Neo-Nazis Are on the March Across America

On November 16, eleven days after the presidential election, a dozen neo-Nazis from a group called “Hate Club 1488” brazenly marched through Columbus, Ohio, carrying swastika flags and shouting racial slurs. State and national leaders, including President Joe Biden, condemned the march, as did community leaders and activists.
On that same day, about 500 miles south, around eight masked neo-Nazis from several groups came together to hold a roadside demonstration in Decatur, Alabama. They brandished signs containing antisemitic, anti-immigrant, and generally racist statements.
The demonstration in Decatur received no media attention—much less condemnation from the president. But researchers say that both rallies are part of a disturbing pattern of increasingly hateful demonstrations led by neo-Nazis who have been emboldened to use explicit Nazi imagery.
WIRED compiled all reported instances of similar neo-Nazi demonstrations, gleaned from local news reports and social media, and counted 34 in total for 2024, across 16 states. That’s compared to about 30 demonstrations in 2023, 22 in 2022, and four in 2021. Experts say they are now happening with such frequency that they risk becoming normalized.
And although hardcore neo-Nazi groups tend to eschew electoral politics, they view Trump and his second presidency opportunistically. Blood Tribe leader Christopher Pohlhaus, known as “Hammer,” celebrated Trump’s victory after the election in a post on Telegram. “Thanks Trump,” he wrote. “Cheaper gas will make it easier to spread White Power across the whole country.”
Days after the election, a group of neo-Nazis gathered outside a community theater production of Anne Frank’s Diary in Howell, Michigan to shout antisemitic slurs. They chanted “heil Hitler; heil Trump,” according to news reports.
Most of the demonstrations observed in recent years have been led by the same handful of networks and organizations, which, despite their small membership numbers, have become increasingly visible. These particular extremists fall under the category of “racially motivated violent extremists”—which, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray, are among the biggest domestic terror threats facing the US.
The vast majority of neo-Nazi demonstrations that WIRED logged in 2024 have targeted immigrants with their messaging, continuing a trend that emerged late last year, when groups like NSC-131, a neo-Nazi network active in New England, began showing up outside hotels housing migrants, lighting flares and holding banners that said “invaders go home.”
The renewed focus on immigrants by neo-Nazi groups coincides with surging hate crimes targeting immigrants, according to recently released FBI data. And it also marks a sharp pivot away from the drag shows and Pride events that had consumed their attention during the previous years. That pivot matches with the shift in the GOP’s attention away from the “culture war” issues surrounding drag shows and trans teens that had failed to galvanize Republican voters in the 2022 midterms, and back towards the same nativist, anti-immigrant rhetoric that secured president-elect Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 and again this November.
As the GOP and conservative influencers turned their attention towards immigration, hardcore hate groups followed suit. This synchronicity is not a coincidence, says Jeff Tischauser, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center. While hardcore groups don’t tend to care about electoral politics, they do see opportunity in dragging the “overton window” (the range of ideas, policies and speech deemed acceptable in mainstream society) towards the far-right fringe, which they hope will result in lawmakers pursuing increasingly extreme policies.
“White power activists get their marching orders from conservative influencers,” says Tischauser. “[These groups] see themselves, particularly post-2022 and -2023, as really pushing the GOP further to the right by being out in the street. They see themselves as doing and saying what the GOP elected officials and influencers cannot.”
Springfield, Ohio, was the clearest example of this relationship at work. The small Ohio city and its burgeoning Haitian community became a flashpoint for vitriolic anti-migrant rhetoric from conservative influencers and the Trump campaign. Hyper-local rumors and conspiracy theories about Haitians in Springfield circulated on Facebook, before eventually making their way to major right-wing social media accounts and then regurgitated by Trump and vice president-elect JD Vance. With Springfield in the spotlight, armed members from the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe descended on the city on two separate occasions, in August and in September.
“These MAGA influencers pointed out a target, and white power activists took that as a call to arms,” says Tischauser. (According to recent reports, since Trump’s victory, Haitian migrants are seeking to flee Springfield.)
For groups like Blood Tribe or Hate Club 1488, demonstrations are also a way to “normalize and mainstream their ideas and symbols,” as well as create propaganda opportunities—for example, filming themselves marching unopposed, or trolling bystanders, and then posting those videos across their social networks.
Tischauser believes that the decision by Hate Club 1488, which is based out of St Louis, Missouri, to rally in Columbus, was one that had been carefully calculated to stoke fears and associate themselves with Trump’s victory.
“It was a well-timed march. They picked their location, an island of blue in a sea of red,” says Tischauser. “And the ways that migrants were used by GOP elected officials and candidates during the election really put Ohio on the map for groups like Hate Club.”
Other extremist groups, such as the Proud Boys and Blood Tribe, are also active in Ohio. “White power groups are competing among themselves, among a finite resource of people that they can recruit and fundraise from,” said Tischauser. “They’re trying to say, “we’re the realest of the neo-Nazis.’”
In August, a coalition of activist groups in the state formed Ohioans Against Extremism in response to what they saw as rising extremism on the streets and in the state house. Their executive director Maria Bruno says they were grateful for the national spotlight on the issue of rising extremism in Ohio following the Columbus rally, but is a little surprised it’s taken this long. “At the same time, it’s hard not to feel like, “where have you all been?” says Bruno. “This is something that I and marginalized communities in Ohio have been screaming about for years.”
Blood Tribe set up shop in Ohio in 2023, and a slew of alarming incidents followed. 20 members of Blood Tribe showed up to a Pride event and a Jewish center in Toledo; 26 armed Blood Tribe members rallied outside a Drag story hour in Columbus, chanting “There will be Blood; a coalition of extremist groups including Blood Tribe, Proud Boys, and White Lives Matter rallied outside a drag queen story hour in Wadsworth; a member of White Lives Matter firebombed a progressive church in Chesterland, Ohio, that was planning a drag queen story hour.
Earlier this year, Nashville, Tennessee, also emerged as a flashpoint for neo-Nazi activity. In February, about 36 members of Blood Tribe and another group called Vinland Rebels marched through historically Black neighborhoods in Nashville, Tennessee, chanting “deport every Mexican” and performing Nazi salutes. Over the course of several weeks in July, a network called Goyim Defense League held several antisemitic rallies across Nashville. (Goy is a Hebrew term used to describe non-Jews, sometimes disparagingly, which has been co-opted by antisemites).
In one instance, about 30 members of the Goyim Defense League wore t-shirts saying “Whites Against Replacement” and disrupted the Nashville-Davidson county metro council public meeting, performing Nazi salutes and berating media and bystanders with slurs. According to The Guardian, the Nashville police chief had learned that the Goyim Defense League had secured a temporary residence about 65 miles away in Scottsville, Kentucky. They had seemingly zeroed in on Nashville because, like Columbus, it’s a bastion of liberalism in a red state.
Tischauser expects these groups to ramp up demonstrations, as they envision themselves influencing and engaging not just with state policies but with federal policies. And by latching onto Trumpism, whether MAGA likes it or not, they’re trying to prod his supporters into backing an increasingly extreme version of their president.