Events like the Western States 100-Miler may now start kindly telling DEI extortionists to take a long hike
The scam isn't over, but it's shapeshifting to accommodate a pandemic of nausea among consumers and the ongoing massacre(s) overseas
Happy almost-belated The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Day here in the U.S., where it’s lethally cold across vast portions of this oversized country. It saddens me that the tally of already forgotten American people who will wind up freezing to death just over the long weekend will surely rise into the hundreds.
I’m wondering which of these two outcomes MLK would have chosen, given the chance sometime on April 3, 1968:
Be assassinated tomorrow in an operation perpetrated by the U.S. Government, with the U.S. Government later creating a national holiday in your honor.
No assassination, but no posthumously created holiday, either.
God chose the first scenario, because MLK had too genuine a vision about civil rights and too massive a bullhorn to be anything but dangerous to Uncle Sam.
On January 2, I issued what I categorized as the opening round of a two-part complaint about the various broken and sniveling people currently occupying editorial positions at what’s left of American corporate running publications, centering this portion of my gripe on a particularly obnoxious, bozo-bimbotic jogger and freelance sleaze-generator named Emilia Benton.
This post isn’t the continuation of that “series,” as the associated draft in the bowels of my Substack interface alternates between neglect and expansion to an even more unwieldy length. But Benton—whose AI-generated biography would describe her as an avid racist who projects profound levels of ignorance about all of her favorite “writing” topics—is never far from any discussion centering on distance running’s DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) extortionists. (I’ve grown even more weary than my readers of the word “grifters” to describe people like these, and “extortionist” is arguably even more accurate.)
Last July, Benton reposted an extended threat against the management of the annual Western States Endurance Run (WSER) by an extortionist X account named Women’s Running Stories. Serving as an intermediary in this amplification of a childishly unfounded grievance was Alison Wade, who uses the name of her newsletter, Fast Women, to bitch, whine, slime-post, and degrade both herself and whatever there is left to enjoy about professional hyperjogging.
Although everyone with a brain gets the big picture, as do the termite-like goons behind this public extortion attempt, I’ll spell it out explicitly because the many people being targeted by these extortionists are in no position to do so without consequence.
The WSER, which takes place at the end of June, is a 100-mile trail race over the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California and probably the most prestigious ultramarathon (any race longer than 42.195K/26.21875 miles) in the United States. My sense of the WSER's competitive éclat is that were this horrifying display of extended muddy bushwhacking instead a flat 26.2-miler on asphalt, it would exist quality-wise somewhere between the Boston Marathon of the 1970s (when a time of under two hours and fifty minutes was required for entry) and the Olympic Marathon Team Trials.
I decided to consult a past WSER finisher to augment my nonexistent wisdom about the affair, and received the following input:
The WS100 entry list is bound to 369 runners due to permit issues. WS isn’t like Boston, where someone like LieToya can grab an Uber if she wants to quit. It’s a remote, technical course with dangers - altitude, wildlife, poison oak, trip hazards, heat, etc. if some inexperienced person gets injured, then others have to rescue them, possibly endangering themselves. Race resources are then diverted from the other runners. Even an elite can have an accident and require rescue, but it makes sense to allow entry only to those likely to finish. The course limit is 30 hours, and you are a DNF at 30:00:01.
Last year, several Asians ran (from China/Japan/Hong Kong) - do they not count as DEI? Jorge Pacheco was a working class guy (Mexican), who ran when I did and beyond; he was the nicest, most humble guy.
That Riley Brady chick is LGTBQ.
My own half-assed contribution to this analysis accounts for the fact that the people who race road marathons are a far better class of endurance runners overall and that the best of them would mop the floor with the best ultramarathoners in circulation if there were any financial incentive to move up. At least the ones with enough demons yelling “YOU HATE YOU, YOU PILE OF SUCK!” as permanent fixtures in their psychological rear-view mirrors to give them whatever it takes to finish these events, anyway, and plenty of 2:02 marathoners would be unable to do so even with loads of cash on the line.
While ultramarathoning is a far more competitive environment than it was two decades ago, one of the greatest achievements in the sport (including track and field and road running) is Scott Jurek winning this race seven times in row from 1999 to 2005. Those were my main competitive years, and I went long periods running well over 100 miles a week without getting injured. Despite fully grasping that what we call “durability” is at least as much innate as it is trainable—that is, that Jurek was a genetically lucky guy in important ways—I still think that being healthy enough just to show up at WSER seven times in a row is itself at least a minor feat, and that “merely” finishing seven in a row, period, is extremely impressive. No matter what Jurek’s times were, he established a roving dynasty-of-one.
But praising the toughness of ultramarathoners while casually derogating their sport is a long essay for another time. What matters is that the WSER has limited entry spots for what I imagine are self-evident logistical reasons and that it has long made its entry qualifications procedures explicit. What also matters is that very-long-distance running is largely a pursuit of either the affluent or dead-broke people (many literally living in the woods or in recreational vehicles) who have all they need in running, food, water and some form shelter. Mostly the first.
In the United States, certain ethnic minorities have fared poorly as in terms of group socioeconomic thriving. While I agree that longstanding policies of the U.S. Government have fueled this grim—and once again rapidly worsening—reality, this is not what DEI extortionists—many of whom come from affluent background themselves—are targeting. They’re not one bit interested in even looking at the state of lower-income minorities in the U.S., let alone trying to address the root problems. They just want to “correct” any “iniquities” they detect, and any time they find an event or workplace where the number of black or indigenous or wheelchair-bound or L/G or B or Q or T people is below the nationwide percentage (e.g., about 12 percent of Americans, or 1 in 8, are considered black), they charge whoever’s in charge with racism and demand handouts on behalf of minorities who are statistically but not functionally underrepresented.
Whoever wrote that trash for Women’s Running Stories—and you can bet that this club consists almost entirely of wide-bodied non-runners with spray-painted hair who wear disfiguring jewelry and ignore science wholesale—is implicitly accusing the WSER of excluding qualified runners on the basis of these snubbed persons being nonwhite while very explicitly insulting the entire event, claiming that if the ultramarathon community itself were “nice,” then “things would already be different.”
As I pointed out recently, black trail-ultramarathoner Mirna Valerio doesn’t share this perception of racialist antipathy from the upscale crackers and hyper-white kinda-sorta-vegans whose presence has long defined the very-long-distance-running environment. And whoever runs WSER—and call me an ignorant jerk, but I, a bad-vibe magnet, have historically heard nothing but nice things on the ground about the people who host the event—is not responsible for how the demographic profile of the country and the resulting influx of better-off people into costly hobbies.
Also, to the extent it is meaningful to ever say “American black people as a rule think X,” there undeniable elements of both unearned vanity and ritual masochism dominate the white affluent psyche in ways that seem foreign to most black people I’ve met. They’re just not interested in suffering in public or even in semi-private mostly to prove a point, and they find the bevy of white “haves”—especially but not exclusively housewives—perennially making social-media mountains out of their molehill-sized accomplishments to be among the most entertaining all-time online spectacles incidentally tailored for black viewers’ enjoyment.
Yet the extortionists keep getting what they want, because no one has the balls to do the right thing and tell them “no.” And these idiots not only don’t care about actual problems facing ethnic and sexual minorities—their only aim when targeting events they see as “too white” is vandalism and eventual ruination. This could not be more evident in the New York Road Runners installing Latoya Snell, a 300-pound thunder-bustling tumor of artless prevarication, in the first citizen corral of the 2023 New York City Marathon so that she could spend ten hours waddling through the boroughs eating chicken sandwiches and slugging tequila (as a “recovering alcoholic”). Alison Desir, another malevolent nonrunning fool who hauls her gibbering bulk from major marathon to major marathon to extort people by inventing episodes of anti-black racism, even calls herself a “disruptor" and insults white people nonstop.
Yet no one in a position to say “no” to obvious nonsense ever does, even when they and their event participants are openly denigrated wholesale by their leering prospective extortionists. In fact, dumb, complacent white women like Kara Goucher who live in multimillion-dollar houses repeatedly cheer all of this on, because even if they could see the big picture, why should their cozy asses be concerned about consequences to the lowly herd?1
The Instagram account of GU Energy Labs recently boasted that GU is donating two 2024 WSER entries to members of underrepresented communities.
I would love to believe that whoever wrote the post was slyly trying to punk the whole DEI movement with its wording:
GU is proud to offer 2 runners from historically excluded and underrepresented communities (e.g. people who identify as BIPOC, Trans, Adaptive, etc.)
Yeah, the best way to show that you really understand and care about a group of people you really want to uplift is to refer to them in a parenthetical list ending in “etc.” Imagine someone running for local political office promising to help the poor in a stump speech including the promise to “help those with less get back on their feet with their rent, food, energy bills, cigarettes, whatevs.” While you might indeed observe an approximation of such these days, you would at a minimum grasp its hilarious insincerity. What might be unclear is the underlying catalyst: snark or rank cluelessness?
With an eye on the planting of Snell’s stanktastic carcass among real runners in the first corral at last year’s NYCM, I’m wondering about the use of “adaptive” here. It would be perfectly in form for a slavering detachment of chortling DEI apparatchiks to demand that the Western States Endurance Run provide spots for wheelchair-bound people or a transgender, acrophobic, Three Spirit, minor-attracted quadriplegic who wants to try to haul himself 100 miles face-down through the dirt from Olympic Valley to Auburn using only his lips.
Lately I’ve been chronicling the dark social-media escapades of Ziopathic vulture capitalist and multi-billionaire Bill Ackman. If Ackman is to be believed, which no Zionist or vulture capitalist ever should be, he has been on a quest to rid Ivy League campuses of “antisemitism” (e.g., his precious horse-faced daughter having to listen to people at Harvard “University” complain about, oh, a genocide) specifically and its alleged catalyst, DEI initiatives and power-brokers, more generally. I argued that Ackman was merely attempting to hypersemitize the Ivy Leagues because this is what Zionists do at every opportunity—boot everyone out of a system until it’s nothing but themselves and their goy lieutenants.
Glenn Greenwald and the Due Dissidence duo (disillusioned Bernie Sanders-style ex-liberals Russ Dobular and Keaton Weiss) have both made the same case, albeit without resorting to the ironically antisemitic or at least cough-inducing term “hypersemitize.” In short, as Greenwald and the DD guys have described, Ackman and his Ziopathic ilk are not defenders of democracy who want to eliminate the ravages DEI; they just want Jewish people (innocent bystanders in this ongoing ghastliness) to be declared a special-needs group or whatnot so that parasites on the faith like themselves can get in on the ESG/DEI money train.
In even shorter, they want the DEI tent to expand by one member, not collapse.
The Wall Street Journal, an often very illuminating Zionist-run publication, suggested in a January 9 article that DEI—which can be loosely regarded as the biggest part of the “S” (social) and a big part of the “G” (governance) in “ESG”—was disappearing in favor of an overall shift by Larry Fink globo-lord types toward the “E” (environment) in ESG.
I love how the globo-lords rub the scam in people’s faces by holding “climate summits” in places like Dubai, where I suspect the air conditioning keeps running during such confabs and is not powered to any appreciable degree by solar or wind energy.
The day before the WSJ piece, the X account End Wokeness announced that the globo-lords were conceding to the one thing that matters—the hemorrhaging of cash (or “cash”) as a result of consumers broadly and vehemently rejecting a Wokeblown consumer market.
So perhaps now is indeed the time for events like WSER to stop believing they need to remain hostage to DEI actors with obviously bad, self-interested motives and “disruptive” intentions. But again, while Wokism itself might take a downturn, in reality it’s only shapeshifting. Jordan Schachtel at The Dossier pointed out today that Ackman donated $1 million to the DEI-supercharged campaign of hopeless Democratic presidential hopeful Dean Phillips.
Schachtel’s exposé, however, omits at least one important detail about Phillips, and it isn’t difficult for the astute to guess what that detail is.
Moving back from literal (and multiplying! Whee!) wars to the culture wars, I hadn’t thought about Wade in a while before today, and the picture of her that distills in my mind upon seeing her name is rightfully that of a pure squawking caricature of someone who actually gives a rip-stinky. Wade’s signature achievement so far has been complaining vociferously about the abuse of female runners by male coaches, only to treat the 1,500-meter performances last summer by Addy Wiley—whose entire career had been spent running for a coach known to dispense performance-enhancing drugs as well as become sexually involved with schoolgirl athletes—as not just legitimate but a “nothing to see here” scenario given that Wiley assured people she was getting drug-tested in private.
While Wade is a livid joke, she’s not that much more clownish in her hypocrisies or her anti-white, anti-“patriarchy,” anti-successful-woman than anyone else still bothering to remark on a sport infested with rawgabbits and blatherskites and therefore no longer broadly worthy of fan interest, especially in these U.S. where even most of the doped-up pros are laggards on the world scene anyway.
I wonder how many people who used to follow pro distance running but no longer care would, like me, specifically cite Goucher’s trashy antics across multiple topics as a major reason for regarding the sport as a rusty, ten-gallon spittoon rapidly overflowing with a brew of PEDs and (somehow) used transgender-only tampons, vibrating buttplugs for the morbidly obese, and miniature fleshlights.