I found my first far-right sticker while walking past the Aylestone Road intersection outside Leicester College in early April. As a student of far-right movements, the design caught my eye: a white flaming torch against a black background, encircled with the words ‘Active Club Midlands’ (ACM). 

That's what led to us working with the Leicester Antifascists to map over 16 covering a wide range of the city. With many around Bede Park, they have spread to St Margaret’s bus station, Abbey Park, the train station, and Great Central Way.

Active Club Midlands is one of 187 chapters of white supremacist fight clubs with ties to neo-Nazi movements across the globe. Alexander Ritzmann, senior advisor at the Counter Extremism Project, said he has “never seen a network in right wing extremism grow so fast”, and Hope Not Hate believes they are “cultivating a capacity for violence”.

How Active Clubs hide hate in plain sight

Active Clubs typically have between five and 25 members, meeting regularly for fitness and combat training in gyms and public parks. Each operates as its own decentralised entity, with no official leadership or hierarchy between groups. They primarily advertise themselves on X and TikTok, recruiting committed members through the encrypted messaging app Telegram (though ITV’s exposé reveals that some clubs are moving to the Swiss-based messaging app Threema).

It can be easy to dismiss Active Clubs as harmless fitness groups, and Ritzmann argues that this is key to the danger they represent: “To hide in plain sight, Active Clubs are supposed to present a friendly face to the public with a focus on sports and brotherhood to avoid law enforcement intervention”. Their website pushes this narrative, describing itself as “a fraternal organisation” committed to “physical fitness, self-improvement, and the building of strong and healthy communities”.

Investigations by ITV and the BBC, however, have found its members celebrating Hitler’s birthday, abusing minorities in the street, and sporting clothes referencing Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS. For anyone familiar with the fascist right, the groups make little effort to hide their true nature. Their application requirements include being a ‘Heterosexual European male’ and having a ‘Pro-White worldview’.

ACM's public Telegram channel frequently quotes Julius Evola, the self-declared “super fascist” philosopher who advised Mussolini. Its founder has described the movement as “White Nationalism 3.0”, and Ritzmann notes that its key slogans include “white unity at every opportunity” and “make fascism fun”. ITV’s undercover investigator said that meetings were “65 per cent fascism, 35 per cent fitness”, and that its members were “preparing for a future race war”.

The fastest growing form of white nationalism

Researchers have pointed to Active Clubs as one of the most troubling developments among the extreme right this decade. The network grew out of the Rise Above Movement (RAM), a fascist street fighting group turned clothing brand founded by American white supremacist Robert Rundo. In 2018, Rundo and other RAM organisers were charged with conspiracy to plan and engage in riots across America, prompting him to flee the country. Travelling to Europe until his 2023 arrest and extradition in Romania, Rundo developed the Active Club movement in the early 2020s with the Russian neo-Nazi activist Denis Kapustin.

Since then, Active Clubs have become one of the fastest growing forms of white supremacist organising in the world; the Counter Extremism Project found 187 chapters across 27 countries in 2025, up by 25 per cent from two years prior. Together, they have close links to many neo-Nazi groups, including the Hammerskins in Canada and Patriot Front in the United States.

The first UK Active Club was established in Scotland in 2023. Hope Not Hate found that key figures in the Scottish Active Club (now renamed Caledonia Club) had convictions for making bomb threats and had marched with the proscribed terror group National Action. Eight other Active Clubs have since formed around the country, including AC North West, AC South West, AC London, AC Wessex, AC Yorkshire, AC Anglia, and a youth-focused Albion Club, all united under the umbrella organisation Active Club England. In 2024, the BBC estimated that UK Active Club Telegram groups had over 6,000 subscribers, and ITV noted that membership rose to over 100 following that summer’s anti-migrant riots.

ACM's links to national and international neo-Nazis

Hope Not Hate write that the Midlands chapter, based in Newark-on-Trent, is “one of the best established in the country” and detail its links to the explicitly neo-Nazi organisation Patriotic Alternative (PA). ACM is headed by Matthew Darrington, identified by Hope Not Hate as PA’s east Midlands organiser, and the chapter acted as PA’s security at their October 2025 conference in Leicestershire. Hope Not Hate have also linked Darrington and ACM to radical fascist activists, including one member who called for the “mass assassination” of media figures and another former member of the Combat 18 terror group.

Particularly concerning is ACM’s international links. ITV uncovered Leicestershire’s Matthew Gravill, organiser of the neo-Nazi group Vanguard Britannica and a former tour guide for Buckingham Palace, as a key propagandist for Active Club England. Last September, Gravill travelled to Texas to meet Thomas Rousseau, founder of America’s neo-fascist Patriot Front, and Eric Orwoll, leader of Arkansas’ “whites only” settlement. The PA conference stewarded by AC Midlands also hosted the American white supremacist writer Jared Taylor. Pictures from the group’s Telegram channel and X account show them having recently received a delegation from Norway, suggesting the group is building associations across Europe as well as the US.

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The danger posed by this ‘standby’ militia

Leicester’s far-right is currently disorganised. The protests organised by ex-EDL member Chris Boyall and right wing auditor Paul ‘DP Audits’ Dunbar are often sparsely attended and vastly outnumbered by counter-protests. Some high-profile far-right movements have appeared around the city in recent years – Hundred Handers stickers (a PA-associated group whose organiser was found guilty of inciting racial hatred in 2024) have appeared in Clarendon Park and near De Montfort University.

This January, the fascist National Rebirth party held a stall outside the Lane 7 bowling alley – but these haven’t concretised into sustained, violent far-right movements. An Active Club chapter could change this dynamic, acting as a radicalisation training ground for the right and even providing access to neo-Nazi networks across the country and beyond.

Several Active Clubs have been tied to acts of violence and are becoming increasingly militant. In the US, an undercover FBI investigation found members associated with AC Tennessee attempting to build a paramilitary urban assault unit capable of “taking out ‘high-value targets’”. Last August, Swedish Active Club members committed a spree of racist street assaults.

In October, authorities in Germany seized a weapons stockpile held by AC members. While violent acts committed by AC England members have so far been limited, ITV’s undercover investigation into AC London found members discussing training with knives, practising archery, and the possibility of obtaining firearms. What’s more, the group is intent on building a long-term economic infrastructure for its activities, with Rundo advising members to “build real structure” by “renting dedicated gyms” and “launching businesses”.

Ritzmann considers the movement’s intent to be the creation of a ‘standby’ militia ready to commit violence supporting far-right demonstrations. In their Active Club Podcast, Rundo explains the usefulness of Active Clubs in training members for far-right militant action to Kapustin in similar terms:

Active Clubs are a great local way to start guys off as they come from the online world into the real world to learn actual skills... All skills that you learn within the Active Club are on a very local level, and when the time comes for a mass movement, right there you get a solid base that’s all over it. 

Rundo’s quote here and the appearance of ACM stickers in Leicester demonstrate that fascism is as much a local problem as a national one. It’s impossible to say yet whether these stickers are the work of an AC group with multiple members, or a lone activist.

Still, as Ritzmann writes: “If Active Clubs are allowed to continue to operate and multiply, the likelihood for targeted political violence and terrorism by their members against supposed enemies of the ‘white race’… will increase”.

In the country’s most multicultural city outside of London, with thriving Black, Asian, migrant, and queer communities, Active Club activity is a serious concern. And all of Leicester should be aware of the danger they represent.

• The identity of the author of this article is known to the editor but the name has been omitted to protect the writer.

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