The Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) is a non-profit organisation in the US that professes to be an advocacy group for civil rights and minorities. It reportedly monitors hate groups throughout America, but its left-leaning views have often made it the focus of controversy. Its most recent stance on the use of the term “Merry Christmas” during the holiday period instead of the politically correct “Happy Holidays” has once more put the group at the centre of attention. The left-wing group has designated anyone that uses the hashtag #Christmas as a possible right-wing extremist!
That’s right, according to the SPLC and its “hate tracker”, those that used #MerryChristmas, #ChristmasEve, #Christmas, and #Jesus represented a range of extremists “from ‘conspiratorial fringes of mainstream conservatism to outright white supremacists.” The SPLC includes disclaimers, however, such as that the accounts “are not necessarily part of the far-right population of accounts we monitor.” It also claims these “extremists” also participate in many “conversations and topics that are popular among more ‘mainstream’ communities.”
In the past, the group has gone as far as to label former Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Muslim reformers like Maajid Nawaz as “Islamophobes”.