Michael Joyner's fight with Mayo Clinic authoritarians highlights why the only proper response to tone-policing is tone-deafness
Those of us already low to the ground need to keep yammering, as Joyner's case illustrates that even the most diplomatic dissidents with anything to lose eventually become deplatforming targets
Michael Joyner, M.D. is an anesthesiologist by medical training, a former 2:25 marathoner, and a performance-oriented human physiologist by regular, longtime inclination. When I was active on Twitter, I followed Joyner because in this medium, he traveled in the same genial discursive orbit as Alex Hutchinson, Ross Tucker, Trent Stellingwerff, and other ex-phys types who not only have earned their reputations as reliable analysts and idea-mongers, but also tend to rise above the spasmodic tenor of the Twitter fray and exhibit respectful comportment.
The output of Joyner and his ilk suggest that these men are interested in nothing more than distinguishing what’s likely to be true from what probably isn’t. This is how trained scientists have traditionally enjoyed behaving. Joyner was the 2023 recipient of the Honor Award bestowed by the American College of Sports Medicine. He also enjoyed consistently and comprehensively positive reviews from his employer of 36 years, the Mayo Clinic, in 2020, 2021, and 2022, with Joyner’s reviewers commenting that he is “a most respected and influential clinician” who “elevated colleagues across Mayo.”
But these accolades, and the fact that Joyner is among the Mayo Clinic’s most prominent physician faces, didn’t stop the demoralized health-standards colossus from suspending Joyner for one week without pay in March for the crime of repeatedly contradicting state-mandated narratives about covid and transgenderism.
This punishment came after Joyner had been warned late last year not to publicly contradict Fauci, Inc. and Big Perv (a conglomerate of dozens of well-concealed derivatives of Epstein-BlackRock Holdings, Ltd.) in the course of exercising his First Amendment rights. Specifically, after Joyner offered the wild idea to The New York Times in May 2022 that human puberty entails marked and consequential divergences between boys and girls in the area of endocrine physiology, the clinic advised Joyner in advance of a lecture ominously titled "Sex differences and human performance" that the professor of medicine should “refrain from making similar, ‘unprofessional statements.”
The last straw for the members of the Mayo lynch-mob, for now, was Joyner appearing on CNN in January and complaining that “‘bureaucratic rope-a-dope’ at the [National Institutes of Health] had hindered efforts to revise COVID-19 protocol to recommend convalescent plasma treatment for immune-compromised patients.”
All of Joyner’s dealings with his employer came to light when Joyner filed suit against the Mayo Clinic on November 14. The lawsuit alleges that his employers violated his free speech rights. If even half of the allegations in the complaint are true, the Mayo Clinic should be in a world of legal hurt. But we live in a world where the rules have been determined primarily by wealthy people like Larry Fink who should be placed in a fully inspected and voidworthy Space X contraption and launched toward Altair with just enough food, water, child pornography, and wadded-up sweat socks on board to last the hundred or so of them one hundred grunting and fitful days, provided the rations are allocated fairly and inclusively among this array of elite, gigawatt-class social-chaos-generators.
In its March 5 disciplinary letter advising Joyner of his suspension, the clinic claimed that Joyner’s straightforward and uncontestably accurate May 2022 comments to The New York Times about endocrine physiology “were problematic in the media and the LGBTQI+ community at Mayo Clinic.” (All of the unspecified groups indicated by a helpful plus-sign must be mighty important.)
First of all, today’s wave of psychologically and ethically deranged transgender activists, including those with administrative heft at the Mayo Clinic, are themselves dismally problematic to reality. They’re psycho-cognitively derailed, vicious, and avaricious individuals who should be in charge of nothing because they respect nothing—most of all human life and flourishing itself—and therefore stop at nothing in their efforts to help globalists turn the United States into a permanently face-masked and censored intellectual and social sewer.
The photo below appears at a glance to depict three different people—a pleasant-looking older gentleman flanked by what might be the members of a female-male fraternal-twin set.
The fact that the “twins” are the same female person—one photo was taken before the voluntary flooding of her system with testosterone, the other snapped years afterward—should be enough to convince anyone that, in their native hormonal states, males and females are quite different and that the central, required modulator of this difference is a chemical compound produced by the body in high amounts by and only by the Leydig cells of the testes and afforded the chemical formula C19H28O2. (The sole man in the photo is Michael Joyner.)
Second, this illustrates the damaging and well-documented inanity of lumping in gay people with transgender people or any of the other groups signified by any of the bazillion identity labels starting with “LGBTQ.” The attitudes of gay women—the ones who even care about sports at all—are surely best encapsulated by Martina Navratilova, a retired tennis legend who has recklessly chosen the side of sanity when it comes to off-kilter males poisoning female-only sports.
(Ask any lesbian collegiate softball pitcher (it’s a thing) what she’d do if some benchwarmer from the previous year’s baseball squad at the same university suited up for the softball team. Ideally, she’d say that she would aim right for what there was of his fallen nuts with a fastball in practice sessions (perhaps even an overhanded toss) in order to send the dude the proper message.)
In recent years, Navratilova has had to field statements like these from ostentatiously bespectacled longtime femtard Kara Swisher:
I don’t quite understand your perspective, because you’ve been ahead of the curve on gender equity, so I’d love you to explain your perspective here because there are very upset people, disappointed by you because you’ve been so behind inclusion.
Look at this posturing goon-nerd pretend to not get it and pressure Navratilova to recant and get with the program, its obvious absurdities notwithstanding. Anyone who still pretends that Wokism is not a flagrant religious cult—one engulfing the country like blue-haired, body-positive amoeba and expunging any dissenters with as much prejudice and as many material consequences as possible—is a dunce-yawping fool.
I don’t think too many of those people actually remain other than the cult members themselves, though. Most people have reached a point where they realize they were fooled in 2020 by an implacable tide of media messages suggesting that trans people had never been under greater threat and as a result should be given absolutely everything they demanded. People are sick of the forced nonsense because they now realize they can’t fully avoid it, whether they pay attention to any sports or not.
This is why I now refuse to go along with a single broken concept propounded by the Wokish (including Branch Covidians), even the concepts people are whimsically regarding as less-harmful, like the Nikki Hiltz “nonbinary” circus.
Hiltz is a narcissistic twit who happens to hold the American women’s record for the outdoor one-mile run. Hiltz decided a few years ago that being a gay female athlete wasn’t going to allow for much grifting, so she “came out” as “nonbinary,” at which point she demanded everyone refrain from referring to her by female pronouns. The only reason it’s not absolutely incredible that everyone in the track and field sector has gone along with this open-face sham is that everyone with a job in the industry, including people who make their living as running-pundits, has been forced to play along or else lose their standing.
And although running is laden with classic The Atlantic-scanning pseudoliberals and end-stage harridans happy to cajole the whole stinking amoeboid borg forward with no provocation at all, the Hiltz circus is really only possible because the same phenomenon—enforced rhetorical insanity—is now a universal throughout Western corporate culture. This Kurt Vonnegut-like reality is owed mainly to high-ranking Big Perv operatives such as those at NBC, who feed strict directions to announcers such as Kara Goucher to call Hiltz a “they.”
I’m thinking a lot of these folks, including many I regularly deride, would be happy to have the freedom to not have to act like gibbering idiots just to avoid being canceled. But Goucher, a retired elite (female) distance runner herself, is among the numerous high-profile running-pundits who often appears to go beyond obligatory “Yay equality” tweets and savor the rhetorical and pictorial garbage they’re rolling around in a little too much.
Goucher’s mea culpa was surely not as literally nauseating to her as this tweet was to thousands of running fans who used to like the cut of her jib, and more importantly, accepted the substance of her claims of being mishandled by past coaches. If she’s really about respecting people, the truth, and the sport, then there is no logical reason for her to be voluntarily offer succor to known cheaters and troublemakers. Yet she has repeatedly and emphatically backed some of the worst infiltrators in the sport.
Below is just one example of Goucher amplifying a racist lie by toxic and increasingly gibbous gadabout-slug Alison Desir.
Then there’s Goucher’s inexplicable affinity for Latoya Snell. Snell is, above all, a cheater and an unrestrained fraud. Her uncouth mannerisms draw a lot of the fire aimed her way, including mine, but that’s a distraction from the fact that this is someone who claims she’s setting an example of how to succeed as a “disabled” “athlete” when all she does is display what happens to someone’s already slow running when she drinks and gorges her way up to 300 pounds and never trains.
The unseen, craven operatives within HOKA, the New York Road Runners, Strava (which needs to become the target of a DDoS attack on all of its servers) who promote this bucket of scamming pretend that she’s an example of someone who has succeeded because she’s been given a chance, when everyone can see that her only success rests in continuing to receive handouts for being nothing but a sociopathic slob with sociopathic, slovenly online followers.
Yet despite knowing this—or at least being someone who knows her own public comments are highly scrutinized by in-universe standards—Goucher has given Snell encouragement.
Goucher, a white woman who loves in a neighborhood of $4 million homes, seems unaware that her own participation in online conversations is entirely voluntary, and that if “some asshole” has gotten in her head, then perhaps “some person” named Kara Goucher might have said something to provoke whatever the “assholes” invading her cranium so sourly expressed.
Goucher is also an advocate, on the outside, for drug-free competition. After Nike athlete Shelby Houlihan was suspended for four years for doping in 2021 in as obvious a case of intentional cheating as any the sport has witnessed, Goucher refused to say that she believed that the nandrolone metabolites in Houlihan’s system were the result of a conscious choice.
All of this is really too bad, because Goucher was perfectly positioned to write the book she did about the prevalence of doping by professional runners with Nike and the importance of having ethical presences in the sport. Given her public persona, I’m inclined at times to wonder if Goucher invented the “dirty massage” story and accepted something stronger than thyroxine from Alberto Salazar’s druggists. It looks for all the world at times, given the online company she keeps, as if she’s actively trying to kneecap her own credibility, not just play the game well enough to maintain her standing.
The punishment of people like Joyner is aided and abetted by immoral, fundamentally brain-dead egomaniacs such as David Roche, on whose podcast the chronically dung-speckled Goucher appeared in February to promote her book. If Roche was so confident in this March 2021 tweet, why did he delete it and refuse to engage me when I questioned it a year later?
The microcosm of Wokism encapsulated by the Roches’ coaching-mill maps on to the shambling and soulless Wokish blob in general. It’s impossible to overstate what bad people they are. Just greedy, shifty, spineless pigs with no regard for anything but their reputations, their vacation money, and their (or at least Megan’s) destined-for-calamity son Leo. Anyone who willingly associates with them might as well tattoo I SUPPORT DEGENERACY in neon-pink ink on his, her, or their forehead. Anyone who doesn’t accept that the Roches are chortling dingbats and thieves is already too far gone to reach, whereas everyone reading this has already been nodding their head in bored agreement to the same refrain for years.
I have sung the praises of Letsrun for not going along with Wokish evils any more than necessary, but that praise needs to be watered down or even rescinded. For whatever reason, these guys have slowly aligned themselves with the cheats and the frauds and the destructive harpies.
I first noticed the fellas’ slippage in the spring of 2022, when they posted an April Fool’s Day joke about transgender “women,” then quickly deleted and apologized for the joke under pressure from the usual incessantly howling leftards, winding up their burst of contrition with “Your messages in private, on social media, and on our forum have made it clear to us that our editorial was counterproductive to that goal and unnecessarily offensive. For this reason, we are replacing the editorial with this apology.”
As sad as this saccharine slurry was, at least it earned the fellas a friend in former foe and low-information goblinette and ersatz journalist Erin Strout, who was one of the people who whined about the “transphobic” joke, but now cheerfully follows the Letsrun fellas on Twitter and, true to scurrilous form has deleted the evidence she was ever maaaaad in the first place.
This the public could see. What they couldn’t see is that, after someone posted a link to a Beck of the Pack post a couple of years ago about Snell’s cheating ways on the Letsrun forum, a moderator immediately deleted it. I was told about this well after it happened, and it happened a while ago. But while I would never use that forum to advertise my site, this was a deeply reality-unfriendly move.
More recently, the fellas started using “they” along with everyone else to describe Hiltz. This was coming eventually, but it’s still sad to see the last, failing bastion of anti-crybaby, anti-filth running punditry give way completely.
I probably should have seen this coming, because although Weldon and Robert Johnson are regarded as conservatives, they are also products of prep-school privilege whose admissions to Ivy League colleges appear to have depended less on their demonstrated academic prowess than on their ascribed class status, as their father worked for a future U.S. president when they were growing up and their mother for the U.S. Department of State. And during covid, Letsrun benefited from over $87,000 in PPP “loans” that were gifts all along. Not bad, just to keep a running Web site going.
So despite being fiercely knowledgeable about running and politically right-leaning, these guys are ingrained with automatic empathy for the sensitives and vicissitudes of the Roches, Desir, Zoe Rom, Alison Wade, and other leftist running figures born into affluent families and (in some cases) processed through respected schools despite a conspicuous dearth of traditional intellectual vigor. People like these, the smart ones as well as the ninnies, ultimately tend to organize around common incentives despite differences in political orientation—especially incentives as absolute as those created by cancel-crazy Wokism.
I may not have commented in such detail any of the Letsrun stuff were it not for being hectored multiple times by representatives of that website for the crime of using forbidden words, or at least one of them, or portraying forbidden scenarios, however obviously Quentin Tarantino- or Bugs Bunny-like in their parodic reach, such as someone sneaking past U.S. President Biden’s security detail and felling him with a large, largely obsolete farming implement.
I took heat from the same source for calling Lauren Fleshman the dreaded Cee Word when I wrote about Fleshman’s then-new book in January. I was told that this person’s spouse—who probably doesn’t even know about this site, let alone read it—has the Cee Word at #2 on the list of things people should never say. I agreed to edit the post, even as I became increasingly bemused by my interlocutor’s chain of reasoning.
I appreciate that some people are distressed by the use of hackneyed off-color pejoratives. But cripes, this is their clown-show now, and its cast is peppered with malign, hypocritical, and illegitimate actors playing equally decrepit characters. As a result, they’ll get no further dadgum cooperation from me on the self-restraint front. They can all do better or expect further and increasingly illicit barrages until I become so bored with the repetitiveness of the unchecked scamming, selective racism, industry-wide absence of editorial accountability, and lazy defenses of dopers that I move on to something else. And sadly, this “moving on” from you goshdarned flippin’ weirdos is harder than it should be.
Here is Mizz Fleshman being, by golly, a huge Cee Word.
Egad, amirite? A big harrumph! to all that blasted horse-puckey.
The ease with which narcissistic women like Fleshman unfurl lies like these is uncanny. What if I started telling the world I had evidence that Fleshman was a doper or had punched some little kid in the face for mistaking her for actor Owen Wilson? (That kid didn’t know this any more than you did, but in the mid-1980s, Wilson was expelled from the same Dallas preparatory school, St. Marks, that Weldon and Robert Johnson later graduated from. Owen’s brother Luke, while also best known as an actor, ran 1:54.99 for 800 meters while at St. Mark’s, then a school record, and even earned a diploma.)
Fleshman had already given a window into her own reliability after news of Houlihan’s suspension broke in June 2021. Like everyone else with a platform in the sport, she’s firmly against cheating until the slightest challenge to her anti-doping barking arises.
Here’s Fleshman more recently, reveling in the company of cheating filth. That’s Snell in the “YOU’RE ON MUTE” T-shirt, which like Lauren’s cap should instead read “COWARDLY CEE-WORD.” (Actually, maybe Fleshman’s cap does say that on its unseen front. Maybe even the uncensored version!)
The idea that I am punching down at any of these laughably insincere slime-vendors or depriving them of any opportunities is a livid joke. Running, and the corporate environment more broadly, leaves the door wide open to any fact-averse language-mangler willing to unfurl pro-pharma, anti-scientific, pro-obesity, or anti-MAGA piffle while slamming the door in the faces of stoics unwilling to perform an endless cross-eyed, arms-flapping, goose-stepping cuck-dance around pronouns and “letting people claim space.”
If someone like Michael Joyner can’t win even when he’s as kind as anyone can be in his dismantling of scientific myths, why the heck should any commoner who’s watched a string of liars and swindlers thrive for years bother politely grinning his or her way through it from the sidelines?
Everyone else can conduct their business as they see fit. To everyone who loves running first and ethically operates an business based on that love, I’m with you. Even if you sometimes mess up. The artistic portrait of my own personal and professional life is roughly the same variegated palette of hits and misses as everyone else’s, and during periods when I can count at least as many artistic-looking strokes as a I can messy splotches, I reckon I’m doing as well as I ever will. People are tough these days.
If a reader has a factual or philosophical quibble with something I’ve written, then of course I invite criticism, including blowback, as this is part of being vociferous in my attempted stewardship of reality. But as far as the “you’re too rude” comments, folks might try aiming these instead at the bullies-of-bloat and the ethno-swindlers and the equity crap-casters and the gaslighting cheats and…the other stuff. I will continue describing—quasi-autistically at times, no doubt—the decadence and the bigotries and the stupidities and the clamor and the foulness and even the occasional high points of “the sport” exactly as they appear to me, because I am not (bilaterally) blind, and other runners and denizens of Earth have similar eyes and perspectives.