Since the start of the cultural war in the ’60s, the right has almost always come in second in terms of trends. Whether it was music, film, style, etc. This sporting culture is something we can lay claim to, this is something we are setting the trend in. What better trend to set for our people to become in shape, active, and capable.
Robert Rundo, ‘Combat Sport for the Future of Nationalist’.
Robert Rundo fancies himself an essayist, but is better known as the founder of the Rise Above Movement (RAM), a network of gyms in the United States that is used to build the far Right. Troubled by the unassured, powerless men of today, he saw combat sports as a way to inculcate young men with nationalist movement ideals such as strength, discipline and masculinity—‘the warrior spirit’. Our people, he said—by which he meant white people—must become ‘in shape, active, and capable’ against the moral decay of society, which he blamed on the Left with its drug culture and consumerism. Rundo gave a nod to the purifying and redemptive role violence plays for fascists when he described the ‘spiritual awakening’ that combat sport offers: ‘One can be reborn with a few months of training, turning the once meek to mighty’.
Sports journalist Karim Zidan documented how RAM trained its members in combat sports to prepare them for street-fighting against anti-racist and anti-fascist activists. As the self-described ‘premier MMA [mixed martial arts] club of the alt-Right’, its members attended rallies with skull masks or nationalist bandanas covering their faces, wearing goggles to protect themselves from pepper spray and wrapping their hands as if about to step into the fighting ring. During 2017, RAM took part in protests at Huntington Beach, Berkeley and the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville where hundreds of (predominantly) young white men marched through the streets with tiki torches chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’.
RAM is now defunct, and Rundo was extradited to the United States from, where else, Romania and charged for his role in the Charlottesville rally, but his legacy lives on: he has inspired a decentralised international network of ‘Active Clubs’—‘localized fascist fight clubs’, according to Zidan, which recruit disenfranchised young white men to far-right political activism and physically train members in preparation for the anticipated revolution.
RAM is one example of the increasing tendency for far-right and fascist groups to use gyms to mainstream their political ideas, attract new members and advance reactionary politics. Gyms such as the Reconquista Club in Kyiv, the L’Agoge in Lyon and a secret boxing gym called La Phalange in Montreal are ‘named for historical legends and terms that symbolize brutal combat and nativist defense, and all focused on training far-right nationalists and extremists in hand-to-hand combat and street-fighting techniques’, notes sociologist Cynthia Miller-Idriss in ‘Hate in the Homeland’.
Gyms provide a physical infrastructure that allows far-right groups to avoid any unwanted public scrutiny whilst bringing members together in person, a strategy which may develop group bonds more effectively than online forums, as far-right activists may experience life as a keyboard warrior to be insular, isolating and emasculating compared to jumping into action in the real world. All of this helps us understand why National Socialists Network (NSN) members were until recently operating out of the Legacy Boxing Gym located in Melbourne’s Western suburbs.
The ‘Australia for the White Man’ event held by the NSN at Legacy Boxing Gym in December 2022.
Legacy Boxing Gym came to prominence in December 2022 when it hosted a national event titled ‘Australia for the White Man’. Boxing. Mixed Martial Arts. Music. The event poster advertised ‘a straight edge event’ with a prohibition on alcohol, reflecting changes in the far Right’s subculture towards a clean-cut aesthetic in which activists must exercise self-responsibility and control by cultivating lean, muscular physiques. This fantasy of self-improvement can be a powerful motivating force among young ‘normal’ men seeking direction in the ruins of neoliberalism. Well-known neo-Nazis like Thomas Sewell featured in the group photo taken at Legacy Boxing Gym with swastikas, SS flags and other Nazi paraphernalia.
The Campaign Against Racism and Fascism responded on Saturday 25 February 2023 by leading a march of more than 500 people through the streets of Sunshine. Protestors chanted ‘No Nazis, never again!’ and called on the Brimbank Council to withdraw Legacy Boxing Gym’s licence. Later that year the gym hosted a ‘White Power Lifting Meet’, but this time there were large community protests outside the event. The gym closed in January 2024, with the site owner refusing to offer the tenants a new lease.
The NSN set up a space for deadlifting on Victorian Parliament steps at their anti-immigration rally on May 13 2023, seeking to capitalise on the anti-migrant sentiments expressed in Leader of the Coalition Peter Dutton’s Budget speech.
This is not the first time exercise and sport have been used to support reactionary political projects. Blair Cottrell, the former leader of the United Patriots Front and amateur bodybuilder, co-founded The Lads Society in 2017 to provide gyms for the new generation of feminised (white) young men whom he felt lacked the courage, strength and nobleness required of them. He enjoys a wide following on TikTok and Telegram, where he combines physical training instructions with reactionary politics.
Another example is Jarrod Searby, the former leader of the Australian chapter of the Proud Boys, MMA fighter and gym owner who admitted to using combat sports as a way to funnel young men into neo-Nazi groups. Reports in The Age described how Searby would travel to Melbourne to train NSN members at Racism HQ, a house in Melbourne’s west that was used for political organising and physical training. Searby’s identification with combat sports can be seen in his video podcast ‘Brawler and the Brain’, where he speaks from his gym, and the use of combat sport video footage in his music videos, produced through his label Hard Knocks.
Gyms like The Lads Society, Racism HQ, and Legacy Boxing Gym have failed to take off, thanks in part to community opposition, but new spaces of physical culture and hard-right politics will likely develop in the future.
What can we surmise about the hard Right and its obsession with gym culture? There is a long history of links between such politics and sport and exercise. Yet there are also differences between past and current practices. For example, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) used sport and exercise during the 1930s and 40s to promote a distinct form of manliness that fetishised acts of violence, a disciplined moral character and a hard, muscular body. Sport historian Tony Collins explains how the importance of physical activity was promoted through newspapers such as Fascist Week and embodied in the physical training sessions held at summer camps along the English south coast and affiliated sport clubs. In an article titled ‘Return to Manhood: The Cult of Masculinity and the British Union of Fascists’ (1999), Collins stated that the BUF’s:
insistence on the primacy of the male, of the necessity of physical hardness, on the importance of violent militarism and the assertion of the physical over the intellectual all came from the philosophy which dominated British middle-class education in the decades before 1914.
Sir Oswald Mosley, who founded the BUF, embodied this quintessential British masculinity and was known for joining fights against anti-fascist demonstrators. According to historian Julie Gottlieb, in her article ‘Body Fascism in Britain: Building the Blackshirt in the Inter-War Period’ (2011), Mosley said in 1934 that ‘In hours of leisure we shall rely for the maintenance of the health and morality of the nation not on legislation but on the spiritual rebirth of a national renaissance’. The BUF’s attitude towards sport, exercise and bodies was influenced by historical changes in gender relations during and after the First World War, the declining levels of physical fitness among the urban working class and the perceived threat these developments posed to the future British Empire. For the BUF, boxing was exalted above all other sports because of its role in both reasserting British masculinity and preparing British warrior-patriots for fighting the enemy: socialists, unionists and Jews.
Fascism in the interwar years featured mass parties like the BUF and drew on the residual social solidarity of industrial and imperial life. However, in his recent book titled Late Fascism (2023), Alberto Toscano cautions us against drawing simple analogies between interwar fascism and the present. Today’s fascism is characterised by the absence of mass parties and increasingly atomised populations that, amidst rapid social and technological changes, express an aggressive nostalgia for the twentieth century with its traditional forms of masculinity and Fordist economies, and an underlying resentment towards marginalised groups.
Toscano challenges us to consider contemporary fascism in relation to bodies, desire and collective identification. Fascism, as noted by Theodor Adorno in his 1951 article ‘Freudian Theory and the pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, struggles to convince the masses to act against their interests through rational argument alone, and requires the mobilisation of irrational, unconscious psychological processes. Perhaps this is what makes the use of sport and exercise, with their potential to generate passionate collective identifications, a love for and identification with leaders and a commitment to shared ideals among members, so pernicious. As Rundo notes in his essay, ‘When you train together, when you bleed together it forms a bond unmatched strong enough to stretch over continents’. In Sport: A Prison of Measured Time (1989), Jean-Marie Brohm argued that sport and exercise are important outlets for displaced aggressive impulses and sexual desires, in which physical pursuits substitute for thinking and participants can experience simultaneous pleasure/pain in cultivating machine-like, efficient, productive bodies fit for capitalist society. She suggested that:
Apart from the act of labour, the dominant and fundamental way man relates to his body in state capitalist society is through sport—in as much as it is through the model of sport that the body is understood in practice, collectively hallucinated, fantisised, imagined and individually experienced as an object, an instrument, a technical means to an end, a reified output of output and productivity, in short, as a machine with the job of producing the maximum work and energy.
In recent decades we have witnessed the simultaneous rise of commercial MMA and the toxic politics of neoliberalism. The latter is characterised by a decline in union strength and a subsequent deterioration in working conditions, an upwards redistribution of wealth, a pressure on both parents in families to work that displaces many men from the traditional breadwinner role and shifts in the cultural and political landscape that place an ideological emphasis on competition, self-responsibility and individualism. We can see ideological overlap when Donald Trump attends Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) events and is warmly welcomed by spectators, and receives political support from UFC fighters and executives like Dana White, who spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention.
A personification of the spirit of dominating hyperindividualism and the increasing cultural currency of combat sport is Andrew Tate, the ex-kick-boxer turned entrepreneur who is a poster boy for the far Right and commands a mass following among young boys and men around the world via the social media networks where fitness gurus, athletes and others share their ‘wisdom’.
Inevitably, this trend has been marketised. Tate is one of many who have seized upon the commercial and political opportunities of combat sports. White supremacist Denis Kapustin started White Rex, a lifestyle and streetwear brand, in 2008 to sponsor combat sport training camps, host ‘whites only’ fight competitions across Europe and sell clothing featuring neo-Nazi symbols and racist slogans. White Rex sponsored MMA tournaments outside of Russia from 2012 and worked with far-right political groups and MMA organisations to host tournaments across Europe.
Pride France is another example that combines the sales of streetwear with sponsoring and organising fight tournaments and building far-right politics. The website ‘2YT4U’—that is, ‘too white for you’—sells clothing from Pride France with a range of t-shirts featuring slogans such as ‘White Division’, ‘Strength and Honour’ and ‘Reconquering Europe’. Cynthia Miller-Idriss and her co-authors explain in a CNN article titled ‘Selling Extremism’ (2019)that:
These brands encourage consumers to accept an ideology that positions us against them in a war to the end, valorizes violence as the moral solution and calls on individuals to join the righteous fight to restore the nation or white heritage.
The use of combat sports to cohere the far Right internationally has inspired similar developments across the globe, like Kampf Der Nibelungen in Germany and Pro-Patria in Greece. Closer to home, The Age produced a series of articles titled ‘Nazis Next Door’ that revealed how the NSN introduced Jarrad Searby to Kapustin and the two bonded over ‘white boy fight clubs’ on Searby’s podcast. Searby told Kapustin, ‘I think you’re a pioneer and would love to help build your brand over here’. But it’s a two-way street, with the White Rose Society describing in its 2024 senate inquiry submission how Thomas Sewell has helped two dozen Active Clubs start overseas.
The proliferation of gyms and fitness culture since the 1970s, where the neoliberal subject feels a moral imperative for self-transformation towards maximum health and productivity, provides commercial and political opportunities for hard-right groups. Will commercialisation have the same effect on any future reactionary cults as it does on everything else: a dilution through commodification?
It would be in character. Today’s hard Right has little interest in team sports, with their genuinely collective process. Hardbodyness, diagnosed in the 1930s by Wilhelm Reich as the creation of a protective, de-eroticised machine body, dead rather than alive, has become the dominant expression of the movement. The pursuit of a hard, muscular body mirrors increasingly militarised national borders and a turn against unruly bodies, gendered, racialised and obese. Such fantasies and political rituals are in part a response to isolation in an atomised world, assuaged by endless repetitions. Perhaps the fact that fascism is always a pseudo-revolution against capitalism, compensating for its atomising effect with ersatz ‘tradition’, does as much as anything to undermine its capacity for mass mobilisation. Or has Australia merely avoided the worst to date, with future crises to come?