Hello, MW reader! Here is another MW BiMonthly, covering June and July 2026. Stories are short here, but cover the following:
- DOJ succeeds on behalf of Proud Boys, Oath Keepers still in limbo
- Militia leaders fail at the ballot box (again)
If you’d like to read the previous BiMonthly, you can access it here:
J6 Convictions Erased
In late May, the D.C. Circuit Court initiated proceedings to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of 12 Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders. On July 10, Trump appointee Timothy Kelly granted the motion to dismiss the Proud Boys convictions with prejudice. Previously, Judge Amit Mehta deferred ruling on these cases, but Mehta has not yet ruled on Oath Keepers cases.
Ballot Box Rejections Continue
Chad Bianco, the Riverside County Sheriff and former Oath Keepers member who generated significant coverage earlier this year for his March seizure of 650,000+ ballots, came in a distant fourth in California’s June 2 gubernatorial primary, finishing with about 11% of the vote. Bianco’s constitutional-sheriff-aligned brand of politics, which was enough to fuel early polling interest and a noisy news cycle over the ballot seizure, didn’t translate into a broad electoral coalition.
Meanwhile, William Null does not appear to have made it onto the August 4 Republican primary ballot in Michigan. Null is an acquitted member of the alleged Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot who announced he was running for Michigan governor late last year (and since). He apparently failed to secure the 15,000+ valid petition signatures required to get on the ballot.
Tig Tiegen of the United American Defense Force continues his 2027 mayoral run in Colorado Springs. He has run in the past and got obliterated.
Constitutional Sheriffs and ICE
In late May, seventeen of Maryland’s twenty-four sheriffs (many representing ‘Second Amendment sanctuary counties’) filed a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s Community Trust Act, which limits how local law enforcement can cooperate with ICE. The sheriffs were organized and represented by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a hate network. The SPLC’s June Intelligence Project Dispatch flags that at least one of the lead sheriffs, Chuck Jenkins, has documented ties to the constitutional sheriff movement.
Some Notes on Patriot Front
Patriot Front (a fascist street movement, not a Patriot Movement style militia, but nevertheless worth mentioning here) marched in DC on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, bringing out their largest crowd to date. It is unclear whether PF founder Thomas Rousseau met his goal of 600 members by July 4th (as reported by Will Carless from leaked documents), but the turnout was significant nonetheless. Rousseau gave a speech with a slightly more aggressive valence than ones in the past, and clips of his speech got hundreds of thousands of views on Twitter, usually as posted by overtly fascist accounts.