Slobbering race-grifters like Emilia Benton and Alison Desir are worried that running companies' handouts are tapering off
Desir's latest idea: Not only comped entries for black and brown people with no demonstrated background in running, but free shoes, gear, plane tickets, and hotel rooms, too
Emelia Benton is a glowering, muddle-minded muckraker who harbors both South American ancestry and a malignant attitude, making her both off-putting as a citizen and the ideal contemporary freelance running journalist. And luckily for her, running knowledge, general intelligence, and writing skill are all obsolete prerequisites, as she is riddled with devastating deficits in all three areas.
Because Benton’s output has repeatedly appeared in Runner’s World, now no more than a lie-fest operated by special-needs cowards, and the various extraneous Wokeblown brands maintained by Outside, Inc.—chiefly Women’s Running, Trail Runner and Outside Online—she and her mindless capering have also figured prominently on Beck of the Pack.
Trail Runner posted a piece by Benton yesterday called “New Study Highlights Critical Steps Toward Equity in the Trail Running Community.” It’s nothing more than a complaint that dingbats like Benton and super-grifter Alison Desir—one of Benton’s heroes and an unusually stupid bigot even among running’s flab-lined, cross-eyed bullhorns of scamming, disruption, and bloat—are not getting enough free stuff from white people.
In this predictably horrid piece, Benton—in a sentence in which she craftily omits closing punctation to keep both Trail Runner readers and its absentee editor, Zoe Rom, alert—names all of the demoralized companies who desperately fulfilled part of their diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements by funding the garbage-research discussed in the article:
With the possible exception of Smartwool, whatever that is and whatever it does, these companies have all spent three-plus years being near or at the forefront of the ugliest escapades in citizen running. Altra, based on its Instagram account, was founded or recently acquired by high-school dropouts with an excessive appetite for inhaling the vaporized residues of industrial adhesives. Brooks is the company that dumped someone from its “Run Happy” squad for correctly pointing out that Layota Snell is a psychotic slob, and Strava is of a piece with these slag-heap outfits but uses less-hoarse, more-sophisticated language to fake its pro-bullshit positions.
The whole article—like this post, come to think of it, or almost anything—may be summarized in one paragraph: Desir didn’t already have enough hate-driven ways to direct money toward her own ample ass, so she created yet another “nonprofit” organization based on the false premise that running is beset by white supremacy. Companies in the running industry are starting to quietly tire of financially supporting a cause they knew from the start is illegitimate but have had no choice to fake supporting if they wanted to stay in business. Desir doesn’t ever want the money-train to stop, so she’s trying to stoke its engine and make sure the tracks ahead of it remain clear by telling white people—whom she clearly despises despite them having almost solely funded her immoral, brain-dead, ever-more-gibbous existence for years—that they need to keep the handouts coming or she’ll tell the world they’re racist. Benton’s article is an attempt to spread that message.
Benton’s latest foray into frazzled fabulism explains that one of Desir’s “nonprofits,” the Running Industry Diversity Coalition, recently released three studies re-establishing that running is thoroughly racist toward people of color. And the conclusion is always the same: Running is systemically racist because not every managerial-level job in the industry has been set aside for high-BMI, functionally illiterate women of color (with a smattering of men of color posing as women of color allowed) who make MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid sound like Maya Angelou whenever they open their mouths and begin discharging acidic nonsense.
Even if nonwhite people were, on average, as organically interested in distance running as white people are—and no one expects that every ethnic group has the same collective affinity for every cultural niche and pursuit on offer—they still wouldn’t hold most of the industry jobs for lack of numbers, and that’s (somewhat precariously) assuming equal competence among all human subpopulations. But they’re not as interested, because they literally can’t afford to be. Distance running is an activity for people with an excess of time, money, or both—especially trail running.
Desir is a waterhead, but because swindling money is all she does, she’s smart enough to know that black people are especially underrepresented in hobbies that cost a lot of money and always will be, so she’ll continue to preferentially target trail running because trail running will always remain overwhelmingly white. And the fact that she’s therefore surely aware that black poverty in America is both terrible and worsening, yet never seems to acknowledge this, makes her an even worse person than is evident from spending five minutes on her FUCK U WHITEY!-flavored Instagram account.
Alison Desir doesn’t want to help improve the quality of life of black Americans; she’s a bottomless pit of shameless avarice who thinks only of her own anti-human but apparently lucrative ends.
Equity beggars are so used to getting what they want no matter how inane their rationales are for receiving handouts that these beggars’ rationales are somehow becoming more boldly and stridently retarded. Benton writes:
RIDC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that was established in October 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and in the wake of the tragic deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, which sparked a social justice reckoning across nearly every industry, including the running industry.
This is a frank admission that running isn’t racist, that the nonprofit is a scam, and that the person behind the nonprofit is an unusually greasy turd. Arbery was out jogging when he was murdered, but wasn’t a runner in any meaningful sense. Floyd and Taylor could have probably written better running-related articles than Emilia Benton does, but they clearly had no connection whatsoever to distance running. And although none of the people mentioned deserved to die the way they did, a trip into stories beyond those supplied by the mainstream media about these people’s deaths suggests that not all of them had been leading saintly lives when they ended prematurely.
I don’t bother reading most of the article because Benton’s prose is too artless and clunky to wade through on the rare occasions she’s not bitching or lying about her subject matter. I skipped instead to the exciting conclusion, where I learned that Desir still isn’t subtle about demanding literal handouts—big ones:
One key aspect of enacting tangible change is increasing financial accessibility to trail runners of all levels, Désir says. For runners at the recreational level, this demonstrates how complimentary entries for these races that are otherwise hard to gain entry to simply isn’t enough, as runners have to also factor in the expenses of trail-specific gear and equipment, as well as travel and lodging to these races, often held in remote areas.
So Desir thinks race organizers should buy nonwhite people shoes and gear, fly them to their events, and give them complementary entries. And keep in mind that Desir’s concept of a suitable “recreational runner” isn’t just someone who’s nonwhite, but a specimen as rotund, demanding, slack-minded, and childish as herself. Such people have not been traditionally easy to find, but I’m sure plenty of white race directors have room in their budgets for intense nationwide searches.
As grotesque and blatant as this is—just an obnoxious, greedy liar screeching “GIMME GIMME GIMME!” and knowing she’ll likely extract what she wants thanks to instilling terror on the part of the sad-sacks she petitions—it’s also exactly what “equity” means. Don’t confuse the term with “equality,” which implies “equality of opportunity.” Equity means “equality of outcome,” which means redistributing resources from people who have them to people who scream about things like reparations and the lack of black trail runners in Montana.
Black and brown people have, to my knowledge, never been turned away from running events when attempting to run or compete; they have the opportunity to enter—it’s not up to others to recruit them. Maybe black and brown people aren’t especially drawn to the trail scene because they, like me, see many of the white people involved not as racists but as insufferably ignorant and insincere and not much fun to hang around or listen to.
And forgive me for also believing that people of color are not currently finding it difficult to find jobs in the running industry.
It may take a while—and by then I hopefully won’t be paying attention to other distance runners, real or fake, at all—but eventually even the dummies out there will figure out what I’ve been trying to tell them for years: Since the only people the Wokish care about or are ever truly interested in is themselves, the Wokish eventually turn on each other.
The extent to which Rom and David Roche have trashed Trail Runner is downright impressive. Even if a shift toward sham-social-justice nonsense was obligatory for every corporate entity alive in 2020, how these two, of all candidates, were put in charge of what’s left of a once-representative publication for trail runners is a mystery. But not many people are in a position to make hiring decisions at Outside, Inc., and everyone on that very short list has already proven himself worthless at the helm.
Desir’s rise to heroine status is one of the main reasons I have lost all respect for organized running and almost everyone involved. Combining the collective treatment of Desir with the Nikki Hiltz ”nonbinary” circus, I’m starting to realize that some of the people I have believed were unwillingly caving to “social justice” pressures were actually just depthless as well as gutless all along, and that running has always been as powerful a draw for pro-cheating, half-literate fist-fuckers as any other assortment of bored, vain, and yes, mostly white people.
I’ll continue posting training-related ideas for as long as that feels at all worthwhile, but I’m done following the professional arm of the sport. I really can’t stand anyone in it or anything about it. Besides, whatever a bunch of drugged-up stick-men and pixies are up to in between trying to get their pronouns “correct” for interviews is the least important of my present external concerns. Not to sound like a Wokester crying to be rescued from another one of his or her own catastrophically bad decisions, but why the hell couldn’t I have gotten hooked at 14 on something likely to kill me within a few years instead of this magnet for hyper-conforming, squint-eyed freaks?