back into the national sphere. nbc news reporter brandy, who worked on that piece, joins me now. brandy, really fascinating piece. describe the basic phenomena that you and ben sort of reported out in this piece. sure, so, you know, it s been a year, and we wanted to know what was happening with the general landscape of domestic extremism in america. and so, we talked to several people, we tracked ones that we knew of. we looked at telegram groups and counted. we watched a bunch of white supremacist podcasts and we saw the story of a group of people that are very different but that all went through this sort of cooling-off period after january 6th, dealt with sort of pr crisis, and honestly, the chance of being arrested. and then sort of took a breath and evolved, almost took a step back, actually, and acted a lot like they acted in early 2020,
so they could take action. i know that is going to create fear in them as well but a part of me told myself they did deserve to know as well so they can do something about it or they can confront the person who they gave it to say they know how it was circulated and what not. after intense media pressure, the group was eventually closed down, but during the course of our investigation, we found at least two duplicate groups sharing the same kind of images. joanna doubts that these groups will ever disappear. sometimes you just feel so helpless because you try to do so much to remove these groups but they are still coming up, you know, the telegram groups, so i don t know if there is an end to it, honestly. only telegram has the power to close these groups down and stop them from reappearing. the app prides itself on protecting
before court but the point is to intimidate people to change the rule they don t like, banning the book they don t like before anything gets to court. piling up a group said of forest of paper. what do they think will happen coming from that? the school districts have to manage even if it is all based on as you say nothing, useless information. the school districts have to manage that. no? they have to deal with it as if it s real because they don t know. this is an individualized thing. it is coming from by the way the telegram groups called bonds for win with local individualized chapters. 14 states have been targeted by the group led by a flat earther who believes aids is a hoax and teams up with a man who most likely is q and pulls off in
down, but during the course of our investigation, we found at least two duplicate groups sharing the same kind of images. joanna doubts that these groups will ever disappear. sometimes you just feel so helpless because you try to do so much to remove these groups, but they are still coming up with, you know, the telegram groups, so i don t know if there is an end, honestly. 0nly telegram has the power to close these groups down and stop them from reappearing. the app prides itself on protecting the privacy of its users, but what we have seen is the opposite for women. as the platform continues to grow, there are fears that more women could be targeted and their bodies and lives exposed.
places like patriots.win. like january 6 th was planned online. the same day the invasion happened, you can see this upswing in posts about the anthony fauci bio labs happening in ukraine. this is all made up. this is not real. it the big thing that took over the far right internet and you have to give them credit. some of the people in the trucker convoy said no, we see this brutality and how bad this thing. i would say it s 50/50 stepped away from the talking point while some people still, you know, because of how engrained the hatred of anthony fauci is in the far right spaces, some people leaned into this. you re seeing a 50/50 split in the far right telegram groups between people proputin because of the fauci stuff and still, you know, people who see reality. people who are anti putin because of the brutality they see with their own eyes. we have a chart here.