Malcolm Gladwell's impenetrable intellectual cowardice exemplifies shitlibs' breathtaking arrogance about their own cluelessness, with the Roche cult an archetypal example
Midwits and dolts jamming their fingers in their ears while shouting nonsense may assure them prominence in today's propaganda-only media circus, but this fails when intelligent people are listening
Malcolm Gladwell is a very accomplished distance runner reaching back into the 1980s, a best-selling author, and a committed intellectual fraud. Gladwell’s discomfiting visage boasts one of the most practiced fake smiles and most contrived knowing looks you’ll ever see—even within the sizable crowd of people who make comfortable livings as eminently polite-sounding, properly frazzled-looking flim-flam dispensers and corporatist shills posing as an intellectuals and advocates for greater humanity. As such, Gladwell is one of the few distance runners both fans of that sport and normies are likely to be aware of, meaning that this article should appeal to both readers normally only here for the running-related blather and readers normally only here for the deconstruction of nonsense ejaculated by public peckerheads.
I’ve written about Gladwell’s burgeoning banalities numerous times in recent years. At least as far back as 2019—though I didn’t know this until last year—Gladwell was farting into the bathtub of running ideas with suggestions for youth cross-country running that made no arithmetic or procedural sense.
And like all full-on fraudsters, Gladwell seamlessly changes his mind when the cultural winds shift:
In September 2021, Gladwell, in going to bat for Nike’s stateside reputation, opined that American distance star Shelby Houlihan—who had begun serving a four-year suspension for doping in January of that year but had concealed this from the public until June, not the best look for a supposedly a blameless athlete—would never have taken anything illegal owing to her awareness of drug-testing protocols.
This is no different from saying that a given automobile driver would never grossly exceed the speed limit or drive drunk because of his awareness of posted signs and published DUI statutes. It’s so incredibly prima facie inane that I assumed at the time that Gladwell was merely being lazy with his “free Shelbo!” assignment.
But given how truly daft I now know the man’s mind is under that admirable scouring-pad of a coif, I’ve decided he might have actually believed this. Malcolm Gladwell is refractory to learning things he hasn’t already accepted on his own, because he is convinced that all his conclusions are correct, thereby dispelling any need to consider or even listen to input that by definition could only be static to his ears. He really does think this way.
I don’t have to be able to read Gladwell’s mind to draw such a conclusion. No one does. You just have to let him display precisely who he is, which only happens on the rare occasions when his curiosity about why someone has schooled him (or, in his view, produced the strange appearance of him having been schooled) prevails over his habit of never wading into unknown conversational territory lest his purported credibility across subjects be exposed under duress as no more than a satisfied veneer of oft-regurgitated tropes, topical derailment, and airy, “Ha, good one!”-style deflections.
In January, I wrote about Gladwell and terminally addled but determined-to-dupe New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg getting thumped in a debate about the reliability of the mainstream media by
and Douglas Murray. And when I say Gladwell and Goldberg had their prim and quasi-dignified asses handed to them in a high hat, this is not merely me cheerleading: Taibbi and Murray swung an audience stocked with standard MSNBC viewers and initially against their position (52 percent to 48 percent) by 38 points, with the crowd’s ending assessment 67 percent to 33 percent in favor of the two independent-media representatives.If you watch the 100 or so minutes of that Munk Debate that took place in a Toronto auditorium, it’s easy to understand why the crowd was deeply unimpressed with the New Yorkers. Gladwell has no idea what he’s talking about and is not used to having his stock talking points systematically dismantled, especially not by someone as sharp and ruthless as Murray. Anyone with a properly calibrated sense of shame would have fled the stage long before the debate was over and guzzled at least a quart of straight whiskey before leaving the premises outright. But Gladwell was not pained, only a little confused about his interlocutors’ reluctance to get with the societal program and trust the media’s ceaseless torrent of lies. The smart people are taking care of you, Matt.
This became evident a short time later, when Gladwell decided to consult some genuine debate experts about what had (in smaller minds) gone so wrong for him in Toronto. I found out about this consultation in an article Taibbi posted on Saturday, soon after Taibbi himself first became aware of Gladwell’s field trip.
Taibbi’s Saturday article both recaps the Munk Debate and reviews the pertinent details emerging from Gladwell’s discussion with the debate experts back in April, which you can watch yourself below. But this is both classic Taibbi and a perfect summary of the exchange: “Listening to it is equal parts entertaining and excruciating, like watching a man in a Mayor McCheese costume hire comedians to try, and fail, to explain why people laugh when he walks down the street.”
Meanwhile, Gladwell has remained popular this year among running’s primary blowhards and grifters. He partnered with another unaccountably pompous raving idiot, Lauren Fleshman, at an event in March and another in April to help bemoan the “crisis” in girls’ sports. In September, he was a guest on the podcast of climate-griftress Tina Muir.
Gladwell is a thoroughly self-degraded fellow and seems determined, owing to his own hard-wired obliviousness, to disintegrate into an even more gruesome specter of self-dealing immoralities. And even if his stream of gigs speaking to Karens and race-baiters and prematurely senile Ivy League students dried up, Gladwell would still find a way to blame the world for causing this by not listening to him closely.
A reader who recently started combing through my older contributions about ethically and cognitively challenged distance-running coach David Roche—another virtue-signaling muddle-minded input-averse runner—discovered the hoarse and entertaining stream of invective from commenters that greeted a March 4, 2022 post (original, live version) on Ultrarunner Podcast merely because the post contained a link to an article I’d written the day before. Eric Schranz’s entire commentary on this article was contained in the text in the link he offered, which was just one among eight links in the post: “Kevin Beck unloads on David Roche’s coaching philosophy and wokism.”
This terse summary is accurate. In my lengthy and immediately unpopular-among-shitlibs piece, I embarked on two distinct tasks. The first was establishing how bad Roche was at what he was trying to do because of not knowing what the hell he was talking about and how evident this was to anyone with real experience in this sport. The second was exploring how unusually ridiculous Roche’s stance on males being allowed to compete “as females” was because of his claims that this stance was rooted in demonstrable scientific principles.
It’s a 4,000-word read, so you may prefer to dubiously trust the author’s own summary of his work. I spent the first five paragraphs complaining that Roche’s writing was so terrible that it was difficult to tell what he was trying to get across while concluding that, based on the rare crimes of editorial clarity Roche committed in this piece, he was unquestionably awash in technical confusion.
This opinion is, I assure you, almost universal outside of David and Megan Roche’s cult. I don’t think any of the cult members are intelligent or curious enough to understand that their coach does nothing but unleash entire produce-farms worth of word salad and that his published advice is just geyser after geyser of scattershot physiobabble.
I then expended thirteen paragraphs on how wayward Roche’s claims about trans-“women” were, and embedded the first tweet in a thirteen-month old Twitter thread containing these claims. I noted that his own wife had just scheduled a podcast about the physiological differences between men and women. Anyone who couldn’t already peg these two as unfettered con-artists after this detail alone probably goes through life practically begging to be scammed.
After that, I returned to Roche’s ramshackle grasp of elementary training principles. I exhausted about twenty paragraphs digging into the factors that make it obvious to anyone with a brain that Roche doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Unlike the opening section devoted to essentially the same chore, this part is reasonably dense in what I hope might be applicable training knowledge. After all, when someone is wrong about practically everything, reviewing their work offers an opportunity to easily be right about those same things or at least re-organize the wrong person’s thoughts in a way that offers a meaningful starting point for cogent analysis.
I spent the final four paragraphs sucking my own dick—in this context, explaining how much better at writing about running I am than Roche could ever be, not that this requires more than a token, half-detached bout autofellatio—and announced as much so as to make it clear I was boasting about being smarter than a capering fool.
And for the profanity record, there was but one “f”-bomb (which was neither politically motivated nor directed at Roche) and no “s”-bombs in the article. This was unusual for me at the time, though I think I had already begun to tone things down from my freewheeling late-2020-through-late-2021 longshoreman-style heyday. Maybe.
I also observed in the piece that Roche had “done his homework,” and opined that he “doesn't qualify as a rip-off artist,” although I damned this already faint praise by adding that this was because “he clearly believes at least some or most of his own nonsense.” I would amend this only to state that I have suspended all optimism about Roche’s intentions; he is purely a rip-off artist. It’s become evident that any success his athletes have in their races is incidental to Roche’s guidance, and even more evident that he chose to “coach” trail runners because of the ease of disconnecting himself in this medium from his athletes’ poor results while taking credit for the success stories. This is a crude strategy, and the Roches didn’t invent it, but all that’s required for it to work is an intellectually decrepit and morally confused pool of people to fish for. Wokism was therefore an absolute gift, a necessity, to the Roches.
It is worth remarking here that this article that offended so many people was, I believe, the first article I ever devoted to David Roche on Beck of the Pack. I had never had any contact with the man and still haven’t. When I was active on Twitter, I occasionally hectored him, but since he hadn’t blocked me, he must have muted me. He has blocked me on Instagram. He even blocked Lize Brittin, who’s never had a genuinely hostile word for anyone but, you know, hangs out with creeps.
Meanwhile, in the twenty-one-plus months since that first attempt to decipher as well as deride him, I have probably written substantively about Roche at least twenty times. And in that span, he and his wife have done nothing but not merely confirm my first and developing impressions about him but add to the zany legacy of his misstatements on covid, the covid jabs, and all things training; his monumental cowardice; and his ethical shortcomings, including the acceptance of previously banned athletes to the stable of S.W.A.P. degenerates. Run Happy!
Roche, as I must have noted in at least seventeen of those approximately twenty articles since March 3, 2002, deleted his “transwomen are women” tweet soon after my article about it hit the Web and complained on Instagram that someone didn’t like him. Such blatant self-emasculation—not a big project in Roche’s case—is all it takes to get Wokish people ablaze with fury and prepared to unleash triumphantly ignorant retorts…
…Just not at the person who really pissed them off. The Wokish, you understand, are the most spineless people on the planet, with this trait so ingrained in their approach to life that they frame their refusal to entertain substantive if spicy criticism as a form of moral rectitude in itself: “If I don’t click on dirty links, I retain my Wokish purity.” Deep down, however, they know better, which is why they’re so angry.
I will deal with the individual comments under that Ultrarunner Podcast post, which I had previously only scanned before deciding I’d gotten the picture, sometime soon. But take a look at them yourself and try to spot anything resembling substantive engagement with what I wrote. In addition to that search proving fruitless, you’ll note two curiously related things: People wanted to shout at me—a couple of them even address me by name even though I didn’t comment in the thread myself—but those same people didn’t want to click on the link to the article so they could yell at me directly. Some of them clearly did click, because their comments imply that they got through at least some of the article with at least some comprehension of the words therein. But the general vibe was HOW DARE YOU POST THAT! coupled to a categorical refusal to either state clear, defensible reasons for this stance or confront the source directly.
This is how these enfeebled cultists operate: Like children. Anything they don’t like—even and especially when they are too dumb to understand what it means beyond offensive adjectives—they want gone. They don’t want to talk about it or get into details; they just want their discomfort to disappear, even at the cost of looking both gelatinous and cretinous to the rest of the adult world. Eric Schranz isn’t supposed to even link to a scourge like me, even with only a noncommittal comment, if he wants to be liked by these hysterical anti-science crybabies.
How is this not the behavior of people emotionally stalled in the seventh grade? Nevertheless, the emergence and persistence of the Roches and “their” walled-off weirdos seem to have ultimately hectored Schranz into a nearly undetectable level of website output. And Gladwell is merely a version of this type of I’M RIGHT, ALWAYS shitlib who, owing to a far higher profile, has to occasionally subject himself to widespread ridicule while simply pretending just like the Roches do that the people he’s staunchly ignoring aren’t making fools of him; in-group defenders and echo-chamber accolades are always a sufficient salve to heal the “attacks” from “right-wingers”—provided the money keeps flowing in, too. In that case, a reinvention of the public-intellectual self is required, because these frauds are incapable of fundamental personal change.
I did get two adversarial direct comments to that first “Roche is a tool” article, perhaps from Ultrarunner Podcast regulars, perhaps from others. Both were advice to shut up, no more than that. One consisted entirely of “Wow, way way way too much time on David. Sounds like you need some critiquing of your own!” I invited this anonymous person to elaborate, but he or she declined. The other comment exhorted me in fragmented English to quit writing to go outside for a run. I invited this anonymous person to elaborate, but he or she also declined.
Please do sift through all the comments and tell me if you see anything I missed. And don’t be discouraged by the opening salvo in the topmost comment—not everyone who chimed in is this jubilantly retarded:
David Roche is one of the finest people in the trail running and coaching community. I do not know him personally but have listened to his podcasts and appreciated his training articles for a long time This is one of the most dickish attack’s I’ve ever seen, because obviously someone is a thinly disguised alt-right troll with obvious pre-conceived notions, and an abrasiveness that belies the fact that the writer has probably never known the touch of a woman.
Regarding that last part: Really? What if all I ever wanted instead is the touch of a man, maybe even one disguised as a woman? This guy’s presumption that I’m straight seems closed-minded coming from a supposed progressive.