Wikipedia Deep Dive

Rise Above Movement

10 min read

In the summer of 2017, a group of young men from Southern California traveled across the country to Charlottesville, Virginia. They weren't there to hold signs or chant slogans. According to federal prosecutors, they came specifically to hurt people. And they were very good at it.

The FBI would later describe them as "among the most violent individuals present" at the Unite the Right rally—a gathering that ended with a woman named Heather Heyer dead after a car plowed into counter-protesters. These California men weren't responsible for that murder, but investigators said they left their own trail of victims with bloodied faces and broken bones.

They called themselves the Rise Above Movement, or RAM. And they represented something genuinely new in American extremism: a white supremacist organization that marketed itself less like the Ku Klux Klan and more like a fitness brand.

The Fight Club Model

Traditional hate groups in America have always had an image problem. The Klan, with its white robes and burning crosses, looks absurd to modern eyes. Neo-Nazi skinheads, with their shaved heads and swastika tattoos, practically advertise their ideology to anyone who might want to avoid them.

RAM's founder, Robert Rundo, had a different vision. What if you built a hate group that looked, from the outside, like a mixed martial arts gym?

The group started under an even more revealing name: DIY Division. "DIY" stood for Do It Yourself—a nod to punk rock culture and its emphasis on grassroots organizing. But "Division" carried a different meaning, one drawn from the vocabulary of military units and, not coincidentally, from the name of notorious Nazi SS divisions.

By early 2017, they had rebranded to Rise Above Movement. The name suggested self-improvement, transcendence, physical excellence. Their social media accounts showed young men lifting weights, practicing boxing combinations, grappling on mats. They called themselves "the premier MMA club of the Alt-Right."

It was, in essence, a marketing strategy for political violence.

What They Actually Believed

Beneath the fitness aesthetics lay a familiar ideology. RAM members embraced white nationalism—the belief that America should be a nation defined by and for white people. They were explicitly antisemitic, blaming Jewish people for what they saw as the decline of Western civilization. They opposed immigration, particularly from Muslim-majority countries.

Heidi Beirich, who directed the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center (a nonprofit organization that tracks extremist groups), offered this interpretation of their worldview: "They think they're holding onto the old California, which was white, which was conservative, which was male-run, which was connected to the military... and now that culture is being lost and they're fighting to bring it back."

This is worth pausing on. California, in their imagination, was once a white conservative paradise—and someone had taken it from them. Who? Muslims. Immigrants. Jews. Liberals. The usual suspects.

The reality of California history is considerably more complicated. The state was Mexican territory until 1848. Its agricultural economy was built by waves of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican laborers. Hollywood was largely created by Jewish immigrants. The conservative fantasy of a "lost" white California requires forgetting most of what actually happened there.

But extremist movements don't run on historical accuracy. They run on grievance.

The European Connection

RAM drew inspiration from something called the Identitarian movement in Europe. "Identitarianism" is a relatively recent development in far-right politics—it emerged in France in the early 2000s and spread across the continent. The core idea is that different ethnic and cultural groups have distinct "identities" that should remain separate. White Europeans, in this view, need to protect their identity from being diluted or replaced by immigrants.

If this sounds like old-fashioned racism with updated vocabulary, that's because it is. But the rebranding matters. Identitarians explicitly avoid swastikas and Hitler salutes. They talk about "cultural preservation" rather than racial superiority. They cultivate an aesthetic that's sleek and modern rather than crude and backward-looking.

One RAM member, Michael Miselis, had traveled to Europe to meet with violent white supremacist groups there, according to federal prosecutors. When police searched his house after his arrest, they found a poster displaying "88"—a coded reference to "Heil Hitler," since H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. Whatever the marketing said, the ideology underneath was the same as it ever was.

Training for Violence

Most political groups hold meetings. They discuss strategy, plan events, maybe knock on doors or make phone calls. RAM's meetings were different. They trained.

Members spent their weekends learning to box, practicing Brazilian jiu-jitsu, conditioning their bodies for combat. This wasn't abstract—they had a specific purpose in mind. ProPublica, the investigative journalism organization, described RAM as having "a singular purpose: physically attacking its ideological foes."

And then they went looking for fights.

In March 2017, they showed up at a pro-Trump rally in Huntington Beach, California. In April, they were in Berkeley. In August, they traveled to Charlottesville. Each time, according to prosecutors and video evidence, they sought out confrontations with counter-protesters and attacked them.

The group was surprisingly open about this. They posted videos of their violence online, using the footage as recruitment material. Look at us, the videos seemed to say. We're winning. We're strong. Join us.

The Legal Reckoning

In October 2018, the FBI came for them.

Four RAM members—Benjamin Daley, Thomas Gillen, Michael Miselis, and Cole White—were charged with violating the federal Anti-Riot Act for their actions at Charlottesville. According to the charging documents, they had traveled across state lines with the intent to commit violence. This is a crime.

The evidence was substantial. Video footage showed the men attacking counter-protesters. Their own social media posts documented their intentions. When Miselis was arrested, police found assault weapon ammunition, smoke bombs, and flares at his home, along with that "88" poster.

One by one, they pleaded guilty. Daley got 37 months in federal prison. Gillen got 33 months. Miselis got 27 months. They would later appeal, arguing that the Anti-Riot Act was unconstitutionally broad—that it violated their First Amendment rights. In August 2020, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected this argument unanimously.

A second wave of arrests followed. Robert Rundo, the founder, was charged along with three other members: Robert Boman, Tyler Laube, and Aaron Eason. But Rundo didn't wait around to face justice. He fled to Mexico, then to Central America, eventually making his way to Eastern Europe.

The Flight and Capture of Robert Rundo

Rundo's case took an unusual turn. In June 2019, a federal judge in California actually dismissed the charges against him and his co-defendants. Judge Cormac Carney ruled that the Anti-Riot Act was "unconstitutionally overbroad in violation of the First Amendment." The statute, he found, could potentially criminalize protected speech—and therefore it couldn't be used to prosecute RAM members.

This was, briefly, a major victory for the far-right. Rundo was free. He left the country.

But in March 2021, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Judge Carney's decision. The Anti-Riot Act was constitutional after all, the appellate court ruled. The indictments were reinstated.

By then, Rundo was somewhere in Europe. He had essentially become a fugitive, traveling between countries while American prosecutors sought his extradition. In August 2023, Romanian authorities finally caught up with him. He was extradited back to the United States—arrested, appropriately enough, at Los Angeles International Airport.

When police had searched his home years earlier, they found a large framed portrait of Adolf Hitler.

Rundo pleaded not guilty. His case, as of early 2025, remains ongoing. In March of that year, his co-defendant Robert Boman was convicted of rioting and conspiracy.

The Legacy: Active Clubs

RAM itself is largely defunct. Its leaders are dead, imprisoned, or awaiting trial. Its members scattered.

But the model survived.

By January 2021, a new network had emerged, explicitly inspired by RAM's approach. They called themselves "Active Clubs"—small groups of far-right activists who train together in mixed martial arts and present themselves as fitness enthusiasts. By recent counts, there are Active Club chapters in at least 25 states, with additional groups in other countries.

The formula is the same. Emphasize physical fitness. Post workout videos on social media. Build a community around training. And underneath it all, cultivate an ideology of white supremacy and prepare for violence.

This is, in some ways, a clever adaptation to the current environment. Social media platforms have gotten better at identifying and removing explicitly hateful content. A group that posts about deadlifts and sparring sessions is harder to flag than one that posts swastikas. The fitness aesthetic provides plausible deniability.

What Made RAM Different

It's worth considering why RAM matters beyond its specific crimes. Hate groups have always existed in America. Political violence is nothing new. What was distinctive about this particular organization?

First, the demographics. These weren't marginalized young men with nothing to lose. Miselis, for instance, was a defense contractor with a security clearance who had worked on sensitive government programs. Several members came from comfortable middle-class backgrounds in Southern California's beach communities. They had jobs, educations, futures. They chose this anyway.

Second, the explicit embrace of violence as the point. Many extremist groups engage in violence, but they usually frame it as defensive or incidental to their "real" mission. RAM was different. Training for street combat wasn't a means to an end—it was the end. The violence was the product.

Third, the sophisticated use of social media for recruitment. RAM understood that young men are drawn to images of strength, competence, and belonging. They packaged white supremacy as a lifestyle brand, complete with merchandise you could buy online. This wasn't your grandfather's hate group.

The Broader Context

RAM emerged during a particular moment in American politics—the early Trump era, when the boundaries of acceptable discourse seemed to be shifting rapidly. The "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, where RAM members committed their most publicized violence, was itself a product of this moment: an attempt by various far-right factions to unite under a common banner and demonstrate their strength.

That rally ended in disaster for the movement. The images from Charlottesville—the tiki torches, the Nazi flags, the murder of Heather Heyer—horrified mainstream Americans. Far-right figures faced social and professional consequences. Many of the key organizers were sued into bankruptcy. The vision of a unified far-right street movement crumbled.

But the underlying conditions that produced RAM haven't gone away. Young men still feel alienated. The internet still provides pathways into extremism. The fitness-focused, violence-oriented model that Rundo pioneered continues to attract followers through the Active Club network.

The story of the Rise Above Movement is, in this sense, not really over. It's been continued by other names, other faces, other young men throwing punches and dreaming of a white ethnostate. The federal prosecutions sent some of them to prison. They didn't solve the underlying problem.

Whether that problem can be solved through law enforcement at all is an open question—one that American society has been grappling with, in various forms, since its founding.