Shield and Friends is a metapolitical youth movement, related to the popular identitarian movements of Martin Selner (Austria) and Richard Spencer (USA), focusing on Flemish identity and family values. They seem to be the perfect sons-in-law, cleaning up the streets and donating blood in the name of their organisation. They also strive to stop mass migration and uphold Flanders as a Christian society, using memes to change the thoughts of their followers. Journalist Tim Verheyden climbed up their ranks and succeeded in looking into their secret chat boxes on Facebook and ‘gaming application’ discord, where they have almost 900 and 200 members respectively. He found more than 67,000 sexist, anti-Semitic and racist messages, memes, thoughts and comments. Tim followed their leader Dries Van Langenhove, or ‘End Boss’ as he wants to be called, for 6 months, filming the actions and meetings with, among others, the Hungarian president Viktor Orbán. They frequently refer to a race war, calling for arms, and post pictures of them holding weapons, saying they are ‘totally ready’. Who are the real Shield and Friends? And where does this end?
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