The Spread of Fascist Fight Clubs: Not With A Bang, But With A Thud
March, 2019
“The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.” Brad Pitt immortalised these words in the 1999 cult movie classic, Fight Club, a satirical book and film about violent masculinity. However the movie was the most recent cultural pillar hijacked by a rising threat: white supremacists.
White supremacy is not new to the fighting arena. Prominent fighters such as Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fighters Donald Cerrone, Lyle Beerbohm, and Joe Brammer have been exposed over the past year to have ties to far-right groups. All were sponsored by Hoelzer Reich, a clothing brand known for selling far-right products, which was consequently banned.
Anastasia Yankova, a Russian fighter for Bellator featured in Vogue and Nike ads, was accused of promoting White Rex, another far-right brand which regularly sponsors neo-Nazi events. Yankova denied affiliations with the company and any other neo-Nazi groups.
Out of the ring, the subculture of white supremacy is omnipresent, although generally small and underground, as seen by the subgroup of soccer hooligans. Soccer hooligans are violent fans who create informal fights between opposing fans. Many of these groups have ties to right-wing extremism.
However, as our world becomes more globalised and world leaders support the ideals of white supremacy, these groups are emboldened to organise.
The intersections between the Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) community and the soccer hooligan fighters are apparent as a show of violent masculinity. But soccer hooligans mainly fight for the thrill of fighting. Alternatively, MMA fighting is particularly appealing to white supremacists and neo-Nazis because they fight with a sense of purpose, which only makes their cause more dangerous. MMA fighting is justified to prepare members to “defend their homelands” and prepare for a coming race war. There are currently training gyms spreading throughout France, the U.K., Australia, Russia, Italy, Germany, Poland, Quebec, and the U.S.
One international gym is called Agogé, a white nationalist boxing gym founded by Generation Identity, a far-right group which began in Lyon, France but now has training camps and recruitment centres all over Europe. Promotional videos for their “Identitarian Summer University,” a training summer camp in hand-to-hand combat and nationalist ideas, feature young, white people in matching clothes. They are training for what they call “The Great Replacement,” or the belief that “indigenous Europeans,” or white people, are becoming a minority. This sentiment is echoed throughout the neo-Nazi world and allows for groups to recruit through fear.
Rise Above Movement (RAM), was the most prominent MMA style neo-Nazi group in the U.S. They became infamous for their reckless behaviour and inciting violence at Trump rallies/marches and the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia. They conceal their identities with skull masks and wrap their hands with tape in preparation for fights.
The founder of RAM is Robert Rundo, who was arrested by the FBI in October 2018 after attempting to flee to Central America. Before founding RAM, Rundo was part of the Original Flushing Crew, a multiracial gang in Queens, New York City. He then served in New York State prison for attacking a rival gang member, where it is believed his radicalisation to white supremacy began. He created RAM in Southern California in 2016 and established ties with the West coast chapter of Hammerskin Nation (HN), which became integral in establishing global ties.
According to Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC), HN began as a small group in Texas but soon established chapters throughout the U.S. Today, HN has viable chapters in Australia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Serbia, Slovenia and Russia. HN has a lengthy recruitment process and regularly targets juvenile correction facilities and prisons. Another recruitment tool has been through the production and promotion of white power rock music and white power rock festivals. HN has sponsored at least seven of these festivals in 2018 — in Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas and Budapest, Hungary.
RAM has adapted several of HN’s recruitment strategies to draw in specific men: those who fantasise about a real-world fight club. RAM’s social media sites are flooded with promotional videos featuring their workout and training routines, with messages about taking the power back, highlighting the fear of being replaced.
In the spring of 2018, Rundo and several other RAM members when on a “Euro- tour” to network and participate in MMA tournaments hosted by neo-Nazi organisations to “bridge the gap between the two nationalist scenes.”
Keegan Hankes, an analyst for SPLC who follows RAM told ProPublica the trip, “signals that they aren’t just hobbyists. It’s gives them credibility” within the white power movement, as published in “American Hate Group Looks to Make Allies in Europe" in July 2018.
One particularly large event with RAM’s presence was the Shield and Sword Festival in Ostritz, a small German town near the Polish border. The festival is held annually in honour of Adolf Hitler’s birthday and is characterised by political speeches from neo-Nazi leaders, heavy metal concerts, far-right merchandise, and an MMA tournament.
The tournament was sponsored by Kampf der Nibelungen, a far-right MMA organisation. “To live is to fight. At all times it was fighters who defended their clan, their tribe, their homeland,” is stated on their official website. The website also features promotional videos and clothing from far-right companies, including White Rex. Kampf der Nibelungen used to hold its events in secret, attracting soccer hooligans and MMA fighters, but attendance numbers quadrupled in the past few years.
“It’s a question of fashion,” Sword and Shield’s organiser Thorsten Heise told Vice News in the article, “German Neo-Nazis Are Trying To Go Mainstream with MMA and Music Festivals” in April 2018. “We’re seeing lots of young people in Europe not interested in drugs, they’re interested in fighting – in the ring, with rules. Especially in the nationalist scene, it’s the style – to be fit, to have a nice body. We love that, and the MMA fighters all love this also.”
Rundo and other members also traveled to Italy, where they collaborated with CasaPound, an Italian fascist party with regular MMA underground matches, and Ukraine,where they met with Denis Nikitin, the founder of White Rex, the neo-Nazi clothing company who sponsored the Shield and Sword festival. Nikitin began as a soccer hooligan and slowly transitioned into a businessman, a capitalistic endeavour to sell his white supremacist ideology with slogans such as “Zero Tolerance,” “Angry Europeans,” and others featuring neo-Nazi logos worn by blonde hair, blue-eyed models.
“If we kill one immigrant every day, that’s 365 immigrants in a year,” Nikitin told the Guardian in “The Rise of Russia’s neo-Nazi football hooligans” in April 2018. “But tens of thousands more will come anyway. I realised we were fighting the consequence, but not the underlying reason. So now we fight for minds, not on the street, but on social media.”
Nikitin was one of the first to connect neo-Nazi ideologies with MMA subculture, making him an integral part to the movement and particularly important to RAM. He has since created connections around the world.
Also present in meetings in Kyiv, Ukraine was the extreme right group Azov, who saw the meeting with RAM as a way to expand and legitimise the group abroad. Leaders of Azov partnered with Nikitin and consistently reached out to other Western groups.
Neo-Nazi hate groups and fight clubs are not limited to Europe and North America. Recently, Australia has seen an increase in far-right activity as a response to a growing fear of “losing the white identity.” Far-right groups such as Antipodean Resistance, True Blue Crew, Reclaim Australia, and United Patriots Front (UPF) expanded rapidly. In January 2019, UPF, along with other neo-nazi groups, organised a rally in Melbourne. Photos from the event show Nazi propaganda, symbols salutes, and many similarities to the photos from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
Several participants had taken up arms in Ukraine before their return to Australia, in a war that has become to right-wing extremists what the war in Syria is to jihadists, according to “From Neo-Nazi to militant: The foreign fighters in Ukraine who Australia's laws won't stop,” from ABC News in May 2018.
In 2017, members of UPF created “Lads Society,” a private far-right men-only fight club in Melbourne and Sydney. Lads Society has weekly “fight nights” attended by members of UPF and Antipodean Resistance. More clubs opened in 2018, with the threat of expansion.
MMA style groups became a growing subset within the white supremacist movement. Although Rundo was arrested, his ideas and followers remain, and only grow stronger. But they broke the first rule of Fight Club and embraced a more nefarious idea: Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer, maybe self destruction is the answer.
