A short and needlessly tragic Twitter history

If the hilariously imperfect Elon Musk can prevent Twitter from remaining a security-state disinformation outlet, it's $44 billion well squandered

In the summer of 2021, I deleted a Twitter account I’d had for maybe ten years. I spent the next year mocking users of the platform for shitposting, retweeting lies and nonsense, and otherwise being their worst selves before quietly rejoining the ranks of the squawking and the agitated in late July. I say “quietly” because I didn’t mention here having gone from peeking through the window of the crackhouse to tweaking around on its bathroom floor with the other wastoids. Instead, I just started casually including screen shots from my new account by way of bragging about my dunking prowess.

The idea behind creating this account was to share, en masse, all of my saltier posts about running figures going back two years while tagging all relevant accounts. I did this late at night to minimize the odds I’d be immediately noticed by my taggees, so they would have to wake up to the possibility that true and unflattering things had been circulating around Twitter for a few intolerable hours.

This was to remain the whole business plan: Share posts and tag people, but don’t engage any content, just remind certain bad actors—the ones, that is, who manage to avoid peeking into the window of this electronic funhouse—that their bad actions were still being observed and tabulated despite their admirable determination to avoid all accountability.

I shared about seventy-five posts, around one year’s worth, before growing bored. By this time, Chris Chavez and his Citius Mag account had already blocked me even though it was around 2 a.m. on the East Coast. An unknown number of accounts no smaller than ten would soon follow suit. And for my part, my commitment to not engage any content lasted about five minutes—if I at any point sincerely believed in the possibility of any other result, I was doing a superb job of deluding myself.

But at least I was back in the right place for the deluded. I experimented with trying to engage people who hadn’t yet blocked me with douchey quote-tweets, but they had probably muted me, and in any event they all declined to respond even to my gentler hectoring.

I got myself banned, and quickly, for an honest, darkly comical mistake. If I remember right, the gap between the posting of the offending tweet and the ban was only a few seconds, so the ban almost had to be automated rather than the result of someone reporting it.

It took me multiple reads to spot the problem. I was convinced I’d been sanctioned for comparing David Roche to a cheerleader. In fact, when I showed a few people with a “Can you believe this crap?” and they replied with “I know, that’s lame,” I only later understood that they thought I was complaining about being banned for an obvious typo.

Maybe some of you are better proofreaders than I am, at least when primed.

Humbled, albeit for the wrong reasons, I admitted having been a putz and a ditz like most of the goyim and deleted the tweet.

My next official mistake, scant weeks later, was tweeting something snarky but unremarkable at professional liar Ben Collins, which earned an instant request to verify my account with a phone number. This I can’t do, because my number is stored in a deleted account, so Twitter’s response amounted to a ban. Zounds!

Ben Collins is employed by NBC to lie to the public on behalf of the increasingly melded interests of corporations and the U.S. government. Formerly, he had the same job for The New York Times. Like Brian Stelter, recently canned from CNN, Collins does this under the guise of targeting misinformation. In other words, he’s the male Taylor Lorenz, perhaps without all the public crying. Both of their personal histories have been scrubbed from the Internet.

I understand why some people who have joined me in spirit for even most of the uglier parts of this telescopic societal nightmare start to balk when I start in about the security state controlling the news as well as social media. It may sound Alex Jones-ish, but if you believe otherwise, you are not living in reality. See this incredible thread or the associated, equally numbing story at The Intercept. If you abhor what you believe the CCP does to limit the knowledge of Chinese citizens, then spend a moment pitying yourself and (if applicable) your fellow Americans, too.

Glenn Greenwald has mentioned Collins (and Lorenz) many times, the latest being in this comprehensive article about how the most powerful agents on the planet are seeking to control what everyday people know and believe and what we can say. If you think about this for two seconds and do your best to imagine being a soulless psychopath like Bill Gates, it’s a very easy, if dispiriting, reality to accept.

But if that’s too much for you, try this. Knowing what you now (should) know about Hunter Biden, if you still trust Ben Collins, you are worse than a fool; you are intentionally remaining misinformed and welcoming being hand-jobbed toward your own demise by cable-TV and Internet propaganda-jockeys every day, many of them literally government-trained.

Lorenz and Collins therefore belong to a protected class on Twitter. Yap at them, and you get “questioned” by the system. This sod-off-you-pissants policy may disappear now that Elon Musk has “taken control” of the platform, but as of a few days ago, it had not.

I was able to get back on Twitter after about a week of e-mailing back and forth with nameless people who at the time didn’t know they were soon about to be fired. I wasn’t asked to delete whatever it was I had tweeted at Collins. Grateful to be freed anew, I resumed snarking and snarling and being a dick, with every word as logically ironclad and morally unimpeachable as everyone else’s rage-tweeting.

On Friday, I served the tweet below in reply to a Glenn Greenwald tweet, not realizing or caring that Taylor Lorenz was tagged as well. Oops! Another instant request for phone-number account verification. (This tweet was unpleasant, true, but I threaded the needle nicely between “knock over the NYT building stat!” and merely hoping for an occurrence that would result in the seamless removal of the edifice from Manhattan.)

I’m still banned from logging in (the account itself remains active) and playing the e-mail “c'mon man, I know you’re not busy” game once a day with Twitter. But thanks to Elon Musk, the account may be banned for some time yet.

Because I can somehow still gather screenshots of other people’s activity in exile, I’ve determined that the number of truly destructive people in running is actually pretty small, probably smaller than fifty. Those people have a lot of followers, but as far as active runners (not “influencers”) and coaches who have loud voices shouting from heads embedded in various asses, Twitter makes it easy to identify them, because they inevitably congregate in low-signal, high-static e-cocoons rife in masturbatory blurtage.

Better still, these people, being inauthentic or misled liberals, are ardent followers of flagrant flack-artists like Collins and Lorenz.

Peter Bromka is—apart from being a doping-denier along with the rest of running’s yutzes—a well-meaning but chronically underinformed gentleman. His insipid persona locks him in a continual state of unfocused excitability, leading him to physically abuse superlatives while embarking on an aimless yet blistering streak of self-owns. He is also a writer who struggles mightily with the basics, the sub-basics, and the layers below those.

Thanks largely to these high-Blue Book-value qualities and to missing the 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials by the tiniest of margins approximately nineteen times in a two-month span, Bromka has a significant in-universe following.

I don’t recognize every handle in Bromka’s above tag-list, but I can affirm that it contains a mega-supermajority of people who are determined to cause distress to running and other institutions, and whose rapid, shameful, and permanent departure from the scene would be welcomed by thinking folk of integrity everywhere.

Also, some of these buddies of Zoe Rom—who herself quit Twitter when Outside, Inc. killed the print version of Trail Runner, but is now attributing this to a flash of unrelated insight—should tell her to at least split her time between penning dolorous dispatches about her body shame (which is about the best way to remain ashamed, by the way, but that’s her issue) and doing her job as the editor of Trail Runner’s moribund e-remnant.

“Ben C…” in the image below is Ben Collins.

Ellie Pell again. Allllll-rellie then! Here she is by her own cruel standards misgendering her “non-binary” best friend Riley Brady a week before the Javelina Jundred.

Here she is getting to within about a pecker’s length of a couple of highly sought legendz.

Meanwhile, Erin Strout, who’s writing a book about either quantum mechanics or something she’s even less qualified to tackle, established anew that she supports censorship, unfounded cancellations, the harassment of women, and blatant lies that serve the wealthy and screw over the poor.

Someone should tell Strout and Bromka (also a spreader of DNC talking points) how high violent crime rates have become in black neighborhoods across the country—almost certainly thanks in large part to police scaling back their efforts like “everyone” wanted—or refer to unchecked illegal immigration or any other number of recent crippling failures on the part of establishment politicians. But Strout is already the consummate 2022 middle-aged female blue-check Democrat: Arrogant and clueless at once, shrewish, cowardly, and blaming her poor self-image on white men and successful women while feigning concern for the common good, with the eternal drama powered by an incurably victim-centric orientation to the world.

So that’s the good news for the day. To know what the dumbest and most obnoxious people in running are saying, you only need to know about two or three names, and you’ll be led to the rest of them on Twitter whether you seek this outcome or not.

Alas, no one is putting any dents in my theory that running is being progressively ruined by gregariously ignorant people like these who filter out all helpful input. People who are shallow-minded and craven while possessing sizable platforms are just baaaaaad people. Baaaaaad people are out there, and all we* can do is try to limit their morose, hostile, and implacably self-serving influence. Mockery helps.

One anticipated benefit of Musk taking over Twitter (liberal perspective; conservative perspective—both are great blogs) is purging the platform of bots and allowing facts to percolate through. Frazzled shitlibs like Strout and Bromka are worried about too much conservative noise appearing or their own input being limited (I wonder why?), but the real damage has been the suppression and outright censoring by Twitter’s previous disposable and disposed-of owners of true information about covid, Ukraine, biology, and far more.

(Oh, and liars like Aysha Mirza—who vacillates between being a professor and being a student—will be probably be allowed to persist in their aggressive delusions while occasionally lobbying for handouts. Yes, the Branch covidians should be safe while the inverse glory lasts.)