Front Burner - Fascist fight clubs are growing across Canada

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Groups known as "active clubs" are growing across Canada. They often meet in public parks or martial arts clubs, and say they are building community and fitness while standing up for Canada's European history. But they're part of a decentralized network with deep ties to white nationalist, neo-Nazi, and other far-right groups — and they're spreading fast.An exclusive CBC investigation has uncovered exactly how and where these groups operate, who's involved, who they target, and their connections to other extremist groups in Canada and beyond. The CBC's Eric Szeto explains what his team uncovered during the months-long investigation. Then, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue's Mack Lamoureux puts the clubs into the context of growing far-right extremism worldwide, and the broader goals of the movement.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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Hi, I'm Elaine Chao, in for Jamie Poisson. Order heritage training! Order heritage training! More than a dozen mass figures, dressed in black, are protesting in front of the gates at Exhibition Place in downtown Toronto. They're holding banners that say, mass deportations now, and DEI is how nations die. There's some chanting, and at one point, a demonstrator gives a speech about how, quote, foreign blood has diluted the country.

This happened back in May, as part of a protest organized in part by a group called Nationalist 13, or NS13. It's one of several fight clubs, known as active clubs in white nationalist circles, that some experts see as the fastest growing extremist threat in Canada. And according to a new CBC investigation, groups like NS13 are becoming more and more public with their activities. The reporting exposed, for the first time, how they're training at gyms,

martial arts clubs, and public parks in Ontario, organizing anti-immigration protests like the one that I just mentioned. We'll get into how active clubs connect to wider white supremacist and neo-Nazi networks across Canada and around the world in a bit. But first, my colleague Eric Zito is here to talk more about the CVC investigation. Eric, hello. Hello. So, before we get into kind of what these active clubs are and how they operate, the ones that you investigated, you know, what actually led to this investigation? Like, why did you take this on?

Yeah, so the team actually had this on the radar for months. What really put this thing into motion? And as you mentioned earlier in your intro, there was this mass deportation rally that happened just outside the CNE in May held by a group called Nationalist 13 that really kind of put this on the radar because while we were looking at these groups, it also indicated how much bolder and coordinated these groups were getting. And the one that happened in Toronto was, I think, the third in a number of mass deportation rallies, which is kind of like a mirroring of what's happened in some of the language and some of the stuff was going on in the US, especially during the election, right?

But it happened in London. It happened in Hamilton, Ontario, a few months prior. And then this one. Nicole Zichal-Pasquale We've been mentioning NS 13 a bit. Like, can you tell me a little bit more about the group? Nationalist 13 came onto the map, but definitely a couple years ago, you know, and it started with these sticker campaigns on light poles around Hamilton area, because they're based out of Hamilton, Ontario, and it ended going to kind of real world organizing, right? Like if you go back to that, for example, those mass deportation rallies that we were just talking about, or even the sparring in parks or practicing, you know, boxing in gyms, like it became a real more real world thing. And they became bolder.

And, you know, one of the people that we noticed that we were able to use through our open source techniques and also just visually verifying was a fellow that had the same tattoos, had the same markers as someone that was an open supporter of Proud Boys, used to wear Proud Boys paraphernalia, but was now a very prominent member of NS13, especially with the photos and the videos that we came across. And what are the group's main beliefs? Tell me a little bit more about their messaging and their presence on social media. They're very present on social media.

I think one of the more active or more prolific posters on social media, lots of subscribers on their Telegram channel. Over 3,000 subscribers, right? Is that right? Over 3,000. And that's also something that we always take with a grain of salt. We don't know whether these are supporters, whether they are law enforcement journalists like us, researchers, we don't know. But they definitely had the most compared to a lot of these other clubs. Yeah. A bit more profiles. Definitely. Yeah, for sure. And their social media, they're very active and they want to show them training and them elaborating and building community and being active as they say, their main messaging, right? And this goes back to what an

active club or what on the surface they are, they're there for fitness. They're there to get trained to build community. But, you know, there's also all these little messages and coded messaging. You know, they cover their faces in these photos and videos with a totem cloth. It's like a grinning death mask that was used by the Nazi SS. Correct. That's right. In videos, they will show themselves doing some reno's with the Nazi lighter in front of them. Or on Hitler's birthday on April 20th, they celebrate it and say this is the greatest person to ever live. And they hope that someone one day actualizes his vision. That's kind of the range of what they do on social media. And you also looked into a group called Second Sons,

which is not an active club by name, but it very much operates and markets itself like one. And what can you tell me about them? What we know about this group is that it's an offshoot of another extremist group called Diagonalon, founded by a man named Jeremy McKenzie, who's become quite notorious with this group and in a lot of the circles, especially in the right wing. We've talked about the I go on, on our program. Um, before, uh, they have been associated with the trucker protests, uh, in both Ottawa and in Coutts, Alberta. Uh, they've also been described by the RCMP as like a militia-like network

with members who are armed and prepared for violence. Just for a bit of context. Absolutely. And this is what was interesting to us too, that this was an offshoot group. And very similar to Nationalist 13 in the sense of they're coded, they're coded in their language. We are putting out the call for real Canadian men to create a brotherhood, to strengthen each other, protect our families and preserve our identity. And if you go to the website, it's not anything overtly white nationalist or violent. You know, like for example, they have their banner, right? It's the red ensign. It's basically like an echo of it.

You know, Canada's colonial flag, which was replaced by the Maple Leaf in 1965, right? They consider this the true flag. It's also used, there's a lot of white nationalist circles. A nation is a people, an intergenerational community forged through blood and soil, with a ferocious love that defends its own no matter the cost. Through some pretty extensive combing through of their social media posts, you know, your team found that they're quite active in the communities that they operate in.

And just walk me through some of what you were able to find. Yeah, this was what the bulk of our work was put towards is they are so active on social media, but they take such great care to hide their identities and locations for the most part. Sometimes they do show their identities, but for the most part. Sometimes they do show their identities, but for the most part, they're all blurred, obscured. And so part of what led to this and why we started looking into this

is because we wanted to show that these guys were in public parks and in private businesses next to what could be families, kids. We looked at Nationalist 13 in one one of the videos and it was a video of them sparring in a park. It was obviously springtime while they obscured their identities. We could also see behind the markers. We use the houses behind them, the green building behind in a white dome behind that green building. And we use those three markers and we searched every single park in Hamilton where they're based out of. This is nationalist 13 and we said okay where are these

parks that these guys are training in and we located it to basically one of the biggest parks in Hamilton which was Gage Park where they were training was next to a children's garden. Some of the other things we ended up finding wasn't just the public parks. What also was the jumping off point for us and one of our producers was the fact that he saw a video of these guys training in Brantford, which is west of Hamilton, I think way back maybe last year. And he saw another social media post where these kids, the soccer academy, had been training at a similar place and it was under a gazebo and it was very identifiable because it had a crack at the top of it and he was able to geolocate it to that.

And this is kind of what the point of this is, is that like, you know, there's these soccer academies or families, whoever, using these facilities. Meanwhile, you have these fascist fight clubs, these active clubs, these white nationalists using the same facilities and promoting their cause in these same places. That's actually part of the impetus for why this story started as well. Thank you, Eric, for your time. Thank you for having me. You know, shopping for a car should be exciting, not exhausting. And that's where CarGurus comes in.

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are found all over the world. According to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, there are 187 of them in 27 countries, from the US to the UK and Germany. They've grown at a time when white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups have become more and more decentralized. For more on the Active Club movement, its history, and evolution, I have Mack Lammerow with me.

Mack reported on far-right movements for years for Vice. We've had him on the show many times. He now works for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a UK-based think tank dedicated to studying authoritarianism, hate, and extremism. Hi, Mack. Hi there. We just heard some very specific things about active clubs that are operating here in Canada. But I want to zoom out with you.

What is the history of these groups more broadly? What is their origin story? Yeah, so these groups were formed in 2021 by a man named Robert Rondo. Rondo was this figure in the California far right who was involved in this group called the Rise Above Movement, which for lack of a better term could probably be called like a far right street fighting group. They went out and they got into quite a bit of skirmishes with, you know, anti-fascist groups, that sort of thing in the late 2010s. And he actually got a couple of charges for his activities with them.

This protester punched in the face, one of the organizers of the rally, Pepper Spray. Today, the FBI says this man, Robert Rundow, is the leader of a white nationalist group that plotted the violence at that rally and other rallies as well. He actually kind of running from these charges went to Europe. And when he was in Europe, he saw these kind of extreme right mixed martial art groups, specifically ones that he saw in Ukraine and other Eastern European countries. And I suppose he thought that would probably work in the United States. So after taking inspiration from these far right groups in Eastern Europe,

he decided to give it a try back in the United States. And he set up these decentralized cells. The best way to think of active clubs would be more of a network of groups rather than one large group. They kind of crisscross the United States and they crisscross Canada right now. Therefore, for simplicity's sake, leaderless. And he's had massive, massive success with his latest project. And how did it, like speaking of that success, like how did it get so successful? I mean, you mentioned MMA there. Active clubs are known for kind of using the popularity

of MMA to reach out to potential recruits and such, right? Well, I think they took inspiration from the last wave of extreme right groups, which would have kind of been the far more militant groups like the base or Adam Waffen division, the ones that have been involved in pretty extreme levels of violence. And they decided to soften it. They decided to have a huge focus on aesthetics and propaganda, as opposed to, I mean, this hyper focus on violence. And so they leaned into mixed martial arts, they leaned into propaganda, and that's more or less what this entire

active club network revolves around. They film themselves training, they make snappy edits about it, they host large fight tournaments, they even have... Activeware. Yeah, they have activeware. They have merchandise. Fascist Lululemon, one person once described it to me. So it's a lot more softened than the last wave of kind of extreme right organizations that we've to their benefit. I read in a report from the Counter Extremism Project from a couple of years ago that said

that their ultimate goal is, quote, the creation of a standby militia of trained and capable right-wing extremists who can be activated when the need for coordinated violent action on a larger scale arises. What is the main purpose of this wider global network of active clubs? It's difficult to say exactly what each active club is training for because as I mentioned earlier they're very much decentralized and it could honestly change from active club to active club. But from former members I've spoken to and listening to far, far, far too many words

of their leaders are spoken in podcasts or in propaganda they've made. You can see that this training and all of this stuff serves a dual purpose. Yes, it's a very, very good propaganda outlet, but it's also preparing for what many see as a possible scenario of a race war of being able to build a white ethnostate. We've seen how much damage and how much bloodshed just one of these people that believes this sort of ideology can have. You don't have to look any further from London, Ontario,

just a few years ago, we had that young man who believed in very, very, very similar ideologies to the people who are within these organizations kill a Muslim family. Prosecutors say a driver intentionally ran down the Afzal family, targeting them because of their Muslim faith. After police searched his apartment and electronics, a detective said some documents appeared to be hate-related material and relevant to the listed offences. An RCMP national security investigator writing,

the murders constitute terrorist activity. Moving back a little further to Quebec City, we have Alexandre Bissonnette who shot up a mosque, he also had very similar viewpoints. Leaders of the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec invited cameras into their mosque just days after a gunman opened fire during evening prayers, killing six men and wounding 18 others. Reports say he had made right-wing, anti-immigrant and anti-woman posts on social media.

And even if these people aren't in their heads organizing for some sort of grand race war, we know how much damage people who adhere to these beliefs and who embrace violence can do. Getting back to Canadian active clubs specifically, like how do you see them fitting into the broader network of white supremacist groups and neo-Nazi groups, you know, in the country? Because I'm just thinking back to the fact that a lot has changed for these groups in recent years. In 2021, the Proud Boys and Adam Waffen were designated as terrorist organizations by Public

Safety Canada. The Canadian government is currently considering criminalizing hate and terror symbols. So I feel like there's been a lot of changes in the landscape. Yeah, 100%. In many ways, I think you could view active clubs as being, for lack of a better term, maybe the tip of the spear of white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizing in Canada. They're the ones out in front creating propaganda, actively recruiting, They're the ones out in front creating propaganda, actively recruiting, while some of the other groups tend to not be as publicly facing. What we do know is that active clubs do have a very deep connection with other extreme

right organizations. We've seen by great reporting from Peter Smith of Anti-Hate Canada that they have very, very deep ties with the Hammerskins, which is a neo-Nazi skinhead organization that's been around for years and years and has connections to criminal organizations. In particular, there was a young man that I reported on. His name was Christopher Nipick. He was one of, if not the, central organizers of the initial spread of active clubs across Canada. And not even just Canada, he actually traveled to other countries to help set them up in some Scandinavian countries, to help set up the initial active clubs there, to get them off the ground. And Christopher actually got charged for his activities with the Atomwaffen Division

before actively, for lack of a better term, working on the Active Club project. And for those who don't know, the Atomwaffen Division was this heinous, very, very violent, extreme right organization that were... Linked to... They're linked to five killings, right? They're linked to five killings, yeah. And they believed in militant accelerationism, which was this idea of hastening the fall of society so they can build a white ethnostate out of it. hastening the fall of society so they can build a white ethnostate out of it. So they're not just these white supremacist organizations that are out in parks rolling around with each other and doing mixed martial art and kickboxing and that sort of training,

but they're also a conduit to a far deeper and far more insidious far-right network that kind of lays under the surface. One thing that really stood out to me in kind of digging into active clubs and how they operate is that there are a lot of youth chapters across the states and in particular, how young does this go? And is that something that there's been kind of reporting on in Canada as well? Yeah. So, according to the Global Hate and Extremism Project, there's been a 25% increase in active club chapters across the world since 2023. And a large part of this is being driven

by these youth clubs that are popping up, especially in the United States. So these youth clubs specifically recruit and organize around teenage boys that are 15 to 18. We're not seeing it necessarily pop up in Canada yet, but we know Canada tends to fall behind a little bit of America when it comes to far right organizing. So I wouldn't be surprised at all if we saw these kind of groups pop up. Probably it would be good for us to also note that there has not been any acts of violence connected directly to active clubs.

We should mention that as well. No, we haven't seen any, at least in Canada, we haven't seen any sort of violence connected to active clubs. We've seen some kind of minor skirmishes connected to them in the United States, and we've seen violence connected to groups that they have deep connections to. But at least in Canada, we haven't seen any sort of violence. All of this has me thinking, you know, these active clubs are the kinds of communities that would probably not have been operating as openly in the past as they are now, right? You know, we're living

in a time where someone like Nick Fuente's streamer who's openly a white supremacist is incredibly popular. I think about that recent episode of the debate show Surrounded where Mehdi Hassan spoke with a guy who openly called himself a fascist. I certainly don't support anyone's human dignity being assaulted. I'm a Catholic. But you don't condemn Nazi persecution of the Jews. I think that there was a little bit of persecution.

We may have to rename the show because you're a little bit more than a far right Republican. Hey, what can I say? I think you say I'm a fascist. Yeah, I am. And are we in a moment now where it's become more socially acceptable to identify with these extremely far-right types of political views? I think certainly, I think we've seen the window of acceptability when it comes to holding these noxious views certainly swing in their direction.

I think we're seeing a lot more uptake of these views and that comes through a variety of reasons, whether it be the prevalence of social media, whether it be the fact that it kind of feels that we're living in a post-truth world these days. But also on top of that, I also think the factors for young men radicalization are very prominent right now. We're seeing there is not a great outlook right now for young people within Canada and the United States. We're seeing a lack of housing. We're seeing inflation. We're seeing impacts on the job market. So when you have these, well, decreasing living conditions, you are going to see people turn for answers. And unfortunately, some people turn to bad actors and get fed awful ideology and some

of them accept it. McEvoy McHugh, thank you so much for your time today. McEvoy McHugh Thank you so much for having me. One of these days, we are going to talk about something happy. I look forward to it. I don't know what it's going to be, but it's going to be a lot happier than this. Thanks Mack. Thank you so much. Before we go today, we wanted to note the passing of the Prince of Darkness himself,

Ozzy Osbourne. All I do is make music, you know. I don't sit down and purposely plan to freak everybody out. I mean, I always have played heavy metal music. I suppose when I was younger and I started writing songs, my world was kind of dark and dingy, and I came from a working class family who had nothing, no dough, no prospect of ever having much money. And so that's how I saw the world as a child. And so not, Ozzy helped God help me.

And in the early 2000s, he helped popularize reality TV with the Osbournes. Sharon! Sharon! Someone has been in my room and taken my beers away from my room. I don't think so, darling. Ahhhh. Who would do that? and taking my beers away from my room. I don't think so, darling. Ah! Who would do that? Oh! Who could possibly do that?

Who's the beer thief? You. You're the beer thief. -♪ Baby, it's not too late... And in between, he had an incredibly successful solo career, bit the head off a bat, got arrested for peeing on the Alamo, and seemed to have fun doing it all. Ozzy died yesterday at the age of 76, just weeks after performing at the Back to the Beginning concert in his hometown of Birmingham, England.

Billed as Ozzy's final onstage performance, he sang solo hits and reunited with the original members of Black Sabbath. It was the highest-grossing charity concert ever, raising $190 million to be split equally to Birmingham Children's Hospital, Acorn Children's Hospice, and Cure Parkinson's, an organization dedicated to finding a cure for the disease Osborne had lived with since 2019. That's all for today. I'm Aline Chao. Thanks for listening to Frontburnc.ca slash podcasts.