'Among The Most Violent Of The New Breed': A Q&A About SoCal White Supremacist Group Tied To Charlottesville Violence

RAM was founded by a man who went to prison in New York State for stabbing a Latino man six times. He's Rob Rundo, and he lives in Orange County.

Basically, when he got out of prison and moved from New York to California, he started a group that was one of a new breed of white supremacist or white nationalist groups that are out there.

But this group RAM, which is based in Southern California, with members going from San Diego up to Los Angeles, is perhaps the most aggressive, most violent of the new breed.

What we're talking about is a group of young men -- and estimates range from 20 to 50 at any given time -- who spend their days working out, training in martial arts, training in boxing, going out to the desert and engaging in shooting practice, who are actually just much more skilled at physical combat than most of the other members of this kind of white supremacist movement that are out there.

We've seen them engage in violent altercations in Huntington Beach, in Berkeley, in Charlottesville, and these guys are sort of the vanguard, the tip of the spear, the people that really go out and aggressively assault counter-protesters, leftists, anti-racists, that type of thing.

As far I know they're both kind of in blue collar jobs. Ben Daley runs a tree trimming and palm care service, and I believe Tom Gillen does similar work. They are guys that I believe got into this movement in just the last couple years, as there's been an upsurge of white power activity across the country, and they became very hard core, very serious members of this scene and of this gang. So they're sort of founding key people.

Well, what we've seen is, over the last year, a single arrest for Rob Rundo for allegedly assaulting a police officer in Berkeley. Those charges were dropped. But what I believe has gone on is that there has been an interest in the group from local law enforcement as well as federal law enforcement, and interest in building a more significant case against them, and I think that's what you're seeing today.

I think when you see RAM members, they're showing up to engage in physical violence. That is their cause. That is what they were built to do. That is their agenda, and I think that's different than some of the other groups that are out there.

You know, I've also had members who've left the group, who came to me and said "look, the larger long term agenda is to prepare for a race war and to arm ourselves and equip ourselves to engage in a race war in which we will go out and slaughter people of color, Jews, Muslims and immigrants."

Well, yeah, it's remarkable. When you start looking at the white supremacist movement, it has had a big hold in Southern California for decades.

You could go back to the second iteration of the Klan, which was huge in Anaheim and Southern California. Or you could go more recently to Tom Metzger and his White Aryan Resistance, based out of Fallbrook, which is one of the big white supremacist outfits of the 80's and early 90's, and you can see that there has been activity in Southern California of the pretty extreme variety for a very long time.

They are, and they've been repeatedly kicked off of social media platforms. They've been repeatedly kicked off of Instagram, and Twitter, and they kind of keep popping back up.

I would say they're not as savvy as some of the other groups, and they're less Internet based than some of the other groups. Some of the groups out there are really excellent at hacking, at social media, at memes, all this kind of stuff. RAM use the internet and social media but really their world is in the flesh. It's out there in the physical space.