Running's influencers, editors and "journalists" are now indistinguishable from each other, continued
Wherein I continue pushing piano wire through my temples into whatever's still there
(This is this, continued.)
The New York Times, America’s so-called “paper of record,” is no longer a legitimate news entity, but rather a cult of pseudo-liberal religious fanatics encouraged to use the heft of their platforms, often leading with Twitter, for purposeful ruin. The heroine of my previous post, Lindsay Crouse, plays a minor role in the grotesque overall production despite her egregious behavior, as most regular NYT readers aren’t drawn to its running-related content. But an assigned and expected role hers plainly is.
If you haven’t yet any of read Matt Taibbi’s ongoing chronicle of left-media cover-ups or Jesse Singal’s disconsolate review of the media’s ongoing implosion or otherwise remain unconvinced, read this column centering on the escapades of Taylor Lorenz, last week’s primary reminder that inside every privileged, neatly groomed Wokish female reporter (often from Connecticut or an adjoining state) is just another cross-eyed, butthole-exploring primate prone to chortling after sniffing its finger and inviting others do to the same. Or try this post from a popular, formerly pseudonymous blogger the NYT decided needed outing — and then punishing, when he finally outed himself — no matter what this might do to his career.
This story absolutely tops the list, though. For now. Donald (“never Don”) J. McNeil Jr. was the perfect cranky old coot to write a 20,000-word explanation of his own canceling from the New York Times. His account is the kind of occasional reminder of how awful it would be to live forever and watch generation after generation of cute, curious children mature in significant numbers into maniacally butthole-probing, stinky-digit-waggling adult monkeys intent on causing endless gratuitous pain for others while demanding a pain-free emotional space in return. I reckon that almost every one of the rare individuals worldwide who makes it to the age of 110 would become a tall-tower-climbing, sniper-rifle-trained mass-murderer if they could only summon the energy.
When I was a work-study student University of Vermont three decades ago—and don’t feel bad for me, it was easy as hell and I was sometimes drunk—swarms of nasties like Lorenz dotted the campus. These were your comparatively dull products of second-tier prep schools whose unwavering impulse to amass money in life was easier to overlook than their contempt for folks with other, arguably more noble goals. They were eager to look down on anyone no matter how hard they themselves had been walloped with the congenital dimwit-stick or, as we all suddenly found ourselves about to graduate, saddled with premature and progressively worsening beer-bloat.
Given the disproportionate spike in college costs since the early 1990s, I’m sure the student body UVM now looks much the same, only worse. Most of them had just the sort of machinery wired into their minds that would have made them perfect Twitter assassins today: A total absence of conscience when it came to saying or doing whatever was required to maintain the illusion that affluent people—however stupid and immoral and plainly incapable of creating, managing or merely salvaging anything—needed to be in control of all of society’s levers.
There is nothing inherently ignoble about trying to amass personal wealth, and certainly nothing immoral about being born unusually well-off. But dumb people with money, and especially the limitless societal wheels it greases if it comes from family, are a menace to us all, as these leprous greed-heads end up running the U.S. government. I bet you’ve already thought of at least three examples: One in politics, one in entertainment, and one in sports. A number of my neighbors fit this description, too, although their wealth is more at the NCAA Division-I level than Major League-caliber, making their actual influence less but their screeching proportionally more insufferable.
Kicking that aside and getting to my main point in this miniseries, these people, whatever else they sought to absorb and degrade, never used to be attracted to journalism careers; they were, in fact, the kind of adulterous, tax-dodging Dom Perignon miscreants reporters wound up writing true but unflattering stories about. The explosion of opportunities to join established outlets (e.g., The Boston Globe) and upstart pubs (e.g., Vox, Slate) alike seems to have drawn individuals toward journalism who otherwise would have, say, sold properties for their parents’ real-estate firms, become hack lawyers, landed in perpetual boozy therapy, or all three.
But more than that, today’s younger Millennials and Gen Zers are overwhelmingly pussified and trained to avoid anything that causes them any twinge of psycho-emotional discomfort, including open attempts to stifle the expression of any “troublesome”—that’s Wokish for “blasphemous”—idea.
Finally, since insecure women of means (or aspirations to same) flock to anything they think will increase their sex appeal, it’s not all that surprising that the twentysomethings and thirtysomethings now writing about distance running are an unusually virulent subtype of this already anti-journalist form of neo-journalist.
The result is a still-cresting wave of Kleenex-prone weirdos, egomaniacs with brazen inferiority complexes, with media jobs whose approach is the exact opposite of what any journalist should possess and unwaveringly maintain: Push an agenda rather than seek and disperse the truth. Select convenient facts and discard others rather than arrange and present them as they actually are. And no, that last jab above is not just a facile, chauvinistic smear. I report what I see.
The “whys” of the startling unraveling of journalism as a profession, however, are for another day. What’s clear is that all of the misery and malignance Crouse has on continual blast from her elite-shitbird perch maps with eerie fidelity onto the slag heap the dedicated running media has become.
Crouse doesn’t seem to have the malicious streak of Lorenz, but this could easily be a function of her lower profile. She’s a social climber, nothing more (and not even close to hot enough to have her whole “I’ll get away with this” approach make any sort of sense, but I suppose that’s a matter of taste). She is usually too busy telling fun fibs about her made-up triumphs over numerous potentially devastating, albeit imaginary, obstacles to tell mean fibs or stretch the truth about others, except when she's on one of her man-hating, Nike-bashing rampages.
As I proposed yesterday, her peers seem to look up to her not because they believe her accounts of greatness or overcoming something, but because she continually and transparently lies about having overcome something, and a certain type of reader sees that it's okay to lie about affluent-white-girl problems nonstop while playing the fragile victim. What most of those readers don’t see—not that this would discourage them—is that it’s all part of the Wokish quest to assume control of American institutions by continually insisting that protesting even their most brazen injustices is morally unacceptable.
If you think I sound like a crank (in the sense of delusional, not angry; I can’t really argue with the latter), please refer to again to the sheer number of absurd ejections and attempted ejections of older white dudes from prominent media and other positions lately. These are some twats with teeth on a serious rampage, and having mesmerized a fair portion of the citizenry into being too confused and apologetic all at once to appreciate the reality of what standing around and watching accomplishes.
Remember, there is no endpoint to this “equality” nonsense; it is a patent flipping of the oppression script, nothing more. This is why Wokishly coined terms like “whiteness” is seen as a legitimate reason to dismiss someone and their ideas altogether.
Apart from lying as part of being on the payroll of the Grey Lady, Crouse, with her dubious attempts at refined prose stripped away, comes across very much as an “influencer” in the Latoya Shauntay Snell mold. She clearly dislikes her body and explicitly blames this on men. (Harvard!) If you can stand it, look at Crouse’s tweets—true to dirtbag form, she deletes a lot of them, so be quick—and Snell’s Instagram profile, or really any randomly selected white-girl-journalist/fat-girl-influencer, and, stylistic differences aside, you’ll see that their approaches are eerily similar: Someone put an obstacle in my way (this challenge is usually imaginary) but goddamn it I’m soldiering on ‘cuz nothing stops me (this usually involves a made-up workout or photo of a heavyset person fiercely brandishing, say, a small dumbbell or Gu packet).
Snell is a carnival barker in a too-tight workout costume, advertising herself as a voice for the oppressed while making her litany of grievances against Them the sole attraction. The endgame here is exactly like that of any religious con-artist wailing about a different flavor contrived enemy, be it homosexuals, immigrants, or Satan himself: Send me money and I will speak truth to power. And in Joel Osteen’s case, huge, pricey teeth. She is surely laughing, appreciatively, at the white-guilt money she manages to rake in.
Also, at some point, in addition to weeding out obvious psychopaths and liars, running would do well to punish the use of the word “athlete” by any jabbering glop of goo who happens to be wearing workout gear. I don’t see an athlete when I look at Snell, and neither does anyone else. I see, or imagine, in excess of two hundred pounds of rage heaving its squawking, snarling self up the road, maybe in the direction of the finish line, maybe taking a short cut. You know I say this with love and empathy, as becoming extraordinarily adroit at cardio while moving in mostly straight lines without falling down is a respectable feat quite apart from requiring no athletic skill whatsoever. Distance running doesn’t qualify a sport even when performed those who do it well. I run like a duck not quite sure if the next step will snap its last painful hemorrhoids or not, and I’m three times as fast as seven-hour almost-marathoner. (And what is next in this waddle to the bottom? Some 450-pounder with a felony record and born with two huge, floppy ears for legs, but determined to go sub-eight hours in the marathon at least once?
Just as most Christians don’t believe every word or even much of what their favorite preacher says, no one who follows Snell really believes that she’s an honest person, even apart from her proven lies about her running. They cheer on the fact that she’s jabbing a symbolic thumb in the eye of someone in an oppressor group. It’s crap. And although Crouse draws a salary while Snell runs a donate-button-rich con, and they don’t really look much alike or have the same background, it’s the same whiny—but strategic!—message:
I am strong, but also so, so fragile I have to say it constantly, blame the world, and lie so I can keep getting paid.
With this scheme in place—with the people promoting running from the raucous, barely moving bottom sounding exactly like those at the apex of the American media—how could anything on the supposed credibility spectrum in between, the dedicated running outlets, be anything besides the filling of a compost sandwich?
Most of them, being moral degenerates themselves, love Lindsay Crouse, including her lies. You can find a number of podcasts on which Crouse is a guest and both parties seem genuinely unaware that she did not make the Olympic Trials or even come close. That so many runners see this narcissistic junkbox of hoi polloi fantasies as a person worth sucking up speaks ill of the NYT’s choice to place an animated slab if spoiled meat in her position.
But why look under the hood? Of course Erin Strout can “relate to this”—she’s a Twitter toilet overflowing with the same turds. Go girl!
Yeah. Big, necessary ego check. But no small, unnecessary fact check.
Start where you’re at.
In the interest of mutual harm reduction, I’m again cutting this off before it hits 2,000 words. I’ll dispatch one more post in this series tomorrow before moving on for a bit.