Robert Rundo is the co-founder of the Rise Above Movement (RAM), an American white supremacist gang that saw three of its members imprisoned for violence at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. As we noted in our investigation in 2020, Rundo reportedly had a history in gang life, 20 months in prison for a 2009 assault where he stabbed a member of a rival gang five times.
RAM focused on physical fitness and combat sports training, all with the purpose of “physically attacking [their] ideological foes.” With their hands wrapped like boxers gearing up for a bout and skull masks hiding their faces, members of RAM violently attacked anti-Trump protesters at Unite the Right in Charlottesville in August 2017 and other rallies in California.Rundo has spent much of 2020 in eastern Europe. He attended a neo-Nazi commemoration in Budapest, Hungary in February 2020. Two weeks later he was in Sofia, Bulgaria for an annual neo-Nazi march that, for the first time in years, was banned by local authorities, with only a small commemoration to a Nazi-collaborating general taking place (the author of this article covered both events). On his YouTube channel, Rundo appears in videos offering advice on everything from organizational tactics and physical training to graffiti and travel tips. The first of the documentary series is a nine-minute video of Rundo and a RAM colleague’s trip to Bulgaria take part in the banned neo-Nazi Lukov March.
A separate website features occasional articles by Rundo and others, including English-language translations of Russian-language pieces by Ukraine-based neo-Nazi group Wotanjugend.
Rundo has also started up a far-right fashion brand, whose clothes the website proclaims are exclusively made in eastern Europe and that “not a single hand touches the production that is not of like mind.”
The focus of these efforts appears clear from Rundo’s online output and his own words: image. In july 2020 Rundo incorporated a company in Serbia — “Will2Rise,” the name of his far-right fashion brand.After Rundo and his network of neo-Nazis desecrated the cemetery of the liberators of Belgrade in January 2021 and extinguished the eternal fire, the police deported him to Bosnia and Herzegovina, more precisely to the Republika Srpska, in February. However, he returned to Serbia illegally in July or early August and rented an apartment in Belgrade
