[W]hat would the Will-to-Power Conservatives do with state control once acquired? The specifics vary from person to person, but the policy agenda can be characterized as right-wing on social issues (blue laws; crackdowns on pornography) and left-wing on economics (industrial subsidies; generous unemployment insurance). At the nexus of the two are proposals to use the tax code to encourage larger families, in which women preferably work less outside the home.
But this description is too modest! The Catholic version of Will to Power Conservatism will feature burning at the stake.
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In anticipation:
Girls, work that muscle! E PLURIBUS UTERI!
Guys … I’m a little concerned about that porn crackdown… It seems at odds with the primary policy goal… But… just try your best.
It’s exactly as Joe Biden said of Donald Trump: “[They have] failed in [their] most basic duty… [They have] failed to protect us.”
By us I primarily mean GW’s students. The GW history department hired and promoted to lifetime employment an openly vicious personality – an anti-white racist notorious for her cruelty to people, and for her encouragement of revolutionary murder, in South Africa and in America.
Perhaps one of the most disgusting things she publicly did was to attempt to justify the brutal murder of 15-year-old Lesandro Guzman-Feliz, who died in a machete attack at the hands of gang members in a case of mistaken identity, by claiming that had he lived he would have ended up being a cop.
Associate Professor Jessica Krug proves George Orwell wrong. In Politics and the English Language, he writes that because no one can say outright “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so,” we get obfuscation and euphemism and all the other rhetorical tricks Orwell famously describes. But Krug is perfectly willing to say outright that it’s good to kill her opponents. Just watch her.
Note that I have not even gotten to Krug’s hoax identity and Duke University Press-sponsored lies. I don’t need to get there. I only need to show that the history department was so ethically inept as to have given lifetime employment to a teacher for whom the classic tenure by-laws phrase moral turpitude barely scratches the surface. GWU has sicced on its students an insidious degenerate, forced them to play along in her sick, destructive games in exchange for a grade, presented her to them as an authority and a role model.
Of course the history department has also made GW a global laughingstock, and forced the institution into expensive, degrading proceedings in order to try (they might not be able to) to dismiss a tenured faculty member. That’s but a trifle here. Nothing compared to putting innocent eighteen year olds in a room with a monster.
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[H]ere we are, three days into an absolutely disastrous and damaging crisis in the historical profession – disastrous for the reputation of the profession, damaging to Black and Latinx scholars who were marginalized and misrepresented and caricatured by a white woman who took opportunities and resources meant to encourage and foster more diverse voices and viewpoints in our scholarly community… [This is] outrageous, malign behavior… [H]er work is not necessary. To anybody. She should never be cited again.
A French government official’s attempts to ban an essay entitled I Hate Men over its “incitement to hatred on the grounds of gender” have backfired, sending sales of the feminist pamphlet skyrocketing.
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Perhaps you don’t share UD’s sense of humor. I haven’t gotten past that first paragraph and I’m already laughing. Let’s read the rest of the article. Here’s hoping for more laughs…
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Yes!
[The 25-year-old author] criticised [the gender equality advisor’s] response to her work. “A state official who has a power crisis facing an 80-page book released in 400 copies, I find that very problematic,” she said.
[The small publisher] did initially set out to print just 400 copies when the essay was published in August, but after [Ralph] Zurmély’s attacks, the first three editions of the book have sold out, with almost 2,500 copies sold just two weeks after its release. A larger publisher, who has yet to be named, is now set to take the title on.
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And, as faithful readers know, UD always finds a way to sing it.
In exchange for fifty seven thousand dollars in annual tuition, George Washington University students receive the following:
- An anti-white racist who is also a much-dispraised teacher and someone who tells lies in her scholarly work. This professor pretends to be black in order to get financial and other benefits designed for actual minorities.
- Not even one professor from her field at GW who will tell you why Jessica Krug’s colleagues tenured her.
- A department desperately seeking someone to teach her hastily-vacated courses.
And again UD asks: Where is Andrew Zimmerman? A high-profile professor/activist in Krug’s department, and someone who sat on panels with Krug and cited her work (and was cited in turn by Krug), Zimmerman is currently the loudest and most powerful dissident voice at GW. Why is he silent? Doesn’t he think students have a right to know the process whereby his department not only hired Krug and, despite reams of alarming reports, kept her in the classroom, but also – incredibly – tenured her?
… 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.
A poem taken from a newspaper or magazine article, using words and sentences from the article.
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THE MOON IS RUSTING AND WE DON'T KNOW WHY
The moon is rusting and we don't know why.
Hematite shows, where latitudes are high.
But how can that be, since the moon is dry?
There are a couple theories as to why.
Solar wind calms in our magnetic sky.
Meteors make the surface liquefy.
Reading the joint statement about Jessica Krug from GW’s history department, and considering everything else UD has read by and about Krug, UD finds herself thinking that this dept should be put into receivership. Something is terribly wrong. A globally embarrassing, deeply destructive thing happened on its watch. This department hired Krug; and though it’s clear from what students have said (see post below this one) that she was insanely irresponsible, they retained her. Then they tenured her.
The department begins by talking about how shocked and appalled they are by this incredible revelation about her, yet really – really – how can it be that these people had no idea?
With her conduct, Dr. Krug has raised questions about the veracity of her own research and teaching.
Well, you not long ago tenured her. Did you read her work? Did you read her student reviews? Did you visit her classroom? Did you try answering those questions?
The discipline of history is concerned with truth telling about the past.
Mes petites. I know most of you don’t believe that hidebound shit about the graspability of truth. I mean, you don’t lie, like Jessica; but you certainly don’t think history truth-tells. History is about perspective and point of view and which power regimes happen to control discourse; and truth is a mobile army of metaphors…
Until you’re cornered; and then big bad Truth with a capital T comes lumbering back into the picture to paddle Krug on her black, brown, Algerian, Tuaregian, Ashkenazi behind and leave you looking on, in the innocent light of moral astonishment.
I don’t think you should be allowed to rest in that posture. I think you should get together, pronto, and begin a punishingly honest reckoning with what you have done – to your students and to the school.
