I have made a fundamental error in judgment

Vestigial optimism about society's values is now the sole purview of suckers

In complaining continually for over two years about the infestation of running by liars, grifters, doping enthusiasts, dodgy cowards, pro-“racial equality” racists, narrative-bending-butthurt vendors, biology-deniers, pseudo-intellectuals, and rank opportunists not otherwise specified across the spectrum of attention-whoring, knock-kneed misfits, I’ve made a mistake, and it’s not being insufficiently colorful, insistent, or contemptuous.

That mistake has been believing that the general vibe among people who consider themselves distance runners or supporters of that endeavor think negatively of people who exhibit the above qualities, especially in distressing permutations, and leverage them to extract money, acclaim, and other resources they haven’t earned.

This belief constitutes a category error, in this case “Most ‘highly online’ casual runners are conscientious people.”

Whenever I’ve pointed out that someone has demonstrably defamed someone or made contradictory statements, or displayed double ethical standards, or fabricated a comeback story for The New York Times, or pushed obviously false ideas about human physiology, or “invented” something women actually invented decades ago, or that someone simply has no earthly fucking idea what they’re sermonizing confidently about and even can’t even assemble bullshit coherently despite advances degrees, I have been operating under the assumption that the reticence of my targets to acknowledge their incredibly wide range of errors and flaws and the pissy defensiveness of their supporters have arisen from a general consensus of “That’s not true” or maybe “That’s up for debate.”

That isn’t the explanation at all. Indeed, such occult optimism isn’t a good look for anyone in 2022, much less for Beck of the Pack. The reality is that people know full well that members of their in-group are lying, and they just don’t care. They just see this as one more way to get ahead, maybe because it’s always easy to point at someone else who is cheating on a far grander scale, screwing more people to get there, and becoming far richer in the process.

This has been coupled to the lingering belief that people who consider themselves liberals, or Democrats, or leftists, or whatever the opposite of Republican voters now like to be called, actually care about things that used to be pillars of leftism, liberalism, and the Democratic Party: Freedom of speech, a sense of humor, a penchant for honest debate, being opposed to needless wars, and a hunger for a tide that lifts all foundering boats.

I knew that Wokish people themselves are moral and ethical lost causes—resentment-powered self-loathers who are more viciously anti-speech, pro-cancellation, and anti-reality than even the most ardent right-wing Christian fundamentalists. Their mission is not to improve anything for the better, but to topple it all for the ugly satisfaction of feeling cheap but extensive power in wrecking something better people than themselves built. They often announce as much, but they don’t need to—it’s evident in all of their stated aims around gender, education, technology, the economy, and citizen life. They’re constitutive scumbags and not a single word I write here is aimed at them.

My error has been failing to appreciate that—be it mainly because of direct Wokish influence, the wholesale corruption of corporate media, rampant censorship across platforms, covid fatigue, or a corrosive admixture of these and related factors—most people, anointed progressives and otherwise, are okay with all these things provided they themselves remain safely unscathed by the chaos. Some people hate Donald Trump so much that anyone who rails against MAGA or the 1/1/2020 “insurrection” or white supremacy automatically gets a pass in many corners for the spewing the most flagrant absurdities about other things. The success among Dems of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project—founded and run by longtime right-wingers, among them a confirmed child molester—is rock-solid proof that a lot of “liberals” will overlook anything if it means feeding their hatred for all things MAGA, real and contrived.

I’ve pointed out that Alison Wade’s core Fast Women followers are harridans motivated by a distaste for the patriarchy and that, despite her dutiful rundown of race results in her weekly newsletter, she is an absolute antagonist of women’s running.

In 2018, two boys began calling themselves girls and running for high-school track teams in the state of Connecticut. No hormone suppression, just a pair of uniform swaps. They won almost everything in sight except when racing each other, and high-school girls in Connecticut were understandably upset as they were being bumped from placing in regional or state championships and advancing to the next level.

If you’re in a mood for bleak humor, you can read how the social arsonists at Outsports deliriously framed the controversy. (Another reminder: If a male insists that he’s female or conversely, that person is the one doing the misgendering, and you should guffaw into the faces of anyone who tells you otherwise.)

Here’s what Wade tweeted about the issue in June 2019.

Wade is uncontestably evil in terms of her intended influence, but she writes clearly enough so that I shouldn’t have to translate this. She’s saying that the girls who complained of being denied recognition thanks to boys being in their races shouldn’t have worried about that because NCAA coaches interested in recruiting them would understand that the results had been skewed by illegitimate participants in their races.

It is not possible to glean anything from this but open contempt for successful girl athletes, a category that obviously never included Alison Wade. It just isn’t. Note that these tweets aren’t even supportive of the “girls” these girls ran against; they’re just potshots at the real girls.

This is a woman who frequently, even thematically, expresses concern for the well-being of high-school girls who run. Yet here she is proudly announcing that these girls need to suck it the fuck up, and should be relishing the opportunity to compete against superior competition. Please do not pretend you can thread any of this cuntic bluster through the eye of a “support female athletes” needle.

Four girls eventually sued the Connecticut Association of Schools, and last April, some mentally or morally challenged judge named Robert N. Chatigny tossed the lawsuit.

And look at how damned stupid Wade is: “Kids don't file lawsuits without being influenced by adults.” “The NCAA is full of good competition…champions embrace better competition.” Despite being aggressively moronic, clearly wrong, unreservedly adversarial, hypocritical on demand, and intent on turning the sport into a worse joke than it already is, Wade has convinced thousands of people that she is sharp, credible, and kind. What she really wants is to prevent the rest of us from seeing anything nice and daring to remark on the pleasing aesthetics.

Not only does Wade’s newsletter have hundreds of paying subscribers, it has also received support from Tracksmith, New Balance, and a slew of other companies with execs whose support can only come from one of two things: They are terrified of not supporting the only large-scale newsletter dedicated to women’s running, even knowing how shitty its creator is, or they stand behind the ideas of its creator. This means those people are also cowards or fools, and while the cowards at least know it, feeling pressure to prove how progressive your company is doesn’t let you off the hook for bad choices.

So, I apologize for not getting that scamming and grifting and anti-white racist con artists and psychotic human-manatee hybrids are all things not merely to be tolerated or ignored, but valued. If someone’s got a superficially successful coaching business going, so what if he hasn’t a clue, deletes old soliloquies, and writes articles that appeal to the non-reader in all of us? He has clients and followers and articles, so it’s good.

And more broadly, because Wokish people who run or write about running are deeply concerned about black lives, most of them express this by also supporting the sending of billions of dollars to a foreign army that includes significant numbers of actual Nazis, rather than reserving it to better the lives of American black people so far.

The image below exemplifies the open circle of grifting that I’m only now admitting enjoys near-complete sanctioning. Latoya Snell is of course an aggressively repulsive “influencer” who enjoys a swath of sponsorships despite having lied about too many things to keep track of, most notably the number of marathons she’s finished. She hasn’t finished one in the three years she’s been sponsored by HOKA and other companies, and she’s almost doubled in size since the first of her thirteen completed marathons.

David and Megan Roche operate a coaching business for runners. At some point after HOKA started handing this chortling clown freebies, they apparently connected her with Megan Roche, a medical doctor, for coaching. Dr. Roche apparently did stress the value of finishing races. I don’t think this arrangement has continued, but anyway, David Roche was recently spotted declaring diet to be completely irrelevant while nevertheless linking to a selection of his own articles in the subject in the improbably incestuous Trail Runner Magazine Website.

I would not feel compelled to comment on this if the show seemed to offer the running public a single beneficial message. Instead, it looks like an intentional inversion of promises and a willful abandonment of quality standards. Megan Roche had to know she was getting a scammer; maybe she terminated the arrangement when Latoya, who claims to be the victim of a host of medical conditions, communicated that weight loss was not on the table and that weight gain was in fact Snell’s goal.

But speculation aside, this is absolutely ridiculous. The message here is: Be your [insert self-glorifying adjective] self, eating yourself stationary as needed; hide from your critics after baiting them exactly like toddlers; lie about your running accomplishments; treat self-inflicted debility as wonderful. Add to this treat male as female, treat “whiteness” as a legitimate medical finding instead of a Wokish bleat, and above all cash the checks before society snaps out of its collective spell and starts figuring out who the real anti-progressives, and haters, and cancellation candidates are.

Snell thinks people who don’t like her fake runnership (she did manage to walk a half-marathon last weekend at 17:30 per mile) should just ignore her, but she and her asshole fans can suck a gnarly fat one, for the simple reason HOKA calls attention to her and others it positions as athletes. And when it propagates her lies and shit-stirring and claims of harassment, it becomes a target of criticism wholly independent of the slovenly goof-offs it attaches to its brand. HOKA sucks, and the New York Road Runners as an organization sucks even worse because at least HOKA at one time put out a desirable product.

But again, the days when this would have been the joke of the century are gone. This is the fitness media that rules the day. So, hopefully for the last time, my bad. The model is not “cheat and hope you can get away with it”; it’s “cheat and hope your scam does better than other people’s.”

With this in mind, I think I should probably be more emphatic in my criticism instead of posting so many tepid and conciliatory appeals to the mistaken. These people are fucking gross, deep down, where it counts the most and can never be fully excised by outside forces. They’re not going to change, but maybe the ones who don’t die of diabetes complications in the next year will disappear somehow.