[guest post by JVW]

In these woeful times we’ve seen a troubling trend where ordinary citizens — those who make our country such a bastion of freedom and toleration — are oftentimes shamed into silence because their views might not be entirely tolerated in a close-minded society in which compliance with community mores is aggressively enforced. Yet we can still rejoice that there are those among us who refuse to be bullied by the mob into meekly going with the flow. One such man is Ander Christensen of Lincoln, Nebraska, and he won’t stand idly by as popular barfood is misnamed:

I can’t tell you what I love more about this brave whistleblower, this Thomas Paine for our times: maybe it’s the hamburger tie, maybe it’s the ironclad logic with which he makes his argument, and maybe — just maybe — it’s because he is absolutely right in his assessment.

Naturally, Mr. Christensen’s crusade has attracted a great deal of attention among intellectual circles and the barfly community. The sports-beer-and-wings behemoth, Buffalo Wild Wings, while disagreeing with Mr. Christensen’s premise, is addressing the situation in that time-honored capitalist manner: by trying to buy him off. But our hero is an all-American patriot and he won’t be lured by filthy payola (or tasty Mango-Habanero wings) from the greedy corporatists of Big Wing:

Thank you for the wings. And I'm a sucker for a good charity. But know this fight isn't over yet.

— Ander Christensen (@Handsome121Duck) September 3, 2020

Our hero campaigns on, having earned a powerful and influential ally in the Nebraska Barbecue Council, who is taking the battle outside the borders of the Cornhusker State and urging their neighbors in Iowa to take up the cause against the criminal mislabeling of chicken parts. The franchise Wingstop has asked Twitter whether they should change the name of what is misleadingly called “boneless wings” to the more accurate “saucy nugs,” and thus far a majority of respondents has weighed in on behalf of honest disclosure.

The fight is far from over, but I am glad it has been set in motion. Not all heroes wear capes; sometimes they don a hamburger tie.

– JVW

[guest post by Dana]

It makes sense that the reason she has “come out” about this is that she was found out by a colleague:

Despite publicly living as a black woman for years, George Washington University associate professor Jessica Krug admitted Thursday that she is actually a “culture leech” — who is white.

“For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,” Krug, 38, writes in a brief but life-shattering Medium post titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.”

The self-proclaimed “historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora” goes on to detail a lengthy trail of public deception.

“To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness,” she says. “I have built my life on a violent anti-Black lie, and I have lied in every breath I have taken.”

But of course she has: Krug has also written a book which “interrogates the political practices and discourses through which those who fled from slavery and the violence of the slave trade in Angola forged coherent political communities outside of, and in opposition to, state politics”.

And here’s what’s really um, quirky about her thinking:

She has not lived a double life, she claims, as she has no other life beyond the lie she has been living.

“There is no parallel form of my adulthood connected to white people or a white community or an alternative white identity. I have lived this lie, fully, completely, with no exit plan or strategy,” Krug writes. “I have no identity outside of this. I have never developed one.”

Krug points to childhood trauma as being the reason for the duplicity. She also says that she is unsure how to move forward from this point on:

“I don’t know how to fix this,” she goes on. “I don’t know what to build from here. I don’t know that it is possible to repair a single relationship I have with another person, living or dead, and I don’t believe I deserve the grace or kindness to do so.”

Perhaps she should contact Rachel Dolezal.

As a result of Krug’s Medium post, the university has opened an investigation into the professor. You can read more about Krug here.

–Dana

It’s a recurring pattern, and it always happens in three steps:

1. Donald Trump says something indefensible
2. Donald Trump’s flacks say he didn’t mean the bad thing, he meant something else
3. Donald Trump reaffirms that no, he really meant the bad thing

Two nights ago I wrote about Step 1 in Trump’s bid to have his followers vote twice:

“So let them send it in and let them go vote, and if their system’s as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote. If it isn’t tabulated, they’ll be able to vote,” Trump said when asked whether he has confidence in the mail-in system in North Carolina, a battleground state.

“If it’s as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote. If it isn’t tabulated, they’ll be able to vote. So that’s the way it is. And that’s what they should do,” he said.

Then came Step 2: people pointed to his flack’s explanation that he is really just saying you go to the voting place and make sure they have counted your mail-in vote by election day. Which is a stupid explanation, because states are not going to require that mail-in votes be counted by election day, so the implication that there’s something wrong if they haven’t is totally false. But hey, lying flacks gotta work with the material they have, and they know chump suckers will lap it up no matter how illogical it is.

Welcome to Step 3:

This is not how it works — and (as usual) it directly contradicts the spinning by his flacks over the past 24 hours claiming he didn't say what everybody knows he said. https://t.co/OHZnXG1NEi

— Patterico (@Patterico) September 4, 2020

Sign your mail-in ballot. OK? You sign it and send it in and then you have to follow it. And if on Election Day or early voting, that is not tabulated and counted, you go vote. And then if for some reason after that, it shouldn’t take that long, it comes in, they’re not going to be able to tabulate it because you will have voted. But you have to make sure your vote counts. Because the only way they’re gonna beat us is by doing that kind of stuff. I’m trying to be nice.

He’s telling people to vote by mail and then to vote again in person, which is cheating. Yes, hopefully the state catches it, but because Trump is telling his people to do this, it will happen on a massive scale, which of course will complicate the counting.

He is advocating that people commit felony voter fraud, and a bunch of people who have spent years wailing about voter fraud will defend him. Which makes those people frauds too.