Active Youth Clubs: Mentoring the Next Generation of Far-Right Extremists
Screenshot from the Atlantic Youth Club chat highlighting the response to the murder of Austin Metrcalf - from Revontulet Collections.
In response to the federal charges against his Rise Against Movement (RAM), Robert Rundo went on to create the Active Club model, also frequently referred to as “White Nationalism 3.0.” Will2Rise serves as the Active Club merchandising brand and is often worn by Patriot Front and other neo-Nazi groups around the world. As Active Clubs continue to widen their footprint around the globe, including clubs recently established in South America, our team has identified a new emergent threat: Active Youth Clubs in the United States targeting minors.
Active Clubs and their Affiliates
Patriot Front, founded in 2021 by Thomas Rousseau, works and organizes closely with Active Clubs in their respective regions. If an Active Club has not been locally organized, young men looking to join are often encouraged to apply to Patriot Front instead. While no strict hierarchy of organization is publicized, it is clear through social media presence that Active Clubs, Patriot Front, and local White Lives Matter groups share membership and collaborate for offline events, such as demonstrations.
White Lives Matter consists of loosely formed regional groups that hold demonstrations and engage in propaganda dissemination through flyering, stickering, and holding large banners on street corners or overpasses. The primary message of White Lives Matter is exactly that: White Lives Matter, while other lives matter less. These forms of propaganda are encouraged in Active Clubs and Patriot Front.
Creating a Pipeline for the Next Generation of White Supremacists
Active Clubs and Patriot Front do not allow minors to participate, so Youth Clubs have been created as another radicalization pipeline. These Youth Clubs adhere to both Active Club and Patriot Front models of activism, instilling White Nationalist principles, but do not appear to publicly encourage overtly illegal activity, with the exception of mild vandalism: Youth Clubs are engaging with offline propaganda through stickering. This effort to recruit the next generation of extremists has been tested before by Patriot Front with the recently-deplatformed “Patriot Youth” effort to reach younger individuals through the gaming platform, Roblox.
Aesthetically, Youth Clubs in the United States maintain the standard Celtic cross design of Active Club logos, but carry the color scheme and font choices of Patriot Front, yet another indication of the close relationship between the two organizations. The Youth Club network has already shown steep growth over a few weeks, suggesting they could potentially act as a conduit for membership into the adult version of Active Clubs and Patriot Front as well.
At the time of writing, Youth Clubs in the United States have groups in the following regions:
New England Region (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, and New Hampshire)
Atlantic Region (New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania)
Chesapeake Region (Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and Washington, DC)
Deep South Region (Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama)
Midwest Region (Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana)
Great Plains Region (Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North and South Dakota)
Rocky Mountain Region (Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah)
Great Lakes Region (Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin)
State-based clubs in California, Texas, and Pennsylvania that maintain enough members to function outside of a regional structure.
Both Active Clubs and Patriot Front look to capitalize on the growing number of disaffected teens and young men in a time of social, political, and economic chaos, pushing their “tribe and train” model of activism, which involves gathering with fellow white men for self-defense training, aimed at protecting themselves and what they see as the white race during what they believe is a current crisis in society. This creates an insular movement that can lead to further radicalization into extremism. While Youth Clubs follow the Active Club model, it has been established that Active Clubs and Patriot Front have crossover in their membership and organizing.
On the surface, Youth Clubs appear to be a safe space to allow young white men to gather, but these clubs are rife with racism, white supremacism, and White Nationalist ideals. However, it is important to note that Active Clubs are accelerationist in nature, and their underlying goal is to train and prepare for a race war.
Exploiting Tragedies
The April 2025 killing of Austin Metcalf has created more moments for radicalization as social unrest widens. Metcalf, a 17-year-old white honor student, was fatally stabbed by Karmelo Anthony, a Black student, during a high school track meet in Frisco, Texas. The incident began as a seating dispute where Anthony allegedly stabbed Metcalf after being told to leave a team tent.
Following the murder, white nationalist groups seized on the incident as a rallying poin, taking the narrative of the killing as their cause célèbre to push radicalization narratives into mainstream media. The hashtag #WhiteLivesMatter trended after Metcalf's death, and white nationalist groups have distributed propaganda materials featuring the incident.
Jeff Metcalf, Austin’s father, has explicitly rejected these narratives, telling one "Protect White Americans" organizer "You're trying to create more race divide than bridging the gap." The refusal of Jeff Metcalf to “make it all about race” has shifted the tone in explicitly accelerationist groups, who are expressing great anger and resentment towards both the alleged perpetrator, Karmelo Anthony, and Jeff Metcalf, the victim’s father.
Youth Clubs have shared propaganda videos and posts from Patriot Front regarding the killing of Austin Metcalf, signalling that Youth Clubs intend to follow the other groups by attempting to wrench the narrative from the family of both the accused and the victim, and instead turn it into a rallying cry for young, disaffected white men.