Latest news with #whiteSupremacy
Al Jazeera
6 days ago
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Swedish neo-Nazis are using MMA to recruit new members
Swedish neo-Nazis are using MMA to recruit new members NewsFeed Neo-Nazis in Sweden are using mixed martial arts events to try to attract new followers to their white supremacist ideology. Al Jazeera's Nils Adler has been investigating. Video Duration 00 minutes 54 seconds 00:54 Video Duration 03 minutes 18 seconds 03:18 Video Duration 00 minutes 40 seconds 00:40 Video Duration 03 minutes 00 seconds 03:00 Video Duration 01 minutes 39 seconds 01:39 Video Duration 01 minutes 47 seconds 01:47 Video Duration 02 minutes 57 seconds 02:57
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
From Canada to Finland, a US neo-Nazi fight club is rapidly spreading across the globe
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.
New York Times
03-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Man Is Charged With Creating ‘Hit List' of Public Officials
A man has been arrested and accused of working with members of a white supremacist group to create a 'hit list' of assassination targets, including a U.S. senator and a federal judge, the authorities said. Noah Lamb, 24, was arrested on Tuesday and indicted in the Eastern District of California on eight counts, including soliciting the murder of three federal officials. Prosecutors said Mr. Lamb had suggested people to include on a hit list and found personal information about them that was distributed to members of a group on Telegram, the messaging app. The people on the list were not named in court documents, but they include a sitting U.S. senator, a federal judge and a former U.S. attorney, as well as state and municipal officials and leaders of private companies and nongovernmental organizations. A lawyer for Mr. Lamb declined to comment on Wednesday. Mr. Lamb was accused of being a member of the Terrorgram Collective, which operates on Telegram, and of playing a 'central role' in the group's effort to make a list of assassination targets. Federal prosecutors described the Terrogram Collective as a transnational terrorist group that promotes white supremacy and calls for using violence and attacks on government infrastructure to ignite a race war. The group has been tied to a number of attacks, and planned attacks, across the world, prosecutors said. The group 'recruited impressionable teenagers to do their dirty work, promising them eternal glory — 'Sainthood'— in return for committing an act of mass violence,' prosecutors said in court documents. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
03-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Member of white supremacist group charged in alleged plot to solicit murder of 'high-value targets'
A 24-year-old man is facing charges after allegedly working with a transnational terrorist group to create a hit list of 'high-value targets' for assassination that included U.S. officials, nongovernmental organizations and leaders of private companies, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. Noah Lamb was charged and indicted in Northern California federal court with eight counts of conspiracy, soliciting the murder of federal officials, doxing federal officials and interstate threatening communication, according to a federal indictment unsealed Wednesday. Authorities allege that between November 2021 and September 2024, Lamb collaborated with members of the Terrorgram Collective to create a list of targets they viewed as 'enemies of the cause of white supremacist accelerationism,' the indictment states. The Terrorgram Collective is described as a network of white supremacist, neo-Nazi and accelerationist groups who promote violence and white supremacy, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The group primarily connects through the social networking app Telegram. An attorney for Lamb declined to comment on the case. The indictment does not name any of the targets but says that the list included a U.S. senator, a U.S. district judge, a former U.S. attorney general, as well as state and local officials, nongovernmental groups and business leaders. The targets were allegedly chosen because of race, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity based on the group's belief that 'the white race is superior,' the Justice Department said in a Wednesday news release. Each target had a 'list card' that allegedly included reasons why the group viewed them as an enemy, according to the indictment. The list allegedly labeled the judge as 'an invader' from a foreign country and highlighted the judge's ruling on an immigration issue, the indictment states. Federal prosecutors say the senator was labeled 'an Anti-White, Anti-gun, Jewish senator' and that the former attorney general was called a racial slur. According to the news release, Lamb was responsible for identifying the targets and obtaining their home addresses and other personal information, which other group members could then disseminate. 'Transnational criminal networks that promote extremist ideology and seek to commit targeted assassinations and cause terror obviously have no place in our society,' Assistant Attorney General John A. Eisenberg of the Justice Department's National Security Division said in a statement. This article was originally published on
ABC News
03-07-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Tracing the trajectory of the Christchurch terrorist
In 2019 an Australian white supremacist lifestreamed his shooting rampage through Christchurch mosques. He killed 51 people and injured more than 80 during Friday prayers. He's been treated as a lone actor. His manifesto shared online minutes before the massacre disguised his connections to far right/white extremists. And at the New Zealand Royal Commission he convinced investigators that he had minimal online presence. But other investigators, academics and anti-fascist researchers here and in New Zealand have questioned this. Journalist Joey Watson argues that by unpicking the disguised interactions the terrorist had online leading up to the mosque attacks, and following his movements in Europe, that we should not be seeing this Australian terrorist as a lone actor.
