‘Family Friendly’ Gym Training Partner Identified as Alleged Neo-Nazi

A Tennessee grappling school says it has banned an alleged white supremacist, who reportedly claimed he travels the U.S. teaching martial arts to other right-wing extremists, from its “family friendly” facility after The Daily Beast revealed he was training there.

Ian Michael Elliott was previously a senior member of the regional chapter of the neo-fascist hate group Patriot Front, according to the Alabama Political Reporter. According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, “Patriot Front’s ideology is built on the perception that White American culture and heritage are under threat from multiple angles and are facing complete annihilation if no action is taken... It can be classified as a neo-fascist hate group that is organized around the goal of preserving white American identity.”

Athens Jiu Jitsu, based in Tennessee, said it was “proud” to have Elliott “as a training partner and friend” in a March Facebook post that praised his performance at a tournament in Louisville, Kentucky.

The school’s website extols its “safe, clean, family friendly, fun & affordable environment in which to learn and grow,” adding that “the best time to start Jiu-jitsu is 4 yrs old.” Images on its website and posted to its social media show dozens of young children and adolescents in attendance.

But other images and videos posted by the school as early as October 2023 and as recently as last month show Elliott, one of several alleged far-right extremists who reportedly participated in white nationalist fight clubs in Nashville last year, training with its members. One video, posted to the school’s Instagram page on July 23 and set to the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” shows him grappling with several others.

Three days after this article was published, and after initially not replying to multiple requests for comment, the school said in an emailed statement that Elliott “has been told not to come back to our facility.”

“We were unaware of his background and any beliefs he holds like that are not, in any way, aligned with ours,” the statement reads. “We are a diverse school. We do not have the resources to do background checks on people. We can only address what we know of. We knew nothing of his past.”

The Nashville fight clubs Elliott participated in last year were reportedly put on by the Tennessee chapter of the white supremacist Active Club movement, a loosely connected network of combat training cells with ties to neo-Nazi groups.

A report published last year by the Counter Extremism Project described Active Clubs as a “stand-by militia of trained and capable [right-wing extremists] who can be activated when the need for coordinated violent action on a larger scale arises.”

“I don’t see how you can be family friendly and associated with a dedicated white supremacist like Ian Elliott,” said Jeff Tischauser, a senior researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center who studies far-right movements. “A lot of these Active Club guys are using local mixed martial arts gyms as a recruiting ground. They’re trying to bring their ideology into those spaces and recruit teenagers and adults to try and pull them into their white supremacist worldview.”

“Any talk or ‘recruitment’ never took place at our school,” said Athens Jiu-Jitsu, in its statement.

It is unclear if Elliott has trained with any underage students at the school, but in one picture, taken at the same Louisville tournament earlier this year, he can be seen posing alongside other members and two young children.

The tournament, one in a series called the Chewjitsu Open, is affiliated with Nick “Chewy” Albin, a popular martial arts influencer based in Louisville who has nearly 170,000 Instagram followers. Albin even presented Elliott with a $100 award and novelty belt for winning his category at the February event, which he, the tournament, and Athens Jiu-Jitsu all shared on social media.

Albin did not reply to requests for comment via e-mail and Instagram message. The Chewjitsu Open, which also caters to school-aged children, did not reply to requests for comment via their Facebook page or via an e-mail sent to the contact person listed on their website. Albin and the Chewjitsu Open both deleted images of Elliott on their social media after this article was published.

Elliott, meanwhile, has reportedly stated his desire to spread the cause of hate through martial arts in the past. “I spend most of my time traveling, and training, with White Nationalists,” he wrote in leaked Telegram messages that were published by an Atlanta-based antifascist blog in 2021.

Formed in Texas in the aftermath of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Patriot Front is the most prolific distributor of racist, antisemitic, and hate propaganda in the United States, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Of the 7,500 cases of hate propaganda distribution documented by the ADL last year, 60 percent were done by Patriot Front.

“The Patriot Front manifesto explicitly states that membership to the American nation is inherited through blood, emphasizing the movement’s ethnonationalist understanding of identity,” notes the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

Elliott reportedly stepped down from the group sometime after his white nationalist activities were first revealed in 2021. Huntsville, Alabama-based grappling gym Triad Martial Arts, where Elliott previously trained, is reported to have stripped him of all ranks and expelled him.

“He is a major player in one of the most hostile and aggressive white power networks in the country, in a region around southern Tennessee and Northern Alabama and into Georgia and South Carolina that includes overlapping neofascist, neo-Nazi and other far-right extremist groups,” added Tischauser, the SPLC researcher.

Evidence suggests that Elliott has retained links with the white nationalist community at the same time as apparently training with “family friendly” Athens Jiu-Jitsu. The Daily Beast found images of him training earlier this month with Devotion Jiu Jitsu, a Virginia-based grappling school affiliated with the neo-fascist hate group Wolves of Vinland. Members of the Wolves of Vinland have been convicted of attempting to burn down a historic black church and plotting to rob a bank. They were posted to Devotion’s Telegram account.

Devotion also recently congratulated Elliott on its X page for winning at a tournament it held earlier this month, which was said to include an afterparty with bare-knuckle fights.

One of the images on Athens Jiu Jitsu’s Facebook page featuring Elliott even shows him wearing a uniform that bears a Devotion logo at the school. A YouTube video posted by the far-right-affiliated Virginia grappling school shows similar logos visible at their gym.

Athens, the seat of McMinn County, is a city of 14,000 located between Knoxville and Chattanooga. Athens Jiujitsu has approximately 1,200 followers on Facebook.