Well I said I wouldn’t do it anymore, but something in this Sunday’s Gazette needs a little exposure both on its own sake and for what it says about the people running “your hometown paper.”
The piece is a creepy commentary by an emeritus UI professor named Robert Weissberg, from the political science department. It’s basically a compendium of all the nutty charges against Obama you hear from the likes of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh (daily on WDWS — hate radio for CU), under the thesis that Obama is an alien of some sort — not really an American (I’m not making this up). Even the mayor of Champaign doesn’t go quite this far. By the end Obama is George III and Weissberg coyly and ambiguously asks “What’s next.” I’d say it’s a hit.
The piece in question comes from an extremist right blog titled, with unintentional irony, “American Thinker.” It’s basically an angry white guy echo chamber, sort of along the Beck/Limbaugh axis, where writers try to outdo each other in explaining the disease of liberalism, or socialism or fascism or Marxism, or who knows what. They certainly don’t. It’s an incredibly ignorant, often downright demented, attempt to define the world. Thus we get the socialist plot being hatched by Woodrow Wilson (I am not making this up), or my favorite: that liberalism is simply a manifestation of innate depravity. It’s pure craziness by people who have actually been to law school, business school, and yes, political science school. Which if you’ve been around some of the faculty in those disciplines, would not terribly surprise you, but that’s for another day.
So I get to wondering who is this Robert Weissburg and soon I’m wandering in bizarro world. First there’s the American Thinker stuff, nutty enough. Then it gets really weird. A letter from Weissberg to the Jewish Defense Organization (which is totally crazy, but that’s yet another story): The gist of the letter is that Weissberg is asking JDO to not disrupt an American Renaissance meeting, and that he is a solid hard-line right-wing Jew and there is nothing wrong with AR, that he’s written for its publications and even had AR founder and honcho Jared Taylor over for dinner.
And who is Jared Taylor, and what is American Renaissance you ask? Well you can see for yourself at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Files, or the Antidefamation League’s site. A little taste of this well-bred conservative intellectual: “Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”
Among other things they do is put on conferences, which, as SPLC notes, “are usually a major hit in white nationalist circles and feature as speakers prominent white supremacists, academic racists and other extremists from around the world.”
A while back when the radical right was (and still is) howling about Obama’s former association with the ex-Weatherman bomber and current UIC professor Bill Ayers, News-Gazette publisher John Foreman opined that this was quite right, since one should be judged by their associations. OK then, fair’s fair. Let me associate Foreman, Dey and Beck with Jared Taylor — not much of a stretch at all. They do seem to be trolling American Thinker and similar rightist web-sites for pieces they think they can publish to advance their views.
Weissberg’s recent writings, along with other members of the racist right such as Charles Murray, are based in the idea that some people (and you know who they mean) are just not quite up to snuff intellectually and we should basically throw them on the trash heap. It’s ironic that in the same section of the Gazette is a story about the Urban Prep High School in Chicago, which flatly contradicts, through the results of its work, all of the racist, “intellectual” swill dished up by the extremist right.
It’s not all that surprising to see such vile stuff in the News-Gazette. It’s long been known as a bastion of a covert genteel sort of White Supremacy. Foreman still pushes every chance he gets for the racist ex-mascot of the U of I. Recently he minimized what the Mayor of Champaign said about Obama, and dismissed any notion that race is one of the fuels for the tea party craze as just political name calling. Well, anyone with a smidgen of knowledge of the relationship between extreme conservatism and racism, or the history of the city of Champaign — and particularly its police department — finds Foreman’s denial laughable. But it is of a part with the column by Weissberg, not to mention the bigoted rantings of Cal Thomas, and all the rest. And this is the face Champaign-Urbana portrays to the world. Aren’t you proud?