As the Mastermind of Far-Right ‘Active Clubs’ Goes to Prison, His Violent Movement Goes Global

American neo-Nazi Robert Rundo’s six-year “battle with the feds”—a fight that spans two dismissals, three appellate reversals, and an extradition and deportation from at least two countries—concludes today with his sentencing to federal prison for attacking ideological opponents at political rallies across California in 2017.

Along with several members of the Rise Above Movement, a fight club-cum-street gang Rundo cofounded with fellow extremist Ben Daley in Southern California during the peak of the alt-right movement, Rundo was convicted on 2018 charges of conspiracy to violate the federal Anti-Riot Act for training and planning a series of attacks on political opponents at rallies across California and Unite the Right in Virginia the year prior. While Rundo may be locked behind bars for years, the movement he created is running wild around the globe.

In the interceding years since his initial arrest, indictment, imprisonment, and flight from the US after his case was initially dismissed in 2019, Rundo helped mastermind an international network of RAM clones known as “Active Clubs.” A transnational alliance of far-right fight clubs that closely overlap with skinhead gangs and neofascist political movements in North America, Europe, the Antipodes, and South America, the Active Club network is proliferating internationally. There are dozens of Active Clubs in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, Australia, and Colombia, according to the groups’ presence on Telegram and extremism researchers.

Seemingly harmless from the outside, Active Clubs are small groups of young men who go on hikes, train in combat sports, weight-lift, and build camaraderie—all part of the Rise Above Movement’s original program. But the darkness is in the details: The groups’ membership often overlaps with other extremist organizations like Patriot Front, criminal skinhead groups like the Hammerskins, and other violent extremists in foreign nations. Some US-based Active Clubs are branching out into political intimidation and violence, like the Rise Above Movement before them.

“I definitely do believe that in the future there needs to be a mass movement, a mass organization, but when it comes for that, do you really want a bunch of guys coming strictly from the online world to come join a mass movement without having any experience or skills?” Rundo said in a video posted online shortly before his March 2023 arrest in Bucharest, Romania. “Active clubs are a great local way to start guys off as they come from the online world into the real world, to learn actual skills.”

Hannah Gais, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center who has long researched Rundo and his associates, says the Active Club model stands out for its low barrier to entry, emphasis on positive community building to draw new blood from outside of extremist circles, and a ready-made international network. “The model has really made it easier to facilitate those transnational connections,” Gais says. “If you’re not an organization, then you can network with whoever you want.”

The Active Club network is seeing expanded breadth and growing significance in street politics (American members appeared alongside foreign counterparts at extreme right-wing demonstrations in Paris this May and Warsaw this fall), a fact emphasized by US prosecutors in their filing seeking prison time for Rundo. Federal attorneys scoured Rundo’s media output—which is considerable, ranging from a series of far-right “influencer” Telegram channels to the Media2Rise propaganda outlet that he ran in conjunction with stateside followers and members of Patriot Front—for their explanation of how seemingly innocuous fitness organizations like Active Clubs serve as vehicles for radicalization.

In a November 26 sentencing memorandum, prosecutors flagged Rundo’s description of the Active Cub network as “brush fire effect” that will be difficult for authorities to stamp out “because these clubs are generally small and local, helping to shield it from infiltrators and broader law enforcement actions.”

The Active Club ideology also leans heavily on young male grievances against a world that supposedly singles them out in favor of people of color and LGBTQ+ youth. “Defendant lamented that ‘[b]oy scouts no longer teach boys how to be men, instead softening them up, discouring [sic] any forms of competition, accepting girls, and promoting LGBT values,’ and encouraged Active Clubs to ‘put out propaganda’ to ‘let[] our own know the fight is not over,’ the government’s filing reads.

The Active Club network was not Rundo’s creation alone: He came up with the idea along with Denis Nikitin, a German-Russian neo-Nazi who started out as a soccer hooligan before moving into combat sports as a fighter, promoter, and organizer of far-right tournaments. According to exhibits filed by US prosecutors, Nikitin counseled Rundo on how to flee the US in 2018 while dodging what he believed to be his first arrest warrant, and sought to smuggle him into Ukraine with the assistance of the Azov Movement (a neo-Nazi political movement that has its own paramilitary forces integrated with the Ukrainian military and organizes with other similar extremist groups across Europe) and its allies in that country’s security services. Nikitin is not currently charged with an offense by the United States government.

Nikitin, whose legal surname is Kapustin, is one of Europe’s most influential neo-Nazi activists, starting out small with fight club events held in backwater Russian cities among amateurs from soccer hooligan and skinhead groups. In 2012, Nikitin’s MMA tournament promotion vehicle, White Rex, ran its first tournament outside Russia, in Kyiv. Soon Nikitin was hosting tournaments in Italy, Hungary, France, Germany, Greece, and elsewhere.

Nikitin also got his hands dirty. He allegedly participated in the hooligan riot during Russia’s 2016 European Championship clash with England in Marseille and trained British Nazis in armed combat tactics in 2014 at camps in England and Wales, as well as Swiss extremists in 2017. In 2019, he was reportedly banned from the European Union’s Schengen Zone for promoting extremism in several countries.

Nikitin currently leads a volunteer combat battalion of far-right wing extremists in association with Ukrainian command that spearheaded a surprise assault on Russia’s Kursk region earlier this year.

Since Rundo and Kapustin coined the concept of an Active Club in 2021 on an eponymous podcast, the neo-Nazi fight clubs have proliferated throughout Western Europe, Australia, and the United States, and are currently the preeminent organizing model for far-right streetfighters. Their members have been involved in political violence in the US and France, have been banned and arrested in Germany, and are a growing concern for UK and Irish law enforcement as the place of their recruiting has skyrocketed following this summer’s riots.

Michael Vandelune, a research fellow at the American Counterterrorism Targeting & Resilience Institute, has long studied transnational networking by neo-fascist groups, including Rundo’s relationship with Nikitin. “Rundo was building on the Eastern European emphasis on hypermasculinity and physical fitness, and in many ways, he was a perfect Western mouthpiece for Nikitin and similar peoples’ ideas,” Vandelune says. Rundo’s devotion to Nikitin is apparent: While getting RAM off the ground, he repeatedly cited Nikitin’s white-nationalist clothing brand and MMA promotion company White Rex as inspiration, and got the company’s logo tattooed on his shin in 2018.

Along with members of the Azov Movement’s 3rd Assault Battalion who have been integrated into the regular units of Ukraine military intelligence directorate (HUR), Nikitin hosted a September conference in Lviv that gathered representatives from extreme right-wing organizations across Europe for a strategy conference. Italian fascist organization Casapound, which Rundo visited in 2018 and views as an exemplar, sent a representative, as did Germany’s openly neo-Nazi party Dritte Weg (Third Way).

Patrick Macdonald, a Canadian known as ‘Dark Foreigner’ who allegedly produced the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division’s eyecatching signature far-right propaganda at the end of the last decade, did the same work for the Active Club network, according to testimony given during his trial in Ottawa this month (Macdonald has plead not guilty to several charges, including participating in terrorist activity). Last year, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network identified Macdonald as a participant in Canada’s Active Club.

Outside of North America, the Active Clubs have proliferated most widely in France, the first European country to start such an organization. There are currently at least 50 such organizations in operation across the country, from Normandy to Provence and the Swiss border.

Sébastien Bourdon, a French journalist with Le Monde’s video investigations unit who authored a forthcoming book on that country’s far-right, says Active Clubs are the fastest-expanding facet of far-right militancy in France.

“When they launched the first Active Club in France in early 2022, within a few months they had 10 to15 groups. That’s already quite a lot. The fact that within two years they’ve grown from 15 groups to 50-plus groups throughout the country is mad,” Bourdon says. “Historically, most far-right groups in France have been active in big cities like Paris, Lyon, but if you look at some of the places they claim, some of them I’ve never heard of before.”

In France, where far-right street violence has a decades-long history despite authorities’ attempts to ban and dissolve organized groups, Bourdon says Active Clubs have proved effective at dodging legal crackdowns while appearing to have carried out acts of violence including an attack on an asylum center near Nantes last year. At least one founding member of the Active Club in Lyon has gone on to fight in Ukraine alongside other far-right volunteers.

As for Rundo, he will likely spend years in prison—a place he’s been before. He previously served nearly two years for stabbing a rival gang member in Flushing Queens in 2009. While he did radicalize during his stint at New York’s Greene Correctional Facility, starting a small white power gang, Rundo’s forthcoming prison term will mark his first federal term as a certified domestic extremist. But it remains unlikely that federal lockup will change his ideologies.

Rundo “has not renounced the violent extremist ideology that motivated that conduct,” US prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo. It’s also likely that Rundo will hold out for help from a friendlier government.

Prior to the US election in November, Rundo urged his supporters to vote for Donald Trump specifically in the hope that the Republican president-elect would pardon him and other extremists who plead guilty to federal crimes. Since the election, there has been a sustained pardon campaign from corners of the far-right internet, which is a possibility since Rundo will be serving time in a federal prison when the incoming administration is sworn in this January.