Experts tracking far-right extremism have tracked a resurgence in California in recent years.
According to the latest publicly available data from the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are nearly 100 “hate and anti-government” groups in the state, including anti-vaxxers, doomsday prepper militias and old-school neo-Nazi organizations.
For years, the Alabama-based nonprofit, also known as the SPLC, has been one of the few NGOs paying close attention to the California frontier. But now, after the Trump administration announced federal charges against the center for alleged fraud, it is unclear how its work will continue.
Some are particularly concerned about California, which has long been a hotbed of extremist groups.
“These types of groups have a deep influence in Southern California,” said Peter Simi, a sociology professor at Chapman University and an expert on hate groups in the state. “You had a substantial presence of white supremacist philosophy that goes back to white settlement of the area – it was seen as a white supremacist utopia in some cases.”
The Justice Department claims that the SPLC attracted donors by providing cash to informants for hate groups.
The April 21 indictment charges several crimes, including “wire fraud, making false statements to a federally insured banking institution, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.”
The case hinges on the Trump administration’s claim that the Law Center misled donors about where their money was going. The organization has long worked to gather intelligence about extremist groups, but federal prosecutors say the SPLC did not properly disclose that it was paying active members to leak information.
The indictment alleges that “some of the funds donated were to be used by the SPLC to make payments to high-level leaders of violent extremist groups and others,” which also allegedly included “payments used in the commission of state and federal crimes.”
This week, the legal advocacy organization hit back, asking the court to seal the grand jury transcripts — a highly unusual step that would show the Justice Department lied or failed to produce exculpatory evidence, including records of direct cooperation with the FBI to report crimes that paid sources helped uncover.
“The Justice Department is well aware that the SPLC has provided useful information to law enforcement through its use of confidential informants,” said attorney Eddie R. Schmidt wrote in a motion to unseal the transcripts. “The Justice Department also knows that these confidential informants helped law enforcement jail violent extremists.”
Legal experts described the indictment as “absurd”.
Eric J., Professor of Law at Georgia State University “This is another example of a larger trend of this administration doing everything it can to help the far right, including hate groups,” Segal said.
Segal called it “irresponsible and incredibly unlikely” that the nonprofit was working to benefit hate groups rather than exposing their activities.
Neither the Southern Poverty Law Center nor the Justice Department responded to requests for comment.
The fight has already tied up the advocacy group’s finances: financial firms loyalty and pawn According to the New York Times, investors have been told they will not make grants to the organization as long as federal charges are pending and the indictment ensures an expensive court battle.
The case comes at a time when other safeguards against violent extremism have been weakened, with federal investigative resources redirected elsewhere under the Trump administration.
“A lot of people were watching this,” said Kathleen Bly, a sociology professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “It’s not being seen much anymore, and it’s a really bad situation.”
In California, far-right hostility appears to be resurgent. The latest from the California Department of Civil Rights Annual Hate Report “Record levels of hate crimes, targeted violence and related aggression” were noted.
The groups the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified in the state include Mamalitia, a mom-centered, pro-gun organization, and an anti-Semitic group that calls itself the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust.
“None of these groups would say they are white supremacists,” said Chapman University’s Simi. “Everyone is in the business of denial, which makes monitoring and classification (difficult).”
Efforts to track groups whose hatred may turn violent are further complicated by the vague, constantly changing nature of extremism on social media.
For decades, SIMI said, extremist groups recruited their members by offering mutual aid, many of whom had been neglected or abused and struggled with addiction and untreated mental illness. Traditional hate groups, he said, provide both community and an outlet for violence.
That profile is no longer valid, Simi said. Instead, hate often comes through social media algorithms.
“Many of the ideas that these groups are promoting have become really mainstream and normalized,” the scholar said. “It’s a huge part of the air we breathe.”
Blee said: “You can find the most horrifying, bigoted, far-right, extremist, racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic ideas and conspiracy stories in plain sight on X or other social media. It has all kinds of tempting ways to attract people, but you can also get sucked into it.”
This week, many Californians voted against Santa Clara gubernatorial candidate Don J. Grundman to find a page-length anti-Semitic section. The message included allegations that Orthodox activist Charlie Kirk had been killed by an Israeli bomb and that Jews planned to enslave American Christians, a claim Grundman tried to support by mistranslating the Hebrew word for “nations” as “cattle.”
“Anti-Semitism has been a very core part of far-right extremism since we started thinking about far-right extremism as an organized movement in America — that is, since the 1870s,” Blee said. “It creates a conspiracy mentality that brings out other kinds of hatreds. Jews are like the quintessential conspirators.”
He and others worry that these ideologies are now spreading unchecked, with far-right memes and white nationalist messages spreading on WhatsApp, Telegram and other online forums.
“Who is monitoring now?” Simi said. “This is not the federal government.”
Without an organization like the SPLC, which focuses on hate groups operating in the shadows, experts said they fear Californians will be left with a false sense of security.
“People aren’t walking around with Klan hoods and swastikas on their cheeks, so people think it’s gone away,” Blee said. “But it’s been transformed into something much harder to see, more pervasive and more impactful. It’s part of the general culture.”
