Last Saturday in Highland Park, a man walked into a local shop with white power tattoos and a t-shirt for “Aggravated Assault,” a 1990s white power band notorious for racist lyrics and violent skinhead fans.
A witness said the man told the staff that he was waiting for his girlfriend. He bought a beer and left, returned, lingered, and then left again.
The next day, a woman entered the same shop, bought a pack of Marlboros and when the employee handed her change, he noticed “White Power” tattooed across her chest in cryptic gothic script, along with SS lightning bolts and a rune on her neck.
These sightings in Highland Park connect to a pattern of hate group activity spiking in and around L.A.
Far-right extremists in places like the Inland Empire and San Diego are staging high-profile “active club” rallies. And in Orange County, some of the same networks are harassing local officials and holding open recruiting sessions in taxpayer-funded public rooms. All while the federal government cuts agencies meant to counter extremism and reclassifies swastikas from recognized symbols of hate to “potentially divisive.”
At an Irvine City Council meeting in August, neo-Nazi agitators led by Nick Taurus targeted District 5 councilmember Betty Martinez Franco, the first Latina to represent the district, which is about one-third Latino.
Taurus and his group shouted anti-immigrant slurs and tried to disrupt the meeting, confronting Martinez Franco over her “chinga tu migra” shirt. The incident went viral on social media and Reddit, but wasn’t reported in the news.
The Irvine Tolerance Coalition called Taurus and his crew’s actions “disgraceful and unworthy of our city,” adding, “Disagreement is part of democracy—bigotry is not.”
Just a few weeks before that, Taurus and the same group of white nationalists disrupted a Costa Mesa City Council session by shouting “ICE” and “We love ICE” at residents who had come to ask their city leaders to protect their undocumented neighbors. Eventually, police escorted Taurus and his posse out to the street after continued interruptions.
More recently, Taurus and Ryan Sanchez (infamous for his Nazi salute at CPAC) have been hosting recurring white nationalist events at the Laguna Hills Community Center. Invitations are distributed via social media.
Online video of these events show speakers spreading racist conspiracy theories.
Laguna Hills residents and civil rights groups have complained, but the community center says its hands are tied by the First Amendment, despite a signed administrative order forbidding “racism, hatred,” and the “promotion of illegal acts” in the center. At the time of this article, these events are ongoing, with events scheduled this week and more through December.
L.A. TACO reached out to the city. We simply wanted to know if these meetings don’t count as “racism, hatred, or the promotion of illegal acts,” then what does?
City Attorney Gregory Simonian’s office replied that they have “no knowledge of any meetings or events for the purposes alleged,” and said enforcement of the order is up to law enforcement and city management.
As of publication, law enforcement and city management have not responded to our questions.
To understand how these events connect, L.A. TACO spoke with Hannah Gais, a senior analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center who tracks extremist activity.
Hannah told us that Ryan Sanchez “has connections to pretty hardcore white supremacist groups,” including the Rise Above Movement, Patriot Front, and local active clubs.
She said that Sanchez acts as a bridge between mainstream conservative organizations, like CPAC and Turning Point USA, and more militant white supremacist groups. He is “able to move between these spaces” and bring local extremists into the broader network.
She explained that Sanchez, alongside agitators like Nick Taurus, are all part of what researchers and activists refer to as “the movement,” a loose network of white supremacist and far-right actors coordinating across the country.
And in the last few years, this “movement” has been accelerated by the rapid growth of active clubs across Southern California.
Hannah told us that active clubs have attracted both younger recruits and veterans from groups like Patriot Front and other racist skinhead crews, “reigniting segments of the white supremacist movement that had faded after Charlottesville.”
Active clubs are outwardly disguised as fitness or boxing clubs; but in reality, they are part of a national and international neo-Nazi network used to radicalize members, promote extremist ideology, and train for coordinated violence.
Founding members of these active clubs call themselves “White Nationalism 3.0,” a reference to their perceived failure at the January 6th Capitol assault and as motivation to be better prepared the next time.
Their stated goal is to form a “shadow or stand-by militia . . . that can be activated when the need for coordinated violent action on a larger scale arises.”
Hannah said the danger of active clubs is both “overestimated and underestimated,” the idea that these guys could form fully trained white-supremist paramilitary is far-fetched, but the documented violence of lone actors, assaulting protestors, carrying out vandalism, and in some cases, committing deadly attacks, should be taken very seriously.
This August, an Inland Empire Active Club hosted a recurring event known as a “fight night.”
Fight nights are equal parts MMA match and neo-Nazi pep rally. Inside, Nazi hardcore bands play and ring fights take place beneath banners of affiliated groups. MCs and speakers deliver rageful anti-immigrant and anti-minority speeches between rounds.
Then in September, Bellingcat reported a fight night in San Diego, identifying violent extremist groups, including Hammerskins and Patriot Front. Members of these groups have committed some of the most foul hate crimes in recent times. A Hammerskin member linked to the Wisconsin Sikh temple massacre and Patriot Front has repeatedly been arrested for conspiracy to riot and violent assaults at public events.
Just days after the San Diego fight night, we saw an Active Club carry out a violent act.
Members of the SoCal Active Club joined roughly one hundred people at the Charlie Kirk vigil at the Huntington Beach Pier. Ryan Sanchez introduced dozens of members of SoCal Active Club and Patriot Front, who marched in white masks, carrying racist banners and flags.
Video then shows several men in SoCal Active Club shirts jumping a man who called them ‘un-American.’ He was punched, kicked, and stomped, as some of the crowd cheered.
Witnesses at the event told us Sanchez and the Active club were recruiting hard, they even saw kids holding flyers given to them by club members that read, “WHITE MAN FIGHT BACK! GET INVOLVED TODAY,” with QR codes leading to nationalist and racist websites.
In 2020, a U.S. intelligence report identified Racially Motivated Violent Extremism (RMVE) as the number one domestic terror threat.
Despite that warning, the Trump administration has been steadily dismantling the agencies that track these threats. Agencies like CP3, the main federal defense for domestic terrorism and the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Operations Section, as well as national databases for tracking domestic terrorism.
And many of their agents have been reassigned to DHS agencies like ICE and CBP.
The government has even severed ties with hate-watch and civil rights groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, which provided analysis for this article.
Just today, the Washington Post published documents showing the Coast Guard will no longer classify swastikas and nooses as hate symbols, downgrading them to “potentially divisive.”
The swastika is the most widely recognized hate symbol in the world, while the noose is directly associated with over 4,400 documented racial terror lynchings of Black Americans across 12 Southern states, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.
We circled back to the Highland Park sightings and the harassment of the Latina councilmember and asked what the best thing we can do to counter the rise of hate groups.
Hannah says our best defense is journalism.
“Journalism can’t get us out of a society-wide predicament, per se, but it is the main tool we have for exposing these extremists and their connections for who they are,” she told L.A. TACO. ”Ultimately, continuing to expose these guys is the way to go.”
The Highland Park shop reached out to us because they wanted to protect their neighbors. If you spot hate or intimidation anywhere in your neighborhood, don’t dismiss it as a one-off. Let us know.
Quotes from Active White Supremacist Clubs
“If you are not willing to take the initiative to engage in simple actions, such as placing a sticker, boxing or participating in a hike with an Active Club, what leads you to believe you would ever have the courage to ‘storm the Bastille’? Embracing risk is essential for meaningful change. Risk is the currency of revolution.” — “White Lad Aesthetics,” an Active Club-affiliated Telegram channel, March 20, 2025
“Lot of talk of being the most ‘radical’ and ‘optics’ but if you don’t have grainy black and white footage stabbing ms13 gangbangers or smashing antifa you might be the optics cuck [laughing emoji] [laughing emoji] [laughing emoji] [laughing emoji]” — Robert Rundo, in a post on Telegram, March 13, 2023
“Awaking [sic] the racial bonds between kin and engaging in shared fitness activities, sweating, and bleeding together, taking the risks of doing banner drops and long nights of stickering and sharing in the thrill and excitement of it all. These elements create brothers. It also becomes a duty to look out for one another.” — Robert Rundo, in a post on Telegram, Nov. 7, 2022
The above quotes were found on The Southern Poverty Law Center's website.
