Running from the Facts: "Lying is the new empathy is the new journalism" edition
Instead of rising to the difficult but straightforward task of honest journalism, today's crop of sad sacks is seeking to normalize the incredibly barren and devious standard they're setting
A commitment to embracing Wokism and its central dogma—that inherent and incurable (but expensive-seminar-”treatable”) racism perpetrated by whites explains all of the ills faced by individuals in minority groups across the board—implies a commitment to looking really dumb. This is because reality remains a thing, and in that thing called reality, people of color sometimes lie, cheat, steal, or otherwise behave as imperfect human beings. To decry instances of racism and its effects is, in theory, to decry these solecisms in all their forms; otherwise, the whole idea of trying to mitigate racism is senseless.
But in Wokism, racism is literally—yes, literally—a one-sided prospect, with the affluent white women spending hand-over-fist on those seminars the first and loudest to support this claim.
So, when a Wokish journalist or pundit is faced with an obvious instance of a highly visible athlete of color or invasive sport-adjacent entrepreneurial figure making racist remarks and worse, she is faced with a choice: Does she behave as an actual journalist or as the opposite—someone who secretes inconvenient facts at the expense of informing the public about an instance of real racism (and at the cost of her own conscience, if present)?
As we* have seen, in the running world, it hasn’t been a contest lately: Ideology always wins.
And what about doping? No running journalist is for doping, right? They all tell you this at one time or another, because that’s as cool and as no-lose a proposition as posting “Black Lives Matter” when you see others in your Twitter-orbit increasingly doing the same.
But again: When a Wokish journalist is faced with an instance of a popular American record-holder being banned for a doping violation, she is faced with a choice: Does she admit right away that the banned runner’s drawn-out sob-story is as flimsy as any other, say “Too bad, it happens in elite-level track, time to move on,” or does she do the opposite and display to the world that she is as biased as any Fox News yabberhead and as much of a sucker for slapstick excuses as any other gelatinous fangirl accepting money and blind accolades for posing as a reporter?
Once more, ideology invariably wins. It’s a bigger cash cow, after all.
Running’s Wokish have been gobsmacked recently by the suspensions of Shelby Houlihan and Sha’Carri Richardson along with the past and present reputation-dehancing behavior of implement-tosser Gwen Berry. Each of these events has provided them all with a clear fork in the road: Does she establish that she is, or at least can be, a consistent transmitter of reliable information, even if she tinges her deliveries with personal biases and preferences; or does she once again fall on her face in quiet shame, holding her nose against opprobrium from Substackville while her blinkered and circumscribed Internet cheer-squad roars on—with each of those one-note, faceless yutzes, by the way, personally insulated from future consequences of the bad reporting and “reporter” they’re “liking”?
A number of recent items might inform such a discussion:
The World Anti-Doping Association issued an entertaining response to a July 2 complaint about the Richardson suspension by two members of U.S. Congress making more excellent use of taxpayer funds. Signed by 36-year-old WADA president and former Polish intermediate hurdler Witold Bańka, the letter emphasizes that the leading voices for keeping THC on the banned-in-competition-substances list have always originated in these selfsame United States.
The letter closes by noting: “I also appreciate your interest in anti-doping policy; and, would be very keen to work with Congress to strengthen anti-doping in the U.S.; where today, approximately 90% of athletes do not compete under the terms of the Code, with the main professional leagues and college sports operating outside of that protection."
In other words, if you really want us to rid your NHL brawls of cocaine and rob your NCAA of steroids, among many other potential interventions, just keep knocking and we’re here to help you at any time.
The letter also includes this: “The decision limit for triggering a positive test for cannabis is 180 ng/mL. According to the current science, an athlete who occasionally uses cannabis, even days before a competition, would be extremely unlikely to test positive with this decision limit.”
As I have speculated, Richardson is almost certainly a chronic user (double entendre not intended, but left to stand once discovered). I don’t see why she shouldn’t be able to smoke weed as much as she likes if it’s not interfering with her performances and she can keep her urine levels under 180 ng/ml during her meets—which is exactly the situation as it is, as it was two weeks ago, and as it had stood for years before Richardson’s positive test. And fans should simply admit that they feel that this sort of choice is fine, scaling with their feelings about any number of runners’ proudly excessive coffee or even beer habits, rather than trying to have it both ways and pretend that Richardson smoked pot only in response to receiving unhappy news, as has been the prevailing trend among her supporters. I understand what they’re trying to do here, but it’s not going to work.Alison Wade’s July 12 Fast Women newsletter is uncommonly grotesque; although most of her newsletters now contain at least one good example of why she can’t be trusted, some of them exhibit this unfortunate trait with rare clarity.
Of Faith Kipyegon’s 3:51.07 1,500 meters, Wade remarks, "Kipyegon’s time is right up there with some athletes who have question marks surrounding their performances."
”Question marks"? The “Ma’s Army” women admitted to doping (not that they appear to have had any real choice). Such tepid phrasing may not seem like something worth jumping on, but to me it is a manifestation of denial, indicative of the fantasy world that lies at the center of any associated media project.
Regarding Richardson’s ban, Wade observes: “WADA said, ‘The U.S. has been one of the most vocal and strong advocates for [banning weed],' which is interesting because some of the coverage has made it sound like the opposite is the case."
Really? “The coverage” conflicts with observed reality? Well, look who's responsible for generating almost all of that coverage.
But what difference does it make? The WADA letter is referring to its own direct dealings with U.S. officials, not whatever the American media produces about those interactions.
Of USA Track and Field’s decision to not monkey with their own rules after the fact of Richardson’s ban, and find a way to put her on the 400-meter relay team, Wade says she agrees with this non-monkeying, yet complains: “I wish they had clarified which rule(s) they used in making their decision.” Girl, Richardson was banned for breaking a rule. If you don’t know which one, stop listening to podcasts for a minute and do some research.
Wade’s greatest “offense” this week is probably mentioning Gwen Berry winning a $10,000 child-care grant without a peep about other Gwen Berry happenings; I’m not saying Berry should be pummeled into an apology she plainly doesn’t feel the need to offer, but I am going to emphasize very strongly what an unpleasant person Alison Wade is when it comes to racism, and it doesn’t appear to stop there. My single biggest gripe with her work is her spreading a story about a nonexistent instance of racism and using it as a reason to propose ending Gary Cantrell’s career in running.
This marked her a zealot in the extreme, and now she’s completing a dubious, symmetrical arc: After raising hell over a white man’s non-racism, she’s ignoring a black woman’s endless hate-stream altogether. (By the way, if Laz is really that bad, why is no one yelling about him now?)
People can go ahead and call this philosophy of selective outrage whatever they want, but it manifests here as nothing more than a dishonest individual using a fairly sizable platform to lie and repurpose a great deal of personal unpleasantness. She and her online band of joyless gadabouts will keep doing their thing, and I can keep pointing it out and ensuring I never get laid by any self-hating liberal white American female person for the rest of my life. Yeah, I made that bed and am happy to slumber in it.
But while Wade’s second-straight newsletter omission of Berry’s antics was the strongest indicator of its writer’s unreliability, the funniest unintentional giveaway of the whole week, in her newsletter or anywhere, was this one:
Someone who takes a “men need to be replaced so that women can fix things” feminist stance would do well to not admit for all to see that she thinks a dude has come up with a great idea, and that women should swipe it and financially capitalize on it. I really don’t know how to respond to the equivalent of a “KICK ME!” sign on the class bully’s crotch other than to take my swat and look around in primal arousal for more asses to spank. Or something like that.
There is so much raw, unprocessed dumb here, unbefitting of someone who, unlike the Lyndsay Crouses and Erin Strouts of the world, can actually think if she tries. Most importantly, the omission of compelling Gwen Berry facts reveals anew that the Wokish are not aiming to engage people in “anti-racism”; this is all an effort to dominate the conversation by force, since they’ve established that there is no room for any kind of discussion here. Do they really expect people they lie to and scream at to just shut up and get on board, hangdog-style?
And again, I have to wonder: What’s the deal with the editor-in-chief of Runner’s World being the last set of eyes on this “newsletter” before it goes out?Thanks to a Strout tweet, I was forced to discover a spectacular electronic diorama of Wokish frivolity called The 19th News(letter).
The story Strout links to is a joke, not mentioning that McNeal has already been suspended for missing three drug tests in 2017, and that she was suspended this time for tampering with a series of medical notes. It says, “Have some understanding.”
Contrary to what apologists for Brianna McNeal and other dopers think, reporting demands little more than a brain, distinguishing fact from fiction, and tabling your emotions. Two of these three areas are improvable in almost everyone. McNeal wasn't banned for five years having an abortion.
An earlier story in the same publication starts with “Sha’Carri Richardson, a star sprinter, smoked marijuana as she processed news of her biological mother’s death,” and you’re welcome to read the rest of the slop if you want. It’s basically another effort to infantilize black women by assuming they can’t avoid behaviors like forging doctor’s notes, smoking blunts at the Olympic Trials or skipping drug tests. This is disgusting, not any kind of push for equality.
The 19th News(letter) is an intentional effort to conflate “independent journalism” with one-sided and truly laughable ideas. Wade does the same thing in a slightly altered form; both of these efforts are at their core no different from the various sites run by this gibbering blob of a carnival barker. I am fighting for you all, send me money. I hope it’s obvious in each instance how laughably untrue this has been all along, and that Wokism for white people is just one more way for them to fight a battle for higher status with other mostly white, uniformly self-overrating neurotics.
I may not be perfect, but if you catch me hiding or misrepresenting something in anything I write, I am counting on people to let me have it.Lize Brittin’s latest Training on Empty post doesn’t deal specifically with the doping responses, but instead explores more focus-free, unresearched, damaging stupidities from Crouse and a few from Strout. There’s a lot of good stuff here, but the message I took from it is that it’s okay to shut the hell up when you have no idea what everyone is talking about, even if you’re standing there holding a fully charged, oestrogen-misted bullhorn.
When a journalist or aspiring journalist casts aside her professional ethics and commits to unconditionally endorsing any type of ascendant in-group ideology, she consciously embarks on a journey of abusing her job in a variety of ways. She does not know or care where the journey will end, because she is not imagining that the bright sky over her limited cultural horizon might eventually be darkened by clouds, or that members of her own crew would turn out to be the biggest threat to keeping the ship headed in a generally cohesive direction from the standpoint of its deluded passengers.
Because her thousands of Twitter-fans are motivated by the same mindless self-interest she is, this non-journalist enjoys, for an unknown time, the thrill of being—in her mind if not in the court of broad public opinion—a Proponent of Something Good. Even when that ideology is as rigid, antisocial, and all-around perverse as any other—and being championed mainly by publicity hounds who are clearly faking their support to enjoy short-term status gains—getting dozens or hundreds of “likes” even for brazenly illogical and widely derided ideas provides a nice buffer against acknowledging reasonable if testy critics who, say, have only a few hundred social-media followers, but make enough testy noise on Substack to earn a steady stream of laughable, passive-aggressive punishments from his cowardly targets, with their supporter numbers growing but something inside them shrinking every time they realize their critics are correct and that they are, in fact, ugly people.
These targets reveal their frustration at having not one credible thing to say in defense of their conduct by doing what liars-for-a-cause always do: Bluster, deflect, hide, and—as this installment underscores—hope that people simply forget what you wrote last year, last week, or in your last tweet, so that those people don’t notice how obvious an unanticipated major news event has made your hypocrisy and overall moral degeneracy.
The people I write about repeatedly in these “Running from the Facts” articles are moral degenerates. I can agree with anyone who says that many of them started with good intentions, and really believed that their outbursts were part of an earnest campaign to see people who were having a suboptimal running experience enjoy a better one, at no cost. It is no longer possible to credit these pundits with good intentions, inasmuch as anyone should afford the Wokish this latitude in the first place. And to repeat myself, Wokism is an ideology, and qualifies at every checkable box as an oppressive religion. It is nothing more than an effort to flip the traditional script of oppression and prevail by force in a marketplace of ideas so incredibly and purposefully flawed that I remain amazed at how many people are not yet attuned to their degeneracy.
Positional advocacy is by definition not journalism even when the advocate operates within agreeable ethical boundaries. But to pretend that flagrantly dishonest advocacy like that in Wokism is even advocacy, let alone journalism, is madness.
In the year-plus since George Floyd’s on-his-back, motionless death at the hands of a police officer, the only thing running’s “anti-racists” have done is tell everyone how racist the world is and insist on meddling with, and proudly misusing, the English language. Some real issues they could address, measurable ones, include black-white wealth and income gaps, along with metrics pertaining to lifespan, incarceration, addiction. violent crime, employment, homeownership, educational, homelessness, health insurance, and addiction. All of the yelling in the world about the rednecks who murdered Ahmaud Arbery is just dancing on Arbery’s grave for personal gain, and those doing the clumsy boogying know it; most of them are well-off whites who have no idea what it’s like to not simply be given these things for hauling their cranky asses out of bed in the morning.
Because the Wokish are compelled to make the morally lackluster choice in every such scenario, their ship’s journey along the path of alternative journalism inevitably leads to the accumulation of visible dings and dents. Like the aforementioned doping and racism sagas, there is no way to predict when the next such “challenge” will occur, and hence no way for a Wokish pseudo-journalist to plan when she will next take a dump on her keyboard and publish the steaming mess as news—something that just might be egregious enough to cause one of those dents in the hull of her ship, now looking more like a dinghy, to become a leak. And sometimes, even if it takes a while, a ship that takes on water doesn’t recover, with the remainder of the journey short and unidirectional.