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:

Among the many calamities of the pandemic, one of the under-reported ones is the sweeping obliteration of social dance, particularly in its most popular form: dancing to the selections of a DJ.

Yes, it’s the ever-groovy Guardian. Specifically, a piece by Tim Lawrence, a professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London: 

Party culture exists on a continuum alongside other activities whose communally based, psycho-acoustic underpinnings provide participants with a dose of natural serotonin, among them music concerts, theatrical performances, sporting events, religious gatherings, choirs and walks in the park.

In terms of “party culture,” I’m not entirely convinced that natural serotonin has been doing the heavy lifting.

Party culture’s kaleidoscopic, connecting potential arguably outstrips these other experiences in terms of immersion, duration and joy.

With the apparently kaleidoscopic joy-inducing effects of natural serotonin, it’s a wonder anyone bothered with ecstasy, cocaine, and nitrous oxide balloons. A few sentences later, Dr Lawrence links to this piece, also from the Guardian, on unauthorised lockdown-era raves – a source of “transformational meaning,” Dr Lawrence informs us – and in which we’re told about “saucer-eyed teenage girls,” who are also doubtless invigorated by that natural serotonin.

David Mancuso, pioneering host of the Loft in New York, even believed that communal dancing amounted to humankind’s best attempt to tune into the underlying essence of the universe, which was born out of sound and amounted to one big party of constantly, intensely vibrating atoms.

Cosmologists take heed.

Theodore Dalrymple on pretentious guilt and moral grandiosity: 

But posing and posturing have become a mass phenomenon, the tattooing of our time. Of nothing is this more true than contemporary Woke morality. Whereas not long ago young people of the middle classes sought to express their sympathy for the lower and supposedly oppressed orders by imitating their tattoos and way of dress, imitation being the highest form of empathy available to egotists, they now express the same desire by making Wokeness the touchstone of their morality. They think they are rebelling when, of course, they are conforming. They do not realise that it is more difficult, and more courageous, to contradict a friend than to criticise a society.

Douglas Murray on denunciation hysteria and societal malware: 

It is unsustainable that we are held hostage as a nation by a minority of fanatics, who have fanatical views that we have never voted in… You do not have to pay your tithes to Black Lives Matter; you do not have to pay your Danegeld to the latest LGBT thing. You don’t have to do any of this. […]  

I don’t care if [the media] say [Tony Abbott] is a misogynist. I don’t care if they say he’s a homophobe. I don’t care about any of it now and nor should anybody else. They’ve overused their currency. They’ve hyperinflated – we’re in Zimbabwean situation. And it’s time that we say, ‘We don’t care. Your magic spell-words don’t work anymore.’ […] By the way, it has to be said, if you are Kay Burley and watching this, I’ll play that game back to her. 2009, she throttled a female reporter round the neck until the woman was bruised. Okay? Fine, Kay Burley, want to play that game? ‘No-one should appear in a studio with Kay Burley because she’s someone who throttles women ‘til they’re bruised. And if you appear in a studio with her, you approve of the throttling of women.’

And G. Thomas Burgess on the perverse, dystopian outpourings of Ibram X. Kendi:

“I have a gender studies degree.”

So boasts Ms Kyl Myers in the pages of Time magazine. I’ll give you a moment to experience the inevitable hushed awe.

Having, as she does, a degree in gender studies, Ms Myers is vexed by many things. Such as being asked, kindly, while pregnant, whether she was expecting a boy or a girl. This, we’re informed, is not “a simple question with a simple answer.”

My partner Brent and I had found out our child’s sex chromosomes in the early stages of my pregnancy, and we had seen their genitals during the anatomy scan. But we didn’t think that information told us anything about our kid’s gender. 

No, of course. No clues there. No information at all, in fact. Just random noise.

The only things we really knew about our baby is that they were human, breech and going to be named Zoomer.

Being enlightened and conscientious parents, Ms Myers and her partner Brent have chosen for their child the name Zoomer. Readers may wonder whether that detail tells us something too. Other fruits of this “gender-creative parenting” include pointedly not “assigning” a gender to their child – though experiments of this kind tend to be inflicted on boys – and instead insisting on “the gender-neutral pronouns they, them and their.” A contrivance whose modishness we’ve touched on before. 

We were committed to raising our child without the expectations or restrictions of the gender binary.

And as trans activists keep telling us, continually interacting with people who aren’t sure what gender you are – in this case, thanks to mommy’s niche fixations – is in no way stressful or aggravating, and could never, ever result in demoralisation and psychological problems. And pretending that your son or daughter isn’t actually a boy or girl will, somehow, in ways never quite specified, “eliminate gender-based oppression, disparities and violence.” It’s “preventative care,” we’re told.

From the archives, Amy Wax on the contortions of “affirmative action”: 

On the one hand, all good people are for affirmative action. That’s a sign of virtue. On the other hand, to talk about the predicate, the reason that affirmative action is needed, which is that there are these gaps in educational achievement and proficiency, is verboten. So, we kind of twisted ourselves in knots that we have to embrace something but deny the factual underpinning of it.

And Heather Mac Donald on pantomime claims of “systemic racism” and their corrosive and farcical effects:

It has been taboo to hint at the reason that the millions of dollars already expended on campus diversity initiatives have yet to engineer exact proportional representation of blacks in the student body and on the faculty: the vast academic skills gap. Now this truth will be even more professionally lethal to anyone who dares mention it. The highest reaches of the university have declared as a matter of self-evident fact that systemic racism is the defining feature of American society, one that explains every inequality. Fighting against that racism has now officially become colleges’ reason for being…

The dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, pronounced himself “absolutely dedicated” to turning the engineering school into an “anti-racist organisation.” Doing so “crucially includes unconscious bias work we must do within ourselves,” he added. How that work will interact with research on nanoparticles and viral transmission, say, was unspecified… The chairman of the earth and planetary sciences department at the University of California at Davis announced an “anti-racist reading group” for faculty and students. The group’s purpose was to confront the “structural racism that pervades” the field of geology. Such structural racism in the study of igneous rocks is apparently so obvious that the chair did not bother to elaborate further. Failure to attend the reading group would undoubtedly count against any faculty member during his promotional review, as a sign of insufficient enthusiasm for “diversity.”

Worth reading in full. As Ms Mac Donald notes, with the question of disparities in academic performance effectively short-circuited, and “systemic” but unspecified “racism” the go-to explanation, the all-but mandatory conclusion, any hope of addressing underlying behaviour and suboptimal choices recedes even further. Instead, we can look forward to more unearned resentment and grandiose entitlement, quotas for the unqualified, and more pretentious self-incrimination. In the name of “social justice.”

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.