Pursuing Cultural Rebranding through Rituals – Discourse Analysis of Finnish Right-Wing Extremist Combat Sports Groups

In recent years, combat sports have become a crucial recruitment tool for right-wing extremist (RWE) groups, serving as a low-threshold activity for entering the RWE milieu, followed by exposure to more radical ideas. In Finland, the three most active RWE combat sports groups—Veren Laki, Active Club Finland, and Club 8—are actively recruiting members for regional subgroups across cities and municipalities via their Telegram channels. These channels target young audiences by blending subcultural aesthetics with nationalist messaging and promoting physical fitness and discipline, while portraying strength and combat skills as essential duties for radical nationalists defending their nation against perceived enemies. The combat groups themselves refer to this form of collective action as nationalism 3.0, describing the strategic focus on creating an activist base through a deliberate mix of RWE aesthetics, sports, hypermasculine, and national romantic imagery as a countermovement to accelerationist RWE ideologies, formal organizations, and far-right parties. This study employs the framework introduced by Törnberg & Törnberg (2024) to analyse the communication of these groups through a Durkheimian lens. Törnberg & Törnberg identify memes, jargon, and subcultural content as unifying rituals in online extremist spaces. Extending this concept, this study argues that the wider rebranding process referred to as nationalism 3.0—including cultural references, combat training, and White Power music events—functions as a series of collective rituals that construct, shape, and reinforce shared norms and extremist identities, fostering a sense of emotional solidarity and cohesion among members. The dataset consists of posts from the main Telegram channels of Veren Laki, Club 8, and Active Club Finland, along with their regional subchannels, spanning from 2020 to October 2024. This study employs a triangulated approach, combining digital ethnography, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and ritual analysis to analyse the online posts. Digital ethnography provides insights into community dynamics through immersive observation, while CDA examines the construction and negotiation of meaning in language, symbols, and cultural references. Ritual analysis explores repeated symbolic actions that reinforce group identity and cohesion. The broader aim is to examine how the RWE combat group milieu strategically aims to recruit young people, particularly by appealing to the core ideals of self-described nationalism 3.0, seeking to understand the mechanisms through which these groups attract and integrate new members to the community, making extremism more socially acceptable and appealing.