The open, cross-border pollination of an American extremist movement has not gone unnoticed by intelligence agencies. Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images
Neo-fascist fight clubs, which are a global locus of neo-nazism, have caught the eye of western intelligence agencies that consider them a burgeoning national security threat, according to experts and government documents reviewed by the Guardian.
“Active clubs”, pseudo mixed martial arts gangs preaching a strain of far-right activism inspired by the teachings of Adolf Hitler, are well known to be moving across borders. But the revelation that official security services are keeping watch over them, the same kind of agencies known to surveil proscribed terrorist organizations like the Islamic State, shows how active clubs are an evolving and quickly growing threat.
“Intelligence agencies want to be aware of extremist networks that exist in their countries,” said Joshua Fisher-Birch, a terrorism analyst at the Counter Extremism Project, about active clubs, “their potential for current or future violence, and what links they may have to other movements and individuals, both domestically and internationally.”
Already, there’s been evidence of that international coordination coming to light.
Related: Revealed: how a Russian fight club expanded into the US with the help of American neo-Nazis
In August, a Canadian active club, Nationalist-13, released a video of a national meetup inside Canada on the Telegram app. Typical of the low production propaganda common to active clubs, members are seen pumping weights and sparring in a flurry of cuts, featuring blurred faces and a synth beat. Then seven emblems of participating chapters appear: two are American active club chapters, from Illinois and Wisconsin, with a third being Patriot Front – an ultranationalist American hate group.
“Canada needs all [white] men of good character,” said the Canadian active club group in its post.
The open, cross-border pollination of an American extremist movement – born from the ashes of a criminal neo-Nazi gang central to the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville – has not gone unnoticed.
In a classified January report released via freedom of information request to Canada’s spy agency, CSIS – itself a sharing member of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, counting the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and the US – made note of the threat of active clubs’ increasing transnational collaboration and the potential for them to empower ties.
“Some Canadians have sought to travel to the US in order to attend events (extremist affiliated or co-opted), likely seeking to forge stronger lies with like-minded individuals,” said the report.
“Some Active Club members, for example, travel between both countries to network and train in martial arts as they strive to strengthen international partnerships.”
The report conceded it “remains unclear” how many individuals in the movement traveled back and forth, but warned that “such travel by those who engage in extremist activities can allow them to reinforce links, share information and strengthen capabilities, all of which could ultimately lead to violence”.
Using Telegram as leverage to their international links, Nationalist-13 and other active club chapters outside the US have also been promoting the legal defense of Thomas Sewell, an Australian neo-Nazi who once tried to personally recruit the Christchurch mass shooter into one of his past groups. Sewell was recently found guilty of intimidating a police officer, and his Australian neo-Nazi group maintains links to the network of international active clubs.
Another Canadian intelligence report, from 2023, makes note of already monitoring the online postings of these same active clubs’ networks: “Neo-Nazi active clubs have endorsed calls on Telegram for violence targeting Jews and the US government.”
Peter Smith, a Canada-based extremism researcher, said it doesn’t surprise him that Nationalist-13 and its growing partnerships are catching the attention of authorities.
“It’s understandable that the intelligence community would be interested not only in extremists operating in their own back yard, but also in those orchestrating cross-border meetups with organizations and networks that openly espouse a neo-Nazi ideology,” Smith said.
“These groups operate independently but see themselves as part of an international movement to ‘retake’ their countries and remove those who are not white.”
Smith described how the sharing of tradecraft, “ideology, tactics and aesthetics” between active clubs that combine their social media followings and presence builds “a stronger transnational neo-Nazi movement than has [not] been seen in decades”.
Recently, neo-Nazi organizations’ forging of global links typically coincided with their escalating threats to public safety.
For example, the Base, an internationally proscribed neo-Nazi terrorist group, started with cells all over the US and eventually spread them across the western world into Canada, the UK, Europe and Oceania. After a years-long FBI counter-terrorism investigation, several members were arrested, including a Canadian cell leader who was illegally ferried into the US and is now currently serving a nine-year sentence in a US prison.
“The neo-Nazi skinhead group the Hammerskins has had members in both the US and Canada, and more recently, the accelerationist groups the Atomwaffen Division and the Base have had members in both countries,” said Fisher-Birch, referring to two other groups that had transnational criminal networks.
“Active club propaganda boasts that they are building a movement throughout the US, Canada, Europe and Australia, so the more connections between the clubs, visits, joint events, etc, the more they can promote the message that they are building an international white supremacist movement.”
Active clubs were first modeled to become globally embraced and designed in the mould of better organized, more publicly acceptable versions of European soccer hooligans and fascist counterculture – both valuing combat sports, nationalism and the violent machismo of the Third Reich. Their founder, Rob Rundo, is an infamous neo-Nazi and was a leader of the Rise Above Movement, a white supremacist street-fighting gang that was a player in the violence at the Charlottesville rally, with members charged for their participation.
Chapters of active clubs are now everywhere from Australia to Europe and South America, with a Global Project Against Hate and Extremism report putting them in 27 countries, along with Hitler Youth-inspired youth wings.
The news that American extremists are traveling north to help strengthen chapters inside of Canada also comes at a time when the Trump administration has accused the US’s northern ally of exporting terrorists stateside. That fact has not been lost on Canadian media: using the same tranche of intelligence briefings, Global News in Canada reported how more terrorists are traveling north than are headed south.
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