SPLC report warns of far-right extremism in Alabama

In its most recent Year in Hate and Extremism report, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that far-right extremist groups gained new power across the federal government, private tech sector and college campuses over the course of 2025. APR recently spoke with Rachel Carroll Rivas, deputy director of research, reporting and analysis for SPLC’s Intelligence Project, to learn more about the report’s findings and how they relate to issues currently facing Alabama.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

In your report, you discuss how right-wing extremism has found a new foothold in our federal government and the private tech sector. What sort of trends have we seen in state governments, and specifically in Alabama?

We’ve been doing a report of this kind for almost 50 years—nearly our whole existence. I’m pretty sure that we’re looking at the the longest running longitudinal study of far-right hate and anti-government groups in the United States and potentially in the world. We’re not aware of another study that really is able to track this kind of group activity longitudinally. So I think your question about the South, about what we are seeing with government and the way these things get institutionalized, particularly in government institutions, is really important.

Here’s a really interesting note about the data: We have shown that some of the biggest impacts of the ideas behind white supremacy and hate in the United States have been in the Deep South. However, when we look at the number of non-governmental groups, the groups that we track, there are very few numbers in the South generally—except for Florida and Georgia—but particularly in places like Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, they actually often have very few numbers. That seems confusing, like why would that be the case? And I think your question about government is exactly why.

We have seen through the messages, the newsletters, the speeches of these hate groups that when there is this government that is carrying out their agenda, they don’t need to create an additional organization to go do the work of repressing people trying to remove their rights because those rights are already limited. We have seen that Alabama in some ways modeled this: repeating the messages, putting them into policy, having figures in positions of power that are representative of this movement, the far-right anti-democracy movement. And now we see that same sort of thing happening at the federal level.

And so it’s almost like Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and the Deep South were unfortunately modeling what we’re now seeing at the federal level. And in terms of where that’s headed—as there have been strong efforts to enshrine civil rights in Alabama in policy, as we’ve seen the language and the pressure from the public to not have politicians or leaders repeat hateful content, and there have been greater rights, including voting rights—we’ve seen some growth in hate groups, but that has been over time and didn’t necessarily play out last year specifically.

In Alabama specifically, we list a number of far-right extremist organizations in the state. They’re kind of the infrastructure behind extremism. Some of those are on the ground, what you might consider more “grassroots” groups in the anti-government or hate movement, but a few of them really do use politics as their main tactic. And we do see that they’ve engaged, at the state legislative level in particular, in primarily trying to roll back LGBTQ rights.

Over the past year we have seen an increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric across the country, including from GOP leaders in Alabama like U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville and Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen. Why do you think that is?

Alabama is a microcosm reflecting what we see nationally around the increase in anti-Muslim bigotry across the U.S. The bigoted language used against Muslim and Arab people by officials in Alabama is something that we’ve seen across the country, from the federal level to the state level. We have not seen a proliferation of local activism around this issue—I would say in many ways it feels very astroturfed, it’s pushed from the top down. But we are seeing a lot of, for lack of a better term, social media “influencers” and online figures in the hate movement who’ve absolutely taken these last few months to spread intense anti-Muslim rhetoric, tropes and ideas.

That is really coupled with a few things. One: the anti-immigrant sentiment we saw in 2025—so kind of this mixing of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment and targeting those communities. And secondly: the growing attention on antisemitism as a problem in the United States, which is absolutely the case. Unfortunately, there are, again, these social media influencers and hate group leaders who have pushed their message in the media and with politicians that somehow addressing antisemitism really means going after Muslim people, and that’s just a false impression to leave on society and how we actually address antisemitism.

Our findings show that what you’ve seen in Alabama is mimicked and echoed nationally, but that has mostly been in the form of rhetoric and less in the form of groups. After 9/11, we saw a number of new anti-Muslim groups who had local chapters all across the country, particularly with ACT for America chapters really engaging in that subject locally. We don’t see that right now. We see this really as a national-level, top-down, astroturfed effort.

How does this trend of far-right extremist groups gaining institutional power fold into what we have seen recently with the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act by the U.S. Supreme Court and the subsequent redistricting battles that have taken place in Alabama and across the South?

When we talk about the impact that hate and extremist ideas have on policy, the wish list of white supremacists has just been checked off at the federal level one after another—everything that they have pushed for for decades. All of the progress made from the Civil Rights Era for black folks, immigrants, indigenous people, women—their wish list has been to roll that all back, and we absolutely see that on every level. It made it difficult to actually make a list for this report, because it could go from all of the executive orders around English-only and the rollbacks of the Voting Rights Act to rollbacks of protections in non-discrimination, housing and employment. So for the report, we actually ended up focusing specifically on the addressing of extremism by the DOJ and DHS.

For the last few administrations, we’ve really seen an attention to the prevention of radicalization by these agencies and attention to domestic white supremacist extremism, which has been documented as the most proliferate type of domestic extremism in the U.S. In 2025, we saw an unbelievable rollback of each of those things. A rollback of the prevention programs, a rollback of all of the attention that was focused on where we knew the problem was, and instead we saw an undermining. We saw the pardoning of Jan. 6 insurrectionists. We saw the focus shift to sweeping immigration raids, with pressure on not only immigrants, but communities that were supporting them. So we have a real concern for not only what happened in ’25, but what the implications for safety are going to be for communities in 2026 and ’27.

What do you expect to see in next year’s Year in Hate and Extremism report now that we are six months into 2026?

On the policy side, I would say we have a chart in the report around the way hate groups, particularly anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ groups, engaged in congressional policy spaces. We see that continuing into this year already. One thing I might predict to be a little different is that absent Minneapolis and the real conflict that happened there over the aggressive immigration crackdown, there has been very little of what you might call “street violence.” Proud Boys, Patriot Front—these groups we track that mostly use a tactical approach of hitting the streets, counter-protesting, trying to draw conflict, really intimidating communities with in-your-face, direct action—we saw very little of that this last year.

I think as we ramp up the engagement, the necessary, constitutionally-protected engagement of people in their right to vote and in civic participation over the summer, I think that we are likely to see more street-level confrontation. We see that there was some ramping up of that by hate groups around No Kings protests and we’re seeing some of that ramping up as they call to be at polling places to intimidate voters, so I think it’s possible we see more of that. I will say that for many years, some of that conflict was at LGBTQ rights and Pride celebrations, and already this month we’ve seen neo-Nazis show up at some of those events. However, there are also less of those events now, because the LGBTQ community is not feeling safe and they are not being given fair protection to hold such events. So it’s a little bit of a chicken and egg there.

Is there anything else that you think is important for our readers to know, or anything else from the report worth noting as it relates to Alabama?

I want to note that college campuses continue to be targeted by the far-right, which we covered that in the report. Why has that been the case? It’s supposed to be a place of free expression and there is this manipulative aspect to the way that hate groups have entered campus and engaged there, and we saw that continue in 2025. We offer some guidance on how students, faculty, parents and administrators on campus can really uphold the values that universities are supposed to have. So I would encourage folks to check that out, it’s an important piece of the report.

I think the other thing I’d flag about Alabama is that there are still groups on the ground in Alabama that are white supremacist organizations who have terrorized and really harmed communities directly. That includes active clubs, white supremacist fight clubs, flyering people with hateful leaflets around the state, and it also includes traditional hate groups like the Klan, which still exist in the state. Alabama is also sort of the headquarters for incel forums, a male-supremacist global entity that has inspired serious violence against women. And lastly, I’d note that there continue to be groups like the Southern Cultural Center who use a revisionist history of the Confederacy to push white supremacist ideas.