The Southern Poverty Law Center works to dismantle white supremacy in public forums and online, exposes hate and anti-democracy extremism and counters disinformation and conspiracy theories with research and community resources. The Intelligence Project monitors and exposes white supremacy and its impact on communities.
Hate prevention
- A recent report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that 1 in 4 posts discussing the Netflix show Adolescence on the largest online misogynist incel forum contained misogynist hate, racism or antisemitic conspiracy theories. In the first three months of this year, the forum had 2.7 million visits. These findings evidence the mutually reinforcing nature of supremacist ideologies. Similar to the Adolescence series, these findings also underscore the importance of engaging with young people about these difficult topics. It’s nearly impossible to prevent young people from encountering harmful content online, but bolstering them with the tools to identify, resist and discuss manipulative content is imperative to their well-being. Not Just a Joke: Understanding & Preventing Gender- & Sexuality-Based Bigotry, our guide produced jointly with the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab, helps prepare all caregivers with the information and skills to keep young people resistant to these ideologies.
Anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim activity
- Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral Democratic primary win met with Islamophobic and “great replacement”-style fearmongering from anti-Muslim and hard-right figures. Anti-Muslim hate group leader Brigitte Gabriel posted on X: “The Mayor of New York City will most likely end up being Zohran Mamdani. Sharia Law will be coming to the United States. We must do everything to stop it.” Pamela Geller, another anti-Muslim hate figure, also took to X, calling Mamdani a “jihadi socialist who wants to globalize the intifada” and “globalize 9/11.” Hard-right figure Charlie Kirk published around a dozen takes about Mamdani’s win, claiming it represented “an insurgency against the West” and that Mamdani is the “candidate for resentful immigrants who hate the West.” Anti-LGBTQ+ figure Matt Walsh said on his web show, “Less than 25 years after 9/11, New York has been conquered.” He noted Mamdani is a legal immigrant, adding, “We’ve rolled out the red carpet for foreign nationals who are gonna destroy us from within.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, known for his anti-immigrant zealotry, had a flurry of posts on X veering into “great replacement”-style conspiracy theories about New York City’s voter demographics. Miller claimed this is “how unchecked migration fundamentally remade the NYC electorate. Democrats change politics by changing voters. That’s how you turn a city that defined US dominance into what it is now.”
- In June, President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard and, later, 700 active-duty U.S. Marines to Los Angeles ostensibly to crack down on people demonstrating against the actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Hard-right activists and commentators responded by unleashing a wave of anti-immigrant fervor, calling for the end of “third world immigration,” whether “legal or illegal.” “Importing third worlders who contribute nothing of value and actively hate your country and want to destroy it is an act of national suicide,” Matt Walsh wrote on X on June 9.
Militia and antigovernment movement activity
- On June 12, Brevard County, Florida, Sheriff Wayne Ivey, a self-proclaimed constitutional sheriff with ties to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, threatened future protesters in his county. Ivey declared that any protester who resists law enforcement orders or blocks an intersection or roadway will go to jail. If protesters gather around a vehicle and don’t disperse, Ivey said, they will likely be run over and dragged. He even threatened death for throwing a brick at officers: “We will be notifying your family where to collect your remains at. Because we will kill you, graveyard dead.”
- South Carolina state Rep. RJ May was arrested and charged with using the screen name “joebidennnn69” to distribute sexual abuse material involving children. Previously a Moms for Liberty co-founder faced pushback amid another sex scandal. The organization named May “Legislator of the Year” in 2023.
- New legal filings by St. Luke’s Health System seek to keep antigovernment provocateur Ammon Bundy from avoiding the $52 million judgment against him by filing for bankruptcy. St. Luke’s attorneys say Bundy acted maliciously and flouted the original court proceedings by refusing to show up. Having fled Idaho for Utah, Bundy must attend a hearing on July 15 to object.
- A jury found election conspiracist Mike Lindell liable for defaming an employee of Dominion Voting Systems and ordered him to pay $2.3 million in damages. During the trial, a central figure was Joe Oltmann of Faith Education Commerce, who is also being sued by the employee. He previously claimed to have infiltrated a call by Denver-area antifa members during which the employee allegedly guaranteed he had ensured Donald Trump would lose the 2024 election. Both Lindell and Oltmann were part of a cottage industry of conspiracists who traveled the country denying the security of elections between 2020 and 2024 in support of reelecting Trump.
- Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon continued a trend among figures on the hard right who have taken on the language of “spiritual warfare.” During a recent interview, Bannon said Washington, D.C., was engulfed in a “spiritual war” and a “dark specter hangs over” the city. Carlson agreed, claiming he could sense an oppressive spiritual darkness in Washington.
- Reaper Consultation, a militia influencer Instagram account, created its third quarter “Find Your Tribe” post on June 25. The posts are used as a place for followers to network with existing militias nationwide, and the posts encourage people to join up. Comments showing interest on threads for individual states ranged from single digits up to around 30 for Texas. First Alpha Company welcomed those interested to contact it directly about joining. Such networking posts allow local militia groups to easily recruit individuals already interested in the militia movement.
- Multiple militia groups were highly critical of a proposed federal program to sell millions of acres of public land for private development that was part of President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Kentucky Prepared Citizen, a Kentucky-based militia, posted on Instagram to “Normalize calling your Senator to say they’re a little bitch if they sell public land.” Militias’ opposition to the sale of public lands is based on the fear they would lose access to land they often use for paramilitary training.
- On June 21, U.S. Senate candidate and Jan. 6 participant Jake Lang posted to his X.com account that he is not “America First” but “Kingdom First,” referring to the Kingdom of God. Lang went on to allege Muslims have conquered Europe and “raped our White Women & White Culture into OBLIVION.” He continued, “WE CANNOT ALLOW THEM TO HAVE JERUSALEM.” In the post’s comments, Federal Watchdog, a group associated with Lang, responded by calling for a “CRUSADE FOR JERUSALEM.”
Anti-LGBTQ+ movement
- On June 18, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution calling on the Food and Drug Administration to “immediately revoke its approval of mifepristone,” a hormone blocker frequently used to end a pregnancy. According to social media, the resolution was authored by David Closson, director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Family Research Council.
- On June 26, the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom successfully defended the state of South Carolina against a lawsuit by patients seeking to overturn a 2018 executive order barring the state’s Medicaid program from paying any claim to health care clinics that also provide abortion care.
Conspiracy propagandists
- On June 18, a child who was missing from Georgia for over a year was found in Connecticut. She was taken by her mother, who did not have custody and had previously told the court she was a sovereign citizen and did not need to follow the court’s order. Some noncustodial parents have chosen to become sovereign citizens or seek their help to regain custody, often soliciting groups such as Punished 4 Protecting or other sovereigns claiming they can help. In 2020, sovereign citizen and QAnon adherent Neely Petrie-Blanchard shot and killed Christopher Hallett, the sovereign citizen who offered to help her regain full custody of her children, after she started to believe he was working with the government against her.
- President Trump recently appointed members to the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council. Appointees include Christopher Cox, founder of Bikers for Trump; Sheriff Mark Dannels of Cochise County, Arizona; Rudolph W. Giuliani, former mayor of New York City; Harvey C. Jewett IV, retired president of Super 8 Motels; and Mark Levin, host of “The Mark Levin Show.” Dannels has spoken at events hosted by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, while “The Mark Levin Show” frequently traffics in popular hard-right talking points and conspiracy theories.
White nationalist and neo-Nazi movement activity
- Augustus Sol Invictus, a longtime white nationalist activist and Florida-based attorney, was initially representing the Proud Boys in a $100 million lawsuit against the U.S. government. Invictus was once the second-in-command for the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, a now-defunct group that acted as the “tactical defense arm” of the Proud Boys. He attended the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was later found guilty of burning an object with the intent to intimidate in connection with his role in the torchlit march that took place on the first night of the event.
- Longtime white nationalist activist and Texas-based lawyer Jason Lee Van Dyke appears to be leading training efforts for Patriot Front. He previously was the de facto lawyer for the Proud Boys and attempted to join The Base, a violent domestic terrorist group that seeks to overthrow the U.S. government.
- In early June, law enforcement arrested Charles Ethan Fields and Levi Austin Frakes, two men living in Washington state, on multiple weapons-related charges. Their arrest took place after military equipment, including body armor and helmets, was reported stolen at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Pierce County, Washington. According to reporting from The Olympian, officials who searched the two men’s home found military-grade munitions, two flags bearing a swastika and the SS logo, and a cache of over 35 firearms. In mid-June, The Olympian wrote, Fields and Frakes pleaded not guilty to over a dozen charges, including 10 felonies and three gross misdemeanors.
- Five members of the Proud Boys brought a lawsuit against the Department of Justice, alleging the government violated their constitutional rights for prosecuting them in relation to their actions on Jan. 6, 2021. Though experts agree that the Proud Boys face a difficult legal battle, the DOJ could settle with the members of the group — in effect using taxpayer money to fund far-right extremism and political violence.
Confederate monuments
- College students in Augusta, Georgia, have taken public history into their own hands, working with the city to place two new historical markers, one celebrating the city’s Civil Rights Movement history and one celebrating its Jewish history. This is an example of the kind of grassroots, community history that is particularly important as the federal government seeks to limit and distort the kind of history that can be remembered and memorialized.
- On June 10, President Trump announced that he was restoring the former Confederate names of the seven military bases that have maintained new names since 2023. The administration’s unilateral action stands in sharp contrast to the democratic way the Confederate names were previously removed — a bipartisan bill that passed in 2020 followed by the creation of a nonpartisan naming commission to find new names honoring American heroes.
- The Department of the Interior has asked the National Park Service to put up signs encouraging visitors to report via QR code where they see “negative history.” This is part of Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, and comes amid a wave of defunding of public history projects that focus on struggle and injustice in the past. For example, the Louisiana nonprofit Whitney Plantation, one of America’s only museums dedicated to the history of slavery, lost federal funding this spring.
Anti-democracy efforts
- Straight Arrow News published an analysis of a leaked database containing over 13,000 applications to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 initiative. The database has exposed personal details and political beliefs of prospective federal appointees. The leak came from whistleblower site DDoSecrets. It includes names, addresses, social media accounts and ideological self-identifications ranging from “traditional conservative” to “liberal.” Applicants had to name “an influential book and policy figure” and answer whether they agreed with such statements as the “U.S. should increase legal immigration.” The Heritage Foundation launched Project 2025 to shape a future conservative administration with far-right recommendations. The Trump administration has implemented many of its recommendations. Heritage has not commented on the leak. DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best called the database “a betrayal of democratic ideals.”