Still from Birth of a New Frontier. San Diego Library in background.

The news that Robert Rundo had been extradited from Romania to the United States to face charges of conspiracy and inciting violence at several California political rallies back in 2017 reminded me of a recent trip down one of the internet’s infinite number of rabbit holes. It began with a sentence in a July 19 NPR story carried on the KPBS website about right-wing Active Clubs: “Also White Lives Matter groups have reportedly attended ‘fight nights’ hosted by active clubs in San Diego and in Washington State.”

I…had not heard about that. Let’s Google “San Diego fight night white lives matter.” Just two hits, both from activist organizations: the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. Okay, let’s see what the ADL has on its Active Clubs page. “On August 20, 2022, a variety of Active Clubs traveled from across the United States to participate in a fight night in San Diego, California…One white supremacist media source wrote, ‘Every fighter and attendee understood that they were participating in a historical first and that, like Charlottesville and the Battle of Berkeley, a man could be proud of being there for years to come.’” But: no link to any kind of news coverage. Did this thing really happen?

The Anti-Defamation League reports: “On August 20, 2022, SoCal Active Club held a fight night in San Diego, California, that a variety of white supremacist from across the United States participated in and attended.”

From adl.org

Well, there was an accompanying photo allegedly from the event, one that featured a Confederate flag on the wall and a spectator giving a Nazi salute. Okay, Google images, have at it. Just six results, and two of them from the ADL site. Then one from the Will2Rise page on Gab Social, where it served as the header image. A number of the posts were hawking the brand’s clothing, including a Triumph of the Will hooded t-shirt, and a Blackshirts Troublemakers Club shirt. Pretty blunt stuff, given the references to Leni Riefenstahl’s famous Nazi propaganda film and Mussolini’s fascist paramilitary. There was also a post reading: “Coming soon from Media2Rise: an episode documenting the first ever Nationalist combat sports tournament that took place in Huntington Beach, California…the culmination of years of joint efforts to revitalize the warrior spirit in our people. It begins a new chapter in a healthy counter-culture for our youth…”

I guess it made sense to advertise it as being a Huntington Beach thing, since that’s Rundo’s hometown (and the site of an earlier White Lives Matter rally). But the NPR story had it right: the fight night (well, fight day) happened here, in Grantville. Media2Rise’s documentary on the event, Birth of a New Frontier, pretty clearly opens on the beach in Coronado. And at one point, a drone camera rises above the fight venue and gives away its location. Turns out San Diego made sense as well, as one of the first personalities we meet is fighter Luke, who looks an awful lot like Rundo’s associate Grady Mayfield, himself a San Diegan.

So yes, it happened. One participant said that the gathering’s ideological component gave him “a purpose, something to fight for — to prove that our ideology is superior.” Rundo is being held without bond in Los Angeles. His trial is set for December 12.