The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has come out with its annual update to its Hate Map for 2023. It lists the locations of all of the hate groups and anti-government that they are tracking. In 2022, they were tracking 1,225 groups. In 2023, they were tracking 1,430, a 17% increase. For Pennsylvania, the number of hate and anti-government groups increased from 72 in 2022 to 78 in 2023, an 8% increase.
To compare Pennsylvania to the other states, the number of groups must be adjusted for population expressed as groups per million. This is because states with larger populations will obviously have more groups. Pennsylvania’s rate was 6.02 per million in 2023. It was 5.54 groups per million in 2022, 9% increase. The U.S. rate was 4.27 per million in 2023 and 3.66 in 2022, a 17% increase.
| State | Rank | # of Groups | Population | Groups per Million |
| District of Columbia | 1 | 13 | 678,972 | 19.15 |
| Wyoming | 2 | 9 | 584,057 | 15.41 |
| Montana | 3 | 17 | 1,132,812 | 15.01 |
| South Dakota | 4 | 12 | 919,318 | 13.05 |
| Idaho | 5 | 25 | 1,964,726 | 12.72 |
| Pennsylvania | 15 | 78 | 12,961,683 | 6.02 |
| United States | 1,430 | 334,914,895 | 4.27 |
The table above shows the ranking of states by groups per million for the top five states as well as Pennsylvania and the U.S. By comparison, Pennsylvania ranks 15th. Thirty-one states have rates above the national rate.
Breakdown for Pennsylvania
Of the 78 groups in Pennsylvania, 48 of them are anti-government. Twenty-six of the 48 are Mom’s for Liberty chapters. Another 8 of the 48 are chapters of a group called Free PA. Nine of the remaining 30 hate groups are white nationalist.
In our area, 3 groups listed on the map:
- Evergreen (a white nationalist group) in Bedford previously described on this website.
- Mom’s for Liberty chapters in Allegheny and Westmoreland Counties
- Tactical Civics in Allegheny, Carbon, and Clearfield counties. It is an anti-government group.
The 8% rise in hate and anti-government groups in Pennsylvania follows a 140% increase the previous year.
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