Charlotte Allen on the farcical racial pantomime of Jessica Krug: 

On September 9th, Krug abruptly resigned from her job as associate professor of African history at George Washington University. Apparently fearing imminent exposure, she confessed that she had passed herself off for more than a decade as being of black-African descent from an ever-shifting range of backgrounds. In graduate school, she told fellow students she was of Algerian origin with a German father. Later, she claimed that she was from the inner-city “hood” with a spiritual kinship to the late rapper Biggie Smalls… Her final self-proclaimed provenance seems to have been the South Bronx slums, where she identified as a “boricua,” or Stateside-dwelling Puerto Rican, whose mother had been a drug addict. She also moonlighted as a salsa-dancing community activist with the tag “Jess La Bombalera” and was videoed at a New York City Council hearing in June 2020 berating the police for violence against “my black and brown siblings.”

In fact, Krug is white, Jewish, and from suburban Kansas City. She attended a Jewish day school growing up and then the preppy Barstow School in Kansas City, where 12th-grade tuition is currently more than $22,000.

Needless to say, things then get a little odd. And rather telling, not least regarding the widespread pretensions and woke neuroticism, and the dismal intellectual standards, of academia’s Clown Quarter.

Seth Barron on the cost of noxious woke pretensions: 

The Department of Education has called Princeton’s bluff on the question of systemic racism, and not a moment too soon. The entire country has been forced to listen, for months now, as a parade of elite institutions—universities, banks, media outlets, a national political party, entire professions—issue laments about systemic American racism and their own complicity in the perpetuation of whiteness. This orgy of recrimination is patently insincere. Does anyone believe these people, or imagine that their contrition is real? Of course not. Qui s’accuse, s’excuse, the French say: who accuses oneself, excuses oneself. The whole rigmarole is a self-justifying performance by whites for an audience of likeminded other whites: beatified souls who have achieved a state of grace. They stand in opposition to bad whites, who refuse to apologise for their privilege.

And Heather Mac Donald on avoided truths: