Serbia expels US neo-Nazi after investigative website Bellingcat outed his location

Robert Rondo believed to have been living in Serbia since early 2020

Fascist graffiti in Serbia defaced by antifascist group was changed from “Put migrants into dustbins” to “Refugees welcome.” Photo by Antifascist Action Novi Sad, used with permission.

Serbia has expelled Robert Rundo, the “American neo-Nazi and founder of the notorious right-wing extremist Rise Above Movement,” the Serbian daily Blic reported on February 11.

According to unofficial information published in the Blic article, Serbian police escorted Rundo to the Trbušnica-Šepak border pass, which connects Serbia to Bosnia and Herzegovina, on the evening of February 10.   

Last November, the investigative reporting platform Bellingcat alerted the public to Rundo’s presence in Serbia, drawing attention to the videos he’d been publishing from the country. These included a clip in which the 30-year-old native of Queens, New York, brags about helping local neo-Nazis restore Serbian nationalist graffiti that had been defaced days before by local anti-fascist activists.

In recent years, exponents of extreme right-wing nationalist and populist ideologies from the Balkans, which promote forms of racism compatible with American white supremacy, have been trying to cultivate ties and cooperation with the US alt-right movement.

A screenshot from a November 8, 2020 video from Robert Rundo’s Telegram channel, showing him in front of far-right graffiti in Belgrade, Serbia. The graffiti includes racist imagery (the Confederate Battle Flag, a symbol of the fight to preserve slavery in the US through the Civil War of 1861-1864) and incitement of violence. Image by Bellingcat, used with permission.

Most Serbian media that followed up on the Blic report featured excerpts from the Bellingcat exposé, which quoted Rundo’s own video in which he says, “So we’re out here in Belgrade, you know, cleaning up the neighborhood …” as he joins local neo-Nazis in restoring hate speech graffiti that had been previously defaced by anti-fascists.

One of the media outlets, the tabloid website Mondo, interchanged the terms “neo-Nazi and “white supremacist,” and described Rundo as a “Super Nazi.”

Bellingcat analysis of the videos posted by Rundo indicated that he has been living in Serbia since at least March 2020, while also traveling around Central and Eastern Europe, including participating in a march in Ukraine and speaking at a neo-Nazi rally in Hungary.

Rundo had opened a clothing company called Serbon in Serbia, featuring products with white supremacist symbols and “anti-antifa” slogans. The Serbon YouTube channel features rap videos in Serbian glorifying street fighting. Founding the company allegedly enabled Rundo to acquire an annually renewable permit for temporary stay in the country as a foreign investor.

Rundo is a convicted felon who served time for a gang attack on a 13-year old boy, and whose racist exploits have been covered by the Daily Beast, PBS, and the New York Review of Books.

He is not technically a wanted person in the US at this moment. In 2019, a federal judge released Rundo after he dismissed charges against three RAM gang members indicted for their roles in violent rallies across California in 2017, saying the federal statute used to prosecute them was unconstitutional. In November 2020, the United States appealed the district court’s dismissal of an indictment charging Rundo and three other individuals with conspiracy to violate the Anti-Riot Act in connection with their activities as part of the Rise Above Movement (19-50189 USA v. Robert Rundo).

The Rise Above Movement (RAM) is an alt-right gang from Southern California that uses martial arts to recruit young people and has been described as “a loose collective of violent neo-Nazis and fascists,” who are white nationalist, white supremacist, and far-right.

According to a 2020 report on right-wing extremism by Serbian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, neo-Nazis in Serbia have been focusing their recruiting efforts on children, drafting their “stormtroopers” from the ranks of boys attending middle and high school.

“Recruitment most often takes place when kids reach high school age. Formerly, the top entry points to fascist ideologies were the subcultures of Nazi skinheads or ultras—hooligan groups presented as fans of major football clubs. Today the recruitment mostly takes place online, even though a minor part of the new fascists still come in touch with fascism through the subculture movements,” explained the sociologist Miloš Perović in a statement for Nova.rs TV.

Perović added that the increased recruitment of young people in these organizations is not an exclusive problem for Serbia, but part of a global movement that espouses a very clear strategy, based on the work of former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon.

The website of the Ministry of Interior of Republic of Serbia doesn’t provide any information on Rundo’s expulsion from the country.

Written by Filip Stojanovski

Sea Ice Melting Faster

Propósito

You need to look for reasons to go through a whole path of effort, go through disappointments, go ahead, get a taste of victory. The great human objective is to evolve … always. If your life has stopped for an instant, take the opportunity to reorganize what you need and set a new goal. Overcome adversity and dedicate yourself more, believe in you, in your choices, continue. You can … you can.

Pensamentos.me/VEM comigo!

As pressões da vida, por muitas vezes nos desmotivam, causam frustações e desânimo. Dependendo da situação em si, é comum até perder a vontade de viver. O ser humano, fica sem propósito, sem conforto, sem um objetivo na vida, algo que lhe traga segurança. Quando isso acontece, o que devemos fazer?

Nesses momentos, é natural que a pessoa pare, que ela, seja capaz de olhar com coragem para as adversidades da vida e tenha a consciência de dizer: ‘ eu vou encarar”, eu vou vencer o desânimo e tudo o que me faz beirar o impossível. Todos nós, independente da situação que vivemos, passamos por dificuldades. Mas deixa dizer uma coisa: não se deixe envolver pelo desânimo “. Seja firme, pense exatamente o contrário disso, diga: ” eu vou conseguir reverter esse resultado, ou seja, vou correr atrás dos meus propósitos.

Exatamente, tenha um propósito. É importante que você saiba…

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Blames Power Outages on the Green New Deal

What has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem, nor is it the frozen wind turbines blamed by prominent Republicans. It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service. On a wholly unsurprising side-note, that Texas even has its own, separate electrical grid is due to a desire to, as Houston Public Media noted, “avoid dealing with the feds,” and to avoid federal regulation and oversight.

Source: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Blames Power Outages on the Green New Deal

17th Day of February – Fatcowco – 1867 – The first ship passes through the Suez Canal

1867 – The first ship passes through the Suez Canal

The Suez Canal (Arabic: قناة السويس‎ qanāt as-suwēs) is an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea through the Isthmus of Suez.

An Anchor Line ship, the S.S. Dido, became the first to pass through the Canal from South to North on February 17, 1867.

1867 – The first ship passes through the Suez Canal

The canal offers watercraft a more direct route between the North Atlantic and northern Indian oceans via the Mediterranean and Red seas, thus avoiding the South Atlantic and southern Indian oceans and reducing the journey distance from the Arabian Sea to London, for example, by approximately 8,900 kilometres (5,500 mi).

Some sources estimate that over 30,000 people were working on the canal at any given period, that more than 1.5 million people from various countries were employed, and that thousands of labourers died, many of them from cholera and similar epidemics.

Source: 17th Day of February – Fatcowco

L.A. elementary schools can reopen, but it’s complicated – Los Angeles Times

Ultimately, she added, it’s a local decision based on the readiness of all concerned, including the school system’s ability to operate safely. Before any campus can reopen the district must have a detailed safety plan filed with the state and county — health authorities have seven days to raise objections. Some districts and independent schools already have had plans on file. Source: L.A. elementary schools can reopen, but it’s complicated – Los Angeles Times