Watchdog Says Hate Groups Dip in Texas and U.S., but Far-Right Remains Threat to Democracy

Far-right extremism and white nationalist hate groups gained steam in 2021, even though the total number of active groups declined, according to a new report. In Texas, the number dropped from 54 to 52 compared with the previous year.

On Wednesday, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors hate groups, released an annual report that tallies the number of hate groups around the country.

The tally includes white nationalists, neo-Nazis, anti-Muslim groups, anti-LGBTQ groups and anti-Semitic outfits like the Nation of Islam, among others.

For instance, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the list includes the Plano-based Probe Ministries, which the SPLC designates as anti-LGBTQ, the anti-Muslim Bureau on American Islamic Affairs and a Nation of Islam chapter. In northeast Texas, the list includes the Patriotic Brigade of the Ku Klux Klan and the Church of the KKK.

Right-wing commentators and groups included on the hate group list often dispute the designation, claiming the list includes mainstream conservatives. Probe Ministries President Kerby Anderson, for example, has rejected the label in the past, telling the Plano Star Courier in 2015 that the SPLC reminded him of “an infant with a spoon. … They go at it with great enthusiasm, but with little accuracy.” (Probe includes several anti-LGBTQ posts on its website’s blog.)

Around the country, the report concluded, hate groups and antigovernment extremists have shoehorned their way into the national political conversation over the past year. SPLC researchers identified 733 hate and 488 antigovernment groups actively operating across the United States, a decrease from the number documented in 2020.

Still, the SPLC says that, despite the decline, “hate and extremism in America has not diminished. Instead, it has coalesced into a broader movement that is both threatening our democracy at the community level and embracing violence as a means to achieve white supremacist goals.”

The researchers pointed to a loose coalition of hardline antigovernment extremists like the Oath Keepers, Republican politicians, die-hard Trump loyalists and heavily funded right-wing think tanks and media organizations for pushing hardline extremist ideas out of the margins. The Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol served as a symbol of how volatile the movement’s ideas remain, the researchers said.

“Our nation stands at a dangerous crossroad. The mainstreaming of hate and extremism threatens our people, our communities, our education system and democracy itself,” said Susan Corke, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project. “The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the culmination of years of right-wing radicalization. The attempt to rewrite the history of that day and evade accountability for the violence shows the gravity of the problem and the urgency of addressing it.”

The report also details how the far-right has galvanized followers using live-streaming across multiple platforms. As establishment tech companies and social media apps have taken steps to ban people spreading hate and disinformation, the leaders of the movement have migrated from platform to platform, pulling a loyal and massive group of followers along with them.

The SPLC also said that backlash against widespread racial justice protests and activism during 2020 accounts for much of the hate spreading in 2021. According to a University of Chicago analysis of the Capitol siege, counties with the most declines in white populations (that is, the places where non-whites were moving to the most) were “the most likely to produce insurrectionists” that participated in the siege.

Texans have played a central role in the movement documented by SPLC’s report. Earlier this year, former Oathkeepers leader Stewart Rhodes was arrested in his North Texas home on charges of seditious conspiracy for allegedly helping to plan and orchestrate the Jan. 6 siege.

In recent years, far-right outfits like Patriot Front have put up anti-immigrant stickers and flyers around DFW. Last year, federal authorities caught a Grand Prairie neo-Nazi named Christian Michael Mackey, who referred to himself as the “radical Jew slayer” and later pleaded guilty to a federal weapons charge.

Meanwhile, a neo-Nazi group called the Aryan Freedom Network plans to hold its annual “White Unity Conference” in Dallas this October.