A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) says that hate groups in the US have continued to surge in the Trump era, and that the president himself has helped to mainstream hate by “fueling fears of a white minority country”.

The Alabama-based SPLC – one of the most long-standing and widely-cited anti-hate organizations – counted 1,020 hate groups in the United States in 2018, up 7% from the previous year.

This represented an all-time high since the SPLC began counting hate groups, beating the previous record in 2011, when the far right’s angry reaction to the Obama presidency was peaking.

In a press conference, Heidi Beirich, the director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project blamed in part the “words and imagery coming out of the Trump administration” which have been “heightening the fears” of demographic replacement.

The report points to a range of murders and violent attacks – like a mail-bombing spree that targeted Democrats and media organisations and a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue – as evidence that the conspiracy-fueled far right is increasingly willing to commit extreme acts.

Another similar recent report from the Anti-Defamation League suggested that extremist murders in the United States in 2018 were carried out almost exclusively by the far right.

But the SPLC also points to the increasingly strident expression of far right ideas in conservative media, and from Republican politicians, as evidence that hate is being mainstreamed.

One example is Donald Trump’s apparent adoption of the cause of white South African farmers in 2018. The report also discusses how Fox News hosts such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have seized on the idea that white people will be demographically replaced in the United States by a wave of immigrants. Both of these themes are regularly pushed by white nationalists.

Though the report surveys a wide range of hate groups – from the antigovernment “patriot” movement to antisemitic black nationalist groups – it drew particular attention to two developments in 2018.

The first is the explosive growth in white nationalist groups. While longstanding white supremacist movements like the Klu Klux Klan have continued to dwindle, newer styles of internet-savvy white organizations have grown explosively. The 148 groups of this type identified by the SPLC represent a 50% increase on 2017.

White nationalist groups like Identity Evropa have been prominently involved in a wave of flyer distribution, which has escaped its former confines on college campuses and into the “public domain”. The level of flying and related actions, like banner drops, has been “unprecedented” according to the SPLC.

The second area of extensive growth has been in the catch-all category of “general hate”. That growth is largely as a result of the growth of the “western chauvinist” group, the Proud Boys, who the SPLC says now have 44 chapters in 31 states.

It describes the Proud Boys’ attendance at frequently violent street rallies as “the most relentless campaign of rightwing street violence in recent memory”.

The Proud Boys have recently cemented their links with people in high levels of the Republican party. Last week, Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio was given pride of place at a Trump rally in Miami. The month before, Tarrio was a prominent visitor to Roger Stone in the wake of his arrest by the FBI. Stone himself has been frequently photographed with Proud Boys, and the Proud Boys often flourish a video of stone apparently being initiated in some way into the group.

The SPLC’s description of the group in these terms comes in the face of a lawsuit launched by founder Gavin McInnes against the organization earlier this month. McInnes’s suit is one of a number launched by rightwing figures who object to the SPLC’s classification or monitoring of their activities.

Asked about the lawsuits pending against the SPLC by McInnes and the Center for Immigration Studies, Beirich said: “We stand by our hate group listings”.

Repeatedly, Trump himself is singled out by the SPLC report, and his Twitter account in particular is nominated for pushing “noxious anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views”.