Hate Groups in the U.S.: Laws, Prosecutions, and Deplatforming

Hate groups in the United States are organizations that attack or vilify people based on race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or similar characteristics. The federal government does not ban them. The First Amendment protects even repugnant beliefs and most expression, so law enforcement goes after what members do, not what they believe: hate-motivated violence, conspiracies, threats, paramilitary training, and other crimes. The result is a system that tolerates the groups while criminalizing much of their conduct, and it looks nothing like the hate-speech laws common in Europe.

How Many Groups There Are and What Kinds

The Southern Poverty Law Center identified 1,263 hate and antigovernment extremist groups operating in 2025, an 8 percent drop from 1,371 the year before.¹ The 2024 count split out to 533 active hate groups and 838 antigovernment groups. Hate group totals peaked at 1,021 in 2018.²

A smaller count does not necessarily mean smaller reach. The SPLC titled its 2025 report “From Extreme to Establishment” and argued that antigovernment groups in particular tend to go quiet when government policy already aligns with their aims.¹ Rachel Carroll Rivas, the SPLC’s deputy director of research, said the long-term trajectory since tracking began has been upward in both total groups and per-capita rate.²

The ideologies cluster into a handful of recognizable categories. White supremacist organizations remain the largest; the Anti-Defamation League describes white supremacy as a mature movement with established subsets, including neo-Nazis and prison gangs.³ The SPLC also tracks anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigrant, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, antigovernment militia, and sovereign-citizen networks. Male supremacy, drawn from incel ideology and broader misogyny, has grown quickly: the SPLC counted 16 such groups in its 2024 report, including seven new additions.²

All 13 extremist-related murders the ADL documented in 2024 were tied to right-wing ideologies: eight to white supremacists and five to far-right antigovernment extremists in the sovereign citizen movement.⁴

Why the Government Cannot Ban Them

There is no federal law outlawing hate groups or hate speech. The First Amendment forbids Congress from abridging freedom of speech, and the Supreme Court has read that to cover expression most people find odious. In Matal v. Tam (2017), the Court said the First Amendment protects the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.”⁵ The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression puts it bluntly: there is “no general First Amendment exception allowing the government to punish ‘hate speech’ that denigrates people based on their identity.”⁶

Speech loses that protection only in narrow categories. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the government can punish speech that incites imminent lawless action.⁷ Under Counterman v. Colorado (2023), prosecuting a “true threat” requires proof the speaker at least recklessly disregarded how the statement would be perceived as threatening violence.⁵ “Fighting words” that would provoke immediate violence in a reasonable listener remain unprotected under Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942). Outside those categories, offensive, racist, or antisemitic speech cannot be punished by the government.

The FBI operates inside those lines. Attorney general guidelines require investigations of domestic extremists to focus on “unlawful activity of the group,” not the “ideological orientation of its members.” An investigation begins when actors cross from protected expression into committing crimes to advance violent agendas.⁸

How Other Democracies Differ

The American rule is not the global rule, and that matters if you are comparing systems or wondering why American platforms host content that is illegal elsewhere. Germany, shaped by its history with Nazism, criminalizes incitement to hatred, Holocaust denial, and the display of Nazi symbols under Section 130 of its criminal code, with penalties of up to five years in prison. Its Network Enforcement Act requires platforms to remove reported hate speech within 24 hours; Facebook was fined €2 million in 2019 for under-reporting complaints.⁹ A 2008 EU Framework Decision obligates member states to criminalize public incitement to violence or hatred based on race, color, religion, descent, or national origin, and the EU’s Digital Services Act requires large platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks tied to illegal hate speech.¹⁰ The United States follows a “marketplace of ideas” theory in which bad speech is answered with better speech; the European approach treats normalization of extremist ideology as a danger the state must suppress.

What the Law Does Punish

Although the groups themselves are legal, hate-motivated conduct is not. The main federal statute is the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 249. It criminalizes willful bodily injury motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.¹¹ Before 2009, federal hate crime law did not reach sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. As of October 2019, 60 convictions had been secured under the statute.¹²

Reporting is uneven. Federal hate crime reporting by local law enforcement is voluntary, dozens of agencies fail to report each year, and the vast majority of hate crimes are prosecuted at the state level, where coverage varies.¹²

States apply a patchwork of other statutes that constrain what hate groups can do without targeting beliefs:

Anti-mask laws, originally aimed at the Ku Klux Klan, prohibit concealing one’s identity in public in many states, especially when done to intimidate or during a crime.
Twenty-nine states bar groups from organizing as private military units without state authorization.
Twenty-five states criminalize training in firearms or explosives when the intent is to further civil disorder.
Forty-five states and the District of Columbia impose enhanced penalties when a victim is targeted based on protected characteristics. The Supreme Court upheld such enhancements in Wisconsin v. Mitchell.
At least 25 states and D.C. criminalize acts of domestic terrorism or add sentencing enhancements for them.

Forty-eight states also have constitutional provisions requiring military forces to remain subordinate to civil authority, which supports challenges to private paramilitary organizations.¹³

How Prosecutions Have Played Out

Proud Boys and Oath Keepers

The highest-profile recent prosecutions came out of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In November 2022, a jury convicted Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and member Kelly Meggs of seditious conspiracy. Rhodes received 18 years with a terrorism enhancement; Meggs received 12.¹⁴ In May 2023, five Proud Boys leaders — Enrique Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola — were convicted of seditious conspiracy and other felonies after a four-month trial. Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years.¹⁵

The outcomes shifted in 2025. On Inauguration Day in January, President Trump granted clemency to 1,583 people charged in connection with January 6. The sentences of 14 individuals convicted of seditious conspiracy, including Rhodes and the Proud Boys leaders, were commuted, and Tarrio received a full pardon.¹⁶ On April 14, 2026, the Department of Justice asked the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to vacate the convictions of 12 Oath Keepers and Proud Boys members and dismiss their indictments with prejudice, saying “dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice.”¹⁵ As of mid-2026 the court had not yet ruled.

Atomwaffen Division

Federal prosecutors have taken a sustained approach to Atomwaffen Division, a violent accelerationist neo-Nazi group linked to murders and plots against infrastructure. Between 2017 and January 2025, there were 21 federal cases involving 20 defendants; all but one were convicted, most by plea. Sentences ran from 12 months to 18 years. The group formally disbanded in July 2020, with remnants reconstituting as the National Socialist Order, and researchers at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center concluded Atomwaffen has been “largely dismantled” in the United States.¹⁷

Founder Brandon Russell was initially imprisoned for possessing explosive material. After his release, he was convicted in February 2025 of conspiring with Sarah Beth Clendaniel to destroy electrical substations in Baltimore; the intended damage exceeded $75 million. Clendaniel had already been sentenced to 18 years for her role.¹⁸

Patriot Front

Patriot Front, the white nationalist group that split from Vanguard America after the 2017 Charlottesville rally, shows a different enforcement problem: a group that leans on intimidation and vandalism rather than open violence. In June 2022, police in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, arrested 31 members, including founder Thomas Rousseau, in a U-Haul truck en route to a Pride parade. Officers recovered shields, shin guards, a smoke grenade, and an operations plan with GPS coordinates and “drill times.” Five members were later convicted on riot charges.¹⁹ Members have faced vandalism charges in Washington state for defacing a Pride mural and in Virginia for destroying a memorial to Arthur Ashe. In 2022, a coalition that included the ADL and the SPLC asked the Department of Justice to investigate the group under federal conspiracy and hate crime statutes, arguing local charges alone could not deter a nationally coordinated organization.²⁰

Recent Hate-Motivated Attacks

The ADL’s 2025 audit recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents nationwide, the third-highest annual total since tracking began in 1979. That is a 33 percent decline from the record 9,354 incidents in 2024, but still five times the figure from a decade ago.²¹ Physical assaults rose to 203, a 4 percent increase, and assaults with a deadly weapon jumped 39 percent to 32.²²

Two attacks in 2025 drew particular attention. On May 21, Elias Rodriguez shot and killed two Israeli Embassy staff members, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. Prosecutors allege Rodriguez traveled from Chicago with a handgun in checked luggage, planned the attack, and shouted “Free Palestine” during the shooting. He was indicted on nearly 10 federal charges, including hate crimes resulting in death and premeditated murder, and in May 2026 the Justice Department announced it would seek the death penalty.²³

On June 1, 2025, Mohamed Sabry Soliman threw Molotov cocktails at participants in a “Run for Their Lives” gathering in Boulder, Colorado, an event held in solidarity with hostages held by Hamas. Fifteen people were hospitalized, and 82-year-old Karen Diamond later died from her injuries. The FBI investigated the attack as terrorism. Soliman, an Egyptian national, faces 12 federal hate crime counts and more than 100 state criminal charges, including attempted murder, with prosecutors adding first-degree murder charges after Diamond’s death.²⁴

Deplatforming and Cryptocurrency

Private platforms are not bound by the First Amendment and have increasingly removed hate groups and their leaders, a practice called deplatforming. The largest wave followed January 6, 2021: Twitter permanently suspended Donald Trump’s account, Facebook removed more than 20,000 groups and pages linked to the riot, Amazon pulled web hosting from Parler, and YouTube suspended Trump’s channel.²⁵

Research findings are mixed. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed six removals of hate organization leaders on Facebook and found that on average the disruptions cut both the consumption and the production of hateful content among those organizations’ audiences and weakened their coordination. Users closest to the removed leaders initially pushed back with more hateful activity but reduced their engagement within two months.²⁶ A 2015 Reddit study found that after extreme subreddits were banned, most affected users left the platform, and those who stayed posted 80 percent less hateful content.²⁷ After January 6, Gab saw sustained increases in engagement and toxic content as banned users regrouped on less-moderated platforms.²⁵

Fundraising has moved too. An ADL Center on Extremism report tracked 15 white supremacist and antisemitic entities and their donors moving $142,546 in Bitcoin through 22 cryptocurrency service providers in 2023. The exchange Kraken processed more than half of the tracked funds, and as of December 2023 only one of the examined exchanges had a policy explicitly prohibiting the financial facilitation of hate or extremism.²⁸ The SPLC’s 2025 report said extremist groups increasingly use cryptocurrency to fund harassment campaigns while avoiding traditional financial oversight.²⁹

Fights Over the “Hate Group” Label

The SPLC’s designations carry real consequences for the people and groups named: social media bans, payment-processor cutoffs, and lost reputations. That has drawn legal challenges. Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice Media and the Proud Boys, sued the SPLC for defamation in 2019, alleging the designation ruined his reputation and led to his removal from Twitter, PayPal, Mailchimp, and iTunes. McInnes argued the SPLC’s motivation was driven by fundraising.³⁰ In October 2025, an Alabama federal court dismissed the suit, finding that McInnes failed to show the SPLC acted with reckless disregard for the truth or “purposefully avoided further investigation with the intent to avoid the truth.”³¹

The SPLC, founded in 1971, maintains its list for organizations it says “vilify others because of their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity.” Then-president Richard Cohen called the McInnes lawsuit “meritless,” saying the fact that the plaintiff was upset “tells us that we’re doing our job exposing hate and extremism.”³⁰

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2
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17
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19
Tallahassee Democrat. Patriot Front Florida Members
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23
Politico. Justice Department to Seek Death Penalty for Israeli Embassy Shooting Suspect
24
BBC News. Boulder Attack Suspect Faces Federal Hate Crime Charges
25
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26
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27
Vanderbilt Law School. The De-Platforming Debate: Balancing Concerns Over Online Extremism With Free Speech
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ADL. Virtual Money, Hateful Reality: Cryptocurrency Exchanges Enabling Extremism
29
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30
NPR. Proud Boys Founder Files Defamation Lawsuit Against Southern Poverty Law Center
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