Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
A male-only movement in the U.S. dressed up as a sports club catering to white men is taking over the right-wing social scene—and promising some dangerous results.
These so-called “Active Clubs” are now recruiting across the United States, according to Alexander Ritzmann, a Berlin-based senior adviser who co-authored the report “Hiding in Plain Sight–The Transnational Right-Wing Extremist Active Club Network,” which was released last month and highlighted in Rolling Stone.
ADVERTISEMENT
The clubs advertise as sporting groups designated for white-only men, but their real objective, Ritzmann tells The New Abnormal, “is to essentially train a white supremacist militia.”
Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast.
“They are preparing to become a shadow militia, a violent group that is ready to commit large-scale targeted violence in a so-called ‘Day X’ scenario.”
Ritzmann says he spent five months researching “Active Clubs,” which are the brainchild of white supremacist Robert Rundo of Orange County, California.
He says “Day X” could look similar to the events at the Capitol on Jan. 6, but adds of the rioters, “they have [been] discussed as being a bunch of idiots who don’t know how to storm a building properly. And they discuss this in a, let’s say, indirect way, because they don’t want law enforcement to focus on them.”
Plus! NBC News Justice reporter Ryan Reilly joins the show to talk about his new book, Sedition Hunters: How January 6th Broke the Justice System, and his research uncovering the online sleuths who helped identify the culprits involved in the Jan. 6 riots.
