Last year, members of a white supremacist group called Blood Tribe showed up to counter a pro-democracy rally in Covington, Louisiana.
Across the state, white nationalist organizations plastered racist flyers on community spaces more than 60 times.
In St. Francisville, a neo-Nazi fight club held sparring sessions.
In Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the Patriot Front posted racist propaganda.
And in the state legislature, two organizations the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as hate groups spent the session lobbying against LGBTQ+ rights and distributing posters of the Ten Commandments to nearly every school system in the state.
All of it, the SPLC says, is part of the same story.
The SPLC released its annual Year in Hate and Extremism report earlier in June, documenting 1,263 hate and extremist antigovernment groups whose movement exploited politics, government and the private sector in 2025. The report's central argument — captured in its title, “From Extreme to Establishment” — is that the hard right is no longer knocking on the door of American institutions. It has walked through.
The report’s 2025 tally is down from 1,371 in 2024, an 8% decline. But it reported a surge in episodes of hateful flyers being placed in various communities.
Across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, the SPLC identified and tracked 33 such groups: 20 in Alabama, eight in Louisiana, and five in Mississippi.
What the numbers say — and don't say
Louisiana's general group count dropped by five from 2024 to 2025, and the state saw 69 fewer flyering incidents than the year before. To the SPLC, that's not a sign of progress. It's a sign of adaptation.
Rachel Carroll Rivas, deputy director of research, reporting and analysis at the SPLC's Intelligence Project, said the decline in antigovernment groups specifically — Louisiana lost four — reflects a national pattern tied directly to who occupies the White House. Antigovernment extremism is built on the idea of a tyrannical federal government. When the federal government shares your politics, that message is harder to sell.
"It's a little difficult for them to sell an anti-government message about a tyrannical federal government when they're supportive of those policies," Rivas said.
The drop in street activity follows a similar logic. Rivas said these groups go quiet when they face genuine public opposition and when the government treats their activity as potential hate crimes or acts of violence. Both conditions were present under the Biden administration and eroded in 2025.
The Trump administration eliminated funding for the three largest federal hate crime prevention grant programs. In the final full fiscal year of the Biden administration, the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP) allocated roughly $38 million specifically for these combined community-based hate crime prevention initiatives. On April 22, 2025, the DOJ issued immediate notices of termination to recipients of active grants authorized under both the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act and the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act.
Alongside these cuts, the DOJ terminated the State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training (SLATT) program. Since its launch in 1996, the SLATT program successfully trained over 427,000 law enforcement officers and justice system practitioners to identify, investigate and respond to domestic and international terrorism, targeted violence and hate crimes.
What replaced street activity among extremist groups, Rivas said, was policy.
"We saw a lot more of the tactic by hate groups trying to get their agenda passed in policy and government," she said.
Alabama's weight
Alabama's 20 groups, by far the heaviest concentration in the three-state region, include neo-Nazi organizations, white nationalist chapters, antigovernment militias, a male supremacist group and multiple conspiracy-focused organizations.
Rivas connected Alabama's numbers to something the SPLC has tracked for years: a direct relationship between civil rights organizing and extremist backlash.
"In Alabama, we have seen a rising civil rights movement over the recent years," she said. "And as that has grown, we do unfortunately see this response from the extremist movement where they feel threatened. They see a threat and a fight."
She said the pattern tends to wane over time, but not immediately.
Blood Tribe, Patriot Front, and the street-level picture
Of all the Louisiana groups on the list, two are especially notable for the nature of their activity.
Blood Tribe is a white supremacist group with chapters in multiple states whose members stage brash, theatrical demonstrations using explicit Nazi imagery. Wearing their trademark black-and-red outfits and waving swastika flags, members of Blood Tribe have staged rallies across the country since the group's founding in 2022.
The SPLC describes Blood Tribe as one of the most concerning groups it tracks nationally. Its Louisiana chapter appeared at the Covington democracy rally last year — one of the organization's most visible Gulf South actions to date.
Patriot Front is a white nationalist hate group that broke off from Vanguard America in the aftermath of the deadly "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. The organization rehabilitated the explicitly fascist agenda of Vanguard America with garish patriotism, focusing on theatrical rhetoric and activism that can be easily distributed as propaganda for its chapters across the country.
The Louisiana chapter was the least active Patriot Front presence among the SPLC's focus states in 2025 — but the group's national footprint is significant. In January 2025, a federal judge ordered Patriot Front to pay approximately $2.7 million in damages to a Black man the group attacked during a march in Boston in 2022.
A 2025 SPLC investigation also found that several Active Club chapters — combat sport-based white nationalist organizing networks — were controlled by Patriot Front, which apparently hopes to siphon members. The Gulf Coast Active Club, listed among Louisiana's eight groups, held sparring sessions in St. Francisville in February.
Rivas said direct coordination between these groups is documented and ongoing.
"That is absolutely happening," she said, describing networks sharing tactics through alt-social media platforms. "But you don't have to coordinate in terms of an event to coordinate your propaganda."
She pointed to a more loosely organized but equally dangerous track: white nationalist influencers pushing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory online, and policymakers echoing the same ideas in legislation and executive orders.
"There is a direct line where we see repeating of this same racist conspiracy theory by people who are advocating policy and people who are making policy," she said.
From the streets to the statehouse
Of the eight groups the SPLC identified in Louisiana, two stand out for how they operate. The Louisiana Family Forum and the Ruth Institute do not organize street demonstrations or post propaganda. They file amicus briefs, lobby legislators and hold press conferences.
The SPLC still calls them hate groups. Rivas said the organization’s designations are based not only on activity, but also on the way groups and their officials talk about people.
" [The Ruth Institute’s and the Louisiana Family Forum’s vilification and othering and dehumanizing of LGBTQ people is hateful at its core,” she said. “And that doesn't matter if you wrap it in a flag or claim your religion is a very narrow version that most Christians don't believe in, or you put it in a policy docket as a bill — it's still hateful at the end of the day."
The Louisiana Family Forum's footprint in state policy is not theoretical. The organization donated Ten Commandments posters that were posted in classrooms across the entire LSU System, the Louisiana Community and Technical College System and at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, following a 2024 state law requiring the displays. The LFF championed the policy, and nine multi-faith Louisiana families, represented by the ACLU, challenged it in federal court as a violation of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause.
Gene Mills, president of the LFF, rejected the SPLC's hate group designation in a written statement to Gulf States Newsroom.
"The Louisiana Family Forum exists to advocate for a biblical worldview of life, eternity and human flourishing — including human sexuality, grounded in the biblical view of biological sex, lifelong marriage, the traditional family, and the blessing of children," Mills wrote. "We understand these are timeless truths held by the overwhelming majority of Louisiana residents."
Mills also cited the SPLC's ongoing federal indictment, announced by the Department of Justice on April 21, alleging the SPLC defrauded donors by secretly paying more than $3 million to informants embedded in the very extremist groups it claimed to be fighting. The SPLC has said it will vigorously defend itself and described the informant program as life-saving work. The case is ongoing.
Mills wrote that the SPLC has "through false narratives, faulty reasoning, and its widely criticized 'hate map,' contributed to a climate of hostility toward organizations like ours."
'I don't speak for other people'
Mississippi's five groups are the smallest count of the three states the SPLC tracked, but the list includes the American Family Association, a Tupelo-based organization the SPLC designates as an anti-LGBTQ hate group.
Unlike Blood Tribe or the Gulf Coast Active Club, AFA doesn't organize street demonstrations: its influence runs through media, lobbying and national conservative networks instead.
Walker Wildmon, the organization's vice president, gave a similar response as the LFF in regards to the SPLC’s claims, saying the designation has been "widely discredited" in Congress and the media, and that the AFA "roundly rejects" the label.
"The SPLC has become an arm of the Democrat Party," Wildmon said. "They notoriously target Christian and conservative organizations and work in conjunction with the media to defame very reputable organizations such as ours."
When asked whether the AFA would denounce those who weaponize conservative Christian rhetoric to harm others, regardless of whether the AFA itself intended harm, Wildmon declined to answer directly.
"I don't speak for other people," he said. "I speak for American Family Association."
When asked the same question again, Wildmon repeated the organization's position on human sexuality and said it was not harmful to anyone.
"We ought to be able to have varying viewpoints and opinions without calling each other haters or accusing each other of harming other people," he said.
Wildmon also claimed there is a connection between the SPLC's work and the September assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, saying the organization's designations had contributed to a "climate of hostility."
Federal investigators found no link between Kirk's alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, and the SPLC or left-wing organizations. No such connection has been established.
At one point during the interview, Wildmon accused the Gulf States Newsroom of parroting Democratic talking points. Gulf States Newsroom is a nonpartisan public media collaborative covering Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
The guardrails are gone
Professor Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis and author of five books on American religious life, has spent two decades studying what religion does to American politics and what happens when it pulls back.
For most of American history, he argues, religious institutions functioned like guardrails. Denominations, congregations, pastors — they could step into the room and say: we don't believe that here. We don't say that here. When those institutions hollow out, those bumpers disappear.
"When you deinstitutionalize American religion, those guardrails disappear," Burge said. "And now no one can step into the room and go, 'Dude, we don't do that here.'"
The internet didn't just fill the vacuum. It inverted it. Algorithms don't push people toward the center — they push them toward the edge, rewarding engagement over moderation. A fringe opinion that once would have died because its holder never met anyone who shared it can now find an audience of millions.
"If 1% of America holds a nutty view, but you can tap that 1% of America, you have 3.5 million followers now," Burge said. "The internet's allowed fringe opinions to be cultivated because of the algorithms. There are no adults in the room to stop it."
He sees young men as particularly vulnerable — not because of anything inherent, but because they are disproportionately untethered from the institutions that once provided orientation. The SPLC's own report documents a recruiting pipeline targeting young men through gaming chat rooms, unregulated social media, and self-proclaimed incel communities.
"If you don't have anyone in your life you trust who can help recalibrate you, religion, at some level, did provide that for lots and lots of people," Burge said. "It provided social cohesion, social normalcy. Without that, they're floating in digital space without a sense of what right and wrong is. And if you don't know what right and wrong is, you can justify basically anything."
While Burge acknowledged the dangers of hate he also noted that he is, to an extent, skeptical of the SPLC's binary designation system — not because he doubts that hate exists, but because he thinks collapsing all designated groups into a single list stretches the concept past usefulness.
"When you throw in groups that just think two men shouldn't get married with groups that literally are advocating for the elimination of Black people in America, that ain't the same thing," he said. "I think they've sort of lost the plot. Hate is not left or right. Hate is hate. Period."
On the question of how Wildmon responded during the interview — the deflection, the accusations, the refusal to simply denounce those who use Christian rhetoric to harm others — Burge recognized a pattern that goes beyond any single organization.
"That's the age of Trump coming through," he said. "The new model of rhetoric, especially on the right, is: screw you. We don't care what you think. If it hurts you, I don't care." He paused. "That's what's changed in modern politics. And lowering the level of discourse has knock-on effects. It dehumanizes people, it demonizes people, it opens the door toward violence sometimes. That's what I worry about the most."
What this is for
Rivas, who has worked in this field for 20 years, was direct about the limits of what a report like this can accomplish on its own.
"We're really beyond this idea of name and shame," she said.
The report, she said, serves three purposes: to validate the experiences of people targeted by hate groups who may feel alone in their communities; to show them that what is happening locally connects to something larger; and to give communities a concrete roadmap for intervention.
"If you know how it's happening, you can intervene, you can prevent, you can be one step ahead," she said.
Burge, for his part, ended with something simpler.
"The solution to bad speech is not no speech," he said. "It's better speech."
