Happy Thursday! I wrote this one a while back and thought I’d share it now as the civil war going on in the Republican Party is causing a few of its fringier elements to allow their racist roots to show. You’d be surprised at how little it takes to ferret out some people’s racist credentials and affiliations as in the case of this KKK quoting birther and now Chair of the House Immigration Reform Caucus.
Surprise! The National Review is firing another writer for racism.
According to National Review editor Rich Lowry,
“Unbeknowst to us, occasional Phi Beta Cons contributor Robert Weissberg (whose book was published a few years ago by Transaction) participated in an American Renaissance conference where he delivered a noxious talk about the future of white nationalism. He will no longer be posting here. Thanks to those who brought it to our attention.”
The speech happened last month, and Lowry needed someone to bring this to his attention? Sounds like the National Review needs a little lesson in recognizing racism.
So, here’s one way you know someone is a racist.
First, do a Google search of his name. The heading of the first hit? “Racist Prof Who Gave Blacks Low Grades.” No real story is attached to that hit so who knows what that’s really all about. But in a racism hunt, a hit like that ought to get you looking further.
Next, I went to that obscure compendium of knowledge called Wikipedia and found that Weissberg is the author of a book called Pernicious Tolerance: How Teaching to “Accept Differences” Undermines Civil Society, published in 2008.
The book description on Amazon opens with the following:
“Recent decades have seen a consistent effort by the American educational establishment to instruct schoolchildren about the importance of “appreciating differences,” all in the name of “tolerance,” so as to quell burgeoning “hate.” In Pernicious Tolerance, Robert Weissberg argues that educators’ endless obsession with homophobia, sexism, racism, and other alleged hateful disorders is part of a much larger ongoing radical ideological quest to transform America, by first capturing education.”
Of course, I’m not wasting my time going to the library for that particular tome, so maybe that’s not substantive enough evidence.
Back to Google. A quick scroll down the page of hits took me to an article by Mr. Weissberg published in 2010 in Alternative Right. The article featured this cute little graphic:
What’s written suggests that government is obsessed with imposing “‘diversity’ on a reluctant public” and describes diversity education as a “liver-and-cauliflower diet.” Don’t want to eat it? Government power will play “daddy” and “jam it down your throat!”
If nothing else, I’m glad I’m not this man’s son.
Anyway, so this search for clues isn’t so hard, right? Did I just say “hard right?” Sorry, Freudian slip.
But, I admit, these are mostly covert expressions of bigotry, and that’s National Review’s speciality, so maybe a little hard to recognize.
But then, wait a sec, didn’t National Review figure out the guy is a racist because of a speech he made at an American Renaissance (AR) conference?
I figured, a look at the AR website might yield something.
It turns out that Mr. Weissberg gave a major speech at AR’s 2000 conference.
According to the AR website, he spoke about how Jews have supported Black causes in spite of privately harboring fear and dislike of Black people. Only Israel, he argued, receives more support than Black causes like the NAACP, and Jewish support for Israel has contributed to what AR paraphrases as “an increase in sometimes violent Black anti-Semitism, and unceasing attacks on Jews by Black leaders.”
The site further paraphrases the speech, writing, “Jews fear Black crime and violence, and loathe Black ineptitude and sloth. Jewish academics resent the price they pay for affirmative action and are repelled by the Afrocentric “scholars” who are now their colleagues. Jews are the first to move away when a neighborhood changes, and do not socialize or intermarry with Blacks.”
So why, according to Weissberg, do they continue to support Black causes? Because they fear the anti-Semitism of white Gentiles even more.
However, he is paraphrased as saying, “Jews are increasingly disenchanted with both liberalism and neutered conservatism, and are increasingly open to racial appeals so long as they are free of anti-Semitism.”
Okay, here is a ginormous 12-year-old clue that the guy is a racist. He’s speaking of the attitudes of Jews, and Jewish academics in particular are mentioned. What is Robert Weissberg? A Jewish academic.
I’m not saying, as he apparently did, that Jews are generally racist. Quite the contrary. I’m suggesting he’s talking about himself. And his 2000 speech? Essentially a guide to getting Jews to respond to racial appeals.
So, I thought, these American Renaissance guys are a**holes. Gotta look into that. And you know what I found?
American Renaissance is an openly racialist magazine published by the New Century Foundation, a group that receives significant funding from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “hate group.”
That took me, a guy sitting at a laptop computer in a home office 25 minutes to find out. But I’m giving National Review a break. It’s gotta be tough for National Review, a publication founded by a man who in the 1950s went against civil rights because he believed that whites were the more advanced race, to hunt down a racist without trapping themselves.
