Running from the Facts: "Follow the money—what little there is" edition
When big-name sponsors are being stingy with funds, any misallocation of those funds is glaring. Yet Wokish grifters keep multiplying and thriving, and they're not an impoverished group to start with
The theme of this edition of “Running from the Facts” is basically a reminder to myself: Never ignore the real “whys” behind a lot of Wokish behavior, because the motivation often revolves more urgently around the monetization of unsubstantiated grievances—be this by influencers or by their media shepherds and pimps—than meets the eye.
The original draft of this post bookended the bullet points below with around fifteen hundred words of background and editorializing. Because including that stuff would have inflated the word count beyond what Substack will tolerate, I’ll post it separately. Here, I’ll cut right to the latest list of stupidities, and please bear in mind that almost all of my recent attention has been elsewhere:
Latoya Shauntay Snell has a lot of stories she uses to extract money from credulous web-surfers: Already operating under the lash of being a woman of color, she’s been yelled at because she’s heavy, she has uterine issues, and all sorts of people are unaccountably mean to her.
One of Snell’s stories, which she’s now had pinned to the top of her Twitter profile for over nine months, is that her good name is being sullied by a mean person whose age she isn’t exactly sure of, but whose harassment for some reason requires additional cash to combat:
This tweet is the first in a long thread directing people to open their wallets because of nothing more than a garden-variety Internet fight.
Derek Murphy, among others, wasn’t buying the idea that anyone needed an influx of money to accuse someone in court of harassment. You may recall that Murphy has had dealings with Snell in the past, when she became convinced he was about to out her for lying and decided to get ahead of this imagined attack by attacking him instead. Various elements of her outbursts should have terminated her “career” as a slow, but determined and fair, running influencer, and not long ago would have. Today, offering indisputable evidence of both cheating and a cover-up that’s invariably worse than the crime doesn’t even serve as a speed-bump in the progress of a Wokish grievance-monger, and many cases only earns them sympathy and even more followers.
After doing his due diligence in the months since Snell made this accusation, Murphy tweeted this the other day:
@latotashauntay @oiselle The same Ko-Fi account that was being used to solicit donations pay legal fees to ‘press criminal charges’ against her alleged harasser. I hope everyone that donated is fine with this use of their $. Unless she refunded, Latoya lied and scammed you all.
Snell, given Murphy’s visibility, couldn’t ignore this exposé outright. Yet she faced the eternal dilemma of the chuckle-headed huckster’s backed into a corner: How can I call my accuser out without directing my audience to the obvious validity of the accusation?
Snell decided that her best defense would be to post a series of Instagram “stories” (images that disappear 24 hours after they’re posted, for the Luddites among ye) attempting to portray the exposé as, once again, harassment. That’s right: Despite the countless Internet platforms on which Snell runs her mouth, in this case, she chose to “refute” Murphy using images designed to quickly vanish. If this is as aggressive as she’s willing to be in calling someone wrong, she might as well tattoo HE’S RIGHT, I FUCKIN’ SCAMMED Y’ALL on her forehead.
For those scoring at home—or alternatively, those unwilling to wade through that tsunami of butthurt—here’s her story: Someone whose entire career is seeking attention online is upset that not all of the attention is the kind she wants. She refuses to name Murphy or Mirza, attributing this to a desire to not have them harassed (I really did LOL here), but goes into great detail about how terrible they are and how much hatred they caused strangers to rain on her and her family. After all, she’s just trying to eke out a living as a pissed-off public buffoon, not pay any of the consequences of living that way.
Also, “legal stuff” is not suitable for social media, except when you pin “legal stuff” to your Twitter account as part of a wider scam, and though Snell supposedly shamed her harasser into silence months ago, that tweet remains pinned as I type this.
Snell saves her best for last, where she gets around to admitting that, yes, she’s been shoveling those Ko-Fi donations into her other endeavors, despite the harassment having risen to '“horrific” and “traumatizing” levels.I’ve observed and been pointed toward various aspects of the dispute in question, it’s clear that by whatever standard Snell uses to define “harassment,” she’s at least as guilty of it as anyone she has accused of the same infraction. Her pinned tweetstorm is prima facie evidence of this. It gets far worse, but I’ll stick with something no one can sensibly dispute: Latoya Shauntay Snell dishes out at least as much venom as she receives, and she expressly invites it by being a grandstanding, money-grubbing liar.
Zooming out a little from the specifics, I’ve seen a version of this before, because I was personally targeted in much the same way. The reluctance of Snell to even name these people despite their supposedly being such nasties is easily traceable to the fact that Murphy does extremely thorough work, and anyone reading it with an objective mind immediately pegs Snell as the only miscreant in the situation. While Snell is clearly no Shakespeare, she’s not stupid, and she’s certainly bright enough to understand that if it came to each side formally presenting its evidence in a moderating setting, Snell and her babbling sophistry would be laughed off whatever platform was hosting the exchange.
Despite her lies, her obvious and sole aim of making money, and the corresponding fraudulence of her claims about being an activist for the oppressed—claims already belied long ago by her lying and her bellicose, self-serving antics—Snell continues to be materially rewarded by a startling number of business entities.I know that most of you don’t want to even know about, much less see dissected, the ravings of a nonstop whining and lying machine whose larcenous prime will probably end within a year, two at most. But that’s exactly the point: Why is this floor-humping gasbag even relevant?
Nauseating as this stuff is, it matters because Snell, who in addition to being a jerk shows no evidence of doing any meaningful running lately, continues to thrive financially in the sport of running. Snell’s being rewarded per se, however, while grotesque in itself, is only part of the story, and not the most important part, which is that Snell and others are getting away with this at a time when some of the very best U.S. runners are struggling to secure support from many of the same sources (more on this below).A woman named Jocelyn Rivas, who announced in an October 2019 that she was “chasing her dream of becoming the youngest person ever to officially run 100 marathons,” was still pursuing that dream as of mid-April, and days ago posted about becoming a Garmin ambassador, which I assume means receiving a free GPS watch. Rivas will apparently turn 25 on January 19 of next year, and, as the text below the YouTube video explains, she intends to make the Los Angeles Marathon in November number 100.
One serious problem with Rivas’ dream is that various others have finished 100 marathons at various ages Rivas long ago surpassed, including, in chronological order, a 23-year-old-man (Oct. 2010), a 21-year-old woman (Dec. 2017), and a 17-year-old boy (Jan. 2019).
Perhaps this is why both Rivas’ personal website and the L.A. Marathon page promoting her bogus effort are currently off the Web. In any event, I’m planning to delve into this in greater detail, because this woman’s quest has been supported and promoted uncritically by an impressive range of credulous entities. I’d guess the part about her being born in El Salvador with a broken back is clearing a lot of paths that would be inaccessible to the majority of people aspiring to the same non-attainable record.In her most recent Fast Women newsletter, Alison Wade opined about the coverage of The Track Meet in Irvine, California over the weekend:
If Wade is saying that what she hopes for is really no more than solid camera work, an accurate clock, and a visible lap counter, with the announcers’ primary job being to not muddy the picture with errant input or needless chortling, I’m with her. I have visualized a harm-reduction model of my own, mostly involving the volume control, since the days NBC was using Carol Lewis. It sounds like what she wants to pay for is the experience of seeing a race unfold live; this is usually my rationale as well—I know a full video will leak online or be posted by the owner soon enough, but the magic of even the most moving contest is greatly diminished by already knowing the results.
What baffles me is the economics of her suggestion, which reduce to “spend more money on coverage I don’t care about at the expense of the struggling pros I support as my own vocation.” If my goal were to support pro running, given the choice, I would trade abysmal meet coverage for crowd-funded athlete support every time, and have held my nose and done so more than once lately. But if I lived in the wealthiest town in my state, maybe I wouldn’t think about this, hard or at all, and this odd detachment from reality—”It’ll cost more money, but things will be better” would pervade my thinking in other areas, too.I will offer a Lindsay Crouse update for as long as she keeps the tweet linking to her false comeback story in The New York Times from early March pinned to her Twitter profile (are you sensing a theme?). It’s still there. But I’m sure she’ll provide a reason for me to offer faithful readers more than that, week in and week out.
Here’s what this upward-failing, lying, self-absorbed and oblivious warrior on behalf of those without had to say recently about personal finances:
That Lindsay Crouse has either a job with or a savings account provided by a major, or any, media outlet essentially constitutes larceny. And does she think the runners she sucks up to are monitoring their 401Ks? Let’s find out:
Runner’s World editor Sarah Lorge Butler used her platform to perpetrate an episode of real journalism and asked some questions no one else does, mainly because no one wants to answer them. This is understandable; though the answers serve the public interest, at root they’re personal questions: How much money do you a representative professional runner make, and how has the pandemic shifted your negotiating power?
Other than saying that Nike’s long-term de facto ownership of American running (via its control of USATF) cannot make other shoe companies enthusiastic, and saying that a number of Boulder health providers routinely and generously offer discounted or even free services to numerous area runners to help offset the problems non-insured runners confront, I will reserve comment on the topic and instead ask a seemingly obvious question of my own:How can a magazine that chooses to expend one of its six annual covers on Latoya Shauntay Snell then publish a story by its editor-in-chief about the lack of support for struggling professional runners logging two-hour training days without acknowledging that its wires are badly crossed?
For God’s sake, just ten years ago Runner’s World would have been shredded first for putting someone like Snell on its cover and then for having the nerve to describe, sans irony, how awful those with both talent and an earnest work ethic have it. Today, you’re the missing link for even hinting at the five-foot-high mound of “invisible” Wokester dung in the middle of the windowless cultural room.
Is this all a joke?
My next post makes an effort to thread these jewels together in a way that has decent explanatory power. As always, if that effort falls short or fails altogether, I truly hope someone steps up and improves on it.