Anastasia Yankova, a Russian model-turned-mixed martial artist who has appeared in a Nike commercial, was a month away from her professional debut when she took to Instagram to post a cartoon of Adolph Hitler. In the image, Hitler is seated on a window ledge, looking down with weepy-eyes on a dreary, overcast sky. “Matches my mood,” Yankova wrote.

“Aryan sadness?” asked a commenter.

“Only the weather and the restriction of carbohydrates,” she responded with a purple devil emoji later that day, September 2, 2013.

Mixed martial arts has a long and sordid relationship with white supremacists. But neo-Nazi-affiliated MMA outfits, like White Rex, a Russian clothing company and former fight promotion that helped launch Yankova’s career, have typically been confined to eastern Europe and Russia, where they have, well, something of a stranglehold over the far-right fringes of the sport. But now, inspired in part by emerging international talents like Yankova, groups in America, including Rise Above Movement in southern California, have helped popularize a particularly violent version of combat-ready racism, offering an example of how to advance white nationalism with perfectly executed strikes and takedowns, which have already been used with vicious effect in street battles in California and beyond.

At her debut fight a month after her Hitler post, Yankova marched toward her opponent. The floor of the cage was emblazoned with a giant White Rex logo, a hybrid symbol of the swastika, the Nazi esoteric “black sun”, and the Russian Kolovrat, a swastika-like symbol popular with Russian white nationalists. The event, in Moscow, was titled “The Birth of a Nation,” a reference to the 1915 silent film of the same name, which glorified racial violence and is credited with reigniting the Ku Klux Klan. A “hatecore” band, You Must Murder, performed for the 2000 attendees, the tournament host was a former KGB operative, a contingent of the Russian Hells Angels motorcycle club flew a banner from the balcony, and the neo-Nazi Maxim “Tesak” Martsinkevich was reportedly invited to attend. There were 13 fights, Yankova’s the penultimate of the night. Yankova, in black tights, her hair braided back in rows, suffered a punishing first round but caught her opponent, Eleonora Tassinari, in an armlock 26 seconds into the second, winning by submission, and launching her career.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/02/the-terrifying-rise-of-alt-right-fight-clubs/