The Truth about Jessica Wildfire
Please excuse the misleading headline. I can’t tell you the truth about Jessica Wildfire. I don’t know what it is. I am hoping somebody out there can clue me in.
I encountered her writing for the first time on Medium.com just a few days ago. I was doing a search for something I had written about Ukraine, and one of her bylines popped up.
The article was “Vladimir Putin Has Already Won, but Nobody Wants to Admit It.” It was literate, lively, provocative. To summarize her arguments succinctly, if I may, she suspects we Americans and Europeans are too spoiled to withstand the havoc that opposing Putin’s war on Ukraine is already wreaking on our consumption-crazy way of life. We’ll soon enough be kissing Putin’s despotic ass to get Russian oil and precious minerals.
Interesting notion that. Worth contemplating. But something about Ms. Wildfire didn’t sit right with me, starting with that name. Jessica Wildfire? Sounds like a disc-jockey or punk-rock pseudonym, like Poly Styrene or Johnny Fever.
My internet searches turned up a Jessica Wildfire who is Executive Director of Student-Athlete Development at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. There’s a photo along with her bio. She doesn’t look at all like the Jessica Wildfire image that accompanies the Medium profile of the person credited with the Putin-has-won article.
Ah, that image. That’s another curious wrinkle. Ms. Wildfire’s profile shot reminds me of those of doe-eyed “babes” in slightly suggestive clothing who send you friend requests on Facebook out of the blue. She doesn’t look quite real. Is it photo-shopped? Computer generated?
I did some more internet searching. A blogger by the name of Joseph Mavericks had interviewed her about her success as a writer. Introducing her, he wrote, “Jessica is, in her own words, a slightly disenchanted college professor who blogs while raising a family. She is the editor of Splattered. A top writer in Humor, Relationships, Culture, Mental Health and many more subjects, she loves writing and teaching people how to write. To discover her work, check out her Medium profile.”
I couldn’t find where she went to college, much less where she teaches. The only college-employed Jessica Wildfire I could find, the one at Tennessee, is not her. I couldn’t find Splattered anywhere. I did find Splatter, which is the quarterly newsletter of the Washington Arts Education Association (WAEA). Its masthead lists no Jessica Wildfire. No editor, for that matter.
As for her being a “Top writer” in a variety of subjects, my searches turned up her blog, which cross-references her Medium contributions and Medium profile, and three slight books available for purchase on Amazon.com that have only a dozen or so purchaser reviews or star ratings each. No bylines at Slate, Salon, POLITICO, Reason, not even Huffington Post.And yet she’s credited on her Medium page as having 101K followers.
How is this possible? Somebody out there please explain this seeming disconnect if you can.
It’s entirely possible that Jessica Wildfire is just a nom de plume for some crafty essayist who would prefer to avoid the hassles likely to ensue from articles intended to rile readers up.
Then again, that Putin piece, hinting at his being sort of a three-dimensional chess master playing against checker chumps, recalls Donald Trump’s expressed enthusiasm, neither qualified nor grudging, for the “savvy” and “genius” of Putin’s invasion. It chides and challenges us, kinda sorta, but it also encourages doubt and hopelessness which, as it happens, is one of the goals of Russia’s infamous cyber mafia.
No, I don’t suspect Jessica Wildfire of being a Russian asset. She (or he, or they) writes too cleverly and breezily on too many topics for that to be the case. Yet there are elements of mystery surrounding this writer. Efforts to her can feel like chasing a ghost through a hall of mirrors.
So, what’s the real story behind Jessica Wildfire? I’m just asking. Wouldn’t you like to know?
The author is an open book at https://noelholston.com/
