Active Clubs are a network of white supremacist groups that operate in Europe, North America, South America and Australia. Robert Rundo, a white nationalist with a long history of racist violence, cofounded the Active Club network in 2020 while in Europe following U.S. federal rioting charges. The group aims to build a hypermasculine white nationalist subculture with a clear “nationalist” aesthetic that Rundo promotes through an associated clothing brand and propaganda outlet.
In Their Own Words
“If you are not willing to take the initiative to engage in simple actions, such as placing a sticker, boxing or participating in a hike with an Active Club, what leads you to believe you would ever have the courage to ‘storm the Bastille’? Embracing risk is essential for meaningful change. Risk is the currency of revolution.” — “White Lad Aesthetics,” an Active Club-affiliated Telegram channel, March 20, 2025
“Lot of talk of being the most ‘radical’ and ‘optics’ but if you don’t have grainy black and white footage stabbing ms13 gangbangers or smashing antifa you might be the optics cuck [laughing emoji] [laughing emoji] [laughing emoji] [laughing emoji]” — Robert Rundo, in a post on Telegram, March 13, 2023
“Awaking [sic] the racial bonds between kin and engaging in shared fitness activities, sweating, and bleeding together, taking the risks of doing banner drops and long nights of stickering and sharing in the thrill and excitement of it all. These elements create brothers. It also becomes a duty to look out for one another.” — Robert Rundo, in a post on Telegram, Nov. 7, 2022
“My goal is to be James Bond someday. But right now, I’m Jason Bourne. I’m on the run. I’m on the nitty-gritty side of things, you know what I mean? Going from country to country.” — Robert Rundo, in an audio recording shared to Telegram, May 17, 2022
“It does not take a majority to prevail … but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” — Front Range Active Club, an Active Club based in Colorado, in a Telegram post, Aug. 13, 2021
“Not all fights go in your favor. Couple of years ago I had a very intensive mma [mixed martial arts] bout in Kiev against a very strong opponent. Despite knocking him down and being super close to victory I made couple of mistakes and later on it was his turn to knock me down and win at the end. I am not a professional athlete, I never claimed to be the one, I just like violence.” — Denis Yevgenyevich Kapustin, aka “Denis Nikitin” and “White Rex,” in a post on Telegram, June 22, 2021
“I just thought to myself that, OK, I can either follow that path — become a real Nazi terrorist and go down with, like, a blast, taking with me, I don’t know, five, seven, 10, whatever immigrants, who I considered the No. 1 enemy at that moment — or I can do something else.” — Denis Yevgenyevich Kapustin, aka “Denis Nikitin” and “White Rex,” in an episode of the “Active Club” podcast, early 2021
Background
Rundo is a longtime white nationalist activist in the United States who founded the Rise Above Movement (formerly DIY Division), a predecessor to the Active Clubs, in early 2017. A native of Queens, New York, Rundo previously served 18 months in prison for repeatedly stabbing a rival gang member.
Rundo first introduced the concept of “Active Clubs” in late 2020. Today, Active Clubs — RAM’s successors — have spread throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, Canada and South America. Between 2021 and 2024, Active Clubs grew from four to 31 chapters throughout the United States. Members of Active Clubs have participated in demonstrations, conducted banner drops, posted flyers and organized joint mixed martial arts (MMA) tournaments with other white supremacist activists. In addition to a sprawling network of social media accounts, Rundo and his acolytes use two companies that he founded in 2020 — the propaganda outlet Media2Rise, as well as the Will2Rise clothing brand and recording studio — to promote the Active Clubs’ aesthetics, which they dub “white nationalist 3.0.”
Active Clubs first evolved from Rundo’s collaboration with Russian-German neo-Nazi activist Denis Yevgenyevich Kapustin, who is known in the movement as “Denis Nikitin” and “White Rex.”
Kapustin founded the company White Rex in 2008, according to a report from the Ukrainian outlet Zaborona. White Rex sold clothing with neo-Nazi imagery and organized mixed martial arts tournaments in Europe and Russia. Kapustin has trained right-wing militants throughout Central, Western and Eastern Europe, including Rundo and other members of RAM. His promotiong of the extreme right resulted in European authorities reportedly banning him from entering Schengen Zone countries in 2019. Nevertheless, Active Club-affiliated accounts on social media have offered up his trainings as examples for its supporters to emulate.
The pair first began collaborating in 2018, according to reporting from ProPublica. That spring, Rundo traveled to Kyiv, where he participated in an MMA event at a club associated with Ukraine’s far-right Azov Battalion.
Yet even before traveling abroad, Rundo sought to emulate the fusion of mixed martial arts and nationalist street action that Kapustin and other far-right hooligans in Europe embraced.
RAM, the group that Rundo founded in 2017, described itself as the “premier MMA club of the Alt-Right” and rose to prominence through its members’ proclivity for street fights at far-right rallies. (The “alt-right” was a term journalists, members of the movements and researchers used to describe an umbrella approach to white supremacist organizing through the first few years of President Donald Trump’s first administration.) Unlike alt-right groups that sought to communicate their ideas through conferences and staid political gatherings, Rundo and his crew promoted an “active lifestyle,” albeit alongside heavy neo-Nazi imagery. On social media, RAM posted stylized, carefully crafted propaganda with photos and videos of young men training with calisthenics and boxing, holding banners at pro-Trump rallies and assaulting leftist protesters, as well as quotations from fascist thinkers such as Julius Evola.
“More local crews should produce stuff like this,” wrote one user on the neo-Nazi website and forum The Daily Stormer on July 30, 2017, about RAM.
Yet RAM’s image as purely a workout club with edgy politics collapsed under its members’ tendency to reference Nazi slogans and assault antifascist or anti-racist activists, as well as indulge in book burnings of Jewish writings. . Over half a dozen of the group’s members have faced federal charges for attacking protesters at the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as other pro-Trump events. At its height, the group claimed approximately 50 members, according to ProPublica.
In December 2024, a federal court sentenced Rundo to time served for conspiring to violate the federal anti-riot act. The conditions of his parole subject him to periodic monitoring of his electronic devices. He is also barred from being “physically present in any area known to the defendant to be a location where members of the RAM organization meet or assemble,” according to court documents. Despite these conditions, Rundo remains involved in the Active Clubs. He writes for the network’s Substack newsletter, and Active Club-affiliated Telegram channels have shared videos of him training with other members of the network.
An American fascism bred in Europe
Rundo rebranded RAM as the Active Club network following a series of criminal charges that federal authorities leveled against him and his collaborators.
In October 2018, federal authorities charged eight members of RAM in connection with their alleged involvement in violence at multiple political rallies throughout 2017. Federal prosecutors first brought charges against four RAM members — Benjamin Daley, Thomas Gillen, Michael Miselis and Cole White — for allegedly conspiring to violate the federal riot act and traveling across state lines to participate or incite a riot in connection with the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally. The indictment alleged that the men committed acts of violence between Aug. 11-12, including at a march on the University of Virginia campus where neo-Nazis carried torches and shouted, “Jews Will Not Replace Us!”
After the Department of Justice announced the charges against Daley, Gillen, Miselis and White on Oct. 8, 2018, Rundo fled to South America. According to a series of text messages that were made available through a later case against Rundo, he communicated with Kapustin about traveling to Ukraine, where the European neo-Nazi promised he could help Rundo find protection. Authorities intercepted Rundo and arrested him at the Los Angeles International Airport in late October 2018 after he was brought back to the United States.
Rundo, along with RAM members Robert Boman, Tyler Laube and Aaron Eason, was charged with inciting and participating in riots. The indictment against the four men cited multiple pro-Trump demonstrations in California, where RAM members allegedly attacked left-wing counter-protesters and a journalist.
By June 2019, a federal judge dismissed the charges against Rundo, Boman and Eason, writing that he believed the government’s use of the anti-riot statute constituted an infringement on the defendants’ First Amendment rights. Laube, who pleaded guilty shortly after the indictment, successfully requested to withdraw his plea and have the charges dismissed following the judge’s ruling.
A federal appeals court eventually overturned the judge’s ruling in 2021, thereby reinstating the charges. Rundo had long left the country. Bellingcat, an investigative journalism outlet, would identify him as living in Serbia throughout 2019 and 2020, and later in Bulgaria. By March 2023, when authorities in Romania tracked down Rundo and began the process of extraditing him to the United States to face these revived criminal charges, the network that he established had metastasized throughout the United States and Europe.
Launching the Active Clubs
While in Eastern Europe, Rundo launched multiple companies that would form the bedrock of the Active Clubs’ efforts to shape white nationalist culture.
In December 2019, someone launched a Telegram channel called “ACTIVE CLUB.” At first, the channel promoted videos, clothing, music and memes associated with RAM, as well as two short-lived groups called Revolt Through Tradition and the International Conservative Community. Its administrators later used the channel to promote two Rundo-tied companies: Media2Rise, a far-right digital propaganda outlet, as well as the clothing and merchandise company Will2Rise.
Rundo and his collaborators founded Media2Rise and Will2Rise in spring 2020. Someone using a service that hid their name and mailing address registered the URL for Media2Rise in March 2020, according to domain registration records. On its website, the company billed itself as an “outlet that will counter the leftist-controlled media and the narrative that is used to degrade the efforts of nationalist movements and personalities.” An “About” page on the website lists Rundo as its “Founder & Director.”
The “ACTIVE CLUB” Telegram channel first promoted merchandise from Will2Rise’s website in April 2020. The company initially sold T-shirts and other products promoting RAM and other white supremacist slogans.
Will2Rise first established roots in Europe and, later, the United States. In July 2020, Rundo registered Will2Rise as a company in Serbia, according to an investigation from Bellingcat. In October of that same year, someone named Andrew Bose registered a company with a similar name, W2R LLC, using an address in Florida, according to corporate records.
To operate and promote these companies, Rundo partnered with other white supremacist activists, including Kapustin, Allen Michael Goff (aka “Lucca Corgiat”), Grady Joseph Mayfield and Graham Whitson. Goff, a former member of the white supremacist Creativity Movement, and Whitson, a member of Patriot Front and a close ally of the group’s founder Thomas Rousseau, recorded propaganda films featuring white supremacist conferences and gatherings for Media2Rise. Mayfield, a former Marine, appeared in photos on Media2Rise’s website with Rundo and other activists as a member of the “M2R crew.”
Rundo’s first apparent reference to the Active Clubs appeared in late 2020, when he published an essay titled “The Idea Behind ‘Active Club’” on his Media2Rise website. In the essay, Rundo described the group as “small clubs organized independently in … [a] local area.” Rundo argued that, unlike traditional groups with centralized leadership, these clubs were more likely to have a “brush fire effect.” Because these “clubs mobilize on a small and local scale,” Rundo wrote, it made it harder for law enforcement, infiltrators or journalists to expose the inner workings of the entire network. Rundo’s attempts to skirt legal accountability are not new. White supremacist figureheads like Louis Beam popularized the concept of “leaderless resistance,” wherein members of a group would operate in small cells, in the 1980s.
While Rundo produced videos and cohosted a podcast on organizing tips with Kapustin from Eastern Europe, his acolytes in the United States began founding their own groups using the Active Club branding. Throughout 2021, white nationalists in Indiana, Florida, Wyoming, Massachusetts, Texas and elsewhere began promoting Active Clubs on Telegram. Most groups recruited regionally or locally. In other cases, some groups, such as an Active Club in Indiana, encouraged nonresidents to reach out to an email associated with the main “ACTIVE CLUB” Telegram channel to start their own. To promote their activities to the broader Active Club network, groups were encouraged to send photos of their members training, tagging or conducting flyer or banner drops to the main “ACTIVE CLUB” account as well.
Active Clubs as white nationalism 3.0
Rundo and his supporters have described the Active Clubs as a manifestation of what they refer to as “white nationalism 3.0.”
The term shows Active Clubs’ deep roots in what was once the alt-right. This younger cadre of activists sought to remedy the perceived missteps of earlier white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan or ostentatious neo-Nazi groups like the National Socialist Movement. To the alt-right, these “white nationalist 1.0” groups were ill-adapted for the modern social media age. With some exceptions, these younger activists believed that “1.0” groups were incapable of appealing to “normies” — slang for right-leaning Americans who may be open to the movement’s message but have yet to be radicalized.
To this end, some on the alt-right described themselves as “white nationalism 2.0.” They set themselves apart from the older generation of movement figureheads, both in terms of aesthetics and cultural references. Some on the alt-right called themselves “identitarians,” after the far-right European ethno-nationalist movement, instead of white nationalists. Many eschewed Nazi symbolism, such as the swastika, as bad optics. Instead, prominent alt-right groups like the now-defunct Identity Evropa favored a clean-cut look that aimed to present their extreme, racist beliefs as normal, approachable and rational.
In Rundo’s telling, this “2.0” movement did secure some victories. The movement, Rundo wrote in a blog post with someone identified as “AC Author,” was an “organic internet uprising.” While “most of the people involved were sincere in their efforts and dedication to White unity,” the post continued, “the nature of internet broadcasting” shaped the movement’s tactics, and infighting among activists prevented it from achieving long-lasting cultural and political power.
Rundo has also criticized alt-right groups that sought to use traditional political tactics and infiltration of conservative organizations to inject their ideas into the mainstream. In an audio recording that he posted to Telegram in 2021, Rundo described attending meetups with a Southern California chapter of Identity Evropa, a now-defunct white nationalist group whose members and leadership were also instrumental in the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally, prior to launching RAM. “It just really, let me just say, was not my scene,” Rundo said in the recording. To Rundo, this infiltration and mainstream strategy, as he said in a separate 2022 audio recording, was “very narrow-minded.” Instead of “gaining power at the highest levels” in politics, he said, the movement should focus on pushing American society toward fascism through shaping culture.
To that end, Rundo proposed a movement that would not be concerned with day-to-day politics and fused mixed martial arts with white supremacist activism. While the groups that embraced these tactics would include the Active Clubs, they were not limited to them. This “3.0” movement, as Rundo and someone identified as “Active Club Author” wrote in a February 2022 blog post, would promote “activism as a lifestyle.” Activists were expected to train in mixed martial arts together, spread propaganda through banner drops and flyering, and network among themselves.
Fight clubs and recruitment strategies
Anyone can start an Active Club. The size of each club may vary considerably, both in terms of membership and geographic spread.
“We want to get these guys to be as autonomous as possible. … To continue no matter what happens to us,” “The Big N,” a pseudonymous leader of the Great Plains Active Club, said in a 2023 episode of the podcast Achtung! Amerikaner.
Rundo has echoed these sentiments. “I see more of the Active Clubs as a cultural thing. As a counterculture. You know, this is something that all guys can do and get involved in and start up on their own,” Rundo said on a 2023 podcast with “Paul,” the reported leader of the Active Club network in France.
A larger group identity is evident as groups affiliated with the Active Clubs use similar tactics, logos and branding. Most Active Clubs use a logo that resembles a Celtic cross, a ringed cross that some white supremacists have appropriated for its pre-Christian pagan origins. Active Club-affiliated channels on Telegram, a social media app that has become popular with white supremacists, repost each other’s content and share lists of popular clubs. One list from April 2025, which a self-described “nationalist” account on Telegram shared, listed clubs in close to 40 states.
“We’re kind of like our own things that kind of act on an autonomous scale. But we all follow the same message of the Will2Rise Active Clubs,” “Oyster,” a representative from the Southern Sons Active Club, said during a 2023 episode of Achtung! Amerikaner.
Despite this relative autonomy, some Active Clubs regularly collaborate through local, national and even international trainings and tournaments. The Southern California (“SoCal”) Active Club — whose founder and leader, Robert Wheldon, has testified on Rundo’s behalf — has hosted multiple Will2Rise-branded MMA tournaments since 2022. SoCal Active Club’s first event, called “Birth of a New Frontier,” took place in August 2022. Though Rundo was not present, he said in a podcast that he helped “coordinate” the gathering from overseas.
Following the success of the 2022 meetup, SoCal Active Club organized two subsequent tournaments, “Frontier ’23” and “Frontier ’24.” These brought athletes from various Active Clubs, Patriot Front, racist skinheads and other white supremacist groups under one roof.
Other Active Clubs have created their own coalitions on a more local or state-by-state level to train together and periodically collaborate.
The Great Plains Active Club, for instance, consists of multiple Active Clubs in the northern Midwest and describes itself on social media as a “fraternal organization.” It purports to have members in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota.
The Tennessee Active Club, which violent white nationalist Sean Kauffmann founded in 2022, is another example of an Active Club that has divided itself into separate regional chapters. On Telegram, groups that are part of the broader statewide network — such as the Northwest TAC, South Central TAC, and the Smoky Mountain Active Club — operate separate channels and email addresses. Nevertheless, these groups frequently train together, pose with the same TAC flag and share ties to Kauffmann.
In propaganda, Active Clubs portray themselves as men’s-only workout clubs. Photos and videos on Telegram and elsewhere show members holding regular trainings that may include calisthenics, hikes, Brazilian jujitsu (BJJ) or boxing. Though Active Clubs regularly share the general location of a training, the faces and tattoos of their members are often blurred or disguised. Active Club leaders have described these tactics as a means of introducing those who wouldn’t normally be interested in far-right extremism to the movement. Rundo, for instance, has openly talked about the Active Club style as a means of slowly introducing those who were interested in boxing, BJJ or mixed martial arts to white supremacist politics.
“That kind of a project [can] be way more efficient to converting the youth,” “Paul,” the founder of the Active Club network in France, told Rundo in a 2023 podcast. “It’s way more efficient,” he added, “than the usual whole politics that we know in Europe.”
These photos, videos, memes and podcasts are instrumental to the Active Clubs’ recruitment and promotional strategy. “You can do whatever you want. If nobody made a video or, like, photo footage after that, people will not find out,” Kapustin said in an episode of the short-lived Active Club podcast in early 2021.
Collaboration and overlap with other groups
Members of Active Clubs are not dissuaded from collaborating or participating with other activists and groups. Some encourage cross-group collaboration. “We have participated in their hikes. We’ve sent people to go to their demonstrations that are able to, want to do things like that,” “The Big N,” a leader of the Great Plains Active Club, said regarding his group’s collaboration with Patriot Front on the Amerikaner podcast in May 2023.
Patriot Front members have maintained strong ties to the Active Clubs since the network’s early days. Graham Whitson, who lived with Patriot Front leader Thomas Rousseau as recently as 2022, is listed on Media2Rise’s website as responsible for “production & videography.” Ian Michael Elliott has hosted both Patriot Front and Active Club members at his martial arts gym in rural Tennessee. Elliott marched with Patriot Front in January 2025 and is a frequent participant in Active Club-hosted tournaments and has appeared in Media2Rise documentaries about the events.
Patriot Front leadership has described some Active Clubs as “subsidiary recruitment projects,” according to leaked documents that the Southern Poverty Law Center obtained. Known members of the group’s inner circle have also trained and appeared in propaganda for individual Active Clubs, such as in Texas, where Patriot Front leader Thomas Rousseau and several of his close associates live. The group even hosted a tournament with Will2Rise at a location in North Texas in spring 2024.
Racist skinheads form another wing of the movement that has developed close ties to Active Clubs within the U.S. and Canada for the purposes of recruitment. Some of these, such as the secretive network known as the Hammerskins, have extensive ties to racist and antisemitic violence, up to and including murder, as well as other criminal activity.
Southern Sons, an Active Club that describes itself on Telegram as “recruiting” in South Carolina and North Carolina, as well as Georgia, shared multiple posts from meetups of the Vinlanders Social Club throughout April and May 2025. Former Hammerskins members founded the Vinlanders Social Club in 2003.
Antifascist researchers have also documented extensive connections between Evergreen Active Club, based out of Eastern Washington, and the Hammerskins. Members of the Stumptown Research Collective identified Evergreen Active Club members wearing racist skinhead paraphernalia, inviting Hammerskins-affiliated bands and promoters to their events and meeting at the home of a Hammerskins member. During a 2023 fight club event held in California, for instance, reporters from Bellingcat and antifascist researchers from the SoCal Research Club identified a banner reading “Western Hammerskins” hanging near a boxing ring.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified a handful of Hammerskins-affiliated groups as active on the West Coast during that period. In 2023, the SPLC listed a racist skinhead group called Western Hammerskins as active in California in its annual Year in Hate and Extremism report. Another Hammerskins-affiliated group, called the Northwest Hammerskins, operated in Washington state in 2023 and 2024.
“Yeah, there’s a lot of crossover too between like the OG skinheads and then the 3.0 nationalist guys,” Casey Knuteson, a white nationalist involved with Rose City Nationalists, said on an episode of Achtung! Amerikaner.
“A lot of these Active Clubs are made up of a lot of guys that were, you know, in the movement 20 years ago in different skinhead groups,” Knuteson continued.
In 2022, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) published research and reporting showing extensive connections between Hammerskins members and the country’s Active Clubs. The piece identified three “current and senior members” of a group called the Vinland Hammerskins — a Canadian Hammerskins group. CAHN credited these three men, Troy Miles, Ryan Immel and Ryan Marshall, with being “chiefly responsible for organizing the first Active Club in the Greater Toronto Area.”
Building transnational connections
Rundo’s and Kapustin’s connections to far-right groups worldwide, as well as the decentralized nature of the Active Club network, have made it easy for chapters and organizers to connect across borders and build an international presence.
As of 2025, journalists, researchers and activists have identified Active Clubs currently present, or at least once present, in Australia, Belarus, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Despite their geographic separation, clubs often promote one another’s content, sharing out lists with links to other groups or reposting their content on Telegram or other social media platforms. In some cases, such as France, Active Clubs have flourished, growing to 50-plus chapters throughout the country, according to reporting from Wired.
Early propaganda from the Active Clubs shows the movement’s international aspirations. For instance, a video that a Rundo-affiliated Telegram channel shared promoting his vision of white nationalist activism featured figures from Patriot Front (United States), Action Zealandia (New Zealand), Carpathian Sich (Ukraine), as well as various European nationalist marches and riots.
Some Active Club affiliates have been more aggressive in connecting across borders than others. One example is Gym XIV, a fight club in Värmland, Sweden, that a former member of the neo-Nazi Party of the Swedes founded in 2022.
The number XIV, or “14” in Arabic numerals, appears to be a nod to the “14 Words” — a slogan that David Lane, a member of the neo-Nazi terrorist group The Order, created and popularized within the global white supremacist movement.
Through trainings and events, Gym XIV has become a central node in Sweden’s Active Club network. It has brought together activists with the Nordic Resistance Movement, as well as a now-defunct group called Nordic Youth, according to research from the Swedish anti-hate organization Expo. Increasingly, it has found ways to connect with European and American activists too.
In an announcement for its 2025 event, Gym XIV described the event as having “poored [sic] gasoline on the flame that Rundo lit of Fitnessfascism [sic] and Active Clubs.”
Media2Rise, the propaganda outlet that Rundo cofounded, and at least one member of the SoCal Active Club attended a 2024 event that Gym XIV and another Swedish neo-Nazi group called Tvåsaxe co-hosted, according to Wired. The outlet also shared photos of a fighter beside a crowd and Gym XIV’s logo following the February 2025 event, according to posts on Telegram.