![]() ![]() Caught up in the bans after the storming of the Capitol, GE created a Telegram channel on 10 January and began posting 3 days later. GE came relatively late to the game, joining Twitter in 2020. Compared to other influencers, little is known about the poster. In May, however, the extremists hooked their big fish: QAnon influencer GhostEzra.Įnter GhostEzra (GE). Nazis negotiated relationships with these users in multiple ways: letting them act as controlled opposition, making them the enemy, or attempting to recruit from their membership. As both groups struggled, backchannels were utilized to present a solution. They had been blacklisted, their chats became known as extremist havens, and they were no longer able to easily recruit from the Q following. The white nationalists, having shown their hand, presented a different issue. Without an enemy, large Q chat rooms began to turn on themselves and groups began to fracture and split. Behind the scenes, however, conversations were taking place within the loosely formed alliances birthed out of a short-lived period of higher attention. Koenigs of the “American Militia Freedom Forces”.Īs time moved on, it seemed that fears of further radicalization of QAnon adherents were exaggerated, as monetized Q groups such as “We the People” and “Matrixxx Groove” enacted stronger measures, preemptively banning overt white nationalist proponents from their chats. Those that emerged targeted specific groups, such as the civil nationalist contingency, and began to host talks with the likes of self-proclaimed “Captain” Karl P. Friendships and alliances emerged, and Sub-chats to draw in specific groups of users were built out by those active in the original Parler Lifeboat chat. ![]() These extremists experienced a high in January with the opportunity to “red pill” Boomers’ on Telegram. ![]() They did not see the fruit of their labor immediately. A shared goal, and opportunity, had brought divergent groups together with a coherent goal, recruit. ![]() These extremists took to chat rooms and voice channels and adopted an accelerationist attitude and dedication to converting Q type to National socialism. The flood of users already attuned to conspiracy thinking and far-right thought was an opportunity and uncertainty for far-right Christians, Pagans, Civic Nationals, traditional Catholics, and traditional neo-Nazis from around the world. The sudden re-platforming of Parler’s 13 million users and the influx of Q-minded people to Telegram fueled a recruiting drive for the white nationalist community, bringing in older, more financially stable individuals into the fold. Through the group and later sub-groups, actors from the white nationalist milieu on Telegram worked systematically to push QAnon adherents, civic nationalists, and others further down the radicalization pipeline, thrusting them into an environment where explicitly antisemitic and national socialist content flourished. Parler Lifeboat itself was repurposed Proud Boys chat. In the midst of confusion, posts began to circulate funneling people to Parler Lifeboat, on the white nationalist and radical right’s preferred platform, Telegram. Here, the garden-variety QAnon adherents found themselves without a digital home. As QAnon content was banned from sites like Twitter following the storming of the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021 and Parler, a “free speech” social media platform, faced instability and sporadic shutdowns. Unfortunately, for those entrenched in their extremist beliefs, deplatforming can send them further down the rabbit hole. Removing hateful accounts from mainstream social media sites hampers their recruitment abilities. Deplatforming is a good thing, a fact that the literature backs. ![]()
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