On #Telegram, the Paramilitary Far Right Looks to Radicalize New Recruits Ahead of #Inauguration Day – #terror #capitol

The boogaloo movement’s most extreme white supremacist element is ratcheting up calls for civil war. In the wake of last week’s deadly siege of the U.S. Capitol Building, a publicly accessible chat group devoted to sparking a civil war is telling its thousands of subscribers that the moment they have all been waiting for is here. Since the events last week, “Boogaloo Intel Drop,” a channel on the Telegram messaging app with more than 6,600 subscribers, including some self-described active-duty U.S. military personnel, has pushed its followers to usher in a new epoch of political violence in the United States. Subscribers and administrators have called for the murder of police officers with increased fervor and elevated Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran killed by Capitol Police during the riot, to the status of a martyr. The channel is a mid-sized player in a larger, established network devoted to the spread of right-wing terror, a race war, and the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Within this so-called Terrorgram network, which appears to have grown in the past week, the assault on the Capitol and its political fallout is being treated as an opportunity to enlist and radicalize new recruits. Alex Newhouse, research lead at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said “Boogaloo Intel Drop” appears to be the “most active” channel in the Terrorgram network currently looking to peel off individuals booted from other social media networks and recruit them into militant extremism. It has also been the most open in calling for violence in the days ahead. “They have been talking in the most specifics that I’ve seen yet,” Newhouse told The Intercept. “But their rhetoric does reflect what’s happening in the other white supremacist accelerationist channels.”

via intercept: On Telegram, the Paramilitary Far Right Looks to Radicalize New Recruits Ahead of Inauguration Day