Curiosity led me to teh Google, about what she might be up to recently.
She's off Medium and now at a new place called "The Sentinel Intelligence." Her "about" pretty much confirmed old sleuthing. PhD college English prof. To update my pieces above, she got the tenure she was chasing. (She still has her Substack, where I'm blocked, after an interaction that came after I wrote the two pieces above.)
She's also still grifting, getting some non-profit fund founded in 2021 on her side.
The details of the financial relationship aren't mentioned at either site but there you are. She has a 2.0 version of her survivor prepping guide as part of that:
Her current project, Project C, is an illustrated survival manual — a practical guide to homesteading, preparedness, and self-sufficiency for a world where the systems we take for granted may not hold. AKET provides sustained support for Jessica's work because a voice this clear, this honest, and this useful should not have to fight for survival in the economics of independent writing.
OK now.
That confirms my part 2 above, that she's grifting off the prepper world, offering a more librul version of that than you usually find. One of the five coauthors at her Substack explicitly identifies as a prepper.
As for the couple behind that Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimble Fund? His father started a shoe store in Ohio that he eventually sold to Payless, per his obit. (There's NO "about" on the fund's website.)
She also occasionally admits she's wrong, or more likely, doesn't like getting called out; she deleted the "we're running out of food" piece that I linked to in both part 1 and part 2.
She doesn't care a lot about one big geopolitical event. She wrote in early November 2023 to claim that the start of Israel's genocide in Gaza was about oil and gas. Wrong. And, she also apparently is, or was, sympathetic to Zionism:
Let's start with a couple of chilling facts. The war in Gaza has nothing to do with democracy or human rights. It also has nothing to do with Israel's right to defend itself. Until yesterday, that's what I thought.
Ouch. Yet more reason not to like her. (A search finds "Zionism" nowhere on her site, and this is the last piece she wrote about Gaza.) Two of the other five "contributors" there wrote before that, in more detail, but not that much more.
She did get tenure, per this piece, but says "she gave it up." Contra several items? You got paid in summer; it's part of your contract. You just don't get paid EXTRA in summer. And colleges, unlike high schools, have LONG had summer sessions.
The pay? It's about what I would have guessed for someone at either assistant professor or associate professor rank at a second-tier state university in a Southern state. As for the drop in enrollment? Happening at K-12 everywhere, including first-ring suburbs of the Metromess here in Tex-ass. It's a second "baby bust," following with about expected timing after a dropoff from the original Baby Boom hit colleges in the middle 1980s.
That said, this doesn't tell the full story.
She doesn't work the entire summer. She may work parts of it, but not the entire summer. And, "writing books and articles"? After you have tenure and don't have to worry about publish or perish, that's not part of your job anyway. It's something chosen.
Then, she actually BITCHES about students taking independent studies. I guess you long ago stopped being very idealistic as a prof.
She also, at a state university, was in the state employees' pension system. Not a lot of people have on-the-job pensions any more, and of those that do, a lot of them aren't a defined-benefit pension, which I am guessing hers is. She also probably has better health insurance than the typical private-sector employee.
She's right that universities generally aren't librul. They're certainly not leftist.
Oh, as of a year ago, she was still being a Doomer on COVID. And, she claims to be a quasi-clairvoyant "disaster whisperer"; that's where the phrase "sentinel intelligence" for her website comes from.
OK, the other co-contributors at her Substack? One thinks the Democratic Party invented the "Green New Deal." Green Party nowhere mentioned.
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