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The violence that drove scores of ethnic minorities from their homes earlier this month in Belfast, Northern Ireland, has drawn attention from extremist figures and groups in the U.S.
The disorder followed the grisly stabbing of 44-year-old Stephen Ogilvie on June 8, caught on video and widely circulated on social media, by a 30-year old Sudanese man who was seeking asylum in the UK. The victim survived, but was seriously injured; the alleged perpetrator has been charged with attempted murder. The stabbing set off unruly protests, in which masked, anti-immigrant mobs set fire to vehicles and homes in predominantly ethnic minority neighborhoods.
Since then, the former head of the Proud Boys has traveled to Belfast, a move signifying that deepening social strife over shifting demographics in the UK has resonated with those who seek to advance a polarizing campaign to restrict the presence of immigrants in the U.S. And, there are questions about whether a network of neo-Nazi youth groups, called "active clubs," played a role in mobilizing street protesters so quickly.
"This reaction is a natural human reaction"
Enrique Tarrio, ex-chair of the Proud Boys, told NPR that he went to Belfast at the end of June because he is making a short documentary about the stabbing attack and why it provoked riots.
"I don't condone the violence. I don't think it's the way," said Tarrio. "But when people feel a certain way… this reaction is a natural human reaction."
Tarrio was convicted of seditious conspiracy, and later pardoned by President Trump, for helping to organize the attack on the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. He traveled to Northern Ireland with another Proud Boy associate, Barry Ramey, who was convicted – and similarly pardoned – for his role in the Jan. 6 attack, which included pepper spraying two Capitol Police officers.
The duo posted about their travels on social media, at times erroneously associating the Republic of Ireland's flag with Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland; or declaring that in Belfast, "nationalism is alive and well," without regard to the fact that the term "nationalist" has a different meaning in Northern Ireland. There, it refers to the portion of the population who would like to see Northern Ireland break off from the UK.
Tarrio said his documentary will center the voices of people in the movement to curb immigration because, he said, the Northern Irish government has ignored them.
"The government has to listen to these people. They've been in civil war for decades. They're good at organizing," he said.
"Yes, the violence was about mass expulsion. But you're not going to change them," Tarrio elaborated, referring to people he met in Northern Ireland who sympathized with the rioters. "How to get this to stop? Stop mass migration. Try to get [migrants] to assimilate."
Tarrio, whose legal name is Henry Tarrio, said that while the particulars of Northern Ireland's history distinguish it from the U.S., he sees similarities in rising anti-immigrant sentiment in both countries.
"When we're talking about Trump, [and] why did he get elected – his number one campaign message was: build the wall," he said.
Tarrio also acknowledged that some high-profile figures in Northern Ireland's anti-immigrant movement – with whom he snapped photos – deployed white nationalist messaging in their activism.
"I would say that I support it," Tarrio said, and that in a "culture and system that divides us up by race," those who use white nationalist slogans are "bringing us back to the middle."
Active Clubs, however, seized on the potential for further racial division the stabbing attack could stoke. On Telegram channels, they referred to the alleged perpetrator as a "Negro invader" who brutally injured a white man.
Active clubs "saw their model in action"
"Effectively, they saw their model in action," said Michael Colborne, journalist and researcher for Bellingcat, an investigative journalism group based in the Netherlands. "They saw masked young men committing political violence and in a model that they … would actually further like to emulate themselves."
Active clubs have been on the rise in recent years across Western Europe and the U.S.. Organized locally but with well established transnational ties through digital platforms and conferences, they structure their activities around a shared interest in mixed martial arts training.
"The whole point of participating in combat sports for them isn't like it is for most other people who might want to just go get fit, taking a kickboxing class or learning self-defense or bettering themselves," said Colborne. "Their interest in combat sports is explicitly about preparing for political violence."
A social media flurry on active club accounts that preceded and followed the unrest in Belfast has spurred reporting in Wired that they may have helped to orchestrate or instigate the attacks. If true, this would represent a significant escalation in those groups' public activities. But those claims are eliciting skepticism from observers who are familiar with the particulars of Northern Ireland's political history, social infrastructure and increasingly violent anti-immigrant sentiment across the UK.
"Unfortunately, the UK is somewhat of a tinderbox at the moment," said Sid Venkataramakrishnan, analyst and editorial manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit organization that tracks and counters extremism. "And you know, even if I suspect the active clubs hadn't been promoting this, you'd still see violence in Belfast as you've seen in countless other cities [in the UK]."
"Make them terrified…"
The Telegram account of a neo-fascist group in Northern Ireland, called the Ulster Youth Club, has fed speculation that active clubs may have helped mobilize people to the streets. The account shared a post from another UK-based Telegram account that urged white men to take action against non-white people and, "Make them terrified they are trapped on an island with you."
The morning after the stabbing attack, hours before the riots began, the Ulster Youth Club's account posted advice to those "doing the rounds." It told would-be street protesters not to bring smartphones, smartwatches, to wear hats and gloves, and to cover up tattoos.
Following the unrest, which was described by some in Belfast as a pogrom, a Substack account associated with the active club movement published a detailed post-mortem of the rioters' operational security tactics. In particular, it lauded participants in the mob who "conducted phone searches" of "opportunistic videographers" who may otherwise have caught footage that might help to identify those engaged in criminal activity. Similarly, the Ulster Youth Club's Telegram account stated "'Citizen journalists' explicitly not welcome" in its post about preparing for street action.
"It was a pretty explicit way of framing – for their far-right audience – framing how one should go about committing this kind of violence," said Colborne.
Nonetheless, it is unclear whether people affiliated with the active club network were among those in the streets on June 9, the day after Ogilvie was stabbed. So far, no known identifications of the neo-Nazi groups have been made. Instead, experts say the factors that led to a relatively rapid mobilization of people to the streets are markers of an environment that has developed over a much longer period of time.
"I think it's worth bearing in mind Northern Ireland, Belfast, has a history of sectarian violence, has a history of Loyalist groups obviously [that] have previously been involved in violent attacks," said Venkataramakrishnan, referring to largely Protestant, working class formations that fought to keep Northern Ireland within the UK. "So I think it's hard to attribute it specifically to active clubs."
The influence of sectarian violence on the anti-immigrant movement
Violent anti-immigrant mobilizations have, in recent years, become an annual summer occurrence in Northern Ireland. In August 2024, Belfast was one of many UK sites where the killing of three young girls at a dance class in Southampton, England, triggered widespread disorder. The man convicted was UK-born, to Rwandan immigrant parents. Then, in 2025, an alleged sexual assault of a girl in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, led to groups targeting ethnically Roma residents and, ultimately, driving hundreds from that town.
In each instance, influential far-right figures in the UK – and even some in the U.S., like billionaire Elon Musk, who has railed against demographic changes in both countries – seized upon crimes committed against white UK residents to amplify a broader message about mass expulsion of non-whites. On social media, particularly on Facebook, anti-immigrant networks also use these cases to organize on-street action.
"The UK infrastructure of the far right has become quite … geared towards making rapid action," said Venkataramakrishnan. "And that's in terms of promoting action online and in terms of support offline."
Venkataramakrishnan and others also say more must be learned about the influence of people who were active in paramilitary groups during Northern Ireland's decades of religious strife, often called "The Troubles."
"There are members of the identified anti-immigration network in Northern Ireland that self-identify as being former Loyalist prisoners, and that's how they self-identify," said a representative of a volunteer group called The Accountability Project, which monitors anti-immigrant networks on Facebook.
The Accountability Project came together in the wake of the 2025 violence in Ballymena with the goal of identifying early signs of planned violence. The representative, like others in the group, asked that her name not be used in public reporting about their activities.
But she noted that the age of paramilitary veterans is older than many of those that she observed in footage of the recent violence in Belfast. While she said her group saw open planning on Facebook for the street mobilization, she suspects that the young, masked men that were at the front lines of arson attacks were actually in touch via closed communication applications like Signal, WhatsApp or Telegram.
"I think the questions that come away from that is, are they connected to paramilitaries?," she said. "And so where's the link between the network that we examine on social media, on Facebook, and the closed comm systems that are used to mobilize young people?"
As police in Northern Ireland continue to investigate the recent unrest, she said there will be great interest in whether they uncover answers to some of these questions.
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