Running does indeed have a racism problem, all of it traceable to a single relentless brain-dead social arsonist

We can't stop the onslaught if manufactured hate, but we can use our brains and refuse to actively support it

A decade ago, the Westboro Baptist Church was, despite modest enrollment numbers, one of America’s more notorious formal hate groups. Its members were known for crashing funerals held for military servicepersons and displaying signs that read “GOD HATES FAGS”— a conclusion some Christians dispute—to mourners and other gawkers. One of its spokespersons declared early in Barack Obama’s first term as U.S. President that Obama was the Antichrist and would lead a revolt of nations against Israel. (That’s not quite what happened.)

The WBC was not embraced even by standard anti-gay conservative Christians, most of whom are not ostentatiously antisemitic or inclined to aggravate the grief of random funeral attendees. Once a favorite target of a then-far-different “skeptical community,” the whole operation has already receded into the dustbin of rabble-rousing history.

Alison Desir reminds me of a one-person revival of the grim WBC circus of righteous mud-flinging. Like the Phelps family, Desir is on a manic and openly immoral crusade to sow racialist strife in the name of “social justice.” She travels from place to place to do this, two months ago seen at the Boston Marathon showering the police responsible for crowd control with false accusations of racism. And like the heads of the WBC, Desir makes money specifically by being the psychotically depraved person she is.

There’s a major difference, however. Whereas the WBC never had any visible external support outside of a smattering anonymous Redditors, the entire running world openly embraces Desir as a legitimate ally and an icon of progress. This happens even when she makes it clear in advance that she believes her hosts are evil.

Desir, a former capable-enough jogger who is now obese and myxedematous-looking despite claiming years ago that running saved her life, has again decided to take aim at white people, this time using the Western States Endurance Run (WSER) as substrate.

On Monday, she posted this to Instagram:

Desir appears to be pretending that a formal color barrier exists in trail and ultramarathon running, like the barriers that kept black people out of the National Football League, Major League Baseball, and the National Basketball Association until 1946, 1947, and 1950, respectively. Actually, she’s openly conflating what she sees as a shortage of no-questioned-asked handouts to aspiring black trail runners with literally denying black people entries into races; this, after all, is precisely what “equity” means—redistributing wealth toward people who haven’t earned it but can claim a stake in it owing to oppressed-group status, in this case that of a wide-bottomed, yabbering slacklord who happens to be Haitian-American.

From what I can gather of the current WSER entry procedures, most people get into the field via a lottery. The top two males and females at each of five “Golden Ticket” events—which might be loosely viewed at the “Grand Slam” tournaments in professional golf and tennis—are guaranteed entries as well. The top ten males and females in any WSER are offered spots in the next year’s race; there are sponsor spots, too.

But while the WSER organizers have clearly enacted a thoughtful mix of subjective and objective criteria, absolutely none of them include barring or discouraging people from getting bibs on the basis of their skin color. How exactly would that work, anyway, even if a significant number of people actually wanted all-white running races?

Desir consistently says extraordinarily idiotic things, loudly, and does so as a droopy slug and therefore as a comically inapt representative of long-distance running even when she’s not spouting her unfounded antisocial pieties. Her dilapidated and slovenly presentation aside, there are two main reasons to not feed into this grifter’s clumsy posturing and wrongheaded accusations.

The first is obvious: She’s causing problems and is basically like a bratty teenager who—depending on her age and fitness level—needs to be either sent to her room to chill and reconsider her ways or given an abrupt, no-nonsense, full-force five-knuckle backhand blow that knocks her across the room and unconscious.

The second reason may not be as obvious, but to anyone who knows that Wokish people invariably eat their own, it’s a given: Desir goes out of her way to malign and besmirch the very events and entities that most eagerly and ostentatiously accommodate her lowbrow philosophies. Despite being offered the chance at the Boston Marathon expo to push whatever racist fever-dreams she pumped into her book Running While Black, and not being a participant in the race, she made sure to complain about a nonexistent episode of racism, after having already labeled the marathon route itself racist and shrugging off the horror of the 2013 bombings at the finish line.

Meanwhile, the WSER has made conspicuous moves toward both real and sham social justice (the latter the kind Desir prefers) in recent years, with the name of the area where the race begins having recently been changed from Squaw Valley to Olympic Valley in lieu of returning more land to the Washoe people, if any still exist.

She’s not merely an ingrate, she’s rude beyond belief. She’s like someone who responds to the discomfort of having eaten too many habanero peppers by emptying a packet of Xtreme Pop Rocks into her mouth to kill the sensation; she feigns a yen for cultural analgesia, but instead injects acid into every institution that doesn’t find a way to avoid platforming her.

And she is not merely “just buggin’”; she’s an anti-human, shameless troll. She is also ignorant about everything she declaims about that can even be traced to historical or definable scenarios. But she can afford to be these things and more, because the small fraction of people who agree with her hatemongering are gluttons for ignorant rants and are keen on strict in-grouping and out-grouping based on mythical, indefensible, inhumane precepts. They reject dissent without any consideration for its politeness or logic and repeat themselves with all the reflection and deliberation of a flock of honking geese. This is what all cults are like, online and otherwise.

Reed Coolsaet is clearly a man who has guzzled at least a gallon of the “anti-racist” Kool-Aid and gobbled up the ash-coated slop-bucket it was served in. Now 43, Coolsaet, a Canadian, was also a sub-28:00 10,000-meter man in his athletic prime who racked up over a half-dozen marathons in the 2:10 to 2:11 range and even broke 1:05:00 for a half-marathon in 2020 past the age of forty.

This was Coolsaet’s reply to Desir’s post.

I honestly wonder what Coolsaet say if someone asked him to list the “many white supremacy factors” that explain the generally pasty vibe of trail running. He may have honestly never thought of this, no matter how many times he’s duly repeated the phrase “white supremacy” on social-media sites.

The post below has even less actionable content, implying on no evidence that the WSER lottery system is racist toward black people and demanding change without explaining what that change would look like or how it would be accomplished.

The only pushback I saw probably failed to survive the night. If so, I’m sorry for whoever’s loss that was.

It would be tempting to refer Desir to the ever-falling collective status of black Americans, whose urban neighborhoods are being looted and trashed and whose residents are being gunned down in alarming numbers. But even if she actually cared about anyone besides herself—black, white, or other—she probably wouldn’t want to discuss any of that, given that it’s black people who are responsible for almost the entire crime surge nationwide.

Then there are things black people aren’t at all responsible for, such as the school lockdowns that set black schoolchildren back decades academically, just after they had begun clawing their way back into the reading and math ranges of other students. But Desir probably wouldn’t want to venture into those rhetorical waters, either, because the last thing she’s interested in is tackling real, identifiable problems with solutions that would both take real work to implement and benefit poor people, a demographic Desir plainly couldn’t care less about.

Desir is going to keep this up for as long as she finds places to land. After all, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said it himself: If people don’t like Wokish mandates from him and his fellow douchebags, who really do think they should get to run the entire world and everything it contains, then they need to be forced to accept these mandates anyway.

Speaking out against this nonsense does, of course, incur a cost. Any runner who say, questions Strava’s sponsorship of Latoya Shauntay Snell will be cancelled from any status he or she holds in the running world. And when those who can’t be cancelled question these moved, the result is cowardly silence from douchey galoots like Dustin Glass of Brooks Running, which like Strava is a truly demoralized operation from top to bottom.

The constant threat of adverse consequences, however, doesn’t mean that people have to openly welcome Desir and amplify her idiotic rambling and divisiveness-mongering. It’s okay to just not engage with her or her inflammatory stupidities. The only people who honestly believe her demented quest has any merit are haters and people without any capacity to think rationally about what endorsing and rewarding anti-human behavior inevitably does. I have yet to understand why so many people, including many I once respected at least from a distance, are in what looks for all the world like a contest to see who can be the most piously self-prostrating and self-debasing white runner ever born.

This woman is an unvarnished idiot, as is anyone who continues for any reason to pretend her quest is remotely moral or even morally acceptable. The list of such people is curiously and excoriatingly long. I should have known in 1984 when I picked up running that it would come to me wondering four decades later if virtually everyone who gravitates toward the activity as a lifestyle and gains any enduring visibility at all is either spineless, brain-dead, or a sadist.

By the way, since I managed to work “fags” into this post, I should point out something I consider remarkable. I rarely check my site stats, but after littering both a post title and the corresponding post last week with a couple of terms that even decent people tend to wince at, I only lost 1.6 percent of my newsletter subscribers, none of them paying ones. This was the biggest one-day drop this site has ever experienced, but given how thoroughly offensive the post in question was, it seems safe to say that I have shaken off any regular readers with fewer than three layers of skin. That wasn’t why I did what I did, and I have no plans to intentionally sink to that level of raw, targeted profanity. But it was interesting to note all the same.