WASHINGTON – After the 2020 presidential election, thousands of Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters heeded his call to join a “wild” protest of his defeat. Following Trump's lies about a stolen election, hundreds of them stormed the U.S. Capitol under the banners of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other extremist groups and movements.
Many of those far-right networks have dissolved, splintered or receded from public view since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. But the specter of election-related chaos hasn’t vanished with them. Political violence remains a persistent threat heading into the Nov. 5 election, experts warn.
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Election officials have been inundated with threats, misinformation and the prospect of “ election denialist ″ organizations wreaking havoc. The FBI was investigating on Monday after fires destroyed hundreds of ballots inside drop boxes in Portland, Oregon, and in nearby Vancouver, Washington.
Trump has used social media to promote violent conspiracy theories that have become mainstream features of Republican politics. Many, including Trump himself, have tried to recast Capitol rioters as 1776-style patriots and political prisoners. Trump also has vowed to use the military to go after “enemies from within.”
Four years ago, most of the Trump supporters in the mob had no criminal record or any group affiliations beyond their shared allegiance to a president who exhorted them to “fight like hell.” That helps explain why it can be difficult for authorities to identify and ward off threats.
“It only takes one person to cause a lot of damage,” said American University professor Kurt Braddock, who studies extremism.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said the extremists she monitors don’t seem to be fixated on this year's election — at least in their public chatter online. Many likely learned a lesson from the Capitol riot defendants who flooded social media with self-incriminating posts before, during and after the siege.
“We have no idea if there’s something going on in encrypted chats,” she added.
During this election cycle, Trump and his allies have stirred up anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant discourse in a way that galvanizes extremists, experts say. After Jan. 6, the Proud Boys staged protests at drag queen story hours. More recently, Springfield, Ohio, was overwhelmed with hoax bomb threats after Trump and running mate JD Vance amplified bogus, xenophobic rumors about Haitian immigrants in the city.
All manner of far-right conspiracy theories are spreading virtually unchecked on mainstream platforms, including a firehose of lies about the federal government’s response to hurricane-ravaged North Carolina, a swing state.
Trump and his allies often use his rallies as a platform for spewing racism and xenophobia, including one Sunday at New York’s Madison Square Garden that drew comparisons to a pro-Nazi rally in 1939. Vice President Kamala Harris said she believes Trump is a fascist after his former chief of staff, John Kelly, said the former president praised Adolf Hitler while in office.
Trump was struck in the ear by gunfire during one of two assassination attempts against him this year. He has accused Democrats of fostering a volatile political climate by accusing him of being a threat to democracy.
Beirich said it could be difficult for authorities to curb election-related threats “because it can happen all over the country.” She and other experts fear extremists will try to disrupt ballot counting, possibly in battleground states.
“It feels a bit like a calm before the storm,” she said.
Extremism experts are hardly alone in their fears: About 4 in 10 registered voters say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about violent attempts to overturn the results of next month's election, according to a new poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Of the more than 1,500 defendants charged in the Jan. 6 attack, more than 200 have been linked to extremist groups or movements by federal authorities, according to an Associated Press review of court records.
That includes approximately 80 leaders, members or associates of the far-right Proud Boys and over 30 defendants linked to the anti-government Oath Keepers. Other groups, including the Groyper movement, have had smaller numbers of followers charged in federal court.
Four years ago, Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during his first debate against Democrat Joe Biden. Group leaders celebrated Trump's shout-out and eagerly joined the fray when Trump invited supporters to Washington for his “Stop the Steal” rally.
Today, some of the top leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are serving prison terms of up to 22 years for violent plots to stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power from Trump to Biden.
Imprisoning the groups' national leaders left a void. For the Proud Boys, it was partially filled by local chapters that consider themselves autonomous and tend to promote more extreme ideologies, said Jared Holt, a senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which tracks online hate.
“Their organizational capabilities are greatly diminished from where they were in 2020,” Holt said. “There’s always the possibility that, in a post-election period, these groups will all of a sudden find the motivation to mobilize and start showing up at events. But they’ve been pretty docile this year.”
The Oath Keepers, which the Yale Law School-educated Stewart Rhodes founded in 2009, has withered since his arrest and incarceration.
“It was his baby, and no one has really stepped up to fill his void,” Holt said.
Dozens of Capitol rioters were followers of the anti-government Three Percenters movement or belonged to militia groups with names like the Gray Ghost Partisan Rangers, the Southern Indiana Patriots and the Patriot Boys of North Texas. The government's response to Jan. 6 seems to have placed a “huge damper” on militias, Beirich said.
“They don’t disappear," she said. “They might pop up somewhere else, but I have to say: Militias in the last year or so have been relatively inactive compared to earlier eras.”
Many other Jan. 6 rioters were inspired by QAnon, which centered on the baseless belief that Trump was secretly fighting a Satan-worshipping, child sex trafficking cabal of prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites. The self-described “QAnon Shaman” remains one of the most recognizable figures from the riot.
Mike Rothschild, author of “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything,” said the QAnon movement has evolved beyond its bizarre web of “riddles and codes.”
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube cracked down on QAnon after Jan. 6, driving believers to platforms like Telegram or Trump’s Truth Social. Rothschild said many of them flocked back to Twitter, now called X, after Elon Musk bought it. He believes QAnon adherents remain “extremely dangerous.”
“They’ve had four years to build up their anger and grievance,” he said.