Southern Poverty Law Center's 'Hate Tracker' Monitors Twitter Mentions of 'Christmas'

Is there a War on Christmas”? Many on the right argue that there is, while others are skeptical that things reach that level. However, the latest stunt by the supposedly nonpartisan Southern Poverty Law Center may cause skeptical folks suchto rethink.

From RedState:

But then here comes the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), with their new project: a “hate tracker” that is monitoring Twitter trends of “extremists,” including topics like “Christmas.”

The SPLC Hate Tracker launched a few months ago with a website (hatetracker.io) and a Twitter account (@splchatetracker). According to the website, the project’s purpose is to “detect trends in a community of far-right Twitter users … a range of extremists — from the conspiratorial fringes of mainstream conservatism to outright white supremacists.”

Very little of this information is on the @splchatetracker Twitter account, which simply posts the “latest top trend” and “also trending” topics from their data. While some of the topics are associated with white nationalist groups like #altright, #whitegenocide, and #deportthemall, many topics are ones that no reasonable person would consider hateful, like #armynavygame, a reference to the annual college football matchup between the U.S. Naval Academy and West Point, or general news topics.

In recent days, the list has been dominated by Christmas topics, like #christmaseve, #christmas, #merrychristmas, #religion, and #jesus.

The SPLC still likes to paint itself as a nonpartisan observer of hate groups in the United States, but recent years have made it clear that it has a heavy bias towards leftist ideology.

This is evident from its focus on groups that maintain Christian orthodoxy on issues like gay marriage — they call such groups “hate groups” Anything short of complete acceptance of gay marriage constitutes hate to the SPLC.

By listing typical Christian topics as things that are trending among “hateful” people, the SPLC casts Christianity itself as hateful. Christians, of course, make up the majority of this country. And plenty of studies have shown that the more observant the Christian, the more likely that person is to give to charity, volunteer, donate blood, and do every other act of kindness that makes up a civil society.

The SPLC is undermining themselves with these kinds of antics, and they have to know it.

But they don’t care. They just want those donor checks to keep rolling in, and those checks are coming from Leftists with hateful, anti-free speech opinions.