The river of shit from the distaff running-media is overflowing its dildo-strewn banks. Should we bother building levees or just enjoy the toxic flood?
Latoya Snell, whose entire life centers on Internet schemes and deceptions, should know better than anyone that this is NOT how effective gaslighting of a nettlesome commentator is done
Someone sent me a recent post on Facebook by Latoya Snell demonstrating that Snell was deeply troubled by some of my recent articles about her. She seemed especially triggered by what I wrote after she binged and ambled her way through the New York City Marathon on November 5—with not one but two cellphones strapped to her dilapidated carcass—and also cited an article I published in advance of marathon weekend bemoaning the untethered carnival of “current thing” grifters and indolent, cowardly jogging-media ignoramuses that both the NYCM and road-running as a whole have become.
Snell’s apparent strategy here was to attempt to portray me—a person who, unlike Snell, can count marathon finishes and other things accurately, understands that recovering alcoholics don’t get to take bad days off to get plastered, and has not been accused of lying or cheating once since starting this Substack—as unmoored merely because I don’t hold back when describing exactly who she is, what she’s about, and what her antics are doing to the credibility of citizen running as a cultural enterprise, one that until recently included fixed, absolute, fair, and—at least until the advent of Wokism—easily adhered-to and universally enforced rules of conduct and participation.
Notice that Snell doesn’t respond whatsoever to the sole reason I started to criticize her years ago, which is that she is a blatantly dishonest person pretending to be a role model while enjoying both praise and protection from the entire running industry and what passes for its media.
As Snell notes, we’ve interacted before. What she omits is that these interactions have included me confronting her with evidence that she’s a liar and her using every scamming, gutless turd’s ally—i.e., a bout of witless filibustering followed by a slap of the block-button—as an escape-hatch.
Here’s an example from when I was still using Twitter.
Snell has, in my estimation, made a miscue. She has blocked me on social media, only to later voluntarily rise up and engage in a vociferous and self-immolating polemic about someone who she won’t name but obviously intends for her followers to identify and punish. That means she’ll continue scanning this place.
And if Snell were remotely confident in one word of her diatribe, why not post it right under this article? Or, since she lacks the minimal courage required for such a salvo, why not name me in her social-media huffing-and-puffing and get me added to a formal government list of people known to be engaging in violent, perhaps Viagra-induced hallucinations?
The answer is no mystery, and also explains why Snell’s “sly” attempts to get her followers to pepper me with nonsense because she’s too BOCK-BOCK-BOCK! chick-ennnnnn to confront me herself don’t work. As much as Snell may despise the threat my words might pose to the extent and longevity of her shameless array of swindles, she doesn’t have an answer to any of it. As a flagrant liar, she’s obliged to engage in equally flagrant and desperate episodes of dissembling to defend her ill-gotten status and material goodies, and she’s obligated for obvious reasons to avoid conversing with her critics directly.
She also likes speculating about my sex life. I wonder how much money she’d demand to fellate me, and how much cash I would require in turn—perhaps from the same sources—to let her flapping-and-chomping moon-face anywhere near my tender-bits. And I’m told some commenters to Snell’s outburst speculated that I might be gay, like buttsex-with-guys gay. Since being gay is supposedly not only not a drawback an asset—Snell has described herself as “queer,” even if this is yet another fib—I’m not sure what this spirited assessment was intended to adjudicate.
The reason I often include facile details about the tragicomic difficulties someone of Snell’s heft has with basic body-cranny hygiene is simple: She refuses, along with the slime-brokers with the companies that sponsor her, to respond to basic questions about the countless false claims she’s made. That failure necessarily extends to her entire corporate and online support network, which includes a handful of former elite runners who could refrain from egging her on but instead help catalyze the whole morbid production. So, I escalate my rhetoric.
She’s not the only one I do this with. For as long as people who have posted or amplified lies or even innocent falsehoods ignore my articles and refuse to revisit these intentional or accidental errors of fact, I will continue to remind them they still have a debt to the sport, and if I believe them to be reacting out of, say, a nepotistic sense of entitlement or resentments borne of never-realized post-collegiate feminist-conquest reveries, I’ll say so. Especially when I see that this provokes reactions, and maybe even a smidgen of unwilling but useful introspection. I try to use it a last or at least delayed dialectic resort, but in my view, I’m actually being too kind. So far.
Snell herself is a bully who goes on equally long-winded, granular tirades. But for all her bravado, she’s unwilling to face the same kind of blunt verbiage she throws at others despite the fact that she has the entire post-apocalyptic running industry behind every one of her lies, however outrageous. This is the real problem; roving, noisy nonsense-factories have been a fixed feature in free societies forever, but only a few years ago did the running industry and media become infiltrated and then captured by immoral, insecure, illiterate and ignorant interlopers and start not only tolerating but requiring purposeful vandals like Snell.
As an influencer and a constitutive sociopath whose every online word and photo is aimed at gaining mo’ money, Snell appears to honestly think my writing about her and others is aimed at the same thing. I suppose that technically she’s right; anyone who charges money, or even uses a platform that permits this option, is operating a grift. At some level, I’m trying or hoping with some of my posts to sway people’s opinions and being crowdfunded to do so. But on the whole, she couldn’t be more wrong. The very last thing I would want is attention from a mob of strangers, especially if I knew they were paying me to lie and commit social arson, and especially if I also knew that these “allies” knew I was lying and were not cheering for me but merely for the triumphantly stubby middle-finger to decency I represented.
Snell is no dummy and knows all of these things about herself and her followers. I think she probably also knows that I have actually followed running for a very long time don’t rely on the existence of cartoonishly morbid characters like her to maintain a viable Substack.
As I have not been a user of Facebook, a mosh-pit of censorship and shitlib lunacies, for close to five years, had a copy the post not appeared in my inbox, I would have missed it. In fact, contrary to what Snell thinks, I do not follow any of her accounts. I don’t have to in order to remain abreast of the details of her online carnival of idiocy and self-degradation. Snell, not surprisingly, has a significant army of detractors whose soldiers routinely send me evidence of her latest gibbering, dissembling, and wiping her ass all over a sport that these days quite frankly deserves the six-foot-wide tequila-shart streaks and the unholy stink, as does any institution that celebrates similar immoralities.
I’m sure Snell has been regularly checking in here, as I’m one of the few people—maybe the only one—with the nerve to highlight Snell’s behavioral misconduct and, moreover, that of the broken industry shepherding her to a farrago of unearned race bibs, pointless running shoes, and positive press. But in addition to not liking what she sees because it’s deeply unflattering and 100 percent true, she also must have been short on grievance fodder the other day and decided to use me as indirect substrate for extracting sympathy, and ultimately cash, from her low-wattage followers.
I’ll give Snell this: I don’t use a thesaurus, but the fact that Snell is well-read, at least for a fake 2023 runner, and harps on my overly purple prose suggests that I should keep my articles free of infrequently used words and paragraph-long sentences if I want them to become more accessible to precisely the kind of waterheads who would ignore them even if they understood them.
Noted, ma’am.
Stammering blabbermouth Emelia Benton, another suspiciously yellow-bellied “brown” person, has disgorged an article about a woman named Ariane Hendrix who is now apparently the fastest-ever American-born black female marathon runner. This is standard identity-based fare from Benton; the noteworthy aspect as that she is another smug clickbait-only dingbat who repeatedly makes a livid fool of herself and only gets work owing to the pathological climate of contemporary media and everything else about quotidian life.
Benton decided to pick a fight with me in 2020 when I wasn’t around to respond. After Derek Murphy of Marathon Investigation linked to one of my articles on his Facebook MI page, Benton had nothing at all to say about the content of the article. Instead, she opined that “blogging is not journalism,” that “journalism has everything to do with credible, reputable outlets,” and that she “died a little when [she] saw [my article] described as a ‘good read.’” She also claimed that Murphy linking to my article was evidence of “white men supporting white men.” She had a lot of rabid support from a cadre of whining, censorious libtards as unable to face the reality of the Laz Lake affair as were Benton and the acid-belching waddlers and scrunchy-faced know-nothings who travel in her wobbly Internet circles.
Well, after that smackdown, one would expect to see evidence from Benton of superior writing and journalism, in credible outlets. She’s had several years since that decisive assessment of my own craftsmanship to strut her literary and investigative stuff.
Here’s the opening sentence from her story about Hendrix:
When Ariane Hendrix, 35, ran her first marathon in Bismarck, North Dakota, in 2012, she started off on a similar trajectory as many new recreational runners.
Pretend Benton didn’t know where this North Dakota race had taken place. This sentence then becomes
When Ariane Hendrix, 35, ran her first marathon, in 2012, she started off on a similar trajectory as many new recreational runners.
Since Benton—who allegedly has a bachelor’s degree in journalism—and I are not on speaking terms, would someone mind asking her what that comma after “marathon” is for? And while you’re at it, you might ask her why she has no idea how to choose or use simple prepositions despite writing for credible, well-edited outlets like Outside Online and Women’s Running. Ask her on what planet the phrase “a similar trajectory as many new recreational runners” is preferable to, oh, “a trajectory similar to that of other new runners,” or even “a typical new runner’s trajectory.” (See, “new recreational runner” is redundant. Unless, that is, this genius can name any elite runners, current or retired, who took a direct couch-to-pro-contract path.)
That’s one sentence, and the rest of the article is just as littered with intrusive punctuation and inappropriate or poorly ordered words as this one is. Of course, if the outlets Benton were writing for—mostly Runner’s World and the Outside, Inc. suite of piss-and-pubes-splattered urinal-cakes in digital form—were in fact credible, they would have editors who were interested in editing. Conspicuously, none of them do.
Since it appears that this story first appeared on Outside Online before metastasizing unexamined to Women’s Running, one of the eagle-eyed souls in the image below is apparently responsible for green-lighting Benton’s piece. I know from an adversarial four-year-old experience—one that at the time surprised me with its unprofessionalism, as unbeknownst to me and others such race- and gender-based unprofessionalism was rapidly becoming normative by 2019—that Christopher Keyes and Molly Mirhashem are absolutely useless (it’s clear why Mirhashem abandoned her girlish mess of a Substack almost two years ago). The others virtually have to be incompetent or at least uncommonly lazy if they work for Outside CEO Robin Thurston.
In terms of the content, isn’t it funny how the Wokish think it’s perfectly progressive to create a performance-based list of names that expressly excludes immigrants of color, whereas anyone else who strays anywhere close to that zone is instantly tabbed a racist?
If we’re going to maintain lists like these, why not have one for literal African-Americans who arrived here as children with little or nothing, then thrived both as runners and citizens? Ruben Sança, for example, came to the United States with his family from the small West African island nation of Cape Verde. Then 13, he spoke no English and lived in a part of Boston not especially welcoming to running or anything else. But there he discovered distance running, eventually setting records at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, gaining U.S. citizenship, representing Cape Verde in the 2012 Summer Olympics, and pounding out a 2:18:47 marathon off 125-mile weeks at a muscular 6’ 2”. He now has an M.B.A. from UML and a meaningful full-time position at the university. At 36, he recently set a personal road best for 10 miles.
The only problem with the few people out there—American or otherwise— like Ruben is that they don’t aspire to be a part of this environment. They are too focused on achievements to be handed “achievements.” And although I have only heard one person pronounce “Sança” correctly—it sounds like “Sanza” with a soft “z”—Ruben has never gotten annoyed at this, because he never gets annoyed at anything; I’m a prime example of how irritation can distract people from focusing on more rewarding personal pursuits, and he elects to treat ambient static and other challenges differently. Regardless, if there is anyone who deserves recognition for the triumphing-over-adversity stories and traits these Wokish toplists are ostensibly highlighting, it’s him.
Also, at some point, someone is eventually going to come along who has one black grandparent and three white grandparents and identifies as black despite looking more or less like me, and the whole on-off scheme keeping this list plausible will collapse. The Wokish are blunt-minded, emotionally and socially immature people buried up to their armpits in binary thinking, and when challenged with subtleties that expose the frailties in their race-first thinking, they just ignore inconvenient facts and lunge in the direction of new grifting-loci once their nuance-induced intracranial spasms subside.
Benton really is the perfect inverse of a competent, truth-seeking reporter. In this article, she credits Hendrix’ perseverance during covid with Hendrix making a jump to the next competitive level.
Funny thing about that: According to Benton, no one was supposed to be training hard during “the pandemic” at all.
Yes, Benton actually wrote that. Did she believe it in March 2020? Does she now? Doubtful in both cases. Benton is a pure claptrap-spewing slop-tart who eagerly takes money to spew racist, unreadable chum. And if she did believe it, she’s simply too gullible to be playing journalist, not that anyone needed further proof that Benton is not merely a liar but, like most ersatz liberals, organically frazzled and credulous enough to believe anything establishment Democrats and democidal ramrods like Anthony Fauci say.
Zero point zero stars, ma’am.
This is getting close to the e-mail length limit, so instead of analyzing the risible hagiography of the uncommonly inept Erin Strout that Jen Ator wrote a week and a half ago for Women’s Running that I referred to the other day, I’ll save that task for another day and instead invite you to read the tribute yourself. If you’re at all familiar with Strout, ask yourself if it looks as if Ator—the shiftless former editor of Women’s Running and a cut-out character who left the rag at the same time Strout did around two years ago, with few signs that departing was voluntary for either—went out of her way to avoid making a single true compliment about Strout: about her work, her orientation to journalism, her capacity to inspire others. Ator was clearly writing about the intrepid, progressive heroine Strout imagines herself to be instead of the shrewish, brain-damaged munchkinette everyone else sees Strout to be.
But I do have room for noting my favorite two lines from Trail Runner editor Zoe Rom’s November 9 masterpiece, “Boston Versus New York City: Which Marathon Is Harder?”
Boston also has a qualifying standard, too
Regardless of the course, running a marathon is a major accomplishment, and to all the competitors who toed the line, we say hats off to you and your majorly impressive data!
Like Snell, Benton, Strout, Rom, and Mirhashem themselves, there is no need whatsoever for this article to be circulating among members of the perambulating classes. You would have to be exceptionally clueless to believe there is any real debate over which of these courses is faster, ceteris paribus, and why this is. But in today’s corporate publishing climate, contributory or coherent content is not, as Alison Wade might put it, a major issue. As long as a file containing a set of words conforms to anti-white, anti-female, and anti-scientific standards and someone can get paid for writing it, it’s good to go. And a yuuuuuuge boo to all those psychotic Substackers struggling to master the basics of English and cursory research while experts like Benton soar toward Pulitzer prizes.
If these decrepit actors—and yes, they’re all acting—really want the “mistreatment” to stop, then they can stop lying, stop hiding, and start doing better than middle-school children who are not only snorting their Adderall but packing their ears, bungholes, and navels with it as well, to prolifically imbecilic, self-defeating, and—let’s face it—entertaining effect.