… or… okay… UD explains it all for you.

A reader writes wondering about Jessica Krug and intentionality. Could this have been a double hoax? As the reader puts it:

Jessica [at some point] reveals that “I did it on purpose.”

Indeed it’s worth posing the question of motive in deeper terms than merely careerist in cases like Krug, although pretending to be a black woman in a work/financial support/emotional support setting designed to advantage minorities was obviously a large part of her intent. I’m sure H. G. Carrillo, once her colleague at GW, and a fellow hoaxer (Meta-hoaxer! He was already black. He added Cuban.), had exactly the same advantages in mind. And there are abundant similar examples, including the curious transformation of Mike Hudson into Yi-Fen Chou.

The particular case of Krug, however, suggests instructive truths about certain dangerous personality traits. Instructive – as in listen up! and your university might be able to see the next Jessica Krug coming before the super-rad bullies at your school muscle her tenure through, and getting rid of her costs you a ton of money.

There’s a very ugly way in which the personal is the political. Something toxic happens when angry narcissists with massive diffuse grievance as a preexisting condition meet ideas about the public world which allow them to organize, exteriorize, and be rewarded/celebrated for that personal rage. We know from several sources that Krug was, from about the age of thirteen, a highly irritable, self-righteous, arrogant, fight-picker. Nothing about her privileged (private schools, loving family) upbringing suggests mistreatment; rather, if you follow her behavior through to the present — where people in her New York apartment building report sudden motiveless insult, hostility, and threat from her; and former friends report a self-loathing so intense it regularly broke out in attacks on other people around her as being even more loathsome than she — what emerges is a violently nihilistic hatred of the world seeking outlets. “Krug is way worse than Rachel Dolezal. Krug not only pretended to be Black, but purposefully caused tension between Blacks and whites—trying to get Black people to hate white people as much as she did, when she really just hated herself.” A friend describes her “persistent negativity and jealousy.” A GW student describes her showing the class a photo of “the white woman who won an award over her.”

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I’ve encountered a few people in my life whose sudden outbursts of verbal cruelty shocked me right down to the ground. And you know, your UD ain’t a shrinking violet, so we’re talking really vile and explosive and hurtful statements.

Plus out of context. Nothing in the immediate social setting/conversation seemed to have prompted the statements’ content and ferocity; rather, what emerged seemed to come from a deep, mysterious, long-tended ground of excruciating rancor against moi. (Plus against other people, who were also, UD came to know, targets of these shock-and-awe explosions.) I’m talking about a person who, minutes ago, seemed a pretty unproblematic friend.

So vile and unprovoked were these attacks that UD had nothing to do with the attackers post-attack — except for one of them. Her aunt could not be rejected. Because… well… her aunt. The others seemed to UD to have revealed an essential untrustworthiness, a basic ill-will in regard to other people, themselves, and the entire world of human existence which would be absolute nuts to hang around. So she didn’t.

But let’s say UD were a really politically correct person – and/or really politically committed person. Let’s say she felt almost unbearable guilt about the history of white racism and the ongoing immediacy of her own white privilege. Faced with an angry, insulting Jessica Krug who had told UD tearful tales about the suffering of her black ancestors and her own suffering, UD would interpret Krug’s vileness not as simply the manifestation of a shitty personality (some people get charming ones; some people get shitty ones), but as an understandable personal /political/historical manifestation of resentment, frustration, and sorrow. UD might even be grateful to be made to feel the guilt that was before more of an abstraction. “No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame,” says Mr Bennet as the Lydia/Wickham fiasco unfolds in Pride and Prejudice. We want to feel things, and relentless emotional confrontationalists like Krug oblige.

A person like Krug spends many years observing the gratifying effect of her personal nastiness; people seem to appreciate the wokeness-boost it gives them. And because she’s competitive and insecure and narcissistic, the nastiness will tend to be about chastising other people for being less aggrieved and militant about grievance than Krug is. Sadistically, she explores how far she can go in inflicting politically masochistic wounds, and over time the intensity of her attacks grows. Her fundamental motives are world-destroying nihilism, and the obscure, and less and less serviceable, gratification she derives from exteriorizing her bottomless maddening sense of the grinding nothingness of existence.

She terrorized Black and Latina women, panned their work and politics, and made many of her colleagues take on additional labor under the pretense of having to deal with her imaginary family saga. Krug was particularly cruel to US-born Puerto Rican scholars, who she often accused of lacking the insider knowledge and cultural fluency that she reveled in.

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Clearly Krug’s own being is nothingness; she would not have been able to jettison it utterly and permanently for an assumed being if that were not the case. Like Alfred Jarry, she embraces her vile nihilistic Ubu. Her own family is nothingness; with little to no discernible emotional cost to her, she has been able to abandon them totally for two decades, not even showing up for her mother’s funeral. Over time, her thin, histrionic, theatrical identity thins more and more, and she must carnivalize it with greater and greater desperation. “She always dressed/acted inappropriately—she’d show up to a 10am scholars’ seminar dressed for a salsa club etc—but was so over the top strident and ‘woker-than-thou’ that I felt like I was trafficking in respectability politics when I cringed at her MINSTREL SHOW,” writes a friend and colleague. And if Jarry’s fate is anything to go by, Krug’s fate doesn’t look too good – he too lay his Ubu on more and more thickly, while what was left of his actual self slept the days away in an alcoholic stupor. Not a recipe for a long life, and he didn’t have one.

So – to return to the original question – is there any way to think of Jessica Krug’s life – up to and including her post-tenure explosion – as purposive? Has she all this time been holding aloft to the world some socially important message about race… or intellectuality… or …?

Don’t bet on it. She passively embodies the same message Emil Cioran actively and explicitly wrote out in books like The Trouble with Being Born, the very same message David Benatar wrote out in Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. A nihilist without the courage of her lack of convictions, Krug has a rough road ahead.

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And look. I know you don’t need reminding about the other side; but… if you do.