Moonbat Watch: Crazy Conspiracy Professors

Students who take out large loans to pay for their college education (and parents who cough up many thousands of dollars) would like to think that college professors, as a group, are pretty sensible people.

Many are, and those who aren’t are usually in thrall of some bizarre ideology: Marxism, deconstructionism, post-modernism or such.

But some are just outright crackpots. And these days, it’s 9/11 government conspiracy theories that attract the crackpots.

This is the subject of a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

One of the professors discussed is Steven E. Jones of Brigham Young University, who is famous for his claim that the World Trade Center towers were brought down, not by the aircraft that hit them, but by preplanted thermite charges.

Another is a fellow we know a lot about, James H. Fetzer. Fetzer is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota at Duluth.

He has been a big proponent of JFK assassination conspiracy theories, but lately has turned his attention to 9/11.

He spoke at a recent conspiracy conference in Chicago. According to the Chronicle, the scene was like this:

On the second afternoon of the conference, Mr. Fetzer gave a speech in one of the hotel salons to a standing-room-only crowd. It began like an introductory lecture in moral philosophy he might have given at the University of Minnesota. He discussed different theories for the origins of right and wrong — moral egoism, utilitarianism, deontological moral rights. Then he came to the emergency.

“The threat we face,” he said, is “imminent and ominous.” He recommended arming the citizenry.

During the question-and-answer session, an audience member asked whether there might be a way to capture a TV station, to get the word out about September 11. Mr. Fetzer upped the ante on the idea.

“Let me tell you, for years, I’ve been waiting for there to be a military coup to depose these traitors,” he said from the podium.

“Yeah!” shouted some men in the audience.

“There actually was one weekend,” Mr. Fetzer went on, “where I said to myself, my God, it’s going to happen this weekend, and I’m going to wake up and they will have taken these guys off in chains.”

His voice was building. “Listen to me,” he said. “The degree of perfidy involved here is so great, that in the time of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, frenzied mobs would have dragged these men out of their beds in the middle of the night and ripped them to shreds!”

“Yeah!” cried a chorus of voices in the audience. “Yeah!”