The Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual Year in Hate and Extremism report documented 1,263 hate and extremist antigovernment groups operating in the United States in 2025, including 556 hate groups and 707 antigovernment groups.
But the more consequential finding in the SPLC’s annual Year in Hate and Extremism report is not how many such groups exist — it’s how thoroughly the movement they represent managed, in a single year, to install itself inside the institutions it had long sought to reshape.
The report traces three overlapping channels through which the hard right consolidated power in 2025: a network of social media influencers granted unprecedented access to the federal government; a cadre of hate and antigovernment lobbying organizations that appeared before congressional committees at a pace exceeding virtually any other outside interest group; and a sustained campus recruitment campaign designed to pull a new generation into the movement’s orbit before other institutions could reach them.
The influencer pipeline was the most visible. Trump’s return to the White House emboldened a generation of hard-right livestreamers, commentators, and self-described citizen journalists who had spent years building audiences on platforms like Rumble and X. The administration responded to their loyalty with access. Influencers have embedded with ICE during immigration enforcement raids, been invited to White House briefings, and have been handed binders purportedly containing documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. When mainstream outlets refused to comply with restrictive Pentagon press pool policies, the administration replaced them with right-wing influencers.
The effect has been mutually reinforcing. The administration has used influencers to sell its policies to younger audiences; influencers have used the government access to claim legitimacy and grow their platforms.
The ideological stakes are not trivial. At an October 2025 White House roundtable on Antifa, right-wing provocateur Andy Ngo urged the administration to designate anti-fascist groups as foreign terrorist organizations. Trump asked the room whether they agreed, then said, “Let’s get it done.” The State Department followed through in November, designating four left-wing groups as foreign terrorist organizations.
The report also notes the way antisemitism moved from the fringes of the right to its mainstream in 2025, with a speed that has alarmed even prominent Republicans. Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who has repeatedly praised Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust, saw his Rumble audience grow nearly fivefold during the year and reached one million followers on X. After Tucker Carlson hosted Fuentes for an interview that was viewed more than 20 million times, US Senator Ted Cruz said at a public event that he had “seen more antisemitism on the right than I had in my entire life” and warned the GOP faced an “existential crisis.” Longtime US Senator Lindsey Graham responded to the same controversy with a joke: “I’m in the ‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the Republican Party.”
Inside the Capitol, the SPLC documented a parallel process of institutionalization. Anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ organizations appeared at roughly one in 10 congressional hearings in 2025, a frequency surpassing most other outside interests. The Center for Immigration Studies, which SPLC classifies as a hate group, testified before House and Senate judiciary subcommittees at least eight times. The Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-LGBTQ legal group, appeared at multiple committee hearings and met directly with members of the House Appropriations and Foreign Affairs committees. The Family Research Council similarly testified in December before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The report describes the strategy as “marketing hateful ideologies to policymakers through professional organizations.”
The SPLC also documented the financial infrastructure sustaining the movement, using the case of neo-Nazi publisher Andrew Anglin as its most instructive example. After a federal court awarded harassment target Tanya Gersh more than $14 million in damages, Anglin used cryptocurrency to evade collection.
Anglin moved at least $1 million in bitcoin since 2017 and is believed to have received more than $4.8 million from supporters between 2017 and 2021. In 2025, SPLC attorneys secured a freeze on one of Anglin’s wallets containing approximately $100,000, a partial but telling victory. The report’s conclusion on the matter is pointed: “Current regulation and law are not fully equipped to ensure that monetary judgments against the far right can be satisfied in civil rights cases.”
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has targeted the civil rights group behind the report. The SPLC currently faces charges of fraud in a federal case surrounding a paid informants program that it claims has ceased. The SPLC denies all charges.
