The chair of GW’s history department does the right thing – contacts students who signed up for her courses, writes openly about the situation, and announces that he’ll keep her out of the classroom. Now the larger university needs to say/do something.

Krug will of course hold out for a fat severance check (I’m assuming she has tenure), and she’ll get one, because GW is being ridiculed, every day, all over the world. If GW dawdles, she’ll get a lawyer and threaten a lawsuit. She likes to make noise.

And no – despite all the histrionic self-cancellation language in her bullshit letter to the world, no way will this woman have the decency to leave GW. She’ll plant her ass there until they pay up. She’s got a long life of vileness ahead of her, and will need to subsidize it.

In an interview with the New York Times, [one of the people who outed Krug] said the allegations [against her] came up during a discussion about [the] late novelist H.G. Carrillo.

Carrillo’s sister revealed after he died in April that he was not a black Latino, who fled Cuba with his family as a child, like he had claimed his entire life. 

His sister said he was an African-American born and raised in Detroit, Michigan.  

[The] junior scholar came forward with claims that Krug had also been lying about her identity. 

Your blogueuse was herself on the tenure committee reviewing Carrillo! We turned him down because we simply could not make sense of his creative/scholarly portfolio, and also because he seemed a seriously troubled, unreliable person. He listed works that never appeared in his file; students reported that he could be strikingly irresponsible in his dealings with them… I don’t remember that many details now, but I remember rather liking his fiction writing, and tending toward wanting to award tenure. Almost everyone gets tenure… But it was as if he didn’t really want tenure – he was evasive and not terribly cooperative with our committee…

Of course, now that we know he was a fraud, his ambivalence makes sense – the closer you get to tenure, the higher your profile becomes, and the greater your threat of exposure.

Krug is not George Washington University’s first professor to fabricate their identity.

Novelist H.G. “Hache” Carrillo taught creative writing there full time for eight years until 2015. Carrillo’s true name was Herman Glenn Carroll…

Oy.

Whether Native American hoaxer BethAnn McLaughlin or African American hoaxer Jessica Krug, one universal law seems to pertain to those who, in order to give themselves advantages in life, pretend for years to be suffering minorities rather than privileged white people: Once onlookers finally figure out you’re a fraud, it’s killing fields time. Gotta saturate-bomb that fucker pronto.

Which is why Krug’s logorrheic lie-fest reads like a burlesque suicide note: On the one hand, she’s gotta go hard on the I wanna die I deserve to die thing, in hopes of generating sympathy for her guilt embarrassment anguish desperation etc. On the other, she’s gotta signal that she’s (in her own words) authentically cancelling herself – I mean now, totally, for real! I’ve got the pills in my hand!!

Only…

Maybe I’m sitting a tad short of actual suicide.

This is where – like so many criminals – Krug pushes the Mental Health button. I might not be a suffering black woman, but I’m for damn sure a suffering dissociative identity disorder victim. You wouldn’t want me to kill myself when modern psychiatry can save me from the twisted effects of my conveniently dead parents.

The problem people like Krug are up against is obvious: The reason so many people do variants of what she’s done is that it’s highly rational, self-advantaging behavior: The possession of a black identity in the academy (and in the arts, and in a few other professions) represents a profound advantage at every step of one’s career. It’s a narrow advantage, to be sure – as Michelle Obama recently pointed out, you can be a wildly advantaged black woman and still encounter racist disdain the live-long day – but a very important and real one. It will almost certainly take you places. There’s nothing nuts about grasping that fact and acting on it.

The other advantage – about which acquaintances who had occasion to observe Krug have spoken – is bullying self-righteousness. The sadists among us get off on constantly and unflinchingly walloping the people around them for their racism, lack of wokeness, white privilege, etc.

By “people around them” I don’t mean actual racists running around carrying flags on the streets of our cities. I mean the well-meaning liberal sorts who are the actual people that tend to be around the sadists. I mean Steven Pinker.

People who behave in these ways – appropriating a suffering identity in order to promote their career and indulge their sadism – are so blatantly repellent that we really must ask why, in the case of Krug, they thrive as long as they do. Her triumphal run lasted around twenty years. What the fuck are we missing that we allow people like Krug to rampage through our institutions – not to mention through our hearts and our souls?

Well, UD‘s GW is going to have to grapple with that one. Krug is deeply damaging an already compromised university — her story has been all over the global media for the last two days, and it has made GW an object of ridicule. You’re supposed to protect your school from frauds.

And by the way. GW students knew she was a fraud. Scan her Rate My Professors page.

Hari Ziyad is pissed. He thought something about tenured GW history professor Jessica Krug was off, but he didn’t know she’d been pretending to be black/inner city all this time – in order to pursue a successful career in African American history – until she called him this morning and told him. She’s really a white Jewish girl from suburban Kansas! Hari’s black; his black friends suspected she was full of shit; he defended her black authenticity to them; he’s embarrassed now. And really really pissed.

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What can UD say about yet another political identity fraudster? Didn’t she cover one of these only a few days ago?

Well, first thing to say about this one: Good timing, babe. You faked it til you made tenure, so it’s gonna be real hard for UD’s GW to shake you off. Its new, inept president (his first order of business was trying to send lucky highly selected professors to Disneyland for reeducation) recently made some insanely stupid remarks about race; now one of its professors has written a logorrheic lie-fest about how she’s a big ol’ race fraud cuz of… uh… early childhood trauma …

I’m not gonna quote from what she wrote (there’s a link to it up there) for the same reason Joe Biden would rather pull his fingernails out by their roots than debate The Genius of the Carpathians. It’s dirtying. Shower afterward a must. But Biden ain’t got no choice. UD read it, okay? But she ain’t goin’ back there.

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So what will GW do? Apparently the school will be issuing a statement soon.

UD predicts it’ll go something like this:

Professor Jessica Krug, of GW’s history department, has informed the school that she will be taking a leave without pay to address the personal issues that contributed to her deceptive self-presentation as African American. GW regrets these circumstances, and wishes Professor Krug well.

Lo these many blogyears, UD has covered immense tons of political hoaxes – hoaxes that involve sociopathic ideologues creating/impersonating political victims. If you scan her HOAX category, you’ll discover many varieties of political victim hoax, dating way back, and you’ll probably ask yourself why they happen… i.e., what could possibly be the motive behind such bizarre, incredibly destructive, and self-defeating schemes (as with the latest such hoax, the hoaxers attempt, when the shit hits the fan, to “kill” their creation, but it rarely works).

Long ago, UD wrote an article about the Yasusada hoax, in which a white American dude created a fake atomic bomb-traumatized Japanese poet in order to … bring attention to atomic-bomb trauma? But faking it undermined our ability to trust “testimony.” Seemed an obviously contemptible thing to do, thought ol’ UD; yet she encountered plenty of people who said it doesn’t matter if there are all these liars out there making us think people like Yasusada exist and making their words (their creators’ words) move us to tears … cuz u know the end justifies the means, silly, so what if the speaker is not an actual person who suffered but a non-suffering amoral cynical manipulative POS hoaxer.

We can certainly anticipate similar defenses of the, er, troubled BethAnn McLaughlin, who created a persona packed with political victimization (recall UD‘s Rule of Hoax Revelation: Hoaxers typically cannot control themselves, and way over-endow their creations with political victim traits (or, if you’re trying to destroy someone, as in these two hoaxes (scroll down), with political victimizer traits), and nice trusting people rushed to adore her (the hoaxer’s creation, that is).

At some point, who knows why, things began to get out of hand for McLaughlin and her suffering hand puppet, so she gave her Covid, which you might say was a stroke of genius, but babe when you’re trying to prop up a vacancy the vacancy is likely to be even more troublesome ‘dead.’ Remember Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? George and Martha had a perfectly serviceable relationship with their hoax son until George tried to kill him.

But that was pathos and need, and we are – just like Nick – appalled and pitying at the thought of the emotional desperation that generated that boy. No one, OTOH, really wants to enter the vile psyche of a person capable of exploiting the kindness, trust, indignation, and idealism of large numbers of people by turning what is most serious and true and needed in them into a sick personal joke. “Ms. McLaughlin has prompted particular frustration and disgust by posing as a Hopi woman, right as the coronavirus has caused disproportionate harm to Indigenous communities in the United States.”

Bottom line, stated by a Native American journalist: “[I]t does change our ability to advocate for ourselves when we are constantly being replaced by frauds…”

Certainly your blogueuse fears to venture too far into these farts of darkness. Let us simply say that they are satisfying a profound need for attention coupled with an equally profound hatred of the world (imagine how pleasurable it has been for McLaughlin to contemplate what she’s putting over on everyone).

After [Karen] Littlefair’s son was put on academic probation by Georgetown University, she hired [Rick] Singer’s company to take four online classes on his behalf so he could graduate in 2018, prosecutors said… Littlefair sought a discount on the cheating after the person earned a C in one of the courses, authorities said.

Big bad judge make mommy go jail. WAH!

“I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can’t get into Harvard,” Trump said. “We don’t know a thing about this guy. There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president.”

Well at least – thanks to Mary Trump’s forthcoming book – we now know how Donald Trump got into an Ivy League school.

As a high school student in Queens, Ms. Trump writes, Donald Trump paid someone to take a precollegiate test, the SAT, on his behalf. The high score the proxy earned for him, Ms. Trump adds, helped the young Mr. Trump to later gain admittance as an undergraduate to the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton business school.

A couple of things will follow from this Least Surprising Revelation of the Decade:

Uncle Don will tweet that Mary is a fucking piece of shit cunt whore piece of shit. He will then have Kayleigh McEnany announce that “the president was unable to take the SAT due to a disabling bone spur.”

U Penn will take a good hard look at the accolades it has bestowed upon its highest profile grad (“[Trump was] appointed to Wharton’s Board of Overseers in 1987, and the following year appeared in a video promoting the business school. Trump received an award from Wharton in the fall of 2014, just eight months before announcing his candidacy, and the most favorable recent mention of him as an alum comes in Wharton’s list of “125 Influential People and Ideas” from 2012.”). It will cross itself with relief and self-congratulation that it never gave him an honorary degree (Lehigh University however…), and it will announce that it’s opening an investigation into Trump’s degree. With an eye toward rescinding it. I mean, Varsity Blues is one thing…

Oh, and Jared… You’re up…

Oh! And in about a half hour, the Lincoln Project will release a new thigh-slapper.

Now in its sixtieth year, it has hardly known a time when its fiscal affairs were not in chaos, when its board of regents was not dysfunctional, when its graduation rate was not shockingly low, and when exasperated white politicians in Austin were not talking about putting it under a conservatorship or ending its status as an independent institution.

Thirteen years later, that legacy remains fiercely intact, with Texas Southern University one of America’s most powerful epicenters of criminal negligence in the name of personal greed. One of its recent presidents just barely avoided prison; its last president is running around insisting he had nothing to do with the law school ignoring all applications not coming from people offering bribes, but time and a thousand ongoing outside investigations will tell. Meanwhile, the TSU bar passage rate in 2018 was 27%.

Hey, maybe the board of regents can help!

Ending its status as an independent institution… well, yes, but if it hasn’t happened after seventy years of malpractice , it ain’t gonna happen. What’s gonna happen? They will build new buildings. They will organize sports teams that brawl in empty arenas. The New York Times will visit and see reason to hope.

Her anger at cancer personality bs featured prominently in her book Illness as Metaphor.

UD also remembers wondering why such obviously implausible notions continue to be taken seriously. This might even have been the beginning of UD‘s education in the sketchy field of research in psychology (this blog has over the years covered a zillion stories of disgraced high-profile psychologists, like Marc Hauser and Diederik Stapel).

Finally we seem to have the definitive trashing of the cancer personality. About time.

UD would like to know who this pathetic, contemptible person is. Forbes has of course pulled the article; but how many other Forbes articles are lies issued under the names of people willing to sell out their bylines for – in this case – six hundred bucks from a sex convict?

Forbes‘ famously clever motto is Capitalist Tool – but until now I didn’t think I was supposed to take it literally.

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Oh wait. It’s apparently Drew Hendricks! Silly UD; all I had to do was go to the 404 page and read the url. LOL. More laughs here.

I was wrong.

Jussie Smollett, Upset Over Salary, Staged Assault, Police Say

Humor means we’re getting over it. Good.

This excellent question about the Smollett hoax right away reminded UD of another overdetermined hoax – a university one. And maybe in this overdetermined business there’s one small clue for us as we go about defending ourselves from hoaxers.

Seeking to destroy the faculty member who discovered his fraudulent credentials and research, West Virginia University epidemiology professor Anoop Shankar had an Indian friend go to this colleague’s office and …

“You Indians have nice brown skin,” [the colleague] allegedly said [to the student]. “But you smell weird with the spices that you use for cooking.”

Right about then the grey-haired professor supposedly pulled his chair closer and snatched at the young man’s penis.

[A second friend of Shankar’s, standing just outside the office,] claimed that from the hallway, he could then hear [the professor] rise from his chair and say loudly to [the young man], “Here, taste my white c–k.”

[The young man] said he fled rather than reciprocate and that [the professor] flew into a rage, his words echoing into the corridor: “I will destroy you!”

Allow UD to quote herself, starting with her post’s title:

PILING ON: THE SOCIOPATH’S UNDOING

When scripting these scenarios (one of the friends later confessed that Shankar had written and directed this drama), you need to be selective. Minimalism is more plausible than maximalism to most audiences. Deciding to throw in not merely an ethnic slur, but sexual harassment, and not merely sexual harassment but sexual assault, and not merely sexual assault but violent threat of retaliation, is just the sort of excess you’d expect from a sociopath.

Another example of piling on: The chief of staff at Upstate Medical College claimed

that he narrowly escaped a car bombing in Afghanistan… [that] he was hired by former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to work in the State Department, that he was in the White House when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred in September 2001 and is close friends with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

I mean, it’s better than the cake. The developing story of the latest fake hate assault has much more drama than the mere addition of some anti-gay icing.  Yet it’s the same contemptible attention- and money-seeking behavior (the cake guy sued Whole Foods; once WF proved he homophobed himself, it countersued), and UD has learned over the course of this blog that the business of staging things is sickeningly common. And of course incredibly destructive to efforts to take seriously actual hate crimes.

All the way back in 2004, UD covered the Professor Kerri Dunn business, when she spray-painted her car with swastikas etc. and everyone at Claremont McKenna rallied on her behalf and worried about incipient fascism until the guys who happened to be taking a walk nearby at the time she did it told the police about watching her paint her car. An education professor at Columbia University, under threat of dismissal for plagiarism (of her students!) hung a noose on her office door and claimed to be the victim of a hate crime. A conservative student at Princeton wrote himself some really nasty, anti-conservative letters and enjoyed right-wing martyrdom until he had to admit the truth…. Croyez-moi, I could go on! And on!

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UPDATE: Now this I really don’t get. Washington Post, headline:

I DOUBTED JUSSIE SMOLLET. IT BREAKS MY HEART THAT I MIGHT BE RIGHT

Heartbreak is ridiculous. Anger’s the ticket. The Post editor continues:

I tried telling myself that it is possible that two assailants were walking around downtown Chicago at 2 a.m. in January in 10-degree weather, waiting for a black victim. In addition to that, they were stalking around with a bottle of bleach and a rope. And ultimately, the prey they selected was an actor on a show that they must’ve been somewhat familiar with, because they were able to not only name the show but also know that he played a gay character. Never mind the fact that he was likely bundled up because again: Chicago, January, 10 degrees. Also, after he fought to get away, he left the rope around his neck until he got to the hospital.

This ain’t doubt; it’s close to certain knowledge he was bullshitting. And he wasn’t new to bullshitting. Mature political actors – people like newspaper editors – don’t go into denial when people do bad, illegal, and destructive things; nor do they enter into heartbreak when what seemed obviously the case turns out to have been the case. When weirdly flagrant and flagrantly weird events occur, serious people respond with skepticism.

This is more like it:

Commentator Kmele Foster put it this way on “Reliable Sources” on Sunday: “Two in the morning, almost the coldest night of the year, you were attacked and someone conveniently had a rope? My heart goes out to anyone who gets attacked, but it’s totally appropriate to exercise a bit of skepticism and to exercise a bit of patience in waiting for the facts to develop around this story.”

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As for the legal implications:

Attorney and CBS2/KCAL9 Legal Analyst Steve Meister says every state penalizes fabricating a crime and the trouble this case has caused is serious.

“That’s felony conduct because you caused a lot of people a lot of problems and you cost the city a lot of money and you took time away from what cops could have been doing to solve real crimes.” Meister says.

He says every state’s laws vary as do the penalties. In California a felony conviction for lying to a police officer is punishable by up to three years in prison.

UPDATE:

This case is an object lesson in what happens when people in positions of political and cultural authority abandon critical thinking and pressure those who don’t abandon their circumspection under pain of being smeared as bigots.

Boat check? That’s a new one on UD. Looked it up and all, and found nothing. I think the writer must have meant blank check?

It’s from an article about how Rutgers University does things like give an administrator who lasted one year in his position “a $480,000 sabbatical” year. Rest and recovery after a job well done! Plus you promise not to tell everyone how filthy the school is, right? Cuz we gave you all that money?

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UPDATE: UD thanks Brian, a reader, for explaining “boat check” to her.