Emilia Benton—having been ratioed and smacked down—responds with a non-answer and dismisses legitimate questions as "trolling"
It's also clear her followers and ilk are dangerously deluded, as embracing victimhood and blind rage isn't just ugly—it can be lethal
Emilia Benton is part of a mob of ugly people who falsely accused trail-event director Gary Cantrell of racism in 2020 and are still sulking after their resounding failure to effect Cantrell’s cancellation. In fact, on Saturday, The New York Times, of all outlets, offered a glowing profile of Cantrell.1
On Friday afternoon, as Cantrell’s magnum opus, the annual Barkley Marathons, were concluding far away from her grief-stained keyboard, Benton decided it was time to be good and petty. In the course of linking to her own three-year-old hit piece, she referred to a photo of Cantrell with a Confederate flag without providing any evidence there was one. A couple of the handful of people who replied to the tweet asked to see the photo, and as of early this morning Benton hadn’t supplied it.
First, it’s vital to remember that even Martin Fritz Huber admitted in his touchstone smear-job that the whole thing was a distasteful sham:
Chan noticed that his post had been deleted. There was a note from Cantrell: “I am 1000% in agreement, but this is not a political site.”
(Chan) is adamant that he doesn’t think that Cantrell is a racist person.
On Saturday afternoon, Benton responded to critics of her flagrant trolling attempt with (lightly paraphrased) “It’s there because I say it is, and I don’t have to link to it, trolls.” She also feigned surprise at the blowback, as if it came out of nowhere, and falsely implied pro runners shared her story (you can see all of the accounts that have retweeted a given tweet).
Right now, this tweet has a total of 4,105 views and 12 likes, which means that 0.30% of those who saw it upvoted it. That’s an improvement over the tweet that provoked this stupidity, which now has a corresponding stat of 0.21% and falling (154 likes, 72,500 views), although the defiant rejoinder has but a single rewteet and zero replies.
Eric Schranz 👏CLAPPED👏BACK👏 replied to Benton’s Friday derp-tweet with a DEVASTATING TAKEDOWN terse explanation. If you want to see the photo no one at all who matters is upset about, it’s here.
Imagine living in a world where people could simply get away with anything they wanted if all the people they lied about, stole from, or otherwise harassed represented different phenotypical variants of human beings from themselves.
But if pressed in the right setting, Ms. Burtka would admit that she doesn’t believe this arrangement is valid. She could easily be made to acknowledge the reality in Schranz’s words, which is that Benton was looking for attention while causing problems thanks to a combination of feigned and legitimate ignorance about everything important.
Benton did manage to convince a few people to believe less of Cantrell on no evidence. None.
Sage Canaday is a professional runner, sort of. He’s beyond any doubt a world-class virtue-signaler. This exchange was cute.
What a normal person gleans from this is, “People are missing the problem of whiteness/white supremacy in running because this problem is made up, and you just proved it.”
Which these two did. No one, anywhere, has offered any convincing evidence that running is or ever has been an especially racist environment; a few noisy people just started yelling that it was, by astounding coincidence, in the summer of 2020.
If the running media had to make a BLM-themed target of Gary Cantrell, a man whose own chief haters admit he’s not a racist, then running must be pretty damned friendly toward people of color. And I believe this coheres with the experiences of almost every regular runner out there.
One blue-check standby who retweeted Benton’s false accusation is Jen A. Miller, a textbook New York Times-poisoned self-hating white liberal woman who embraces every idiotic corporate-news lie on offer, however desperate. She’s a laid-off writer and a fan of Lindsay Crouse’s uncommonly atrocious work. Her Twitter feed is a parade of oblivious, defiant self-owns.
The image below is a stream of triumphantly pissed-off projection. The red indicates strawman arguments (non-anonymous people far smarter than Miller have contested the “shots are safe and effective” narrative; the shots can be far more dangerous than the media are letting on without a fatality rate approaching unity, 10%, or even 1%).
The blue emphasizes the tribalistic mentality of the Wokish, the orange indicates why Miller will always remain not merely ignorant but confidently so, and the purple demonstrates, along with the rest of her timeline, how she really feels about people who disagree with her.
Miller’s retweets evoke a wistful “So near and yet so far” vibe in this and many other areas.
Maybe the obstacles Miller has created within her own fraying mind to digging for the truth are why she’s a laid-off reporter instead of a working reporter, even in a media environment that ravenously welcomes confused and resentful “liberal” women eager to blame some “they” for their insufficiencies.
As a refresher—and yes, I’m blatantly plagiarizing from Benton with that—covid-19 drifted into the U.S. in early 2020, while the mRNA jabs were made widely available to women of childbearing age a little over a year later.
The graphs below are from OpenVAERS, a project that aggregates the government’s own available data (which can be asserted with undiluted confidence to show a strong false bias toward optimism regarding the jabs’ safety). Note that maternal mortality is a different, but obviously related, consideration from events pertaining to unwanted loss of pregnancy.
It may be worth considering the idea that the immense rise in the incidence of reproductive and other health problems in Western nations worldwide that began in early 2021 just might be related to something unprecedented in the human environment and introduced to that environment in early 2021. Maybe even something man-made, mass-released, not given remotely adequately safety testing, and known to find its way into places in the body where it’s not supposed to be.
And no, the coronavirus variants themselves are not suitable scapegoats.
I mean really, does anyone have a better or even competing explanation for this trend?
As for Reddick, it truly, truly sucks. Although he seemed to have limited range, he was perfect, and perfectly believable, in every role he played. The Wire is flat-out the best television I have ever watched. With the death of Michael K. Williams—whose Omar Little character is television’s most well-loved dark-vigilante hero in September 2021—two of the show’s foundational contributors are now gone.
I will be adamant that the “anti-vaccine movement” The Washington Post and its countless cohorts have been blaring about was never any such thing. The mRNA shots are not vaccines despite provoking an immune response (a lump of dirt can do that).
The “they” people, the trolls who should be deprived of oxygen, the conspiracy loons who should be blocked and ignored because they’re not worth it, have yet to take a serious hit from either the idiots like Miller who unthinkingly retweet every MSM narrative they see or the purposeful deviants generating those narratives. And I don’t think people like her or Benton will ever be budged from their malignant stances. But at some point they will constitute a sharp societal minority, even if they won’t be able to detect this above the din of their own disinformation-charged squawking.
This was a signal to the rest of the media to consider the BLM era, like the pro-trans movement, officially over, as the jobs of government stenographers posing as reporters must now center more heavily on perpetuating pandemic hysteria; lying about the economy, wars, and the job market; and framing the increasingly criminal behavior of financial institutions as an ongoing public-safety measure.