From Canada to Finland, a US neo-Nazi fight club is rapidly spreading across the globe

The Guardian

3 days ago

More than a dozen men wearing black masks and sunglasses – obstructing any open source investigators from easily identifying them – appeared in a Telegram video in front of city hall in London, Canada, in June.
'Mass deportations now,' the men yelled in unison, holding up banners with the same slogan. 'No blood for Israel.'
While this type of scene with masked men chanting is a relatively common occurrence in the US, this incident in Canada illustrated the underbelly of a surging global movement: neo-Nazi active clubs, American-born neofascist fight clubs, are rapidly spreading across borders.
London, a larger Canadian city in what is a rust belt in the province of Ontario, has had a long history with the Ku Klux Klan dating back to the 1920s and a racist murder of a Pakistani-Canadian family in 2021. But the arrival of an active club, which has also shown itself in other nearby towns and cities like Toronto (the country's largest metropolitan area), is a relatively new development.
'Welcome to Hamilton, our city,' one Telegram post from the same Canadian active club wrote with its symbol posted on a sticker beside a sign for one of Ontario's largest cities. 'Folk-Family-Future!'
Around the world, Canada isn't the only country being introduced to these clubs, which are fitness and mixed martial arts groups operating out of local gyms and parks that espouse neo-Nazi and fascist ideologies. Already proliferating across the US in a number of states, active clubs openly take their historical cues from the Third Reich's obsession with machismo and their modern inspiration from European soccer hooliganism.
Recent research published by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) has shown that since 2023, these clubs are newly sprouting in Sweden, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, the UK, Finland and for the first time, in Latin America with two chapters in Chile and Colombia appearing.
According to the GPAHE research, there are now chapters in 27 countries, with new youth wings – akin to Hitler Youth-styled clubs – are surging stateside and abroad, 'metastasizing' across western countries and recruiting young men into toxic, far-right ideologies encouraging race war.
'The Active Club model was designed by Rob Rundo,' said Heidi Beirich, founder of GPAHE, referring to an infamous neo-Nazi and New Yorker who pleaded guilty in 2024 to conspiracy to riot at 2017 political rallies in California.
Around that time, Rundo was also the leader of the Rise Above Movement, a neo-Nazi gang that had four of its members charged for their role in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, but later pivoted to spreading the idea of active clubs among followers as the new nerve centers for fascistic indoctrination and recruitment.
'As far as we can tell, Rundo isn't directly involved with chapters of the movement in a systematic way, but the chapters are inspired by him and the ideology he stands for,' said Beirich.
Beirich explained that although Rundo isn't likely to have a hand in these groups, it meshes with his original vision of active clubs being 'autonomous and local'. But many of these chapters of active clubs in countries with large populations of white people – some of whom openly have gravitated towards racist, nativism in recent years – promote each other as a global struggle and are linked in a network of accounts on the Telegram app.
One set of accounts, in particular, that have become the sort-of tastemakers among neo-Nazis online, have promoted several local active club chapters across the world and applauded those they think are creating the effective models to emulate.
The same accounts admire the work of Thomas Sewell, a well-known and violent Australian neo-Nazi, who has been promoting active club-styled groups in his country:
'Their organization should be what every dissident group across European civilization seeks to emulate,' said one admiring post about Sewell and his crew.
Beirich said Sewell, who previously admitted to have personally tried to recruit the Christchurch mass shooter to one of his past groups, is aligned with Rundo's politics.
'Sewell, just like Rundo, is a violent neo-Nazi recruiting new members to prepare for violence against both political enemies and the communities he targets, such as immigrants, Jews and the LGBTQ+ community,' she said, adding that he was 'hosting MMA-style training and tournaments' to attract new followers.
The Ultimate Fighting Championship and the combat sports that fall under its purview, have become a locus for the far right. Likewise, Sewell and Rundo have promoted learning these sports as a means of becoming street soldiers, akin to modern-day brownshirts, for their movement.
Other organizations, which are more obviously political and engaging in public displays of activism, have seen this model of trained violence as a means of recruiting and solidifying their ranks. Patriot Front, an American proto-fascist hate group known for public marches and propagandizing natural disasters, has outwardly linked itself to the active club movement.
Its leader, Thomas Rousseau recently posted a group image with himself and others doing 'grappling and striking' training at a martial arts gym in north Texas.
Beirich described how members of Patriot Front 'often work closely with Active Club chapters' including participating in their mixed-martials training. On Telegram, active club chapters regularly share Patriot Front propaganda.
'Join Patriot Front if you are in America,' one active club adjacent account posted on Telegram, with nearly three thousand views.