Fort Worth's New Nazi Fight Club

Leading members of white nationalist group Patriot Front have launched or joined a new neo-Nazi fight club in north central Texas. They're calling it the Lone Star Active Club. Video posted to Telegram by the active club shows them training and sparring in a Fort Worth park and partying at a rental house on Eagle Mountain Lake.

Like Patriot Front, Lone Star Active Club blurs the faces of most members in photographs and videos, in an attempt to prevent them from being identified. But Thomas Ryan Rousseau, the founder and leader of Patriot Front, appears in the active club's first video with his face unblurred. So does Kieran Padraig Morris, a Patriot Front member who has lived and may still live with Rousseau in Haslet, TX.

Morris also appears, face unblurred, in photos posted to the active club's Telegram channel, which was created on July 12, 2024. This may suggest that he created or leads the group, although this has not been confirmed.

Last year, Morris was convicted of conspiracy to riot and given one year of unsupervised probation by an Idaho judge. The conviction stems from the 2022 arrests of 31 Patriot Front members, including Rousseau, while on their way to disrupt a pride event in Coeur d’Alene. Rousseau had his charges dismissed in February, 2024. He is, however, still on the hook for a felony in Virginia dating to the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville that claimed the life of antifascist protester Heather Heyer. Just after getting his charges dismissed in Idaho, Rousseau was re-arrested on a charge of burning an object with the intent to intimidate for his participation in the nighttime torch march.

Since the 2022 arrests in Idaho, Patriot Front has preferred flash demonstrations that see them marching through cities like Austin, TX, and Nashville, TN, with no warning and little resistance. Publicly associating themselves with an active club may mean that Patriot Front members plan to step up confrontational behavior, and even street fights, in the near future.

The white supremacist active club movement is an example of what antifascist researchers and neo-Nazis themselves call "leaderless resistance." While the idea for active clubs can be traced back to Robert Rundo, they operate as independent small "cells" linked together by ideology and aesthetics. This contrasts the operations of Patriot Front, which are controlled and overseen by Thomas Rousseau fairly directly.

Despite the differences in organizational structure, there has always been some overlap between Patriot Front and the active club movement, including financial ties. As the Southern Poverty Law Center has noted:

While the relationship between Rousseau and Rundo is unclear, a high-ranking member in Patriot Front created a banking account for the online business with a Texas bank according to the leaked banking application. In the application, the expected monthly revenue is listed as $10,000, with an estimated average order of $80. According to a report released by Task Force Butler, a group of U.S. veterans opposed to fascism, any time a member uses Patriot Front branded merchandise to destroy property to intimidate minority groups, Rousseau could face legal liability under federal laws that prohibit financing of terrorism and conspiracy.

Patriot Front and Rundo's Will2Rise also recently co-hosted a neo-Nazi fight night at Fuhrmann Hall at the Heritage Park Events Center in Muenster, TX. The event location was kept secret until antifascist researchers were able to identify it based on video and photos from the event.

But the new Lone Star Active Club, prominently promoting Kieran Morris's participation, may mark an increasingly public connection between the two groups.

It also demonstrates that white supremacists increasingly see Fort Worth as a place to recruit, train, party, and hold public events.

Reporter Steven Monacelli identified an active club operating out of Parker County, just west of Fort Worth, earlier this year. That active club has since disbanded, with some members joining the San Antonio-area Alamo Active Club. Now, white supremacists in the Metroplex have a closer Nazi fight club to join.

Lone Star Active Club's promotional video unabashedly shows them conducting fight training in at least one public park in Fort Worth. The same video features multiple scenes of a party held at a rental house on Eagle Mountain Lake, located just after Boat Club Road splits off from FM 1220. Details of the house shown in the video, including boat docks, the concrete edging of the slough, a wooden swing on the end of the house's dock, and the second floor patio's metal railing, ceiling fans, and doors, match the photos for the rental listing.

These scenes may look like normal lakeside fun, but a second glance shows signs of the hate and violence that Patriot Front and active clubs promote, even in private. A man stands on the dock wearing a shirt from the Muenster, TX, neo-Nazi fight night event. The rental house patio is adorned with a Patriot Front flag that features a fasces (the origin of the word "fascism"). At another point in the video, partygoers goad their dogs into ripping apart a rainbow pride flag.