Inside the Cult of Stefan Molyneux: A Historical Exploration of Far-Right Radicalisation on YouTube

Inside the Cult of Stefan Molyneux: A Historical Exploration of Far-Right Radicalisation on YouTube

Daniël Jurg, Maximilian Schlüter and Marc Tuters
Global Network on Extremism and Technology
May 17, 2023

Introduction

On June 29, 2020, YouTube removed 25,000 channels, including several prominent white supremacist figures such as David Duke, Richard Spencer, and Stefan Molyneux. While Duke and Spencer were generally well-known white supremacist figures, Molyneux specifically built his reputation on YouTube. The self-described philosopher has been labelled a cult leader spreading white supremacist ideas to millions of YouTube users, radicalising impressionable young men. The New Zealand Royal Commission also concluded that the Christchurch shooter watched and donated to Molyneux’s channel. Although watchdog organisations like the Southern Poverty Law Center extensively warned of Molyneux’s extremism, popular narratives about YouTube radicalisation still often focus on passive algorithmic pipelines and extreme cases of political violence. However, there is scarce empirical evidence on how audiences engage with problematic YouTube channels. YouTube’s current deplatforming efforts, by simply removing all data from public view, limit further critical analysis and understanding.

In this Insight, we present the key takeaways from an exploratory audience engagement study using an archival dataset of approximately two million YouTube comments from a ten-year period (2008 – 2018) on Molyneux’s YouTube channel. This rare dataset offers unique insight into an important moment in the growth of online far-right radicalisation—one currently invisible through the platform’s application programming interface (API). This piece aims to show the ‘everyday’ aspects of audience engagement with extremism on YouTube. To make our case, we first argue for a more participatory cultural understanding of YouTube radicalisation, highlighting active audience participation. We then present our methods and findings, revealing key participatory and discursive elements in Molyneux’s community. While Molyneux’s audiences express a wide range of opinions using various engagement tactics, we show how core audience members engage with extremist discourse from the perception of pursuing ‘Truth.’

YouTube Radicalisation

Over the past decade, YouTube has become notorious for its ‘radicalising power.’ Commentators such as the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci claimed that YouTube ‘may be one of the most powerful radicalising instruments of the 21st century.’ Although reporting is shifting, YouTube radicalisation is mostly attributed to sophisticated algorithms and how they expedite far-right extremism. However, recent research argues that such techno-centric analyses fail to account for demanding audiences: extreme political communities have incredibly high participation rates. Indeed, as audience studies have consistently demonstrated, viewers, readers, and listeners actively create meaning from and with the media they consume. As we have argued elsewhere, audiences in these communities “perceive themselves less as observers and more as participants in a conversation in which their voices matter”. It is thus worth asking how and why audiences engage with such extreme political narratives.

It might seem perplexing for outsiders of these YouTube communities that ideas about ‘scientific racism,’ eugenics and white supremacism would engage vast audiences. However, on YouTube, such ideas are often embedded within a specific vernacular culture, appealing to existing sensibilities by translating extreme political ideas to the platform logic to which users are already predisposed. For example, Becca Lewis pointed out that extreme political figures on YouTube use tactics like other popular influencers, engaging in interviews, guest appearances, debates, vlogging, and reaction videos.

Media studies have well documented how such practices are fruitful in building and maintaining audiences and establishing high levels of intimacy and parasocial relationships. YouTube increases this parasocial potential by affording audience engagement through features such as ‘likes’ and ‘comments’. In fact, YouTube’s technological facilitation of reciprocity is often seen as one of the platform’s core strengths. Extreme political figures on YouTube do not merely broadcast their ideas to a passive and receptive audience but develop them in dialogue with their audience, who present their own ideas, sources, and arguments.

Methodology

Using an archival dataset containing approximately two million YouTube comments from a ten-year period (2008 – 2018) on Molyneux’s YouTube channel, initiated by Dutch journalists at De Volkskrant and Correspondent, we could (1) analyse when Molyneux attracted active audience engagement and (2) follow how audiences engaged over time. The engagement mapping was done by plotting monthly comments and contextualising the emerging peaks. We used computer-assisted content analysis with 4CAT to detect important discussion points. On a micro-level, we specifically analysed the comments of six (anonymised) highly engaged audience members over time.

Operationalising the concept of ‘radicalisation’ is tricky. This is partly due to the divergent and sometimes vague interpretations of the concept from a diverse set of fields, including criminology, anthropology, social movement studies, and media and communications studies. When we talk about radicalisation in the context of this Insight and our study of ‘everyday’ extremism on YouTube more broadly, we follow the definition of radicalisation as “the process of developing extremist ideologies and beliefs”. As Peter Neumann points out, extremism does not necessarily imply violent acts or terrorism but may refer more broadly to adopting “political ideologies that oppose a society’s core values and principles”.

The Zimmerman Trial

Our first analysis aims to uncover important moments in the development of Molyneux’s participatory community through his YouTube comment section (Fig 1).



Figure 1 shows that Molyneux progressively attracted more participatory audiences, with a significant first peak of engagement occurring in 2013. This peak corresponds with Molyneux’s video analysis of the highly publicised criminal case and trial of George Zimmerman. Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer, was charged with the second-degree murder of the 17-year-old African American teenager Trayvon Martin. In their book Meme Wars, Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss, and Brian Friedberg argued that the Zimmerman trial was a key moment in developing white supremacist internet culture—a hypothesis we can underline with the findings. But while on 4Chan the Zimmerman Trial became part of reactionary meme culture, Molyneux’s video titled ‘The Truth About George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin’ took a serious approach pointing out that mainstream media were not telling the truth and misreporting the facts (the video can still be watched on YouTube).

The Zimmerman Trial seems to be a turning point in Molyneux’s discourse and audiences—his community was more concerned with libertarian ideas before. The video was shared by David Duke and circulated among white supremacist audiences, which explains some of the overt racism in the comments. This point was also noted by an audience member who had been commenting on his channel since 2011:

This video about Zimmerman has drawn out some very savage comments from those who don’t seem remotely interested in the truth (really makes me appreciate the normal comments). I wonder if this video is being exposed via google recommendations to a wider mainstream audience.

The Zimmerman trial was one of the first moments that Molyneux’s community significantly grew outside its libertarian origin, with various audiences joining the online culture wars. As Stuart Hall theorised, audiences performed preferred, negotiated, and oppositional readings of Molyneux’s takes, and it is important to note that the audience is not monolithic but an aggregation. Audiences have different uses and gratifications for watching Molyneux, such as expressing anger, trolling, hate-watching, mocking etc., making it difficult to assess any direct effect of the video on anyone’s political beliefs. The current conception within political persuasion theory is that people have “stable, cognitively efficient predispositions that are commonly activated and reinforced – but rarely changed – by information disseminated by persuasion campaigns and within social media”.

That being said, the Zimmerman trial does reveal a key new discursive element, which cannot be found in any comment before the trial—race-baiting. While traditionally used to identify a racist act, the term was used by reactionaries around the Zimmerman trial to claim that mainstream media were clouding “logic and facts by appealing to emotion through false accusations of racial discrimination”. As we have argued elsewhere, Molyneux increasingly evoked this framing of a highly emotive media vis a vis him as an objective and rational “philosopher”, mediating between the “ugly truth” of objectivism and the wishful thinking of social constructivists. This discourse is highly important in his later discussions on scientific racism. As Molyneux stated in an interview with Dave Rubin, “there is almost nothing harder to absorb than this question of differences in IQ between groups”, juxtaposing his personal uncomfortableness with the ‘facts’ about the hierarchy of different eugenic ‘races’.

Audiences’ Pursuit of the Truth

The ‘logic and facts’ framework is useful for understanding certain radicalising dynamics in the commenting behaviour of long-time super-participants in Molyneux’s community. The key takeaway from close reading highly involved audiences’ comments is that they pack some extensive reflections. Molyneux seems to offer his community members an ‘objective’ framework that allows them to make sense of the world and their place in it. Using super-participant S’s trajectory here as an illustration, we see how this ‘objectivity’ becomes more extreme (Fig. 2).



Having started commenting in 2011, super-participant S wrote in 2012:

Certainty has been something I’ve craved since I was 10 and started reading Descartes meditations. [Molyneux’s theory] and other recent works finally got me there and it is as if someone has taken their boot off my chest and I can breath for the first time. All my intuitive understanding of the evils of violence finally felt grounded on the foundation of reason.

Molyneux offers this feeling of liberation and freedom through ‘logic’, ‘facts’, ‘reason’, and ‘Truth’. This philosophical framework allows audiences to change their minds on politically charged topics like immigration. For instance, super-participant S captures a reframing of immigration discussions in 2015 following a dispassionate analysis of the data:

I’ve always had this misconception about immigrants. I thought they were more hard working and responsible […]. This data on welfare and other irresponsible and immoral behavior is surprising to me. […]. I don’t often trek down to immigrant welfare ghettos to balance out my sample data.

Building onto the concepts of ‘logic’, ‘facts’, ‘reason’, and ‘Truth’, long-time members of Molyneux’s community underline their objectivist worldview by using deeply ethical frames where terms such as ‘evil’ and ‘immoral’—previously used for libertarian discussions—are applied to more extreme discussions. This type of sensemaking occurs across various manifestations of ‘online othering’ in Molyneux’s comment sections, including extreme political polarisation, racism, and sexism, amongst other forms of discrimination. The trajectory of super-participant S in our dataset ends with full involvement in the “grand war for the soul of western civilisation”.

Conclusion
Our exploratory study of the comments on Stefan Molyneux’s YouTube channel sheds light on a historical moment of radicalisation on the platform. Using close and distant reading techniques of audience engagement, our analysis provides a unique perspective on the radicalisation process that broadens the focus beyond algorithmic recommendations. We find that Molyneux’s core audiences participate in a perceived ‘intellectual’ discourse that differentiates their community from the mainstream media, the emotive left, and overt racism. We discovered an almost obsessive relationship with logic, reasoning, and truth as core values among Molyneux’s most engaged audiences, who frame extreme ideas as the ‘sad truth.’

The culture wars in which reactionary actors leverage facts, logic, and reason are expected to remain part of the digital space for some time. We would therefore align ourselves with scholars who question the assumption that the issues discussed above can be reduced to problems of misinformation as fact-checking. Rather, we need to attune ourselves to how platforms afford participatory far-right communities to construct their knowledge and build their worldviews in order to counter their persuasive rhetoric.

We know that such radicalisation dynamics are challenging to track and scale; however, now that YouTube has taken on the more active moderating role, giving external parties access to removed data should be the start. As YouTube tends to downplay the scale of the issue, it remains unclear how it will address the persistence of similar far-right discourse on the platform. We hope our analysis of Molyneux’s community from a period when YouTube treated ‘the alt-right’ as a ‘content vertical’ can shed light on how to address these issues in the future.

Daniel Jurg is a PhD Candidate in Media and Communication Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is part of the research unit on News: Uses, Strategies & Engagements within the research group imec-SMIT at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Open Intelligence Lab at the University of Amsterdam. Working on a scholarship from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), he studies the history of alternative influence on YouTube.

Maximilian Schlüter is a PhD Student of Information Science at the Graduate School of Arts from Aarhus University, Denmark. His research project revolves around studying and understanding disinformative memes in far-right online spaces using feminist critical theory.

Marc Tuters is an Assistant Professor in the University of Amsterdam’s Media Studies faculty where he is affiliated with the Digital Methods Initiative and the Open Intelligence Lab, studying political subcultures at the bottom of the Web.


https://gnet-research.org/2023/05/17/inside-the-cult-of-stefan-molyneux-a-historical-exploration-of-far-right-radicalisation-on-youtube/

Russia far-right sect tries to get foothold in Europe

France 24
March 15, 2023

Heiligenbrunn (Austria) (AFP) – Ines and Norman Kosin left everything behind to follow the teachings of Anastasia, a far-right Russian sect that preaches a return to the land.

They used to work on Sylt, a trendy holiday island in the Baltic off northern Germany.

"Our life was very secure, but our heart was not happy," said Ines, a pastry chef and chocolate maker.

"Something was missing," she said.

So three years ago they set out to found a New Age Anastasian community on an isolated farm in the bucolic Burgenland of eastern Austria.

Interest in the movement -- whose teachings reject much of modern medicine, contain anti-Semitic tropes and qualify democracy as "demonocracy" -- surged during the pandemic.

The neo-pagan sect began in Russia in 1996 inspired by a series of bestselling books called the "Ringing Cedars" by Russian entrepreneur Vladimir Megre.

Mysterious prophet

He claims the teachings come directly from Anastasia, a mysterious hermit with supernatural powers he met in the Siberian taiga. The beautiful blonde preached against the "enslavement" of modern industrial society and the "dark forces" leading humanity to disaster.

As her prophet, Megre passed on her call for people to return to living in harmony with nature in "kinship" groups on small, self-sufficient permaculture farms.

The group claims some 400 Anastasian settlements have since sprung up across Russia.

Norman Kosin dreamed of welcoming 100 families to an Anastasian "space of love" in Austria.

"Imagine a doctor, midwives, lumberjacks and artisans all settling down with each one plying their trade, doing what fulfils them as humans," said Kosin, who hopes to do the same, touching his cedar wood medallion for "positive energy".

But so far Kosin has not been able to persuade anyone to join them permanently in Austria.

In another blow, officials have asked them to leave the country because they failed to show sufficient income to stay.

Kosin, who is sometimes known online as Felix Kramer, or Felix von Elysion ("from Elysium", the name of his hoped-for community), has also campaigned against Covid vaccines and restrictions.

The couple took two of their three daughters, aged 10 and 14, out of school in protest at Covid testing and "indoctrination" at school. Their four-year-old still goes to kindergarten.

"Children's souls are so innocent," he said, drawing parallels with what he called anti-Russian "propaganda" since the war in Ukraine, which he said was "marking people for life".

Kosin regularly denounces media "lies" in online conspiracy theory channels that have several hundred thousand followers, and is convinced that the "system" -- which he claimed "degenerated" people -- will collapse.

'Anti-Semitic elements'

He said the Anastasia movement has between 3,000 and 4,000 followers in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, with members scattered across the rest of Europe from Portugal to Bulgaria.

A recent Austrian government report said the "pandemic has given Anastasia a considerable boost in German-speaking countries," highlighting links with the anti-vax movement.

Ulrike Schiesser from Austria's Federal Office for Sectarian Affairs, which monitors sects, said the movement has attracted official scrutiny because of its "anti-democratic" stance.

While the movement "contains all sorts of harmless ideas for better living," she told AFP, "it poses a problem... because it positions itself against democracy, the state and science."

Schiesser said "the anti-Semitic elements clearly present" in the sect's books were "generally ignored, denied or played down" by members, who refuse to "criticise the guru's writings".

Kosin defended the books, saying "because of two or three chapters, everyone who reads the works is placed in the national socialist (Nazi) category."

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230315-russia-far-right-sect-tries-to-get-foothold-in-europe

How The Epoch Times Created a Giant Influence Machine

Since 2016, the Falun Gong-backed newspaper has used aggressive Facebook tactics and right-wing misinformation to create an anti-China, pro-Trump media empire.

Kevin Roose

NY Times 

October 24, 2020

For years, The Epoch Times was a small, low-budget newspaper with an anti-China slant that was handed out free on New York street corners. But in 2016 and 2017, the paper made two changes that transformed it into one of the country’s most powerful digital publishers.

The changes also paved the way for the publication, which is affiliated with the secretive and relatively obscure Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, to become a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation.

First, it embraced President Trump, treating him as an ally in Falun Gong’s scorched-earth fight against China’s ruling Communist Party, which banned the group two decades ago and has persecuted its members ever since. Its relatively staid coverage of U.S. politics became more partisan, with more articles explicitly supporting Mr. Trump and criticizing his opponents.

Around the same time, The Epoch Times bet big on another powerful American institution: Facebook. The publication and its affiliates employed a novel strategy that involved creating dozens of Facebook pages, filling them with feel-good videos and viral clickbait, and using them to sell subscriptions and drive traffic back to its partisan news coverage.

In an April 2017 email to the staff obtained by The New York Times, the paper’s leadership envisioned that the Facebook strategy could help turn The Epoch Times into “the world’s largest and most authoritative media.” It could also introduce millions of people to the teachings of Falun Gong, fulfilling the group’s mission of “saving sentient beings.”

Today, The Epoch Times and its affiliates are a force in right-wing media, with tens of millions of social media followers spread across dozens of pages and an online audience that rivals those of The Daily Caller and Breitbart News, and with a similar willingness to feed the online fever swamps of the far right.

It also has growing influence in Mr. Trump’s inner circle. The president and his family have shared articles from the paper on social media, and Trump administration officials have sat for interviews with its reporters. In August, a reporter from The Epoch Times asked a question at a White House press briefing.

It is a remarkable success story for Falun Gong, which has long struggled to establish its bona fides against Beijing’s efforts to demonize it as an “evil cult,” partly because its strident accounts of persecution in China can sometimes be difficult to substantiate or veer into exaggeration. In 2006, an Epoch Times reporter disrupted a White House visit by the Chinese president by shouting, “Evil people will die early.”

Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist and a former chairman of Breitbart, said in an interview in July that The Epoch Times’s fast growth had impressed him.

“They’ll be the top conservative news site in two years,” said Mr. Bannon, who was arrested on fraud charges in August. “They punch way above their weight, they have the readers, and they’re going to be a force to be reckoned with.”

But the organization and its affiliates have grown, in part, by relying on sketchy social media tactics, pushing dangerous conspiracy theories and downplaying their connection to Falun Gong, an investigation by The Times has found. The investigation included interviews with more than a dozen former Epoch Times employees, as well as internal documents and tax filings. Many of these people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation, or still had family in Falun Gong.

Embracing Mr. Trump and Facebook has made The Epoch Times a partisan powerhouse. But it has also created a global-scale misinformation machine that has repeatedly pushed fringe narratives into the mainstream.

The publication has been one of the most prominent promoters of “Spygate,” a baseless conspiracy theory involving claims that Obama administration officials illegally spied on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. Publications and shows linked to The Epoch Times have promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory and spread distorted claims about voter fraud and the Black Lives Matter movement. More recently, they have promoted the unfounded theory that the coronavirus — which the publication calls the “CCP Virus,” in an attempt to link it to the Chinese Communist Party — was created as a bioweapon in a Chinese military lab.

The Epoch Times says it is independent and nonpartisan, and it rejects the suggestion that it is officially affiliated with Falun Gong.

Like Falun Gong itself, the newspaper — which publishes in dozens of countries — is decentralized and operates as a cluster of regional chapters, each organized as a separate nonprofit. It is also extraordinarily secretive. Editors at The Epoch Times turned down multiple requests for interviews, and a reporter’s unannounced visit to the outlet’s Manhattan headquarters this year was met with a threat from a lawyer.

Representatives for Li Hongzhi, the leader of Falun Gong, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did other residents of Dragon Springs, the compound in upstate New York that serves as Falun Gong’s spiritual headquarters.

Many employees and Falun Gong practitioners contacted by The Times said they were instructed not to divulge details of the outlet’s inner workings. They said they had been told that speaking negatively about The Epoch Times would be tantamount to disobeying Mr. Li, who is known by his disciples as “Master.”

The Epoch Times provided only partial answers to a long list of questions sent to its media office, and declined to answer questions about its finances and editorial strategy. In an email, which was not signed, the outlet accused The Times of “defaming and diminishing a competitor” and displaying “a subtle form of religious intimidation if not bigotry” by linking the publication to Falun Gong.

“The Epoch Times will not be intimidated and will not be silenced,” the outlet added, “and based on the number of falsehoods and inaccuracies included in the New York Times questions we will consider all legal options in response.”

Clarifying the Truth

Falun Gong, which Mr. Li introduced in China in 1992, revolves around a series of five meditation exercises and a process of moral self-improvement that is meant to lead to spiritual enlightenment. Today, the group is known for the demonstrations it holds around the world to “clarify the truth” about the Chinese Communist Party, which it accuses of torturing Falun Gong practitioners and harvesting the organs of those executed. (Tens of thousands across China were sent to labor camps in the early years of the crackdown, and the group’s presence there is now much diminished.)

More recently, Falun Gong has come under scrutiny for what some former practitioners have characterized as an extreme belief system that forbids interracial marriage, condemns homosexuality and discourages the use of modern medicine, all allegations the group denies.

When The Epoch Times got its start in 2000, the goal was to counter Chinese propaganda and cover Falun Gong’s persecution by the Chinese government. It began as a Chinese-language newspaper run out of the Georgia basement of John Tang, a graduate student and Falun Gong practitioner.

By 2004, The Epoch Times had expanded into English. One of the paper’s early hires was Genevieve Belmaker, then a 27-year-old Falun Gong practitioner with little journalism experience. Ms. Belmaker, now 43, described the early Epoch Times as a cross between a scrappy media start-up and a zealous church bulletin, with a staff composed mostly of unpaid volunteers drawn from the local Falun Gong chapters.

Editors’ Picks

“The mission-driven part of it was, let’s have a media outlet that not only tells the truth about Falun Gong but about everything,” Ms. Belmaker said.

Mr. Li, Falun Gong’s founder, also saw it that way. In speeches, he referred to The Epoch Times and other Falun Gong-linked outlets — including the New Tang Dynasty TV station, or NTD — as “our media,” and said they could help publicize Falun Gong’s story and values around the world.

Two former employees recalled that the paper’s top editors had traveled to Dragon Springs to meet with Mr. Li. One employee who attended a meeting said Mr. Li had weighed in on editorial and strategic decisions, acting as a kind of shadow publisher. The Epoch Times denied these accounts, saying in a statement, “There has been no such meeting.”

The line between The Epoch Times and Falun Gong is blurry at times. Two former Epoch Times reporters said they had been asked to write flattering profiles of foreign performers being recruited into Shen Yun, the heavily advertised dance performance series that Falun Gong backs, because it would strengthen those performers’ visa applications. Another former Epoch Times reporter recalled being assigned to write critical articles about politicians including John Liu, a Taiwanese-American former New York City councilman whom the group viewed as soft on China and hostile to Falun Gong.

These articles helped Falun Gong advance its goals, but they lured few subscribers.

Matthew K. Tullar, a former sales director for The Epoch Times’s Orange County edition in New York, wrote on his LinkedIn page that  his team initially “printed 800 papers each week, had no subscribers, and utilized a ‘throw it in their driveway for free’ marketing strategy.” Mr. Tullar did not respond to requests for comment.

Ms. Belmaker, who left the paper in 2017, described it as a bare-bones operation that was always searching for new moneymaking ventures.

“It was very short-term thinking,” she said. “We weren’t looking more than three weeks down the road.”

A Trump Pivot

By 2014, The Epoch Times was edging closer to Mr. Li’s vision of a respectable news outlet. Subscriptions were growing, the paper’s reporting was winning journalism awards, and its finances were stabilizing.

“There was all this optimism that things were going to level up,” Ms. Belmaker said.

But at a staff meeting in 2015, leadership announced that the publication was in trouble again, Ms. Belmaker recalled. Facebook had changed its algorithm for determining which articles appeared in users’ newsfeeds, and The Epoch Times’s traffic and ad revenue were suffering.

In response, the publication assigned reporters to churn out as many as five posts a day in a search for viral hits, often lowbrow fare with titles like “Grizzly Bear Does Belly Flop Into a Swimming Pool.”

“It was a competition for traffic,” Ms. Belmaker said.

As the 2016 election neared, reporters noticed that the paper’s political coverage took on a more partisan tone.

Steve Klett, who covered the 2016 campaign for the paper, said his editors had encouraged favorable coverage about Mr. Trump after he won the Republican nomination.

“They seemed to have this almost messianic way of viewing Trump as the anti-Communist leader who would bring about the end of the Chinese Communist Party,” Mr. Klett said.

After Mr. Trump’s victory, The Epoch Times hired Brendan Steinhauser, a well-connected Tea Party strategist, to help make inroads with conservatives. Mr. Steinhauser said the organization’s goal, beyond raising its profile in Washington, had been to make Falun Gong’s persecution a Trump administration priority.

“They wanted more people in Washington to be aware of how the Chinese Communist Party operates, and what it has done to spiritual and ethnic minorities,” Mr. Steinhauser said.

All In on Facebook

Behind the scenes, The Epoch Times was also developing a secret weapon: a Facebook growth strategy that would ultimately help take its message to millions.

According to emails reviewed by The Times, the Facebook plan was developed by Trung Vu, the former head of The Epoch Times’s Vietnamese edition, known as Dai Ky Nguyen, or DKN.

In Vietnam, Mr. Trung’s strategy involved filling a network of Facebook pages with viral videos and pro-Trump propaganda, some of it lifted word for word from other sites, and using automated software, or bots, to generate fake likes and shares, a former DKN employee said. Employees used fake accounts to run the pages, a practice that violated Facebook’s rules but that Mr. Trung said was necessary to protect employees from Chinese surveillance, the former employee said.

Mr. Trung did not respond to requests for comment.

According to the 2017 email sent to Epoch Times workers in America, the Vietnamese experiment was a “remarkable success” that made DKN one of the largest publishers in Vietnam.

The outlet, the email claimed, was “having a profound impact on saving sentient beings in that country.”

The Vietnamese team was asked to help Epoch Media Group — the umbrella organization for Falun Gong’s biggest U.S. media properties — set up its own Facebook empire, according to that email. That year, dozens of new Facebook pages appeared, all linked to The Epoch Times and its affiliates. Some were explicitly partisan, others positioned themselves as sources of real and unbiased news, and a few, like a humor page called “Funniest Family Moments,” were disconnected from news entirely.

Perhaps the most audacious experiment was a new right-wing politics site called America Daily.

Today, the site, which has more than a million Facebook followers, peddles far-right misinformation. It has posted anti-vaccine screeds, an article falsely claiming that Bill Gates and other elites are “directing” the Covid-19 pandemic and allegations about a “Jewish mob” that controls the world.

Emails obtained by The Times show that John Nania, a longtime Epoch Times editor, was involved in starting America Daily, along with executives from Sound of Hope, a Falun Gong-affiliated radio network. Records on Facebook show that the page is operated by the Sound of Hope Network, and a pinned post on its Facebook page contains a promotional video for Falun Gong.

In a statement, The Epoch Times said it had “no business relationship” with America Daily.

Many of the Facebook pages operated by The Epoch Times and its affiliates followed a similar trajectory. They began by posting viral videos and uplifting news articles aggregated from other sites. They grew quickly, sometimes adding hundreds of thousands of followers a week. Then, they were used to steer people to buy Epoch Times subscriptions and promote more partisan content.

Several of the pages gained significant followings “seemingly overnight,” said Renee DiResta, a disinformation researcher with the Stanford Internet Observatory. Many posts were shared thousands of times but received almost no comments — a ratio, Ms. DiResta said, that is typical of pages that have been boosted by “click farms,” firms that generate fake traffic by paying people to click on certain links over and over again.

The Epoch Times denies using click farms or other illicit tactics to expand its pages. “The Epoch Times’s social media strategies were different from DKN, and used Facebook’s own promotional tools to gain an increased organic following,” the outlet said, adding that The Epoch Times cut ties with Mr. Trung in 2018.

But last year, The Epoch Times was barred from advertising on Facebook — where it had spent more than $1.5 million over seven months — after the social network announced that the outlet’s pages had evaded its transparency requirements by disguising its ad purchases.

This year, Facebook took down more than 500 pages and accounts linked to Truth Media, a network of anti-China pages that had been using fake accounts to amplify their messages. The Epoch Times denied any involvement, but Facebook’s investigators said Truth Media “showed some links to on-platform activity by Epoch Media Group and NTD.”

“We’ve taken enforcement actions against Epoch Media and related groups several times,” said a Facebook spokeswoman, who added that the social network would punish the outlet if it violated more rules in the future.

Since being barred from advertising on Facebook, The Epoch Times has moved much of its operation to YouTube, where it has spent more than $1.8 million on ads since May 2018, according to Google’s public database of political advertising.

Where the paper’s money comes from is something of a mystery. Former employees said they had been told that The Epoch Times was financed by a combination of subscriptions, ads and donations from wealthy Falun Gong practitioners. In 2018, the most recent year for which the organization’s tax returns are publicly available, The Epoch Times Association received several sizable donations, but none big enough to pay for a multimillion-dollar ad blitz.

Mr. Bannon is among those who have noticed The Epoch Times’s deep pockets. Last year, he produced a documentary about China with NTD. When he talked with the outlet about other projects, he said, money never seemed to be an issue.

“I’d give them a number,” Mr. Bannon said. “And they’d come back and say, ‘We’re good for that number.’”

‘The Moral Objective Is Gone’

The Epoch Times’s pro-Trump turn has upset some former employees, like Ms. Belmaker.

Ms. Belmaker, now a freelance writer and editor, still believes in many of Falun Gong’s teachings, she said. But she has grown disenchanted with The Epoch Times, which she sees as running contrary to Falun Gong’s core principles of truth, compassion and tolerance.

“The moral objective is gone,” she said. “They’re on the wrong side of history, and I don’t think they care.”

Recently, The Epoch Times has shifted its focus to the coronavirus. It pounced on China’s missteps in the early days of the pandemic, and its reporters wrote about misreported virus statistics and Chinese influence in the World Health Organization.

Some of these articles were true. But others pushed exaggerated or false claims, like the unproven theory that the virus was engineered in a lab as part of a Chinese biological warfare strategy.

Some of the claims were repeated in a documentary that both NTD and The Epoch Times posted on YouTube, where it has been viewed more than five million times. The documentary features the discredited virologist Judy Mikovits, who also starred in the viral “Plandemic” video, which Facebook, YouTube and other social platforms pulled this year for spreading false claims.

The Epoch Times said, “In our documentary we offered a range of evidence and viewpoints without drawing any conclusions.”

Ms. Belmaker, who still keeps a photo of Master Li on a shelf in her house, said she recoiled whenever an ad for The Epoch Times popped up on YouTube promoting some new partisan talking point.

One recent video, “Digging Beneath Narratives,” is a two-minute infomercial about China’s mishandling of the coronavirus. The ad’s host says The Epoch Times has an “underground network of sources” in China providing information about the government’s response to the virus.

It’s a plausible claim, but the video’s host makes no mention of The Epoch Times’s ties to Falun Gong, or its two-decade-long campaign against Chinese communism, saying only that the paper is “giving you an accurate picture of what’s happening in this world.”

“We tell it like it is,” he says.

Ben Smith contributed reporting. Jack Begg contributed research.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/technology/epoch-times-influence-falun-gong.html

How right-wing extremists, libertarians and evangelicals built Quebec's movement against COVID-19 restrictions

They may appear to make strange bedfellows, but experts say they share some fundamental values

Jonathan Montpetit

CBC News
September 25, 2020

The main event at a demonstration protesting COVID-19 restrictions last weekend north of Montreal was a speech by Steeve L'Artiss Charland, one-time leader of a far-right group that has since faded from view.

In a parking lot in Mont-Tremblant, Que., Charland told a crowd of around 75 about his miraculous recovery from a childhood illness that had stumped doctors. He then told them they were part of a cosmic struggle of good against evil.

"It's us against them," Charland said to applause. "We're in a spiritual war. We're in a war of darkness against light."

The opposition to public health measures in Quebec has given many figures in the province's foundering far-right movement a chance to re-invent themselves, and to find new audiences.

Charland had been one of the leaders of the Islamophobic group La Meute before leaving last year amid an internal power struggle.

The infighting, according to researchers who monitor the group, contributed to La Meute's decline in popularity.

Charland, meanwhile, has become an active spokesperson for the movement against COVID-19 restrictions. He's been criss-crossing the province to take part in demonstrations.

Several other prominent organizers in what's colloquially known as the anti-mask movement also have close ties to Quebec's far right.

The group behind a large demonstration in Montreal earlier this month, for instance, is headed by Stéphane Blais, a fringe politician who has courted far-right supporters for years.

The march began outside Quebec Premier François Legault’s office near the McGill University campus, and wound through the streets. 1:00

His political party, Citoyens au Pouvoir, received less than one per cent of the vote in the last provincial election.

But the non-profit organization he founded in the spring to challenge public health rules claims to have raised $400,000. In Montreal, he spoke to a crowd of several thousand people.

"The far-right movement had kind of died down last year before some of them recycled the anti-mask issue," said Roxane Martel-Perron, a specialist in right-wing extremist groups at the Center for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence in Montreal.

The movement in Quebec has drawn a wide range of other figures into its orbit as well, including evangelical pastors, libertarian radio hosts and conspiracy theorists.

Their interests sometimes intersect only tangentially, but for the moment these unusual alliances have managed to organize recurring demonstrations across the province, with more slated this weekend. Together, they are seeking to undermine the government's efforts to fight the spread of COVID-19.
Blurred lines

Along with members of the far right, the organizational core of the movement in Quebec is composed of conspiracy theorists, though the distinction between the two is not always clear.

The career arc of Quebec's best-known conspiracy theorist, Alexis Cossette-Trudel, illustrates the fuzziness.

Before starting his own YouTube channel, Radio-Québec, Cossette-Trudel was a frequent contributor to several far-right media outlets in the province.

With Radio-Québec, he was among the first to translate into French material from QAnon, a conspiracy movement that began in the U.S. and believes the world is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles. QAnon theories are often overtly racist or anti-Semitic.

Since the pandemic began, Cossette-Trudel has focused almost exclusively on criticizing the public health rules put in place by Quebec and Ottawa. Subscriptions to his YouTube channel have increased nearly fourfold.

His criticisms are often variations of QAnon theories, such as his recent baseless claim that Premier François Legault is exaggerating the threat of COVID-19 as part of an international plot to prevent U.S. President Donald Trump from being re-elected.

Cossette-Trudel uses his social media reach — his personal Facebook page has 36,000 followers — to promote demonstrations where people rally against COVID-19 restrictions. His speeches at these events are often shared widely by participants.

Last week, Cossette-Trudel was a guest on the top-rated lunch-hour radio show in the Quebec City area.

The radio station, CHOI 98.1 FM (Radio X), is known for airing populist conservative opinions, often with a libertarian bent.

Its hosts and on-air personalities have repeatedly criticized Quebec's public health restrictions, saying they are not justified by current infection rates (experts say the province is already being hit by a second wave).

One Radio X columnist, Éric Duhaime, even organized his own demonstration in August. It attracted more than 1,000 people in Quebec City.

"To force me to wear a mask, to threaten me with $600 tickets — I'm sorry, we're not in communist China here. We live in a democracy," he said in a video ahead of his rally.

Though these on-air figures try to distance themselves from conspiracy theorists, the distinction, again, is not always clear.

When Cossette-Trudel appeared on the lunch-hour radio show, host Jeff Fillion said he was interviewing a "star" whose work was "very detailed and well researched."
Evangelicals step into the public

Next month, Cossette-Trudel and Charland are scheduled to speak at a protest in Montreal that is billed as a "demonstration-gospel concert."

A poster for the event features the names of several evangelical preachers who have become active supporters of the movement.

An evangelical media outlet, ThéoVox, has even taken to broadcasting live from some demonstrations, and produces polished video interviews with organizers and prominent speakers.

André Gagné, a Concordia University professor who studies the Christian right, said it is unusual for evangelical groups in Quebec to engage in politics, but a small number appear to be influenced by pastors in the U.S. who have publicly opposed public health rules.

This particular strain of evangelicalism, Gagné said, associates government control with godless communism or socialism.

It is rooted in an apocalyptic world view that shares many similarities with QAnon-style conspiracy thinking, with its paranoia of secret programs out to control us through vaccines or internet towers.

"This very much parallels the eschatological fictions that have developed in some evangelical circles about the eventual rise of a one-world government headed by an anti-Christ," Gagné said.

This mode of thinking might appear to clash with other spiritual groups that have also joined the protests, such as advocates of new-age therapies.

But Martin Geoffroy, an academic who has studied both new-age and right-wing movements, suggested focusing instead on the fundamental values they do share.

"The common thing is that they are all anti-authority movements," said Geoffroy, who heads CEFIR, the anti-radicalization research centre at Cégep Édouard-Montpetit, a public francophone college in Longueuil.

"Conspiracy theories help them to create a parallel reality where they are the authorities."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-anti-mask-movement-qanon-covid-19-1.5737040

CultNEWS101 Articles: 9/29/2020

NXIVM, Legal, Australian Right-Wing Extremist, White Utopias, Burning Man, The World Wide Association of Specialty Programs, Heaven on Earth Inn's, Transcendental Meditation

NY Times: Clare Bronfman, Facing Sentencing, Refuses to Disavow 'Sex Cult' Leader

"For more than a decade, Clare Bronfman, an heiress to the Seagram liquor fortune, devoted her life to supporting a self-help group called Nxivm. She quit her equestrian career, moved to Nxivm's headquarters in upstate New York and poured millions of dollars into the group.

The organization has since unraveled over accusations that it was a pyramid scheme and a sex-trafficking cult, estranging Ms. Bronfman from her father and turning her into a felon.

And yet, as she awaits sentencing by a federal judge, Ms. Bronfman, 41, has not wavered in her loyalty to Nxivm's leader, Keith Raniere.

"Many people, including most of my own family, believe I should disavow Keith and Nxivm, and that I have not is hard for them to understand and accept," Ms. Bronfman wrote in a letter last month to the judge. "However, for me, Nxivm and Keith greatly changed my life for the better."

On Wednesday, Ms. Bronfman will be the first defendant to be sentenced in the Nxivm case, which led to criminal charges against six of the organization's leaders and prominent members. After Ms. Bronfman and four others pleaded guilty, Mr. Raniere was the only defendant who went to trial, resulting in his conviction in June 2019 for racketeering, sex trafficking and other crimes.

The United States attorney's office in Brooklyn, which investigated Nxivm (pronounced NEX-ee-um), has asked the judge to sentence Ms. Bronfman to five years in prison, saying Mr. Raniere could not have committed his crimes without powerful allies like her."

ABC Australia: Right-wing extremists using Islamic State tactics to recruit, ASIO warns, amid spike in surveillance

"Australia's domestic spy agency has revealed a dramatic rise in the number of violent right-wing extremists under surveillance, while warning some groups are now employing Islamic State-style radicalisation tactics.

Key points:

• Up to 40 per cent of ASIO's counterterrorism case load is linked to right-wing extremism

• Some groups have been compared to Islamic State due to their propaganda outreach online

• ASIO says the COVID-19 pandemic has provided an opportunity for extremists to radicalise more people

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has told Parliament's Joint Intelligence and Security Committee that far-right movements are also taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to bolster recruitment.

ASIO deputy director-general Heather Cook said up to 40 per cent of the agency's counterterrorism efforts are now focussed on thwarting violent plots by right-wing groups or individuals.

"Extreme right-wing violent extremism occupies approximately between 30 and 40 percent of ASIO's current caseload in our counterterrorism work — and that is an increase from approximately 10 and 15 percent prior to 2016," she said.

Ms Cook has also revealed that ASIO is concerned that right-wing extremists are now using the same strategies as Islamic extremists to bolster their ranks."

High Country News: Is spiritual growth possible without confronting whiteness?

In 'White Utopias,' cultural appropriation at festivals like Burning Man goes under the microscope.

"In a geodesic dome in Joshua Tree, California, hundreds of festival-goers assemble for a workshop on prānāyāma, an ancient Hindu breathing practice. Amid an acoustic blend of drumming, chanting and birdsong, a workshop leader, flanked by "guardians" dressed in white, instructs participants to drop into their heart centers and prepare to be "introduced to the place inside (themselves) that is pure love." Many of the participants take these Hinduism-derived activities seriously. But most, if not all, identify as "spiritual but not religious" (SBNR) — a phrase-turned-demographic category that describes the growing number of Americans who are critical of organized religion but believe in something greater than themselves. And these festival-goers have something else in common: Nearly everyone at Bhakti Fest, a multi-day annual celebration of spiritual transformation through Indian cultural practices, is white.

To research her insightful new book White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals, Amanda Lucia, a California-based scholar of religion who specializes in global Hinduism, immersed herself in SBNR communities in California, Hawaii, Australia, Nevada and elsewhere, attending 23 different "transformational festivals" — large-scale gatherings of people attempting to create enlightened selves within imagined utopian worlds. The festivals emphasize certain qualities — kindness, inclusion, mindfulness and the rejection of conventional understandings of the self — though they vary in the details of their utopic visions (and in their acceptance of corporate sponsorships). But Lucia, who attends without hiding her role as a researcher, is struck by their overwhelming whiteness. What makes them, as Lucia writes, such "safe spaces of white ethnic homogeneity"? The festivals are intended to facilitate spiritual transformation. But do the participants ever confront their own investment in whiteness? If not, how profound could their transformations be?"

Website: WWASP Survivors

"WWASP(S) – The World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (and Schools), or as it was known later, Youth Foundation Inc, was an umbrella corporation of associated teen behavior modification programs, boot camps and therapeutic boarding schools. Created by Robert Lichfield in the early 1990s, WWASP quickly became one of the largest troubled teen industry corporations, with dozens of facilities located in both the US and abroad in countries such as Mexico, Costa Rica, Jamaica and Samoa. Following investigations into a number of allegations of child abuse and unhealthy conditions at WWASP's various facilities since 2002, over 20 WWASP affiliated programs were eventually shuttered, and the organization itself was eventually dissolved. Multiple lawsuits have been filed against the company alleging abuse and fraud, the most notable being a joint action lawsuit on behalf of over 350 plaintiffs alleging physical and sexual child abuse as well as various acts of fraud and racketeering."

The Rice Thresher: Visit Houston's Hidden Secrets: Oddities in the Bayou City!

" ... What once was the continental United States' largest Holiday Innnow sits derelict and abandoned, towering over the southern edge of downtown. The formerly space-themed Days Inn got passed around between owners like a hot potato before finally settling into the hands of followers of the Beatles-aligned spiritual guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They rechristened the building as "Heaven on Earth Inn," planning to generate income and house members. Unfortunately for them, cults aren't known for having great bookkeepers and they were promptly evicted."

News, Education, Intervention, Recovery

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CultNEWS101 Articles: 6/5/2020

Jehovah's Witnesses, Ayurvedic Medicine, Exorcism, South Africa, Far Right Extremist, QAnon, Podcast

Oprah Magizne: 10 Jaw-Dropping Podcasts About Cults

#6 IndoctrinNation (Rachel Bernstein)

"Unlike so many creators in the cult and true crime podcast world, IndoctriNation's Rachel Bernstein isn't a comedian, journalist, or historian: She's a therapist who's worked with survivors of cults and emotional abuse for almost 30 years. Bernstein sits down with former cult members, intervention experts, and those who've left relationships with narcissists of all kinds, and offers practical takeaways based on experience."

Nigel Rowley: Ex-Jehovah's Witnesses accuse church of covering up crimes and protecting predators

"BBC News also had access to internal documents of the organization and spoke to four former elders who report that the orders they received were to deal with problems internally, avoiding seeking out authorities at all costs."

Skeptic: Ayurvedic Medicine

It's been around for a thousand years, but does it work?

"Practitioners of an ancient Indian health care system claim to be able to treat cancer, epilepsy, schizophrenia, psoriasis, ulcers, asthma, malaria and many other diseases. They do this by balancing invisible vital forces that cannot be seen, touched, measured, or quantified in any way. In this week's eSkeptic, Marc Carrier discusses some of the scientific literature on Ayurveda as well as the harm that can come from the use of alternative medicine therapies."

IOL: Pastor, relatives arrested after girls beaten to death in exorcism ritual

"Police on Thursday arrested a pastor and two relatives after two nine-year-old girls were beaten to death in an attempt to cast out "evil spirits".

Police spokesperson Colonel Thembeka Mbele said Nkandla police arrested three suspects aged between 31 and 35 at Ezimambeni, including the mother of one of the dead girls. The three face two counts of murder and will appear at the Nkandla Magistrate's Court on Monday.

Mbele said police received an anonymous call on March 24, asking them to go to a house in Ezimambeni because they suspected something sinister was going on. "Upon arrival, the police were greeted with hostility by the family members before they encountered a gruesome scene. Two nine-year-old girls lay on the floor with bruises all over their bodies," she said.

Mbele said one of the girls had already died and the other was unconscious. Police called for an ambulance and the second girl was rushed to hospital but died of her injuries a few days later.

"Upon questioning the family members on the girl's injuries, they alleged that the girls were attacked by evil spirits," Mbele said. 'The family alleged that the young girls had been complaining that evil spirits were beating them up and instructing them to drink blood. In response, the family also beat up the girls as a form of exorcism. A local pastor was called to pray for the girls and he also allegedly joined in the beating of the girls.'"

Vice: Far-Right Extremists Are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests Into a New Civil War

Armed extremists are showing up to protests and urging a "boogaloo" — code for civil war — online.

"Far-right extremists are showing up, with guns, to the protests against police brutality that have exploded across the country.

Others are egging on the violence from behind their computers, urging followers to carry out acts of violence against black protesters with the goal of sparking a "race war."

Their presence makes an uneasy addition to the escalating unrest, which was triggered by the death of George Floyd, a black man who was choked to death by a white Minneapolis police officer earlier this week.

But there's a range of motivations that's driving far-right interest toward the protests, which are being led by community members and Black Lives Matter, and bolstered by antifascists.

For example, the so-called Boogaloo Bois — a group of armed anti-government extremists made visible by their Hawaiian shirts — have reportedly shown up to some of the protests.

The "boogaloo" is code for impending civil war or violent confrontation with law enforcement, and that's what they're hoping to get out of the protests. Their main reason for being there is their antipathy toward law enforcement, and so they're trying to position themselves as allies of Black Lives Matter protesters. They've made police brutality one of their central issues, which was explored at length in a Bellingcat article this week."

Get Religion: Yahoo! podcast: Jon Ward offers lots of questions about Evangelicals falling for QAnon

" ... I guess what I am still trying to figure out is whether white evangelicals are more susceptible to conspiracy theories than the next person or whether what bothers me more is the fact that Christianity is a religion that claims to know and seek truth, regardless of where it leads, and in this case you have people who are adherents of that religion … who are not only not seeking truth but are spreading falsehoods."

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Far right-wing and radical Islamist groups are exploiting coronavirus turmoil

Souad Mekhennet
Washington Post
April 10, 2020

Extreme right-wing organizations and radical Islamist groups are seizing on the turmoil and panic created by the coronavirus pandemic to advance their violent agendas, often using similar tactics and the same messaging apps, security officials and experts say.

In recent weeks, racist and anti-Semitic organizations, as well as the Islamic State, al-Qaeda and radical Shiite networks, have ramped up recruitment efforts, encouraged attacks and advanced hate-filled conspiracy theories about the virus.

Far-right extremist groups have called the pandemic a hoax and floated the falsehood that the crisis is being orchestrated by Jews or China. In the United States, they are exploiting the state of anxiety, including massive job losses, by scapegoating Jews, blacks, immigrants, politicians and law enforcement, according to security officials.

Radical Islamist groups are similarly using the pandemic to push their extremist credo, calling the virus an act of God against the enemies of Islam. They are also trying to stoke violent opposition to leaders in the Middle East, describing those who have discouraged religious and other large gatherings as defilers of the faith.

Security officials warn that extremist groups may become emboldened during a time when governments and authorities are focused on the sweeping changes to societies and economies brought on by the crisis.

“The online messages of right-wing or jihadist terrorist organizations about covid-19 to incite hate and the call for attacks are finding a receptive audience, and we cannot ignore the possible threat this might cause,” said a European intelligence official, who like other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Experts say Muslim extremist groups and far-right organizations are using similar tactics, as well as many of the same online platforms.

“Practically speaking, these groups’ directives largely remain the same: continue attacking the enemy,” said Rita Katz, executive director of the SITE Intelligence Group, a private firm that tracks online extremist activity. “The far right has gone much further in directly exploiting the covid-19 pandemic.”

Of particular concern, security officials say, are the messages encouraging people to intentionally spread covid-19 to create mass disorder.

One recent online extreme-right post listed chemical formulas for making toxic gases. Others have called for spreading the virus to Jews and black children, or encouraged sabotaging infrastructure to start race riots.

“In our research, we have found online chatter in which participants state that they are infected and seek to become biological weapons,” said Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). “Sites for spreading infection are discussed, among them supermarkets, hospitals and power stations. Also discussed is visiting synagogues and coughing in the faces of rabbis.”

In an editorial in an online magazine last month, the Islamic State urged “lone-wolf” attacks to capitalize on the paralysis and fear.

MEMRI and SITE found that Shiite groups — including Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen — and their supporters on social media platforms have accused the U.S. government of deploying covid-19 as a bioweapon.

Experts and security officials say they are concerned about the swell of calls from extremists to strike at a time when they believe they could get away with terrorist acts and not be detected.

On March 24, a man who authorities say was planning to bomb a hospital where covid-19 patients were being treated was killed during a shootout with FBI agents in Belton, Mo. Timothy R. Wilson, 36, who had been active on right-wing extremist online groups, intended to use an explosive-laden vehicle in the attack, officials said.

U.S. security officials say they have noticed an uptick in threats against targets in New York and surrounding areas — which lead the country in covid-19 infections and deaths.

Last month, the FBI told police agencies in New York that white supremacists intended to spray Jews and police officers with virus-infected bodily fluids.

On March 21, the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness warned that a neo-Nazi media group had encouraged supporters “to incite panic while people are practicing social isolation during the COVID-19 outbreak, which includes discharging firearms in cities and putting bullet-sized holes into car windows.”

The fact that people are under quarantine makes them safer from attacks, said Mitchell D. Silber, executive director the Community Security Initiative, a program created to enhance the security of Jews in New York City.

“I am concerned about the day after, when people start to return back to the real world,” he said.

The Department of Homeland Security this week urged religious leaders to keep security in mind when mass gatherings halted by the coronavirus begin resuming at houses of worship. While saying there were no imminent threats, the department highlighted stress fueled by the pandemic and a surge in online hate speech.

In a letter sent to the faith-based community on Wednesday, the department noted that religious leaders who start to welcome congregants back should “also review your security plans and ensure procedures are in place to protect your facilities and visitors.”

“Although there are no imminent or credible threats at this time, there has been an increase in online hate speech intended to encourage violence or use the ongoing situation as an excuse to spread hatred,” Brian Harrell, the department’s assistant director for infrastructure security, wrote in the letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The Washington Post.

“Additionally, stressors caused by the pandemic may contribute to an individual’s decision to commit an attack or influence their target of choice,” he added. “Again, we have no information to suggest such attacks are imminent or even likely, instead we are looking to provide you with useful information for planning for restoration of normal operations.”

The message was sent ahead of major holidays taking place over the coming weeks. Passover began Wednesday, Easter is Sunday and Ramadan starts the following week.

Katz, of the SITE Intelligence Group, said the pandemic should alter the way the world looks at terrorist threats.

“Ultimately, we need to start thinking of terrorism in these new contexts: public health, disinformation, etc. While some of these threats may have seemed far-fetched a few months ago, we’re now learning every day what happens when governments don’t prepare for the worst.”

Mark Berman contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/far-right-wing-and-radical-islamist-groups-are-exploiting-coronavirus-turmoil/2020/04/10/0ae0494e-79c7-11ea-9bee-c5bf9d2e3288_story.html