How a Southern California Street-Fighting Crew Became the Blueprint for a National White Nationalist Network

INVESTIGATIVE — The Navarro Report

In September 2025, researchers at the investigative outlet Bellingcat geolocated a white nationalist “fight night” to a rented gym space in San Diego County, matching a blurred propaganda video against publicly available venue photos. The event was hosted by SoCal Active Club, part of a decentralized nationwide network of white supremacist mixed martial arts crews. The finding placed a documented node of that network inside San Diego County — one data point in a broader picture that traces the origins of America’s fastest-growing white nationalist recruitment model directly back to Southern California.

That model, known as the “Active Club” network, has spread to at least 30 states since 2021, according to the Anti-Defamation League, and has become a recurring presence at demonstrations nationwide, including alongside Patriot Front, the white nationalist group whose masked march through Washington, D.C., on July 4 drew national attention. Extremism researchers describe Active Clubs and Patriot Front as increasingly intertwined: the two have co-hosted MMA tournaments, appeared together at public events, and drawn scrutiny for how their fitness-first branding obscures an underlying white nationalist ideology.

The Active Club concept originated with Robert Rundo, a New York native who relocated to Southern California and, in 2017, founded a street-fighting collective called the Rise Above Movement, or RAM. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, RAM described itself as the “premier MMA club of the Alt-Right” and drew members primarily from Orange County and San Diego, numbering between 20 and 50 people as of 2018. RAM members trained in combat sports while promoting anti-Semitic and white nationalist views, and the group’s tactics — coordinated street violence at political rallies — drew federal attention within its first two years.

In October 2018, federal prosecutors charged Rundo and three other RAM members with conspiracy to riot under the Anti-Riot Act, tied to violent confrontations in Huntington Beach, Berkeley, and the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Rundo fled the country, living for several years in Eastern Europe before Romanian authorities detained him in March 2023; he was extradited to the United States that August. In December 2024, Rundo pleaded guilty to planning and engaging in riots at California political rallies and is currently on probation.

Rundo’s flight from prosecution did not end his influence. While in Europe, he co-founded the “Active Club” concept in late 2020 alongside Denis Kapustin, a German neo-Nazi and founder of the white nationalist clothing brand White Rex. Rundo described the model in a 2020 essay as small, local crews that “combine fitness and nationalist activism, building camaraderie,” explicitly framing it as a decentralized alternative to the earlier, more overtly violent RAM structure — what Rundo has called “white nationalism 3.0.”

Michael Colborne, a researcher and journalist with Bellingcat who helped track Rundo’s whereabouts during his years abroad, described the strategic shift in a 2023 interview with LAist: Rundo, he said, took a decentralized model “borrowing… from far-right football hooligan subcultures” and adapted it for an American audience built around what Rundo calls the “three F’s” — fashion, fitness and fighting. Rather than a top-down organization, Active Clubs operate as autonomous, five-to-25-member cells that adopt similar branding, including a Celtic cross logo, and coordinate loosely through Telegram channels.

The pitch to potential recruits rarely leads with ideology, according to researchers who track the network. Alexander Ritzmann, a Berlin-based political scientist with the Counter Extremism Project, told Rolling Stone that club members are “specifically asked not to talk about ‘the Jews’ when recruiting” and instead emphasize brotherhood and community. A former Active Club member, quoted anonymously by Vice News, described the internal framing around combat training: members are told they need to fight not to attack others, but because they believe an “inevitable” future race conflict is coming.

The network’s roots remain visible in Southern California. In 2023, Bellingcat geolocated a joint fight tournament — drawing SoCal Active Club, Patriot Front and Hammerskins, an internationally designated neo-Nazi gang — to a gym in Fountain Valley, in Orange County, that had been rented out for the event. The gym’s co-owner did not respond to Bellingcat’s requests for comment, and the business has since closed under different, unrelated ownership. A propaganda outlet founded by Rundo produced a documentary-style video of the event, which Bellingcat noted was consistent with the network’s broader strategy of using slickly produced footage to recruit beyond its existing membership.

More recently, SoCal Active Club members were identified at a vigil in Huntington Beach honoring assassinated conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, according to reporting by LA Ten Four, a newsletter covering first-responder issues in the Los Angeles area. Video from the event, reviewed by Bellingcat, showed a vigil attendee who confronted the group as “un-American” being punched, kicked and stomped by several men, at least two of whom wore SoCal Active Club apparel identifiable in the footage.

The September 2025 San Diego County fight night adds another documented instance of the network’s activity inside the county. Bellingcat’s investigation relied on a 12-second teaser video posted by Rundo’s propaganda outlet, cross-referenced against venue photographs and local knowledge contributed by SCRC, a Southern California-based research collective that monitors extremist activity in the region. Researchers matched architectural details — a distinctively colored wall section and ceiling layout — to identify the general vicinity of the event, though Bellingcat withheld the specific venue name to avoid amplifying the location. Photos posted afterward by SoCal Active Club’s own Telegram channel showed a banner for a Hammerskins-affiliated support group displayed at the event.

Nationally, the Active Club network has grown considerably since Rundo first proposed it. The ADL estimated at least 25 active states by 2023; more recent tracking puts that figure at 30 or more, with regional sub-networks forming their own identities, including a Northwest Nationalist Network in the Pacific Northwest and a newly announced Dixie Alliance for clubs in Southern states. “These clubs are decentralized and they’re forming on their own,” Morgan Moon, an ADL investigative researcher, told LAist, adding that the model has begun appearing in Europe and Canada as well.

Researchers caution that the network’s fitness-first branding is deliberate camouflage rather than an accurate description of its purpose. The ADL’s background analysis of the network states plainly that its recruitment materials are “noticeably missing” any mention of the “innate white supremacist, anti-LGBTQ+, and/or neo-Nazi ideologies that unite these geographically disparate clubs.” Ritzmann posed the same tension to Bellingcat directly: “I’m curious about if they are a combat sports network or if they are a militia hiding in plain sight.”

Rundo, now on probation in the United States, continues to sell branded merchandise online through companies he founded, Media2Rise and Will2Rise, and has said publicly that the network no longer depends on his direct involvement to function or grow. “The Active Clubs run on their own,” he said in a May 2022 statement cited by Rolling Stone. “They don’t need me anymore.”

For Southern California specifically, the throughline is difficult to overlook: a street-fighting crew that began with a few dozen members in Orange County and San Diego has, over roughly eight years, become the direct ideological and organizational ancestor of a fitness-branded white nationalist network now operating in at least 30 states and several countries — with confirmed, geolocated activity still occurring within the same San Diego and Orange County footprint where it started. Whether that continuity reflects a uniquely persistent regional presence or simply reflects where researchers have concentrated their attention is a question that would benefit from further, targeted local reporting — including records requests to the cities where past events have been held, and outreach to SCRC and other regional monitoring groups for a fuller picture of current activity levels.

— Jose E. Navarro, The Navarro Report / Human-Directed AI Journalism: Research, analysis, and editorial direction by the author. Drafted in partnership with Claude AI (Anthropic).