With a historic election just months away, a legal advocacy organization in Alabama is warning about the rise of white supremacy in the state and across the country.
The declaration comes from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which is based in Montgomery. The organization’s “Annual Year in Hate & Extremism Report” shows a record number of white nationalist groups and anti-LGBTQ+ groups present in 2023. The organization releases the report each year after research and data analysis across the United States.
The report documents 595 hate groups and 835 antigovernment extremist groups, several of which the SPLC said is concerning. According to the nonprofit, these hate groups intensified efforts in 2023 to recruit new members, increase online presence and in-person demonstrations and participate in local government.
Rachel Carroll Rivas is the interim director of the Intelligence Project, which is the SPLC’s award-winning magazine. She said the report showed a record number of certain kinds of hate groups.
“We specifically saw really concerning growth in the number of white nationalist organizations,” Carroll Rivas said. “These are explicitly bigoted organizations, and that was over 50% growth to 166 groups. We also saw the most number of anti-LGBTQ groups in the United States ever documented.”
The SPLC reports communities of color, immigrant communities, minority faith communities and LGBTQ+ communities are all targeted by and experience the negative effects of hate-filled rhetoric and antigovernment conspiracies. The nonprofit said this is done through actions such as banning books, protesting drag story hours and using school boards as political battlegrounds.
“With a historic election just months away, this year, more than any other, we must act to preserve our democracy,” said Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center and SPLC Action Fund, in a press release. “That will require us to directly address the danger of hate and extremism from our schools to our statehouses.”
Much of the harmful ideology these hate groups participate in, according to the SPLC, is found in white supremacy, male supremacy, as well as Christian supremacy and dominionism theology.
Carroll Rivas said these ideologies represent only a small number of extremist views in the United States, but the groups tend to have an oversized influence for their size. She also said there are various groups pushing back against what the SPLC is calling harmful extremism.
“We see this effort manipulating religion to benefit a very narrow and specific version of Christianity over all other versions and other religions in the U.S., but also some real efforts by various interfaith groups to combat that and fight for an inclusive democracy,” Carroll Rivas said.
The SPLC’s yearly report highlights this activism, including how a civilian oversight board instituted a new policy prohibiting officers in the Chicago Police Department from belonging to hate and extremist groups and how Drag Story Hour is countering anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry with literacy programs across the country.
Carroll Rivas said the annual analysis released by the SPLC is intended to help shed light on harmful hate groups in the United States and become a tool for communities to fight back.
“We hope that this report is not just a reality check, but actually can be a tool for advocates and communities to prevent radicalization and to counter white supremacy, counter disinformation, and get in front of false conspiracy theories,” she explained.
Read more on the SPLC’s “Annual Year in Hate & Extremism Report” here, and a state-by-state list of hate and antigovernment extremist groups and an interactive map is available here.
