anon_qijo said in #5662 8h ago:
A fellow sofer put me onto the "Active Club" idea: form a squad of guys to hold each other to a standard of handsome fitness, meet up and hike and practice boxing, talk politics, build brotherhood, make propaganda videos to promote your crew, and so on. It's like a book club for the body. How wholesome! Our forefathers would be proud. Then I googled it. It's a White Nationalist thing, and not in the implicit or ambiguous way, but the full on black bloc wearing celtic cross black flag militant type. Still, I thought y'all might be interested in a quick report on the model.
The reputation of "WN 1.0" is pretty bad. Low class, flabby, rude, undisciplined, and mostly futile. Movement founder Robert Rundo calls their new aesthetic "3.0 style". The Spencerite alt-right is presumably "2.0". His 3.0 style emphasizes fitness, being clean cut and handsome, and cultivating a tight street-fashion black bloc style inspired by a more cultured sort of European football hooliganism. Supporting the aesthetic is Rundo's "Will to Rise" clothing brand, that sells clothing in the style and other merch to the whole movement, which is otherwise fully decentralized. It's a clever model, and the clean stylized fasces logo is aesthetic on a polo.
Rundo's vision of muscular handsome clean cut white guys becoming synonymous with nationalism is complicated by the unfortunate reality of the kind of guys motivated and willing to associate themselves with the world's most suppressed ideology. It's bleak out there for the average American white guy and the overt WN politics filters a lot of functional people, leaving them with tough material to forge an aesthetic powerhouse out of. Still, an environment of discipline can do wonderful things with basically decent genetic material, so they actually do manage to make a pretty good aesthetic showing. But perusing their propaganda one still sees a lot of tattoos and the same old class problem.
Active Club is the "It's OK to be white" of nationalist organizing. There's no confrontational aspect, they don't protest, they don't pick fights, don't interact with normies as a group, and don't make demands. It's literally just white guys getting together to box and hike and improve each other, but *as white guys*. "Make nationalism a habit rather than an idea" says Rundo. The other half of the model is the propaganda. The different chapters compete to be the coolest, strongest, and most aesthetic, posting pictures and videos at each other like skater crews. That's the only way you'd really notice them, usually on Telegram (they mostly get banned on X). This doesn't stop them from being called terrorists by the usual suspects on the grounds that white men training fighting sports must really be planning attacks, but that's just more hysteria.
The physical discipline is simple: members check in 3 times a week with evidence that they are physically improving themselves. This keeps lurkers engaged, combats the tyranny of the extremely online, and enforces the habit. Then at their occasional meetups they fight and do collective calisthenics to establish the fitness standards and motivational status hierarchy. Simple but could be effective.
There's not that much that can be done against a private anonymous cell-structured movement of clubs that are just working out together, especially since Trump shut down most of the nazi-baiting beat at the FBI and SPLC and politically inclined whites have been shifting more racialist. This could of course reverse, but for now the environment is getting riper for this sort of thing to grow.
I think a "higher class" more "esoteric" version of this would be really cool. Make it about nietzschean philosophy rather than white nationalism, jiu jitsu rather than boxing, and it might be able to pull serious weight. On the other hand, the repellent politics might be a necessary shared sacrifice. What do you guys think?
The reputation of "WN 1.0" is pretty bad. Low class, flabby, rude, undisciplined, and mostly futile. Movement founder Robert Rundo calls their new aesthetic "3.0 style". The Spencerite alt-right is presumably "2.0". His 3.0 style emphasizes fitness, being clean cut and handsome, and cultivating a tight street-fashion black bloc style inspired by a more cultured sort of European football hooliganism. Supporting the aesthetic is Rundo's "Will to Rise" clothing brand, that sells clothing in the style and other merch to the whole movement, which is otherwise fully decentralized. It's a clever model, and the clean stylized fasces logo is aesthetic on a polo.
Rundo's vision of muscular handsome clean cut white guys becoming synonymous with nationalism is complicated by the unfortunate reality of the kind of guys motivated and willing to associate themselves with the world's most suppressed ideology. It's bleak out there for the average American white guy and the overt WN politics filters a lot of functional people, leaving them with tough material to forge an aesthetic powerhouse out of. Still, an environment of discipline can do wonderful things with basically decent genetic material, so they actually do manage to make a pretty good aesthetic showing. But perusing their propaganda one still sees a lot of tattoos and the same old class problem.
Active Club is the "It's OK to be white" of nationalist organizing. There's no confrontational aspect, they don't protest, they don't pick fights, don't interact with normies as a group, and don't make demands. It's literally just white guys getting together to box and hike and improve each other, but *as white guys*. "Make nationalism a habit rather than an idea" says Rundo. The other half of the model is the propaganda. The different chapters compete to be the coolest, strongest, and most aesthetic, posting pictures and videos at each other like skater crews. That's the only way you'd really notice them, usually on Telegram (they mostly get banned on X). This doesn't stop them from being called terrorists by the usual suspects on the grounds that white men training fighting sports must really be planning attacks, but that's just more hysteria.
The physical discipline is simple: members check in 3 times a week with evidence that they are physically improving themselves. This keeps lurkers engaged, combats the tyranny of the extremely online, and enforces the habit. Then at their occasional meetups they fight and do collective calisthenics to establish the fitness standards and motivational status hierarchy. Simple but could be effective.
There's not that much that can be done against a private anonymous cell-structured movement of clubs that are just working out together, especially since Trump shut down most of the nazi-baiting beat at the FBI and SPLC and politically inclined whites have been shifting more racialist. This could of course reverse, but for now the environment is getting riper for this sort of thing to grow.
I think a "higher class" more "esoteric" version of this would be really cool. Make it about nietzschean philosophy rather than white nationalism, jiu jitsu rather than boxing, and it might be able to pull serious weight. On the other hand, the repellent politics might be a necessary shared sacrifice. What do you guys think?
A fellow sofer put m