- White supremacist “active clubs” are spreading across the United States.
- The club recruits disaffected white men and promotes physical fitness and masculinity.
- The group also sometimes mocks and shames Donald Trump and his supporters.
A network of white supremacist health clubs has spread across the United States, recruiting men to prepare for what they believe will be a race war.
These groups, known as “active clubs,” target disaffected white men by providing a sense of community where members meet regularly to practice martial arts and exercise.
But these groups have a darker agenda, rooted in white supremacist ideology.
Their Telegram channel reveals their extreme views and is filled with neo-Nazi iconography, racist and anti-Semitic memes, and negative news articles about people of color and LGBTQ+ people.
“They have rapidly become one of the most prominent vectors of white terrorist radicalization in the United States in recent years,” John Lewis, a researcher at George Washington University's Program on Extremism, told Business Insider.
“They are training for what they see as this kind of inevitable race war, a violent conflict that is inevitable for the future of civilization,” he added.
One former current member of the club told Vice News last year that the group gradually became more extremist by telling racist jokes and talking about news stories about ethnic minorities attacking white people. He said he would introduce the ideology to new members.
“They believe that a culture war is inevitable. They link culture directly to race, so a culture war means a race war,” they said.
“They never said, 'You have to learn how to fight in order to defeat people of color.' They never said, 'You have to learn how to fight because in the future people are going to try to kill you.' “It was something like that,” they added.
In a promotional video, the leader of the Active Club of Southern California said they were not terrorists and simply wanted to build a “positive community” and bring white men “from the internet into the real world.” .
white nationalism 3.0
Lewis said one of the clubs' main strengths is that they function as a decentralized network, encouraging white men from all over the country to form and run their own clubs.
According to a 2023 report by the Counter-Extremism Project (CEP), there are at least 46 active clubs in 34 states in the United States.
Investigative news organization Bellingcat also reported: of A vibrant club movement of white supremacy spread to Europe.
The movement was inspired by Robert Landau, who founded a white supremacist MMA club known as the Rise Above Movement.
His concept of “white nationalism 3.0” advocates for nationalists to operate in small, decentralized groups and improve their online image to avoid law enforcement surveillance.
Although active club members do not engage in overt violence on a regular basis, some have been known to threaten opponents, particularly journalists.
Tennessee's Active Club has become particularly known for its threats against local journalists, activists, and politicians, as well as the extreme views of neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier leader Sean Kaufman.
“Tennessee's current club appears to be an outlier on the surface with its leader, Kaufman, making public statements and waving a Nazi flag in public, but other active clubs are doing the same. They're just not active in public,” Jeff Tishauser, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center who studies active clubs, told BI.
In an increasingly polarized landscape, political extremism and threats to democracy are top concerns for American voters, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.
The group sometimes mocks and severely shames Trump and his supporters.
Many far-right groups once aligned themselves with former President Donald Trump, but most have since become disillusioned and criticize Trump for not doing enough to advance his extremist agenda.
“The groups I track have been against Mr. Trump for a long time,” Tyshauser said, calling Mr. Trump “a puppet of Jewish interests who steal nationalist rhetoric to get votes.” '', he added, adding that some people see him as “not expected to enact nationalist policies.''
In one video, the Active Club of Central California also accused the former president of not being a true “revolutionary.”
Some clubs have mocked and fat-shamed Trump and his supporters.
A video posted to Telegram by the Alamo Active Club shows clips of Trump rally attendees, all of whom appear to be overweight or people of color, with the caption “Average Conservatives.” There is.
The video then cuts to shots of white men sparring and lifting weights, with the caption “Average Nationalist.”
A Telegram channel run by the owner of Nashville's Lewis Country Store, which has ties to an active club movement, regularly mocks President Trump about his weight, a move that Trump has been sensitive to in the past. That seems to be what I was feeling.
While some in the movement see President Trump as a useful tool to help shift policy to the right, their distrust of the political system has led many to vote for any political candidate or not. That likely means not showing support, Tyshauser said.
Many in the group believe there is no political solution and advocate social collapse with the potential for a white ethnic state to emerge, Lewis added.
“They think violent revolution and violent racial conflict are the only way to reach their desired end state,” he said.
