Since the election of President Joe Biden, a number of state legislators have proposed so-called “Second Amendment sanctuary” legislation to declare their states immune from federal gun-safety laws they consider unconstitutional. Such resolutions are legally problematic and threaten to override the very democratic systems upon which the country was built.
Since its founding, the antigovernment group Oath Keepers has steeped itself in conspiracy theories and trained for a revolution against the state.
Researchers studying the far right have sounded the alarm over the threat posed by the rapid proliferation of conspiracy theories, disinformation and misinformation for years, noting that shifts in the extreme right’s mobilization tactics could present new challenges to stemming a tide of violence.
An Oregon man who is alleged to have fired shots into a federal court building in Portland last week had, over the preceding months, expressed increasingly violent and conspiracy-minded beliefs across a range of online platforms.