Running from the Facts: "It's 2021, so Tucker Carlson talked to a New Hampshire track coach" edition
How many different ways are there to botch a simple story?
For no easily pinpointed reason, I found myself too disgusted last week by mundane events to spend much time chasing down Internet nonsense, lies, distortions, and examples of journalistic self-immolation using Twitter as an accelerant. There was nothing out of the ordinary to account for this; I did my usual fifty miles or so of jogging, mostly hoping the nice weather would worsen and drive most of the local beady-eyed contagion-paranoiacs back inside, and continued inexorably narrowing the gap between myself and my expiration date without knowingly ruining anything of significance.
But “the ordinary” remains pretty disrupted these days, probably more so here than where you are. Besides, I’m constituted to dislike almost everything I see and structure my remarks accordingly, in the whimsical hope that people quit reproducing en masse in the realization that the last few thousand years represent a game but mostly failed try by an unusually greedy and off-putting variety of bad-breathed ape at establishing a workable civilization around a proliferation of thermonuclear weapons, such toys standing as the penultimate triumph of this ape’s enlarging forebrains and ever-more-useful thumbs. Perhaps I should probably just not shop at Target when it’s busy.
Whatever the primary basis for my unrest, an alternative, not-unfamiliar way to respond to it would have been to hunt even more eagerly than usual for things to be irate about, then fully open the nozzle of own firehose of whining, thereby keeping the whole merry cycle of screeching at close to peak amplitude at all times. But I more often choose these days to set aside heavy rhetorical equipment when my dander level rises sufficiently far into the red, other than putting a few close, pitiable friends on electronic blast, while also making a point of doing something semi-random for someone I don’t know. I have also concluded that I need to spend my golden years reading more books—none by James Patterson—when my one useful eye can still see words, and in the years after that (scheduled to begin in 2023) I’ll switch back to movies, mostly porn.
So, having done little helpful research or thinking at all lately, today I’ll again omit any sort of prefatory fatuousness and get straight to the content. This week I’ll focus mostly on the New Hampshire high-school track coach who was recently fired for refusing to follow the statewide athletic association’s masking guidelines, then note a few other niceties in passing before ending on a perfectly glum note. I may lie a few times to make myself look and feel better, if only temporarily and in the abuse of my own conscience, so be alert for once.
One week ago, the coach, Brad Keyes, inflamed by the newly released statewide athletic association’s masking guidelines for the spring 2021 track and field season, committed vocational suicide-by-athletic director by saying that the rules are nonsense and that he would refuse to require his Pembroke Academy athletes to wear masks during any events.
Keyes has done a series of interviews with right-wing outlets and controversial figures, including, according to his website, Alex Jones. I say “according to his website” because, as the page advises—it’s now close to 10 p.m. on Wednesday the East Coast—he hasn’t added links to every scheduled or completed interview yet, and as some have heard, Google Search makes it difficult to find out what certain disliked people are up to, Jones among them. As much of a ghoul as Jones is, I find the power of one increasingly Woke tech company to effectively disappear someone worse than the ability of weirdos to more easily maintain public platforms. Knowing what the religious right would do with such power—and it may be easy right now to pretend the pendulum will never swing back in that direction—should make even the most ardent leftist suspicious of this shit. But of course the far left (and at some point, we* should stop calling the Wokish “leftists”) is leading the cancellation train and ensuring it never misses a stop, including most journalists.
I’m going to use the term “statewide athletic association’s masking guidelines” for a third time, because rather than litigate the masking guidelines themselves (there will be more time for that), I want to focus on the mishandling of the event by media outlets.
Here’s the headline from the Daily Caller story, which pins the blame for both the firing and the masking guidelines on the Pembroke Academy “athletic department.” The guidelines came from the NHIAA, and as Keyes himself points out, every school in the state followed them. The headline might be technically true, but only in the sense of “Pembroke Academy fires principal for allowing students to smoke crack on school grounds.”
Maybe the funniest part of this, especially with the “blame the school” angle tossed in for sadistic measure, is that the affable-looking Keyes decided to wear his school T-shirt for the segment.
The right-wing media wasn’t alone in botching the details. MSN, picking up a story from the bastion of unimpeachable reporting known as the Daily Mail, went with “High school track coach is fired after violating school's mask mandate,” which carries the same error. The story itself is also harried and worthless, stating that Keyes said he was fired “when he allowed students to run outside without face coverings,” which not even close to the truth.
You can check out the whole slate of stories using Keyes’ site as a portal. As for my view of the controversy, it hasn’t changed since I learned about it. For now, as someone who is about the only one running without a mask in my part of Boulder—and we’re talking about individuals spaced far apart, covering their faces at any sign of other people on the horizon—I’ll say that the state championship meets are at the end of May and the beginning of June, and I’m confident that if Keyes had waited, the powers that be would have reconvened and dropped the requirement assuming no new burst of COVID-19 cases, et cetera. Probably sooner than Keyes realized. Now, if this happens, he can take credit for it if he likes, and probably will.
In the meantime, high-school track and field is underway this week in New Hampshire. Thanks to the fact that it’s a small state, the coaches have set up the necessarily invitation-free schedule in such a way as to give the top individual distance runners in the state multiple shots at head-to-head competition—or at least it looks this way to my happily suspicious eye. Two kids have a legitimate shot at going under nine minutes for the 3,200 meters and a third may be knocking at that door soon.
Erin Strout wrote a profile for Women’s Running on U.S. 800-meter record holder Ajee’ Wilson. You already know what’s coming: I liked this story and learned a good deal from it. While much of Strout’s writing obviously annoys me, she’s not lazy about her prep or her interviews.
Actually, what really impressed me was Wilson’s volunteering at The Sankofa Healing Studio, which assists incarcerated or otherwise justice-system-affected Black women in being able to live what most people would call a normal life. The page is awash in Wokish terms, which doesn’t bother me because this is an organization that’s doing something.
I’m trying to think of what it would be like growing up in the less-advantaged parts of Philadelphia, which are extensive and fairly frightening, and being a Black girl who winds up in jail early on. I can’t possibly, but I can imagine how challenging it must be to ever escape being “on paper” once it starts, and how easy and at times necessary it might be to survive by criminal means, even passively.Dave Chapelle, a brilliant philosopher in the shape and style of a comedian, said something along those lines in a recent special: “Do something good for someone Black, and make sure they don’t deserve it, because Black people have a lot of bad things done to them they also didn’t deserve.” I don’t think the clients of the Sankofa Healing Studio were what he had in mind by “undeserving,” but when an Olympian decides to spend some her time in the way Ajee’ Wilson does, such genuine social-justice efforts should stand out against the background of the bullshit. I made a donation, and the page to do so is here.
I have to add that the profile echoed with incompleteness without any comments from Wilson about how she feels about intersex athletes no longer being allowed in global championships in her event; Strout could have asked noncontroversial questions along these lines, but I’m not surprised that she didn’t. Johanna Gretschel questioned Wilson directly about this for Podium Runner in advance of the 2019 World Championships (good for J.G.!), and Wilson smoothly moved out to lane two and pulled cleanly away from the inquiry, last seen rigging badly with veins standing out on its neck like Thanos.
A video featuring Lindsay Gibbs has a title, “The Exclusion Of Trans People's Rights In Sports,” that is grammatically suspect and factually incorrect. I admire the fact that the channel’s owner keeps the like/dislike ratio visible even though that ratio now stands at an astonishingly feeble 1 to 15. Other than that, it’s just the joke I needed.
The video starts with almost two minutes of right-wingers saying that trans girls are bad for girls’ sports, which is supposed to poison the well enough to mean something (what if one of those assholes also claims evolution is true? Or that the Bible is filled with made-up, largely borrowed and heavily misogynistic stories?). Then Gibbs, who is best imagined as Eric Cartman as you watch and listen to her speak, continues to frame the entire issue as that of the political left versus the political right. This is provably false.
Gibbs sees or pretends to see the “exclusion” or trans girls from sports as a natural extension of the attempt to ban trans people from certain public bathrooms. She also thinks or feigns thinking that President Joe Biden (Junior) cares in his heart at all about any of this.
She doesn’t seem dumb enough to believe any of the foolishness that spills from her mouth, but who am I to deny the breadth of someone’s real ignorance without knowing for sure? Maybe she’s totally free of an agenda and peddling this shit solely because she believes in it. The host, Tara Sloane, has either paid no attention to sports in her life or doesn’t give a shit—just one more person with two X chromosomes trying to literally capitalize on all of the Wokish bullshit.Gibbs is someone whose output I don’t like because she’s basically the Fox News of quasi-active women—popular among the butthurt because she’s full of shit, and all the more popular I suspect, for claiming to be “no-bullshit” in her incessant fact-starved preaching about trans girls and, I assume, other topics. But I like her even less now for this recent declaration: “Currently, some writers are leaving Substack (the platform that publishes this newsletter) over concerns that the company is elevating anti-trans voices. I certainly share these concerns.” She goes on to say, hilariously, that she’s happy to stay on Substack and rake in the dough from her fellow Harpies. That’s fine, but fuck her and the other cunts for claiming that Substack is a haven for anti-trans voices. Anti-girls-sports activists, which is what “trans activists” should always be called, are zealots who want utter complicity in every stupid thing they ask and will try to end people’s careers over it. I gave less and less sympathy for anyone affected other than biological girls and their parents with every passing day and new reaction from the fuckhead brigade.
Where was I? Oh. I was going to end on a glum note, but that was just clickbait. Have a great rest of your week. It’s going to snow and rain here through Friday, so at least I’ll have the running paths mostly to myself, and will probably be found with a huge head wound next to some slick concrete before writing my next post; no one will be able to tell any difference.