Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, September 21st, 2025.

U.S. born extremism is on the rise and spreading beyond our borders.

The U.S.-based Active Club Network is now taking root across the globe.

Active Clubs are one of the latest iterations of extremist groups

blending physical training such as mixed martial arts with fascism.

What led to the creation of these clubs that used something as innocuous, as fitness,

as a recruitment tool for teaching hate? Joining me to discuss her research into the Active

Club Network is Heidi Byrick, Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of the Global Project

Against Hate and Extremism. Thanks for joining me, Heidi.

Oh, I'm so glad to be here.

Thank you.

I want to start by defining what active clubs are.

And is it clear to those who join these clubs,

what they're about, or do they represent themselves

as something else only to later lure members

into the world of extremism.

And so active clubs were conceptualized by two prominent neo-Nazis, one in American named Robert Rundo, and another, Dennis Kempudson, he's a neo-Nazi from Russia. And both of these guys have long histories of involvement in neo-Nazi activity.

And the idea was to create something that would be decentralized. So you'd have a bunch of

little clubs all over the planet, basically, that would engage in neo-Nazi propagandizing and the

kinds of fitness things you mentioned. And the key to this

was that it would be decentralized. In other words, there wouldn't be one headquarters, one place

that, for example, law enforcement could target or investigate and that you would build power,

...