Last weekend was a busy one for SoCal Active Club and Clockwork Crew, with wannabe mixed martial artists from both neo-nazi groups participating in separate MMA tournaments.
On Saturday, August 24, SoCal Active Club sponsored their third annual punch and kick fest in the Inland Empire. Down in the Imperial Valley, Clockwork Crew’s co-founder got his clock cleaned (again) in his third bout on the amateur circuit.
NEO-NAZIS, WHITE NATIONALISTS AND RACIST SKINHEADS CONVERGE ON SOCAL FOR ANNUAL FASCIST FIGHT NIGHT
Members of various active clubs, Patriot Front, Western Hammerskins, and other hate groups came together from across the country (and some from as far as Canada) for “Frontier ’24”, the third annual fascist fight tournament sponsored by SoCal Active Club (SCAC).
The event was the fourth “combat sports tournament” to take place under the Will2Rise (W2R) banner, and the fifth organized, euro-style fascist fight tournament since the inaugural punching party was held in 2022.
Other W2R-sanctioned tournaments include “Birth of a New Frontier” and “Frontier ’23”, both of which were hosted by SCAC and held in San Diego and Fountain Valley (respectively), and “American Muscle”, which was hosted by Patriot Front and held in Muenster, Texas.
The “Martyr’s Day Rumble” was held in Pasco, WA in December 2022. Though not an official W2R event, it was co-sponsored by SCAC and marked the ‘debut’ of Evergreen Active Club (EAC). The tournament turned out to be more of a Martyr’s Day fumble due to sparse attendance and the subsequent meltdown over the public identification of Tony Allen, one of the event’s lead promotors, just hours before the event started.
FRONTIER ’24: WELCOME TO HEMET
One thing that set last weekend’s “Frontier” fight apart from the previous two was that SCAC didn’t pretend that their event was held in Huntington Beach, CA this time. Instead, they copped to holding their fascist fight night in the Inland Empire (IE).
It makes sense that they’d wanted to lie about holding the first two “Frontier” fights at Huntington Beach; the links between the active club scene and the coastal town are well-established. Huntington Beach was one of the stomping grounds for members and close associates of the Rise Above Movement, the now-defunct white supremacist fighting crew that the active clubs of today are modeled after.
This time, they didn’t feel the need to deceive. Active clubs have direct ties to the Inland Empire, too. At least two members of SCAC are from the area: Robert Wheldon and Patrick Mushaney. The Western Hammerskins, who are active club allies and fight night participants, have a long and violent history in the IE. Never mind the fact that notorious neo-nazi Tom Metzger lived there in the years preceding his death in 2020.
Still, SCAC’s disclosure of the general location was treated as a possibility and not an absolute truth due to their track record of posting misleading information about the location of their previous events.
It was through pure luck (and search result algorithms) that the venue used for last weekend’s tournament was identified: The Ramona Event Center in Hemet, CA just happens to share a name with the semi-rural community on the outskirts of San Diego that was considered a likely location due to SCAC’s close ties to the area.
THE SOCAL ACTIVE CLUBHOUSE
Court records obtained by journalist Ali Winston in the case of RAM co-founder Robert Rundo showed that during his (very) brief release from pre-trial detention in February, two men were believed to have assisted the former fugitive-turned-active club kingpin in what would have been his third time fleeing the country after charges against him were filed. Those two men were Rundo’s right-hand man, Grady Mayfield, and Robert Wheldon, SCAC’s founder and leader.
NEW over at Bleeding Edge [$$$]: Judge's latest quixotic attempt to free Neo-Nazi leader Robert Rundo exposes members of his SoCal Active Club support network & their involvement in alleged plot to flee the US a THIRD Time.https://t.co/gK505V8yTU
— Ali Winston (@awinston) May 2, 2024
The court documents included details about the investigation, surveillance and eventual re-arrest of Rundo, which occurred just outside of a commercial property in Ramona, CA. As it turned out, that space is currently being leased by Wheldon, and it’s the spot he and Mayfield turned into a makeshift hideout for Rundo, stashing him away in what was alleged to be a staging area between his release from jail and a planned attempt to again flee south of the border into Mexico.
A month after Rundo was re-arrested, SCAC began posting photos on Telegram of what appeared to be the group’s new gathering spot. This has led us to wonder if the Ramona property and what we call “the SoCal Active Clubhouse” are one and the same.
CLOCKWORK CREW CO-FOUNDER ENTERS LOCAL MMA TOURNAMENT, LOSES HARD AND COPES EVEN HARDER
One hate group that didn’t get an invite to last weekend’s “Frontier” fight was Clockwork Crew. Despite the close proximity of both of Southern California’s active clubs, the two have had an acrimonious relationship since March 2022.
Clockwork Crew’s co-founder, Mohammad Wadaa, tried to organize a rival MMA tournament in the weeks leading up to the first “Frontier” fight. He was never able to gain enough interest from other ostracized active clubs to pull it off, and the former Marine has since taken his fascist fighting fantasy solo.
NEO-NAZI OVERESTIMATES HIS SKILL LEVEL, LOSES DESERT FIGHTING CHAMPIONSHIP
Just as “Frontier ’24” was kicking off in Hemet, Wadaa was stepping into the ring 150 miles south to compete in the Desert Fighting Championship in the border town of Heber, CA.
We were unable to find video footage of the fight*, but there were plenty of social media posts containing pre-event photos and videos. In them, Wadaa threw jabs at an imaginary foe as he warmed up alone and chatted with a platinum blonde who immediately shielded her face after noticing the camera was focused on the two of them. The footage ends just before his match, but his fighter profile on Camo MMA shows that his August 24 fight ended in a loss, with him submitting in just half a minute.
You read that right: He lost in half a minute — in the first round.
* Footage of Mohammad Wadaa’s fight was found on YouTube two days after publication
As Left Coast Right Watch previously reported, Wadaa began hitting the local MMA circuit almost immediately after being released from military jail this past March after serving an eleven-month sentence on extremist-related charges.
The following excerpt from LCRW sums up the absolute absurdity of his MMA ‘debut’:
The crowd booed [Wadaa] as he entered and tore off a piece of tape covering his swastika tattoo. Commentators were nervous about the crowd booing Wadaa and kept talking about his opponent during the fight. When Wadaa won through submission, commentators tried to paper over the crowd’s animosity to him by talking about what “great sportsmanship” the fighters showed by shaking hands after the match. Part of his post-fight interview is inaudible over the crowd booing. Footage of the fight was scrubbed from the event sponsor’s social media afterwards.
That first bout was the only one Wadaa has won to date. His next two fights ended in a loss, both times at the hands of first-time fighters.
As we previously covered, his second bout in the ring ended with a TKO so epic that it became the inspiration for some fun ‘fan art‘.
🧵Going through large amounts of recent research on Southern California nazis and it appears clockwork crew’s Mohammed Wadaa has his own MMA promotional “highlight reel” floating around out there. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/c3WsPyRF4p
— Conejo Valley Antifascists (@CAntifascists) April 17, 2024
Despite his losses (or rather, because of them) he’s been leaning heavily on his single victory.
Starting the day after Wadaa’s latest fight, posts began to appear on Clockwork Crew’s Telegram channel that grossly misrepresented their co-founder’s new MMA “career”. Whether this was done to bolster credibility for Wadaa’s self-given role as the “Athletic Director of Clockwork Crew” or a vain attempt to treat his bruised ego with an overdose of copium is anyone’s guess, but it’s likely a both/and scenario.
In the past, we’ve declined to publicly share the names of the venues used by SCAC for their annual “Frontier” fight fest. We chose to err on the side of caution in an attempt to avoid inadvertently harming unsuspecting business owners who were duped into renting their space to a group of nazis. Because it’s happened. More than once.
But what that’s done is allowed people like Jeremy Loo, the owner of ION Strength and Conditioning, to reap the benefit of the doubt extended to other gym owners. Though we’d identified his Fountain Valley gym as the venue used for “Frontier ’23” (and identified Loo himself as — at the very least — a fascist sympathizer) within a week of the event, he wasn’t exposed for being a full-fledged neo-nazi until mid-November.
While we had every intention of continuing to dig into Loo in the weeks following the fight, life got busy, Loo was put on the back burner, and we moved on without revisiting the research we’d done into his background. We’re grateful that Bellingcat picked up on Loo because if they hadn’t, he may have slid under the public’s radar completely.
We do this work to help innocent people avoid the harms that come with nazism and other forms of fascism. And part of that includes not inadvertently running cover for neo-nazis and their collaborators.
With that said, we ask that readers not jump to conclusions that venue owners who rent their spaces to hate groups do so knowingly. It’s been the case more often than not that they were duped. Likewise, please don’t make the assumption that event promotors or others involved in planning legitimate MMA tournaments know beforehand that one of the fighters is a full-fledged nazi. Finally—and we cannot stress this enough—do not put them on blast unless you have ironclad proof that they knowingly and willingly allowed known members of hate groups to use their spaces or enter their tournaments.
And for readers who are involved with their local MMA communities, we ask that you share this information with your local training centers, event venues and sparring buddies. Neo-nazis have been appropriating martial arts for a long time, and while it may not be possible to stop them completely, it is possible to make it a lot harder for them to continue doing so.