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 basic concept is obviously great. You're getting too indexed on the WN angle.
Step 1: Totally de-index from any existing WN organization. It's not as if they have a patent on the core concept. We just fork the concept and refashion as we wish. Don't even use the name "Active Club." Call it "Physical Club" or something. There is no "repellent politics" that we need to deal with (very bad idea), because we just totally avoid that.
Step 2: Combine this with a book club doing good philosophy.
The barely veiled point of an Active Club is to have a group of men who are capable of projecting organized force when the opportunity arises. Socially repellent beliefs? Obviously a plus for cohesion. Includes members of the lower class? Despite the grime on your white glove, a plus. No higher philosophical core? Matters for supra-club cohesion, not for local.
Not to say it isn't a good idea to lift what's working from them, the question is if you want to maintain the telos of such a club or denude it.
>>5664 >Socially repellent beliefs? Obviously a plus for cohesion. This is a very good point.
>Includes members of the lower class? Despite the grime on your white glove, a plus. Why is this a plus? I am not reflexively against the more chuddy types, so long as they are *trustworthy* and will not get you into mud yourself. The age old saying 'lie with dogs, rise with fleas' applies here, one must be careful.
This seems like a side quest. Obviously useful to a particular individual to have a mannerbund like this, but hard to scale this sort of mannerbund to even local political power.
Or boxing rather than prizefighting - originally, "boxing" and "fencing" were generic Englishbterms for unarmed and melee weapon fighting, respectively, that then became specialized to their sport contexts as firearms became the professional martial substrate. See, for example, the history of the transition from sport boxing that allowed chancery (grappling holds), to pure gloved striking.
Jiu-jitsu is fine for learning what to do in the terrible situation that one finds oneself on the ground, but it is important to learn how to do almost anything else to avoid being there, which most schools do not teach.
For those interested in converting this discussion into an actionable MVP, I will be at the Ferry Building entrance on Thursday 6am (Oct 29). At 6:15am I plan to jog along Embarcadero before work. Maybe jogging isn't quite what everyone has in mind for a steady-state active club, but for a first pass at this, I'm prioritizing simplicity.
Maybe finding this message on this thread is a workable filter. Pls upvote to show interest, and I look forward to seeing fellow anons.
Update: I didn't realize muni starts as late as 6am. I should be there in a few minutes. 6:15 departure still holds (unless someone asks me to hold up on here); I'll be in a black t shirt.
Don't want to be disrespectful and derail this thread, but its not terribly off topic: heijo.org is a site similar to this one, and I would appreciate this userbase interacting with it. If someone with more credibility wants to take a look and consider making an actual post, I would appreciate it.
Why would you want to replicate the structure if you don't share the ideological framing and goals? Speaking personally as someone who has been involved in multiple groups of this kind, I think you're cargo-culting it.
The purpose of the active-club model is to have a way to induct and maintain an activist base for confrontational street politics. The absolute platinum-standard for it was/is in Australia, where the National Socialist Network tied together a mandatory active-club fitness regime with uniformed and disciplined public-facing protests and media activity. Until their recent ban by the federal government (which they are currently contesting in the High Court), they dominated the Australian news-cycle with constant widely-publicised activities and successfully grew large enough to legally register and form a national political party (this is a remarkable achievement in a country that places very significant burdens on the registration of political parties, e.g. requiring literally thousands of registered members - imagine the difficulty of signing up >2,000 people to formally join an NS party!). In the US, the active clubs are largely an associated feeder for Patriot Front, although their structural relationship is a bit unclear to me. In both cases, the value of the active-club is derived from particular kinds of mass, public-facing activity that it facilitates - your apparent goal, which seems to be some sort of 'elite' (Thielite resume-polisher / current thing-worship) networking, is not well-facilitated by the model.
*If* you have the tied political goals of forcing White racial consciousness into the mainstream through provocative street politics while also creating/growing a mass activist infrastructure and networked community capable of providing backup employment to activists, generating revenue for political activities, linking professional talent to the political network etc, then the active-club model is advantageous, for the following reasons: >Its regular meetings allow for retention and social engagement between members without becoming either an unhealthy/undisciplined obligatory drinking session (one common pitfall of IRL political meetings), or a long consultative meeting in which every attendee expects to 'weigh in' on the political strategy of the group irrespective of the value of their opinion (another common pitfall); >Its physical challenge element and the requirement of maintaining and continuing one's physical progress serves to filter out non-serious dabblers, physically unimpressive people (who present an optics issue as well as a cohesion issue), people who can't keep to a routine, people who can't stand to be punched in the face (i.e. fearful or excessively haughty types, who tend to poison a group's morale), and various other categories of net-negative contributors to IRL organising; >It ensures that the group maintains a high enough basic standard re fighting skills that it can't be embarrassed by being physically attacked during marches and demonstrations (this is a huge deal optically) - in fact, attempts by the left to physically attack marches/demonstrations will end up producing propaganda for the marchers as the leftists will tend to be brutally beaten and forced back (see, e.g. the NSN's Melbourne MFA march, in which they were attacked by a large group of Antifa fighters and beat them to a pulp on camera); >It provides a couple of vectors by which involvement in the organisation can grant actual improvement in the lives of the people involved in it - they (accurately and truthfully) see themselves becoming stronger and fitter, making friends, and gaining in confidence; >The friendly competitive environment fosters a spirit of discipline and excellence that carries over into the activism, working against the tendency seen elsewhere to 'half-ass' things like banners/slogans, uniforms, etc etc - consider how many radical right-wing groups have historically been mocked for their visual sloppiness or lack of cohesion.
Now, all of these things are benefits if you're >A, trying to pursue mass-politics, and >B, doing so without the benefit of a friendly media apparatus. If your goals fit both of these conditions, then the only way you can create a significant impact on the public consciousness is through *earned publicity* from a hostile media apparatus, then the (apparent) best way to do this is through aggressive large-scale political stunts. For this, you need the kind of activist base drawn from the masses that the active-club model provides, retains and refines. If you're interested in having some sort of politically-ambiguous Nietzschean sekrit klub for BASED epik 'elites', why would you lock yourself into a model that is built towards completely different goals? You can see that active clubs/WN 3.0 attract muscular in-shape guys, which for you is a positive value-signifier, and you think >"hmm, maybe if I replicate the model I can hang out with guys like this", in the same way that a 60IQ New Guinean sees American cargo planes delivering tins of spam and thinks >"hmm, maybe if I build a runway and make wicker models of planes, John Frum will return from the skies to give me more cargo".
Before you start toying with ideas about organisation, it's very important to clearly understand your own goals and what relationship those will have with the structure of your activities.
NB: Whoops, I mistyped - in my second post, when I wrote "[...] *then* the (apparent) best way to do this is through aggressive large-scale political stunts", I meant "*and* the (apparent) best way to do this[...]".
I might add a more helpful note, since reading back, I feel that I may have admonished you excessively. If what you're looking to do is essentially create a network of personally ambitious but politically cautious types on the basis of a shared intellectual interest in Nietzsche - the word I would use for such a milieu is 'nerds' - then I'm sure you'll want to examine the ways in which the LessWrong/Rationalist/EA community already succeeded in a project of effectively networking nerds with shared philosophical interests and temperament, and then transforming that network into a remarkably potent force in certain areas of politics and the economy (I shouldn't need to tell you how impactful people like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Dario Amodei and at one point Sam Bankman-Fried have been over the last decade).
Your best bet is probably to emulate them - they started with blogs, which fed into online forums and discussion groups, which fostered (and continue to foster) occasional IRL social meetups in major metros, startup hubs and university/college towns. If you can develop a lively enough community to attract and integrate enough startup talent and some capital, you can then move into shared business ventures and possibly the foundation space, as they did - the difference, of course, is that Effective Altruism is a philosophy that panders to the existing moral consensus, and thus cannot be as easily undone by investigative journalism and hitpieces. Even more than they already do, you will want to lean into *informal* association and networking rather than structured, systematic organising. The major pitfall of this is that you will have almost no way to filter out milquetoast safe-edgy types, who will gradually transform your group into a tedious, safe exercise in Silicon Valley self-promotion (cf. Praxis) - this is a problem for you to solve, and I won't pretend I have the answer.
Essentially, your goal is >How do I get the next Peter Thiel into my deeply bonded social network of pleb-haters? The goal the active-club is optimised for is >How do we get 10,000 blackshirts/SA-men to form the basis for a mass radical political party?
Having discussed the active-club model extensively with people who are involved in them at a high level around the world, our shared conclusion was/is that the only non-WN groups that would derive any value from adopting it would be Maoists and socially-conservative Marxist-Leninists.
