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The Guardian
a day ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘Wolves in sheep's clothing': how a neo-Nazi cell infiltrated a martial arts school in Tennessee
A neo-Nazi fight club that secretly infiltrated a Tennessee martial arts school where young children train has been banned from the facility, after an inquiry by the Guardian. Last month, the South Central Tennessee Active Club published video footage on the messaging app Telegram showing its members participating in combat training at Shelbyville BJJ Academy, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu school in Shelbyville, Tennessee, that offers classes to students as young as three years old. The group is part of the wider Active Club network, which consists of dozens of decentralized cells across the US and abroad that use combat sports to lure people into white nationalist and neo-Nazi causes. While lesser known than other far-right groups like the Proud Boys, experts warn Active Clubs are acutely dangerous because they recruit boys and young men into violent white nationalist circles by using notions of fraternity as a gateway to extremism. 'What makes them unique is the 'wolves in sheep's clothing' approach, which aims at fooling law enforcement into believing Active Clubs are just about sports,' Alexander Ritzmann, a political scientist and senior advisor at the Counter Extremism Project who studies the movement, told the Guardian. In a 2023 report, Ritzmann warned that the ultimate goal of Active Clubs 'is the creation of a stand-by militia of trained and capable [right wing extremists] who can be activated when the need for coordinated violent action on a larger scale arises'. At one point in the video posted by the Tennessee cell, an Active Club flag featuring a sonnenrad, a symbol of Nazi Germany that has been adopted by neo-Nazis and other far-right extremists, can be seen hanging on the wall where young children would normally gather. After it was presented with the video of the Active Club training at its facilities, Shelbyville BJJ Academy told the Guardian 'that type of behavior at our gym is a direct violation of our code of ethics and goes against our community offering as a safe place for children and adults. 'The situation has been remedied promptly and we appreciate you bringing this to our attention,' the school continued, in a statement. 'We can assure you, this will not be happening again. Ever.' The academy also rejected the Active Club's extremist ideology, emphasizing: 'We accept and welcome all people. We all belong. No matter background, skin color, creed, nationality, or status.' As for how the group gained entry, the school said it provides keypad access to members so they can train outside regular class hours. It believes the Active Club entered using this method and said the access code has been changed. While the South Central Tennessee Active Club blurred the faces of most of its members shown in the video taken at Shelbyville BJJ Academy, the face of one man was left uncensored. His name: William Chase May. Records on Smoothcomp, a software used to organize and record combat sports events, show he was awarded his blue belt by Shelbyville BJJ Academy in 2023. The school confirmed that May was a member, though said his attendance was infrequent and that he only showed up from 'time to time'. He was banned after the Guardian brought his identity to its attention and, the academy said, an internal investigation into whether any other members made unauthorized use of the facility is ongoing. Riztmann told the Guardian that the Active Club's presence at the Tennessee academy is especially concerning because the movement's architect, the white supremacist Robert Rundo 'laid out the principle recruiting strategy, which includes reaching out to minors at schools'. In April, the Guardian reported on Telegram accounts which showed many Active Clubs in the US had participants between the ages of 16 and 18. Multiple images posted to the Google reviews page of Shelbyville BJJ by May, under the alias 'Chase Odinson' show he had trained and interacted with young children at the school as far back as 2023. May viewed a request for comment sent to him on Telegram by the Guardian, but did not reply. Images of the Active Club chapter training at the Shelbyville school were first discovered in September by a pseudonymous independent researcher who tracks Tennessee Active Clubs, according to chat logs they shared with the Guardian. In December, they began posting some of their findings on the social media network Bluesky, where they use the alias Inteltwink. 'It was through Chase May that I identified Shelbyville BJJ,' they told the Guardian, adding that they identified him after they 'infiltrated TAC's private telegram chat'. While it is unclear how frequently or for how long the Active Club used the school's facilities, the latest video confirms the group was sharing documentation of its activities there for months. The seat of Bedford County, Shelbyville is a city of 23,000 located 50 miles southeast of Nashville, the state capital. Tennessee has been identified in recent years by researchers and journalists as a hotbed for violent white nationalist activity. In 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) revealed a statewide Tennessee Active Club was holding networking events and fight clubs at a Nashville area general store owned by a self-declared 'actual literal Nazi'. Last month, the SPLC reported that the statewide Active Club was being secretly controlled by the Patriot Front, a racist and neo-fascist hate group. In March, News Channel 5 reported Patriot Front had established a 122-acre compound in Tellico Plains. And, last fall, the Daily Beast reported that one of the men Channel 5 identified as a leader of that compound, Ian Elliott, had infiltrated another child-friendly Tennessee grappling school in Athens (the school kicked him out). Meanwhile May, who was part of the Active Club that infiltrated Shelbyville school, appears to be acquaintances with Elliott. An image he posted to his personal Telegram account on 26 October 2024 shows him and the Patriot Front leader posing alongside a third man whose face is obscured with a sonnenrad.
WIRED
29-05-2025
- General
- WIRED
A Swedish MMA Tournament Spotlights the Trump Administration's Handling of Far-Right Terrorism
May 29, 2025 2:14 PM A member of a California-based fight club seems to have attended an event hosted by groups with ties to an organization the US government labeled a terrorist group. Will the Trump administration care? While the Trump administration carries out a mass deportation campaign against undocumented immigrants allegedly involved with 'terrorist' organizations and targets foreign students with granular social media surveillance, at least one American member of a neo-Nazi fight club has connected with a group linked to a far-right Scandinavian organization listed by the United States Treasury Department as a terrorist group. In September 2024, at least one American affiliated with the 'Active Club' movement—a transnational alliance of far-right fight clubs that closely overlap with skinhead gangs and neo-fascist political movements—appears to have traveled to Borås, Sweden, to participate in a mixed-martial-arts tournament with members of other affiliated fight clubs from across Europe. Social media posts from Tvåsaxe and GYM XIV, the Swedish skinhead organizations that hosted Holmgang 2024, claim that at least one member from the Southern California Active Club was in attendance. Photographs of the tournament were also published online by Media 2 Rise, the American ACs' media wing. While the identity of the American (or Americans) who traveled to Sweden last fall are not publicly known, the groups they are part of are key components of the Active Club network. On October 2, Media 2 Rise posted a series of eight watermarked photographs from the Holmgang tournament, essentially putting the American Active Club's signature of approval on the Swedish event. Media 2 Rise was created by Active Club founder Robert Rundo in collaboration with an pseudonymous individual named "Lucca Corgiat," whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as Montana neo-Nazi Allen Michael Goff. The organization specializes in propagandistic, high-energy video edits of similar far-right combat sport tournaments and the movement more broadly. Media 2 Rise did not respond to WIRED's request for comment. When SPLC contacted Media 2 Rise on its publicly posted contact email address in an attempt to seek comment from Goff, it received no response. Also on October 2, Tvåsaxe's Telegram account posted a photo of nine people holding the group's flag with the caption, 'Borås at night! Aktivklubb Smaland, SoCal Active Club, Active Club Scotland…waiting for the storm! HOLMGANG 2024!' The SoCal Active Club, which is the first Active Club in the United States and is closely associated with Rundo, is also linked to the Hammerskin Nation, one of the largest neo-Nazi skinhead networks in the United States. Two individuals whose photos have frequently been posted to the group's Telegram channel, Grady Mayfield and Robert Wheldon, testified last spring at Rundo's bail hearing during a convoluted legal saga that ended in him pleading guilty to federal Anti-Riot Act charges first filed in 2018. According to Swedish and American researchers, Tvåsaxe is aligned with the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), a pan-Scandinavian neo-Nazi group that was designated as a 'Specially Designated Global Terrorist Group' by the American State Department in summer 2024. Counterterrorism sanctions bar Americans from associating with or providing support to listed groups; ban members from banking, owning property, or conducting business with American financial institutions; and expose anyone found associating with or supporting the sanctioned entity to possible criminal charges. Jason Blazakis, an extremism researcher at Middlebury College who ran the State Department component that makes FTO designations from 2008 through 2018, says that any level of tangible support to a listed terrorist group, be it sharing an event invitation or buying an item of clothing, could be the basis for a support-of-terrorism charge. 'Folks could be looking at possibly 10 to 15 years if convicted, seizure of assets,' he says. 'There are very real consequences for violating these sanctions.' These types of terrorist group designations are determined by the State or Treasury departments, and along with Foreign Terrorist Organizations are included on a formal sanctions list published and maintained by the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which imposes financial sanctions and freezes assets. The Justice Department is responsible for prosecuting material support for terrorism violations for Americans or foreign nationals deemed to have violated the proscriptions. The DOJ has used the statute in a broad range of cases over the years, from charging French industrial giant Lafarge and its subsidiary for cutting business deals with the Islamic State in Northern Syria over a decade ago to six Bosnian-Americans accused and later convicted of providing material support to ISIS fighters. The statute often comes under criticism for its overbroad provisions, exemplified by a 2010 series of FBI raids on activists in Chicago and Minneapolis seeking evidence of ties to designated FTOs in Palestine and Colombia. NRM, which seeks to create a fascist ethnostate through violent revolution, dates back several decades and is considered one of the most violent neo-Nazi groups in Scandinavia. In 2017, three NRM-linked men were sentenced to prison for attempting to bomb one asylum center, and successfully bombing another as well as a left-wing bookstore. Two of the perpetrators received paramilitary training in Russia from the Russian Imperialist Movement, which was declared a global terror group during the first Trump administration. While the Holmgang tournament's host has a different name and history than the banned Swedish group, former State Department official Blazakis believes the difference is semantic, given Tvåsaxe's participation in closed NRM conferences and the long-standing relationship between NRM and the Active Clubs. 'They're trying to get around the listing and relevant consequences by changing their name and symbolism. Law enforcement sees right through that, and it also shows willingness and intent to evade these restrictions,' he says. A current State Department staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals, also believes American participation in the September tournament could represent a potential case of support for NRM. Rundo, a self-professed longtime fan of NRM, seems to have modeled Active Clubs and the Rise Above Movement (RAM), which he also founded, on Europe's extreme right-wing scene. Since 2021, Rundo has appeared at least twice on an NRM podcast, including an April 2023 episode devoted to Rundo's labyrinthine federal case for Anti-Riot Act violations. NRM also conducted banner drops over freeways and held demonstrations protesting his detention outside the American and Romanian embassies the same month following Rundo's arrest on an American warrant in Romania. The 2024 Swedish tournament mirrors similar extreme right-wing martial arts tournaments hosted elsewhere in Europe for years. It also indicates the success of the Active Club model in spreading to the European continent. There are dozens of the fight clubs throughout Europe, including more than 50 in France and several in the United Kingdom, where they came under new scrutiny following a February 2025 ITV documentary connecting members to terrorism and violence. The European Active Clubs are also networking increasingly across national boundaries—Swedish Active Club members were present alongside their Dutch and French comrades at a May 10 fascist march in Paris, and engaged in an outdoor training in the Jardin du Luxembourg with Active Club members from Germany and French far-right extremists. Though a number of the Swedish Active Club participants are older veterans of other extremist groups, they have had notable success in recruiting younger participants, some as young as 15. In the past year, Swedish authorities have started to connect Active Club members to assaults and hate crime incidents. Jonathan Leman of a Swedish civil society group that tracks far-right radicalization and organizing, attributes the formation of Sweden's Active Clubs to Oskar Engels, an Estonian former member of NRM who left the group in 2020. Per research from Engels set up a fight club in 2020 that closely imitated Sweden's burgeoning soccer hooligan subculture, where violence and criminality occasionally crosses over with neo-Nazism, particularly in the support base of Stockholm's main clubs of AIK, Djurgården, and Hammarby. Recently, American Active Clubs have combined with other far-right extremists like Patriot Front and the Hammerskins to hold their own mixed-martial arts-tournaments in Southern California, Texas, and elsewhere. The State Department's listing of NRM, Blazakis says, was notable since it was the first large-scale neo-Nazi movement the American authorities were able to tie to criminal acts with a terrorist motivation. Previous efforts to sanction the UK's National Action, which is banned by the British Home Office and, according to media reports, has more members convicted of terrorism offenses in the UK than the Islamic State, did not get traction. 'The Nordic Resistance Movement, relative to Active Clubs, are far more organized than your typical ACs and have a high level of criminality that is quite reminiscent of the Rise Above Movement,' Blazakis alleges. 'When you have people that are engaged in criminality move towards terrorism, that's very dangerous,' Blazakis says. 'They're evolving in an ideological direction, and in most cases you tend to see groups move in the opposite direction.' Leman, who has tracked the evolution of Sweden's Active Clubs and their interactions with the rest of the burgeoning Swedish far right, says the September 2024 tournament was hosted by Tvåsaxe, an organization that has been invited to closed NRM conferences in the past two years. 'Tvåsaxe are part of NRM's network. They want to have a good relationship with all the groups in the environment,' Leman alleges. Prior to being listed as a terrorist organization by the Biden administration, Leman says, NRM had far cooler relations with rival far-right groups in Sweden. However, following a 2023 change in leadership and the terrorist entity listing, the group altered its stance and attracted a lot of sympathy and solidarity from other far-right organizations. 'Many groups felt that terror designation from the US was unjust, and that brought the Swedish scene together,' says Leman. 'You'd think that the Swedish scene would be reluctant to have anything to do with NRM, but in a way, it's them calling the Americans' bluff.' A security analyst close to the Swedish government, who asked not to be named to discuss law enforcement matters, noted that the country's security services are closely tracking the evolution of the far-right fight clubs. 'Active Clubs have become very popular because they can recruit younger cadres to the movement,' they say. 'I know that this is high on the radar for security services—[they're] much more concerned with these types of activities than they are traditional skinhead groups.' The participation of at least one American in the September 2024 tournament in Borås, the analyst says, reflects a long-standing North American fascination with NRM's organizing model and Scandinavian mythos. 'The Americans are definitely in bed with NRM when they're going over to Sweden and participating in the tournament,' the security analyst alleges. 'You're already providing material support and making key connections.' (This was included in WIRED's request for comment sent to Media 2 Rise, which did not respond.) 'The question is, are there financial transactions taking place?' The State Department refused to comment on the association of Americans with NRM in spite of the anti-terrrorism sanctions. It is currently unclear how the US authorities will handle cases involving far-right extremists who violate federal law, particularly in light of reports that the State Department is minimizing its use of terms related to far-right violence. 'The question is, will there be true enforcement of associations with a far-right [terrorist group]?' Blazakis says, pointing to the presence of Darren Beattie as the State Department's acting under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. In 2018, Beattie was fired from his position as a Donald Trump speechwriter after it was reported that he attended a white nationalist conference; CNN has similarly reported on his social media presence, which often espouses white supremacist beliefs. Beattie's office plays a major role in shaping the State Department's messaging on counterterrrorism and violent extremism. (The White House did not respond to WIRED's request for comment.) 'I think we're going to see reluctance at best, outright reversals at worst,' says Blazakis.
