Regent Weiser- WTAF?!

I thought it was Averliving

I'm going to try to stick to the facts here because I know the guy a bit and know a lot of people who know him. PLEASE don't respond with your political takes or the thread dies.

My interactions are all second-hand except one time I talked with him at a fundraiser thing, and that was almost entirely about Michigan (IIRC I was defending Denard as a QB after some Rich Rod loss). I also helped found a volunteer events org inside of the Detroit Jewish Federation about 10 years ago, and I've worked closely with the Ann Arbor version of the same, and at those meetings the doings of Weiser, and my childhood friend/almost sister-in-law Lena Epstein, were a common topic of banter/curiosity while waiting for the thing to start.

Weiser has been a golem in the Ann Arbor--and particularly its Jewish--community for years. His business is McKinley Associates, which buys up and overcharges for dilapidated off-campus housing. I have never discussed this with Brian but I imagine Weiser is high on his and his pro-building group's shit list because Weiser makes more than anybody off of the student housing problem.

Most of his donations are to state- and federal Republican Party operations, but he throws his money around in the community a ton, which gets him lots of picture moments and his name on things and gratitude of the various orgs, and people affiliated with them and reliant on them. The recognition always includes "Ambassador Ronald Weiser" because he was an ambassador to Slovakia for President G.W. Bush. One of the orgs that gets the most support is Ann Arbor Jewish Family Services, which does--and I cannot emphasize this enough--a TON of good.

Everyone I know who's worked with Weiser at Federation and JFS say he's earnest, especially when it comes to Israel and what he perceives as the threat of anti-Semitism on campus, but creepy and constantly aggrieved, like everything that ever happens is a conspiracy against him personally. How people view him seems very important to Ron. I understand the movement to change the building name was especially hard on him. 

Weiser is currently on his third non-consecutive term as Michigan's Republican Party chair. From the guy I know who used to work on various state-level Republican staffs (went into private practice in 2014), lately the two-year term after a presidential election cycle is more honorary than effectual so they just sell the honorific as a fundraiser, and Weiser comes up with the money. But this time he needed to shore up his right wing bona fides so he teamed up with Meshawn Maddock, who's one of the triumvirate of that we often call the "fascist auxiliary" here in Oakland County. Maddock was the one who organized the buses to bring Michiganders to the January 6 insurrection--it's an open secret that Weiser paid for the buses.

Weiser told one person I know that he's not really in league with the "sad people" (meaning Trump Republicans), and thinks he's just doing what any politician has to do to appeal to a base that includes extremists, justifying it by saying he thinks the Democrats he knows with are willing to deal with socialists, so what's the difference?

There's a lot more I can't share but I think that paints a clearer picture if you're just getting caught up on Weiser.