While much scholarly attention has been on how far-right extremism has influenced U.S. national politics, less studied, and perhaps more ominous, is the equivocal degree to which far-right extremists have entered and reshaped state and local governments, as well as other public institutions. We see harmful legislation being passed in Statehouses, district lines are being redrawn to edge out competitors, school boards are imposing distorted curricula, and libraries are being forced to remove books that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. To effectively challenge the spread of far-right extremism, we need to first understand where and how the various movements within the far-right agenda work. The Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University is organizing a second symposium on far-right extremism, which will include thirteen presentations of original research that is relevant to how extremist ideologies have influenced public institutions. Among the topics, we will learn about how Ohio’s political landscape has been influenced by Christian strongholds, how recent efforts to censor public education echo previous attempts by The Daughters of the Confederacy more than a century ago, how street mobilization about COVID-19 protections and against Critical Race Theory relate to threats against local officials and meta-narratives on social and mass media.