’#white supremacists #white supremacists network #white hate #white terrorists #ethnic terrorists #wannabe proud boys

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ausetkmt · 1 year ago

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Dangerous Organizations and Bad Actors: The Active Club Network | Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey

Active Clubs make up a decentralized network of individually-formed organizations that are centered around the premise of a white supremacist fraternal brotherhood. First introduced in December of 2020 by Robert Rundo, the leader of the white supremacist Rise Above Movement (R.A.M), Active Clubs are intended to preserve and defend the white population and traditional European culture from a perceived global genocide by non-white ethnic and racial groups.

Rundo was inspired to create the Active Club network—something he referred to as “white nationalism 3.0”—in response to the numerous arrests of R.A.M. members made in 2018. He wanted to create an organization that would be less perceptible to law enforcement, and thus less susceptible to disruption or destruction. From this, Active Clubs were born—small, decentralized organizations that would focus recruitment efforts on localized areas and thus garner less attention than traditional white nationalist organizations. This structure would also ensure that Active Clubs were not reliant on a particular physical entity or leadership figure for survival.

Active Clubs provide like-minded white men with physical spaces where they can train in mixed martial arts in preparation for war against their perceived enemies. Ideologically, Active Clubs adhere to neofascist and accelerationist principles, with the promotion of violence comprising a key theme in Active Club communication and propaganda. Located across the United States and in several countries transnationally, the Active Club network ensures that groups of men devoted to training for battle are available for mobilization in multiple locations across Western countries.

Ideology

Active Clubs mirror R.A.M.’s neofascist and accelerationist adherences. Members strongly promote white supremacist and pan-Aryan principles, including the central belief that the modern world, which they perceive to be degenerating as a result of Jewish and immigrant influences, poses an existential threat to the white race and its associated “European nation.” This belief is representative of the core conspiracy theories that members adhere to, including the Great Replacement theory and the white genocide conspiracy theory. Each of these conspiracy theories proclaim that a global attack on the white race is being perpetrated by the Jewish population and non-white immigrants. Active Club adherents believe that this attack manifests not only in physical violence against white people but in mainstream media smear campaigns, which are perceived to villainize the white race and traditional European values using falsified narratives. Accordingly, Active Club adherents believe that the survival of the white race and traditional European culture is dependent on their ability to publicly resist and overpower their enemies, both online through countercultural media appearances and physically in the form of violence. Thus, Active Clubs strongly emphasize the necessity for both the correction of perceived anti-white narratives as well as extensive physical fitness training in preparation for battle against perceived upholders of an anti-white system.

Among Active Club adherents, frequent references are made to the importance of reviving the “warrior spirit” and elevating the “white racial consciousness” of white men. Such rhetoric references the mental, rather than just the physical, conditioning required of men who are preparing for battle against perceived enemies of the white race. In accelerationist circles, however, these references take on an additional spiritual and metaphysical undertone. Popularized by fascist and Traditionalist authors like Julius Evola and Savitri Devi, the concept of the “warrior spirit” refers to a transcendental state of human consciousness that is reached when an individual—typically male—experiences a spiritual revelation that he is fighting a war on two fronts: physically, against a threat to his people’s race, honor, and glory; and metaphysically, against the enemy within himself which prevents him from spiritually ascending. When an individual obtains this “warrior spirit,” he transcends from a human force to an all-powerful and divine force. It is this metaphysical power that Active Club adherents aspire to unlock within themselves through a combination of exhaustive mental and physical training; the power is believed to be the solution to their societal ails.

Like R.A.M., Active Club members adhere to Evola’s belief that humanity currently exists within the Kali Yuga, or end times. As described by H.E. Upchurch,

“The Traditionalist concept of the Kali Yuga is derived from an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Hindu doctrine of the cycle of the four ages. In the first age, the Satya Yuga, humanity lives in harmony with the divine, but over the course of the rest of the cycle, human civilization is corrupted until in the last age, the Kali Yuga, humanity is completely corrupt and no longer has any contact with the gods. The Kali Yuga comes to an end in a cataclysm that wipes the slate clean and restores the harmonious relationship between humanity and the divine. In most Hindu philosophies, each age in the cycle is believed to be hundreds of thousands of years long. Traditionalists posit that they are much shorter, at most a few thousand years each.”

Membership

Although Active Clubs are decentralized in structure, they are largely influenced by Robert Rundo and the broader brand campaign he has developed. Rundo plays a key role in the network’s propaganda and messaging, with frequent appearances made in videos to provide centralized messages for individual Active Clubs to adhere to. Such messaging includes the promotion of diligence in physical fitness, activism, and disseminating propaganda. In this sense, Rundo can be seen as the figurehead of the transnational Active Club network.

The most sought-after recruits for Active Clubs are young white men, especially those expressing a strong connection to a European heritage and a desire for self-improvement and fraternity. Active Club propaganda also emphasizes the desirability of members who have an extra skill to offer their comrades, whether it be in physical training, media production, photography, journalism, or graphic arts. Together, Active Club members train in mixed martial arts, engage in physical combat with one another, create digital propaganda products, and disseminate physical propaganda around their geographical locations.

Active Clubs, especially larger ones, typically enforce a vetting process for potential recruits. This is often done via Telegram, with an Active Club either designating a single member to assess the desirability and capabilities of each recruit, or designating a specific Telegram channel to message in order to initiate the recruitment process.

In the United States, Active Clubs are physically present in at least 25 states, including California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. Outside of the United States, Active Clubs are present in Australia, Canada, France, and a number of other countries. The average number of Active Club members varies largely from one location to another, though the minimum number of members is typically about three people. Some Active Clubs have online followings of hundreds of individuals.

Affiliations

Active Clubs are also affiliated with the White Lives Matter (WLM) network, which frequently partakes in white supremacist-associated activism. Ideologically, Active Clubs and WLM are quite similar, with both networks adhering to comparable levels of white supremacist principles. The link between the two networks is most visible in their emphasis on activism, with several Active Clubs designing and physically disseminating WLM propaganda alongside their own in public locations. Active Clubs also collaborate with WLM for joint propaganda dissemination as well as physical fitness and training sessions. In various geographic locations, the membership between regional Active Clubs and regional WLM chapters can become obscured due to the level of enmeshment between the two. Online, this trend continues, with Active Club members frequently disseminating and identifying with WLM propaganda.

Propaganda

Active Club propaganda frequently mirrors its own ideological emphasis on the preservation of the white male and traditional European culture, physical and spiritual preparedness for upcoming war, and speaking truth to power. Associated propaganda typically emphasizes three core necessities: to expose (and oppose) a corrupt mainstream media through an influx of “truthful” Active Club coverage of violent events, to maintain a strict physical fitness regimen, and to awaken the “warrior spirit” within. Notably, this messaging is in line with Active Clubs’ evolving communication tactics; one Active Club-affiliated website explains:

“The outdated tactic of grabbing as many headlines as possible has proven to be a hindrance on today’s propaganda battlefield, accomplishing nothing but providing ammunition for those who want to define our movement as something antagonistic to decent White people.”

Propaganda associated with the Active Club network is spread across a number of platforms, though its largest presence can be found on the Media2Rise website—an Active Club-operated media outlet created to “counter the leftist-controlled media and the narrative that is used to degrade the efforts of nationalist movements and personalities.” The site is run in large part by Robert Rundo, though others with videographer and producer roles are credited as important upholders of the site’s continued operation. Media2Rise predominantly houses Active Club propaganda videos, although it was also the primary host of an Active Club podcast started by Robert Rundo and Denis Nikitin in January of 2021. Presently, however, the podcast is no longer viewable on the platform and can only be accessed on lesser-known Active Club platforms and on archival sites. Media2Rise is connected to a related Active Club website known as Will2Rise—a retail shopping site where Active Club adherents can buy associated training gear and other Active Club-affiliated merchandise. Such items are often visible in Active Club propaganda. Other Active Club websites take a different approach, using written articles in lieu of videos, digital art, or retail options to spread propaganda, though the core narratives remain ideologically identical.

In addition to utilizing websites to spread propaganda, Active Club adherents also disseminate propaganda on video-sharing media platforms, including Bitchute and Odysee, as well as on messaging platforms like Telegram and Gab. Large Active Club accounts have been banned from mainstream social media platforms, including Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, though less popular accounts still gain small amounts of traction on these platforms. Such propaganda can take the form of videos, images, links to articles, and white nationalist music. Additionally, the tactic of co-opting other groups under its brand campaign allows third party entities like Patriot Front and lesser known networks to serve as proxy for Active Club propaganda dissemination.

Across all online platforms used for propaganda dissemination, the overall narratives, along with the content itself, appear to be quite consistent. Oftentimes, videos uploaded to the Media2Rise website are also posted to all other Active Club-associated video-sharing and social media platform accounts. In other instances, the rhetoric used to communicate particular ideas is nearly identical across platforms. However, the Media2Rise Telegram account appears to emphasize Active Clubs’ adherence to accelerationist principles more explicitly than on other platforms, with an increase in references to the necessary revival of the “warrior spirit” in Aryan men. This increase in overt accelerationist messaging on Telegram may be due in part to the fact that the Active Club network largely existed on Telegram prior to expanding its presence to other social media platforms and websites and establishing physical presences, though the added anonymity of Telegram as a platform likely also plays a role.

Arrests/Plots/Attacks

Arrests corresponding with the Active Club network are consigned to associated groups, such as Patriot Front, and past iterations of R.A.M.

Conclusion

At the core of understanding the dominance of the Active Club network across the contemporary far-right and militant accelerationist milieus is the reality that Rundo has created a compelling brand campaign which offers an alternative to the white nationalist brands of before. His “white nationalism 3.0” model, and in particular its decentralized structure and its emphasis on in-group physical training as opposed to preemptive violence against an out-group, grants members additional protection from law enforcement and allows for increased plausible deniability in the face of questioning. By adopting a branding forward effort, Active Clubs have avoided a large portion of the ego-driven fragility that has plagued the far-right’s history of mass organization and mobilization. Tactically, a brand forward approach lowers the barriers to entry and makes the structure of Active Clubs more malleable and flexible in a prosocial manner that effectively meets recruits where they are and offering to empower them, rather than forcing them adapt to a clandestine association in order to be a member.

Additionally, Active Clubs’ strong affiliation with extremist entities like Patriot Front and the WLM network illustrate its strong adaptability to the goals, narratives, and branding of outside organizations, further ensuring their survival across time. Moreover, the network’s prioritization of propaganda creation and dissemination allows for increased consumption of Active Clubs content both online and offline, potentially resulting in heightened support of and membership within the network. The inherent adaptability of Rundo’s brand campaign not only strengthens the resilience of the Active Club network, but also serves as a tactical model for other accelerationist organizations who have been targeted by law enforcement to emulate in the future.

#active club #white hate #white supremacy #nazis #neo nazis #ethnic terrorists #wlm #Dangerous Organizations and Bad Actors: The Active Club Network #white lies

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