The Ecosystem: White Nationalist Groups and the Recruiting Machine
Part 2 of 6 in the series: Behind the Mask – White Nationalism, Violent Extremism, and the Fight for America's Future
In Part 1, I wrote about Patriot Front – the masked men marching through American cities. But Patriot Front is one group. What keeps me up at night is everything around it.
Think of this whole thing like a funnel. At the wide end, a young guy sees a meme or a workout video that seems harmless. At the narrow end, someone drives a car into a crowd or walks into a church with a rifle. In between are dozens of groups, and every single one of them is designed to move that young man one step deeper.
Here’s what that funnel actually looks like.
The Gym
In 2020, a neo-Nazi named Robert Rundo came up with an idea he called “White Nationalism 3.0.” Instead of rallies and swastika tattoos, he said, build fight clubs. Make it about fitness. Make it about brotherhood. Wrap the racism inside something young men already want – a gym, a crew, a reason to get up in the morning.
Rundo had already built a violent street gang called the Rise Above Movement. His guys attacked people at protests and rallies across California. He got arrested. Got sentenced. But the idea didn’t go away. It became the Active Club.
The numbers should alarm you. The SPLC tracked Active Clubs growing from 4 chapters in 2021 to 78 by 2025, spread across at least 25 states. Worldwide, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism counted 187 chapters in 27 countries as of mid-2025 – up 25 percent in under two years. One researcher said he’d never seen a network in far-right extremism grow so fast.
Here’s how it works. A young man sees a flyer or a Telegram post about a local fitness group. He shows up. The first few sessions are just boxing, jiu-jitsu, rucking. No politics. Just guys working out together, building trust. The ideology shows up later – slowly, through conversations, shared links, and the steady drip of language that makes hate feel normal. They film the fight sessions and post them online as recruiting tools. The message: we are strong, we are together, and we are building something.
One researcher at George Washington University put it plainly: the Active Clubs are who the Proud Boys wanted to be.
They meet in gyms and churches. They do “family days” across state lines. They use the Celtic cross – a well-known Nazi symbol – like a brand logo. And they’re connected to every major white nationalist group out there, including Patriot Front. In Kansas City, the local Active Club works side by side with a militia that has posted “gas the [slur] race war now” on its social media. That’s who’s in the gym.
The Kids
This is the part I struggle with the most.
In early 2025, Youth Clubs started popping up across the country. They work the same way as Active Clubs – fitness, brotherhood, shared identity – but they only accept members between the ages of 15 and 18. Fifteen.
The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism found at least 19 chapters covering 42 states. Most of their Telegram channels went up between February and June of 2025. Some tried to get on TikTok – because that’s where the kids are – before getting kicked off. By late 2025, they had spread to the UK.
These groups don’t hide what they are. Their umbrella account, “United Youth,” describes a network of “pro social young white men” built on “activist, nationalist” principles. They believe white people are “dying off” and that Jews, liberals, and gay people are to blame. One of the biggest chapters, the Kalifornian Nationalist Youth, uses Nazi symbols in its flyers and describes itself as fighting “the hooked nose zionists.”
These are children being recruited into a hate movement. Someone built this on purpose.
The Streamer
Nick Fuentes is 27 years old. He has over a million followers on X and half a million on Rumble. He’s a Holocaust denier who has praised Hitler on camera. He has said that Jewish people need to be removed from society, that Black Americans should be imprisoned, and that women belong in “breeding gulags” – his exact words, from a stream five days ago.
And his movement is growing.
Fuentes doesn’t run fight clubs or organize marches. He streams. Five nights a week, his show “America First” reaches hundreds of thousands of viewers on platforms that regular media can’t touch. His followers call themselves Groypers – named after a cartoon frog meme. The whole thing runs on irony and jokes and edgy humor, which is the point. When someone says something awful and then says “I’m joking,” you can never quite pin it down. That ambiguity is the recruiting tool. It lets a kid share the content without feeling like he’s sharing Nazi propaganda.
Until he is.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk in September 2025 blew the door open for Fuentes. Kirk had been Fuentes’s main rival for the attention of young conservative men. With Kirk gone, Fuentes filled the vacuum. Tucker Carlson gave him a long, friendly interview in October. The New York Times called his politics “on the rise.” One disputed estimate said 30 to 40 percent of Republican staffers in Washington under 30 were Groypers. In January 2026, Fuentes was filmed at a Miami Beach nightclub with other far-right figures – including Andrew Tate and several popular streamers – chanting “Heil Hitler” on camera. The city’s mayor apologized for the incident and banned Fuentes from the club. But the video spread everywhere, and for his followers it wasn’t a scandal. It was content.
Here’s what shook me: a Florida candidate for governor recently called Groypers he’d met “very insightful and patriotic.” The first “groyper politician” may be coming. This is moving from the internet into real elections.
The Pardoned
On January 20, 2025, President Trump granted clemency to everyone charged in the January 6 Capitol attack. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio walked out of prison after serving part of a 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy. So did Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who had been serving 18 years.
The Proud Boys then filed a $100 million lawsuit against the FBI and DOJ. A pardoned January 6 defendant running for Senate in Florida said he would “deputize the Proud Boys to bounty hunt illegal immigrants.”
Here’s the twist that most people don’t realize. The Proud Boys as an organization are a shell of what they were. The arrests gutted their leadership. New data from ACLED – the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, one of the most respected trackers of political violence worldwide – shows that overall extremist group activity in 2025 hit the lowest levels on record. The post-January 6 crackdown actually worked for a while.
But the people went somewhere. They moved into Active Clubs. Into local militias. Into informal networks that don’t have names or membership lists. Harder to track. Harder to stop. And the clemency sent a message to every young man watching: you can storm the Capitol and walk free. The next time someone asks you to cross a line, that’s the calculus.
The Funnel
This is what makes the whole thing so dangerous. No single group runs this. But it works like a single machine anyway.
A teenager sees a Groyper meme on X. He starts watching Fuentes. He finds a Youth Club on Telegram. When he turns 18, the Youth Club connects him to an Active Club. The Active Club trains him and puts him in touch with Patriot Front or a local militia. At every step, the beliefs get harder. The commitment gets deeper. The exit gets smaller.
Most guys in this funnel won’t carry out violence. But the funnel is the same funnel that produced the shooters in Charleston, Pittsburgh, El Paso, and Buffalo. The question isn’t whether the next attack is coming. The question is whether we can reach the next attacker before the funnel does.
In Part 3, we look at the piece of this most Americans don’t see at all – Christian nationalism and how it’s merging with white supremacy to give these movements something they’ve never had before: churches, money, and political cover.
Part 3 drops Thursday: The Ecosystem – Christian Nationalism and the Fusion with White Supremacy.
Dexter Ingram is a counterterrorism professional with more than 25 years of experience. At the Department of State, he served as Director of the Office of Countering Violent Extremism and Acting Director for the Office of the Special Envoy to Defeat ISIS. He is the author of “The Spy Archive: Hidden Lives, Secret Missions, and the History of Espionage.”
If this series matters to you, share it. If you’re not yet a subscriber, this is the work your subscription supports.
Thanks for the free promotion!