Lying attention-hounds who spread hateful messages and dodge their critics should expect occasional bouts of fatigue, experts say
Perhaps it's time to address these unpitiable losers on their own terms
In a pair of posts nearly two years ago, I marveled over the ability of women in the running media to complain that their work-from-home jobs—positions they had been handed despite no talent or qualifications and were bad at performing—were plumb wearing them out.
Of course, they were taking this cue from the worst of the bad “reporters” in the general corporate media, including the self-parodic Cruella de Vil wannabe Taylor Lorenz.
Since then, despite growing public awareness of the insincerity of “social justice” messaging and attendant public disdain for the messengers, the same handful of people have enjoyed continued prominence, and in most cases burgeoning profiles, within the soy-and-kale-rich joggersphere.
The more widely the impact of transgenderism has spread across girls’ and women’s sports, the more people have started to realize they were tricked into accepting a demonic ruse by manically persistent social arsonists. Nevertheless, the muddle-minded sloganeers and squawking eggplants peppering the industry haven’t suffered a professional nick.
(If it seems like I’m picking only on women with these posts, it’s because few men write regularly for running outlets and the ones who do either identify as women, are edge cases like David Roche, or don’t write, tweet, or podcast in the same aggressively asinine ways.)
Perhaps owing to their uninterrupted in-universe platforming, however, running’s primer whining class is only beginning to notice that they’re getting a lot more pushback now, mainly from people who were already annoyed but previously kept silent.
As nothing has changed outwardly about any of the same actors since their emergence from various grievance-incubators, it’s fair to assume no illumination has crept into their enfeebled and securely locked minds—especially since they immediately block anyone who shines light on the pathology of their pandering.
But oh, it’s all just so…draining!
In a rational world, no one would know who Alison Desir even is. Yet despite her new book being universally celebrated by the deviants who now publish and edit “official” as well as most independent running-related content, she’s saaaaaad.
She’s also bad at economics. Let’s say she was right and the running industry was “rewarding and elevating whiteness,” whatever that might mean in English. The industry would not do such a thing “at all costs”; it would only do it if the benefits exceeded the costs. Which is exactly why non-runners and incoherently babbling race-baiters currently enjoy unlimited professional momentum rather than unbridled ridicule.
And Emilia Benton is just a smarmy and decrepit fool, her only skill—like Desir’s—being the automatic and seamless externalization of blame for inner turmoil generated by her own hostile acts. Benton just wrapped up a failed attempt to rekindle the pogrom against Gary Cantrell, and she’s acting like a victim because she was shamed for it. And you can tell she believes she's one.
How is so much of this unwanted static zipping and zapping around society? Well, a few determined microdonors help.
Black Lives Matter is no more than a money-laundering operation for the Democratic National Committee. So is Ukraine. The DNC has a lot of them. And if and when Republicans get another turn, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, the Gates Foundation, and Pfizer will be there to orchestrate the CBDC-based show, ensuring that it proceeds unmolested.
Also, I keep meaning to mention that the 2020 pogrom against Cantrell led by a smattering of dingbats ultimately revolved not around Cantrell being a racist—even these clowns couldn’t credibly pin that on him—but around his refusal to allow political chatter on his Facebook page. In other words, he was moderating his own social-media accounts. And Cantrell’s words about BLM in that Outside Online smear piece, while already on-point at the time, look positively prescient now.
Need I even point out that the same people are the absolute first to block anyone who disagrees with their complaining at all?
This crowd wants to be able to litter other people’s timelines and comment fields with their harried and bigoted blathering, and become irate enough when denied this quasi-orgasmic privilege to try to cancel someone’s career over a bucket of fabricated wrongs and indiscretions. Yet the notion that they should be similarly or even at all accommodating to “outsiders” isn’t even in play.
While this is brazenly hypocritical, it’s not as contradictory is it seems. Once you accept that these zealots firmly believe that they hold the absolute moral high ground on every issue, then you can see why the zealots think they should be allowed to control conversations about these issues literally everywhere. If we* are wrong and they are right, then bad speech is bad speech, period, and it needs to be eliminated and replaced by coded flags, hollow homilies, and absurd demands wherever it appears.
This tendency doesn’t irritate me on principle; if my brain were the size of a walnut and its only thought was EVERYONE IS OUT TO GET ME, I would block someone like me on Twitter too, because I would be unable to comprehend that within the salty deliveries of non-zealots might lie something worth paying attention to; something that might force, for the better, a modification of a corrupt but staunchly guarded principle.
And that’s the most difficult thing. These people are utterly misinformed about everything important happening in the world in 2023. Not only do they guzzle from the twin firehoses of propaganda aimed by CNN and MSNBC at a large but rapidly dwindling number of Americans, but they also obey those same networks’ missives to treat all dissent as MAGA-driven white-supremacism and anti-science callousness.
During the George W. Bush administration, I was against for-profit foreign wars, for same-sex marriage, for the legality of abortion and marijuana, against the mammoth expansion of the surveillance state, in favor of revamping the healthcare system to scrap private equity and phase out HMOs, against the institutionalization of bad science, and against censorship. (I was never against private gun ownership.)
Some people from those days think I have slid to the right. In addition to passing twice on the chance to vote for Donald Trump, I am against for-profit foreign wars, for same-sex marriage, for the legality of abortion and marijuana, against the mammoth expansion of the surveillance state, in favor of revamping the healthcare system to scrap private equity and phase out HMOs, against the institutionalization of bad science, and against censorship. (And I couldn't even dream about being against private gun ownership in 2023.)
That’s how much I have changed, with the caveat that I am now loath to advocate for policies that make it easier for people to visit anyone with a prescription pad.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been replaced by an even more nihilistic, greed-driven, and intrusive one in Ukraine. And the big push for teaching creationism in public schools has been replaced by a dizzying array of bad science surrounding microbiology and infectious disease, basic human sex, and the underpinnings of the smoke-and-mirrors global economy.
The only other difference is that Democrats are the ones now fully leading the charge. In all these areas.
Many of my friends who still consider themselves Democrats or merely liberals have been yanked unawares across the political spectrum into positions once emblematic of the far political right—turned into de facto neocons and defenders of incredibly porous, easily refuted ideas, although many of them refuse to even look at the evidence against these ideas. They act exactly like the peevish creationists I argued with on blogs fifteen years ago.
And every one of them does it because they watch CNN or MSNBC or read online propaganda in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vox, the Daily Beast, Bloomberg, et cetera.
Those same people are poised right now to “explain” to me how the war in Ukraine is different, or that I’m wrong about covid. So far, I haven’t been wrong about one thing when it comes to covid, and a year in advance was railing against “facts” later proven to be not just falsehoods but lies. Maybe the sources I rely on aren’t so shaky after all. Like The Grayzone.
It’s all very simple. The Democratic Party is not what is was fifteen years ago, though even then it was merrily marching toward broad systemic corporate capture. And that was before Citizens United v. FEC was decided in favor of untrammeled cross-party oligarchy. The Democratic Party of 2023 is like the Republican Party was then, only worse in every respect. No? Then why are some of the very same Republicans, like Dick Cheney and Bush himself, now getting warm embraces from Biden, Nancy Pelosi, et al, along with a relentless parade of other established coalitional warmongers?
It’s not unheard of for people to ditch a romantic companion who turns out to be sociopathic and abusive and fulfills none of his initial promises. How hard is it to just “break up with” a sociopathic and abusive American political party? That whole game is dead anyway; presidential elections from now on will be irrelevant, because whoever is chosen for installation in the White House next will either be a Davos puppet from day one or be quickly fitted with strings.
I can tell the Democrats (and Republicans) to suck it, as neither party opposes the march toward a worldwide totalitarian regime, in this case a pedophilia-emblazoned klepto-kakistocracy. But I can’t change being male or white. Yet these traits, especially in combination, have been used by the zealots to justify shutting down discussions and bleats of misandrist derision since the onset of BLM-related madness in the spring of 2020.
This is exactly why I don’t hesitate to point out that the people are doing this lean very strongly sexually unattractive and unintelligent, also largely fixed traits. And this characterization, though necessarily unkind, is not only morally equitable but explanatory in a way “that white guy is white and male” is not. You will just not find sham-social-justice advocates like these—block-happy harpies and stooges unashamed of their limitless hypocrisies and moral shortcomings—who look like they just left a Victoria’s Secret photo shoot; none will be on their way to co-lead an astrophysics seminar, either.
The people who lap up this nonsense, regardless of color or gender, are upset at being left out. They might be 2’s who would be OK with being 5’s, but a 6 who “needs” to be a 9 suffers from the same malaise thanks to the cold math of the system I just invented. And anyone who uses the term “fatphobic” might as well be advertising either not getting laid or being a media hack on behalf of the nookie-deprived.
Erin Strout will post about once every two or three weeks about breaking a non-running streak. Flip-flopping fabulist and fame-seeker Lindsay Crouse got married and had a baby and disappeared from the NYT, hopefully for good, not that her return could worsen that flaming yet floating shipwreck of state-supplied schemes and confabulations.
The tweets below were posted days after Joseph Biden, Jr. became President of the United States. Is there relief? Even joy? Nope. It’s “Me, me, me, how did I look?” and “I’m still traumatized.”
Why the hell does anyone like this bother getting out of bed, on the days this presumably happens? I’m older than any of these cavorting windbags, in most cases by decades, and I miss maybe five days of running a year. And if I had quit or become too infrequent a runner to merit keeping the identity, I can't imagine still chattering about in nonstop, at least not in a way that suggested I was a source of great wisdom and inspiration.
As I did in that 2021 essay couplet, I will suggest that anyone pushing lies and eager to feel like a victim all day is bound to feel some stress from time to time, and stress can be tiring even if—maybe especially if—you misidentify its source. Perhaps Benton, Desir, and everyone else exhausted by the problems they cause and the fake controversies they moan about should simply delete all of their social-media accounts, not submit any more of their grating chum to Runner’s World or any of the Outside, Inc. offerings, and not host or appear on any podcasts.
And the ones who just sit on their asses every day slime-posting to Twitter might try going running. Even regularly. Even often. But maybe don't brag about running 3:30 marathons in Nike Vaporflys, especially if you bash Nike when it's convenient.
That’s right: If you are one of these people, then shut your mouth. Pretty please? Shut your yap-trap, stop entering your sputtering thoughts and flummoxed proposals into the vast electronic record of the Internet, and disappear from the running scene altogether. Find something else to uglify and demolish.
Your words have a right to exist, but no defensible reason to. You’re an unconvincing imposter and a profoundly toxic interloper. And not much to look at.
You’ve had your moments of unglamorous and unearned glory; now it’s time for the sport to be returned to people who can run, think, engage opposing ideas, and treat others with respect when they have earned it.
Accept the collective “L” and start petitioning Uncle Sam to mass-deliver vibrators straight from the warehouses of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to the entire bawling lot of ye.
Y’all routinely post things like this and worse; ergo, so I can I. Especially since my words are rumored to typically make sense.
You can abuse the rules all you want, but you will not successfully rewrite or otherwise overhaul them. Whoever the grownups are who need to be in charge of that, it's not a bunch of narcissistic and resentment-addled crybabies and grifters.