Sing it.
Four million dollars, Laurie Glimcher
Plus corporate boards O greedy Glimcher
Rich and important, research dimmer,
No time at all for thoughts to simmer
Shine little fraud-worm, glimmer glimmer
While Harvard’s rep gets dimmer, dimmer
Look out! The software’s gotcha, folks.
It’s coming for your hoax.
********************************
[T]hese didn’t appear in a bunch of open-access journals that are run out of someone’s van in Samarkand – no, these are scattered across Science, Nature, Cell, and other marquee sites. And I can’t overemphasize just how many examples there are – [the whistle blowing] post just goes on and on, with cut-and-paste jobs in blots, graphs, photomicrographs, you name it.
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.
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).
Another powerful rabbi shares not only his gift for science, but his love of Donald Trump.
[Shmuel] Kamenetsky said it doesn’t matter how the president talks. “That’s because he’s a gvir, a wealthy man,” he said. “Wealthy, powerful people have a way of speaking and acting that is not refined. That’s not a reason not to vote for him.”
Humor means we’re getting over it. Good.
I don’t think the now-notorious UVa gang rape story, as told to Rolling Stone magazine, is a hoax.
But, as I commented to one of my readers who thinks it might be, this blog has covered false rape claims before, and if this turns out to be one, it will certainly do that again.
And of course this blog will cover emergent skeptical takes on the Rolling Stone account. Like this one.
With its way-believable plot (six year old girl escapes Holocaust; is raised by wolves; shoots and kills a Nazi along the way), who could have guessed Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years would turn out to be made up? I mean okay – if she’d said she was three years old, raised by aliens, and blew up a Nazi arsenal, maybe we would have become suspicious…
… has been eyeing with interest the story of a University of Connecticut student robbed at gunpoint inside a campus building.
It’s really rare for people with guns to rob people inside of academic buildings. UD‘s been blogging about universities for years, and she can’t recall a case.
The student has now admitted making it up.
… a con coquotte… a fraud frotteur… This blog’s HOAX category is on fire with scammed credentials, faked memoirs, and plagiarized everything.
And UD always loves to put another log on the fire.
Conwise, though, it’s been a pretty cold winter. There’s been no really big bilking — the sort of thing that involves not merely made up shit in a book, but an author’s fake self-presentation, etc.
So UD‘s pleased that the Hiroshima thing has happened.
The Hiroshima thing departs in one way from one of UD‘s oft-stated rules about hoaxes:
In the matter of the hoax, Europe is holocausts, America addictions.
In other words, Europeans make up shit about how when they were seven the Nazis chased them around Bulgaria, while Americans make up shit about how cocaine put holes in their nose.
Yet this latest thing, this Hiroshima thing, is American.
The author of the now-pulped Last Train from Hiroshima, about the bomb’s immediate aftermath in Japan, lied about his Ph.D.
Henry Holt & Company, which stopped printing and selling “Last Train” earlier this week because of questions about the accuracy of several sections as well as concerns that some of the people quoted or portrayed in the book did not exist, had also questioned whether Mr. Pellegrino actually held a doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Yes, what about kindly old Father MacQuitty, and kindly old Father Mattias, who presided over the funeral of MacQuitty? Like James Frey‘s heroin-hags, these men of the cloth were too good for this world.
I mean, you know she likes a good hoax if you’ve been reading University Diaries for awhile and following her happy, excited coverage of hoaxes of all kinds, but mainly literary hoaxes.
There’s even a case study featuring UD in the soon-to-be-issued Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders update. Look for her under H, for hoaxophilia.
But while UD revels in the details of hoax writing and in statements from hoaxers like James Frey who’ve been found out, she’s disgusted by the thought of actually spending any time with the douchebags.
Thanks to the miracle of tv, however, we can wile away hours (use while away if you prefer) listening to hoaxers talk about what they’ve done, deny that they’ve done it, embellish their lies, etc., etc.
As I say, I can’t imagine doing this myself, but if you’re into it, you can spend a long evening with one of the most notorious hoaxers of all, Norma Khouri, who wrote a best-selling, searing memoir about her wretched life in Jordan. All of it lies.
Just get hold of Anna Broinowski’s film, Forbidden Lies. An Australian tv critic prepares us:
In addition to dozens of errors about Islam and life in Jordan, Dalia [the main wretched person] did not exist, there was no honour killing as she described, Khouri hadn’t lived in Jordan when she said she did and she hadn’t fled the country when, she says, her life became endangered for daring to tell her friend’s story.
In fact, she’d been living for years in Chicago with her husband and two children. The story was broken by Malcolm Knox, literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, and it won him a Walkley award. But the really big story was yet to be revealed.
Anna Broinowski’s film is an ambitious and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get to the bottom of Khouri’s web of claims and counter-claims. Despite evidence that seems to prove Khouri’s deceit, she manages to worm and squirm and reshape her version of events at every turn so that it’s impossible to pin her down.
Well, what sort of hoaxer would she be if she couldn’t do that?
Here are some recent thoughts about it, from an Esquire writer.
… American readers are more than happy to overlook a little literary fraud. Games of identity have always been a mainstay of literary experimentation, but in the past decade the games have turned sordidly mercenary. The JT LeRoy hoax, in which the author pretended to be a male “lot lizard” and confused a bunch of celebrities into being her friends, could have been a magnificent bit of modernist trickery, like the collected works of Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa was a Portuguese poet of the 1920s and ’30s who published as four different poets, all with different styles, reveling in the majestic possibilities of the unconstrained self. But the LeRoy hoax wasn’t about art in the end; it was about a little money and a little fame. James Frey still finds readers and publishers, even though he’s betrayed both. When Herman Rosenblat’s recent Holocaust memoir, Angel at the Fence, was exposed as a lie, interested parties found someone to publish the book as fiction rather than nonfiction. Our literary era has offered little in the way of insights into the workings of the human soul. It has provided, however, many great lessons in what you can get away with and still get paid.
To explain the recent explosion of cultural and financial frauds, it isn’t enough simply to blame the clever men and women who fool us and take our pride or money. Many Americans want to be fooled. This country is full of people who bought houses they couldn’t afford, who took out credit cards at 22 percent interest in order to pay off the interest on their other credit cards, who believed that the stock market would expand without limit.
… Cynicism is now a legitimate virtue…
Longtime readers know that despite this blog’s endless coverage of the American university’s biggest, deepest, and most tolerated frauds — big-time athletics, and the scholarship of medical school professors — UD does not consider cynicism a legitimate virtue.
A reader sends UD a 1975 Time magazine article which describes the diploma mill the University of Massachusetts education school was in those years.
This is the school from which, during that decade, Bambi Cardenas (background here) earned her Ph.D. The School of Education, noted Time, had “earned a reputation as a diploma mill. In the past three years it granted more than 387 doctoral degrees. Some doctorates were awarded to students who had no undergraduate degrees. The writing in many doctoral theses was barely at high school level.”
No wonder Bambi – president of the University of Texas at Pan American – is now being investigated for having plagiarized her U Mass dissertation in educational leadership.
And… I dunno… Sad, isn’t it? That so many ed schools remain, as the New York Times recently wrote, “little more than diploma mills.”
**********************
The other hoax? The journal Quadrant. Australia.
Keith Windschuttle, its editor, published a science piece that agreed with his global warming skepticism, but he did no checking on its author or its sometimes absurd claims.
… Windschuttle admitted the article was unsolicited and from an unknown author, and that he had failed to even Google the author’s name or check easily validated facts, such as the claim that the paper was first presented at the 19th International Conference on Genome Informatics in Brisbane last year.
A check of the program on the internet by The Australian yesterday revealed there was no such paper or author listed.
Windschuttle said his practices were the same as any editor of a publication and that checking every fact and quotation in an article was impractical.
“I guess I could have done more to investigate the author but the content was something I did investigate because I was interested in some of the sources,” he said.
The latest entry on the hoax blog says: “So neatly did my essay conform with reactionary ideology that Quadrant, it seems, didn’t even check the putative author’s credentials”.
“Nor it seems did they get the piece peer-reviewed. Nor did they check the facts; nor the footnotes. Nor were they alerted by the clues. I’m almost embarrassed for you, Windschuttle. Just look at you above, a pea in a pod alongside those other culture warriors.”
The hoaxer wanted to expose the absurdity of the journal’s views on the environment by writing patently extreme nonsense and watching him print it. A hoax very much like the Sokal hoax.
Monsieur Macho represented himself in his trial for defaming climate change scientist Michael Mann cuz NOT ONLY IS CLIMATE CHANGE A HOAX BUT … BUT… BUT … MICHAEL MANN IS JUST LIKE A PEDERAST!
And not just any pederast – Jerry Sandusky!
Mark Steyn has to pay Mann one million dollars.
SHE/HER/FAKE
As always in identity hoaxes, the question is: what next? Most outed hoaxers have long since rejected their … inconvenient … families; and what with big news coverage, pretty much all employers see them coming.
And, wishing to avoid the embarrassment the American Friends Service Committee currently squirms beneath, employers are going to be discouraging, no matter how garish the poncho and massive the earrings.
Yet further, because most identity hoaxers are certifiable, there is no going back to any non-hoax rough-sketch of whatever they were before they assumed a new identity. Like their precursor, Alfred Jarry, they are at this point so jumbled up about whether they are, well, Ubu, or Roxanne Lebowski, or maybe Zdzisława Brzęczyszczykiewicz, that they are going to be flailing for at least awhile.
The one path open to them at this point is of course the memoir, in which – as in The Three Faces of Eve – they recount the lurid formative experiences that made them what they are today.