Sometimes I like to go to parties and introduce myself as a hate group.

I can get away with it because back in the day the Southern Poverty Law Center named me, a bar sign and a bunch of random people as hate groups. The only thing that proved is that the SPLC not only didn’t know the definition of hate, but even the definition of group.

My first thought was to wonder whether some mistake had been made in my own case, but the Southern Poverty Law Center people are experts on hate groups, even if they don’t seem to know what the definitions of “hate” or “groups” or “hate groups” might be. Even if they seem to have copied their list off a forum somewhere at the last minute to have something to show the donors. Clearly I was now a hate group, and with tax season upon us, I called my accountant to find out if there was a tax deduction for that. There wasn’t.

The SPLC has, perhaps out of embarrassment, stopped describing people as groups. But, last week I had written about Jonah Raskin and the Weathermen.

“I didn’t make or transport any bombs but I think I played a useful role,” Raskin admits, after describing seeing a bomb maker at work.

Confessions like these come without social or legal penalties.

Confess to watching a Klansman assembling a bomb meant for a black church without tipping off the authorities, and the social and economic penalties would be severe. But there are plenty of social and economic rewards in writing, yet again, about protecting leftist terrorists while occasionally urging them to stop killing people, without actually going to the authorities to stop them from killing people.

“I supported my wife financially when she was underground, met with her immediately after the townhouse explosion, and on and off for the next six months,” Raskin notes.

He fails to note that his wife, Eleanor Raskin, a red diaper baby, had advocated violence as far back as 1969, had allegedly aided the escape of one of the townhouse fugitives, and was indicted for possession of a bomb and explosive devices with unlawful intent in 1979.

Raskin was unhappy and fired back by accusing me and/or the Freedom Center of being a hate group involved in a civil war.

“I Am the Target of a Hate Group & You Might Be, Too,” Raskin warned the faithful.

By that Raskin means I wrote mean things about him. This makes him a “target”. And a victim. There’s no help for it except to go underground for thirty years and build bombs before transitioning to a profitable career in a leftist industry.

But seriously…

Greenfield libeled me and targeted me, too, as “a stooge for a communist terror group that murdered Americans.”

You don’t have to be an African-American, a Latino, a Latina, or gay to be the target of a right-wing hate group. If you speak your own mind, you, too, can be attacked by the radical right and its members who call for a civil war, a bloodbath and, in the case of Mr. Greenfield, “a reckoning.”

By “attacked”, Raskin again means, “wrote mean things about”.

And Raskin lists himself alongside presumed victims of hate crimes as one of the oppressed proletariat being ground under by “right wing hate groups” writing mean things about them. 

Raskin snips the context completely from the line about a “reckoning” and fails to link to the original article so that he can posture as the victim of a right-wing hate group.

“For the record, let me say that I never was a stooge for the Weather Underground or for any other group, and that the only individuals who died as a result of the Weather Underground were three members of the group itself who accidentally blew themselves up,” Raskin protests.

As a literary fellow, he ought to know that no sentence that starts with “For the record” ever ends in a good or plausible place.

For the record, Raskin doesn’t appear to consider Waverly Brown, an African-American police officer, to be an individual. Or the others murdered by leftist domestic terrorists.

Does Waverly Brown’s life not deserve the least bit of acknowledgement compared to the three murderous Weathermen terrorists?

Then there’s a whole load of inane ramblings about a civil war. 

“I’m with American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote a poem titled “The Warning” in 1842 in which he predicted the coming of a time when “the vast temple of our liberties / A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.” Who hasn’t heard the contemporary warning? Who doesn’t fear that our liberties might become a mass of wreck and rubbish?”

For an English prof and an aspiring poet, Raskin appears oddly ignorant of the subject. Longfellow was warning about a slave uprising, not a civil war. 

Who needs to know a subject when you know the Weathermen?

Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doing it again