Thread by @rdevro

There is a substantial migration from Parler to Telegram underway right now and paramilitary far-right accelerationists are attempting to capitalize on the moment to radicalize what they consider “normie” Trump supporters — here’s what we know so far theintercept.com/2021/01/12/boo…

A “Parler life boat” channel is fast approaching 16,000 subscribers and as researcher @MeganSquire0 has noted, a Proud Boys channel attracted nearly 6,000 users in four hours over the weekend — Telegram says more than 25 million people have joined the app in the past 72 hours

According extremism expert @AlexBNewhouse, the most active channel in the so-called “Terrorgram” network right now — and the one talking most explicitly about violence in the days ahead — is “Boogaloo Intel Drop,” which has nearly 7,000 subscribers.

While the boogaloo movement has white supremacism at its core, Newhouse said, there are varying levels of explicitness in those views — many adherents call themselves libertarians. This channel is not that, he said: “They fully believe in totalitarian, white, Aryan government.”

Within the channel, the accelerationists — people who want to push the country into race-based civil war — are trying to convince the Trumpist “normies” that instead of backing the blue they should murder them.

These radicalization efforts are not new but they have certainly intensified in the past week. Newhouse cautions against reading too much into these channels’ subscriber numbers, but at the same time, he says, “you only need one or two people to take it seriously.”