Thread by @YDanasmithdutra

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Defence Secretary Ben Wallace addressed military leaders regarding a series of scandals dogging the Armed Forces. Former green beret -a member of US Special Forces - arrested revealing his illegal cache of explosives while selling his home on Zillow. bylinetimes.com/2021/11/10/the…

Jeremy Brown was a self-described “Oath Keeper”, a right-wing US militia and is serving a jail term for his involvement in the 6 January Capitol Riots.

@Heidi_Cuda @sianushka @BylineTimes

Much of the recent conversation on the analysed Telegram channel has focused on vaccinations, with one poster who identifies as “SS” and claims to be in the British Army writing how the “military is finished” due to the high take-up of the vaccine.

The nature of Telegram means it’s difficult to know if these men truly are military personnel, or Walter Mitty-style fantasists. Armed forces have been referred to counter-extremism for far-right views. June 2021, 16 military personnel had been investigated since 2019 by Prevent.

Far-right terrorist advocate The British Hand encouraged followers to “hide their political views in order to enlist in the military”. The 15-year-old leader and one other member of the group appeared to be in the Army Cadets where he found friends with similar political views.

US Capitol on 6 January threw the spotlight on the Oath Keepers, a well-established militia group infamous for vigilantism. Members pledge to resist if the Federal Government imposes martial law, invades a state or takes people’s guns, notions linked to right-wing extremists.

Another military presence at the Capitol in January was the Veterans in Defence of Liberty – an organisation run by shadowy radical-right network Council for National Policy (CNP) member Dr Scott Magill. CNP’s membership includes radical-right actors, donors and Trump allies.

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🤬 Facebook

The leak of 2009-2015 Oath Keepers membership data helped to reveal how men entered the militia. The number one gateway, according to analysis by Mother Jones, was Facebook, with variants of the platform’s name mentioned in almost 1,000 entries.

There is growing concern that radical-right organisations are using big data to target military families with their messaging. While these organisations are not far-right or blatantly fascist, they use data to target anti-Democrat, pro-right wing views to military personnel.

Central strategy is “Gloo” a data platform that has been accused of targeting the vulnerable and mentally ill in order to recruit them to US mega-churches. Gloo links to the Koch Foundations and to data firm Cambridge Analytica. Its Board’s Chair is Intel’s Pat Gelsinger. 😱

A Koch Foundations-funded charity commissioned Cambridge Analytica and Gloo to build a software platform that could be used by churches in order to target vulnerable people. The man who commissioned Cambridge Analytica and put money into Gloo is a member of CNP. @Tentoads4truth

Gloo partners with an organisation called Cru, which runs a military mission. The latter describes its vision as seeking “God’s help in facilitating movements throughout the global military community so that everyone knows someone who truly follows Jesus.”

Of course there’s an app!

The partnership involves an app “designed to help military members grow in their faith and stay connected to God’s people”. The app enables Gloo to harvest data on military personnel – which its clients can target with their religious-right messaging.

While the short-term goal is to monetise the data to increase far-right wing church wealth and membership, the longer term goal according to the UK Parliament on disinformation, Dr Charles Kriel, is to identify them so they can be “recruited into the politics of the far-right.”

“the explicit ideology of Gloo partner Cru Military is Dominionist. God’s soldiers, Crusaders. Cru is a truncation of Crusade. The mission describes Roman Generals who conquer territory and then take on a Governing role.”

“This absolutely aligns with the politics of white Christian nationalism,” Kriel told Byline Times. “The optics couldn’t be worse. Recruiting and geotracking the military in the field through an organisation and app named for the Crusades? It’s a very bad look.”

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