The Wokish people of running are hostile, cowardly, and ruthlessly stupid even by the standards of the faith
No one should take superstitious or racist raving seriously, no matter how entrenched social sicknesses have become or the costs of challenging Wokism's delirious high priests and messenger-folk
On September 11, 2020, Outside Online published an undisguised hit piece on a popular race director whose offense was declining to allow any political chatter on his Facebook page as a matter of policy. Even though the victim of this ambush, Gary Cantrell, had told the person whose comments he disallowed “I’m with you (in spirit),” this burst of contrived outrage—catalyzed by the nationwide race-mania set off that spring by the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis—quickly spread to Runner’s World and Citius Mag, the latter having two years earlier published a glowing profile on Cantrell (aka Laz Lake).
Molly Mirhashem—the proud editor of the Outside Online piece and a craven killer of accepted, but overly white and hence unpublishable, submissions—seems to have abandoned her urinal of a Substack, nothing more than an unemptied electronic trash can for primal Wokish bleats since its inception. But she still has her job as deputy digital editor of Outside Online, and she has continued to commission Huber to take slaps at running figures and businesses along with having him join the ranks of the “maybe Shelby Houlihan didn’t dope” yutzes vandalizing running from other angles.
I wrote about this unjustified attack eleven days after Huber’s story hit the Web. I revisited the issue the following month, mainly in response to Alison Wade of Fast-Women calling for “various extremes,” including boycotting Cantrell’s events, in response to what she felt had been insufficient punishment for a made-up crime. After a smattering of semi-literate Facebook monkeys complained to Derek Murphy for sharing this post on his Marathon Investigation page—some of them all but threatening Murphy himself with cancellation for this toxic maneuver—I pointlessly explained my “stop lying” stance in a post the next day.
About a week and a half later, I made a post that criticized Erin Strout, then with Women’s Running, and Chris Chavez of Citius Mag, who had created a separate ruckus around the time of the Cantrell smear-job with a crude but highly successful virtue-signaling gambit. (For reference, protecting the body-shame of female runners on Twitter is not Wokish but Wokish-adjacent. This curries favor with the same bloc of white ersatz-liberal women who align with Wokish precepts mainly because they resent what’s missing from their easy suburban lives—a man—and require white males as a scapegoat for this, as does every other flag-flapping, grudge-grinding gadabout now weaponizing entire DSM-V chapters for once-unlikely status gains.)
The post, in likening recent leftist goon-quads to right-wing religious crusaders, also criticized Ann Coulter, leftism, and a made-up cleric named Pastor Cletus. But it was criticizing Strout that led to my being banned from writing for Podium Runner, a now-dead entity to which I’d been contributing about an article a month over the past year. (This post a few days before was equally frothy, albeit with the spittle-flecks peppering different targets.)
Jonathan Beverly, then the editor of Podium Runner and someone I’d worked with for over twenty years, revealed himself to be spineless in his cancellation e-mail. In my initial response to his message, which I didn’t send until months later, I conveyed this perception in efficient and far stronger language. (That may have had something to do with the disappearance in the spring of 2021 of all ten of the Podium Runner articles I’d written for the site between late 2019 and the fall of 2020, a move remarkable for its peevishness if not its apparently intended effect.1)
For the record, I didn’t insult Mr. Beverly because he’d nixed my Podium Runner privileges; I was already busy making my rowdy, impolite exit from the corporate running-media environment before anyone gave me a boot in the ass to hasten the process. I insulted him because his message—in addition to helpfully affirming that I have a right to say anything I want—had included the words “Apart from writing for us, in my opinion, you're not helping any cause with your attacks.”
I’ll probably never know exactly which of Strout’s theses Beverly would be willing to defend on the ground, and I don’t care. But he’s certainly aware that dumb, frightened little sacks of resentment like Strout have one weapon on their side, one that in a sane world would be useless but has almost unlimited power under Wokism, and that weapon is demanding that disagreeable people shut up or be shut up, period, including those unfairly displaced from jobs and other posts thanks to shrews unfit fot the job of journalism like Erin Strout.
But of course I did not stop writing about any of this garbage for what it was, because the garbage kept coming, metastasizing and shape-shifting to suit the culture-war poison of the week. I criticized demonization tactics in early 2021, pointed out the wreckage this was doing that May, and summarized the apparent benefits of the explosion of “anti-racist” runners in July (about a year into officially mega-funded Wokism).
Shockingly, my yelling for the benefit of a few thousand people once or twice a week somehow didn’t keep the Wokish needle from edging closer to the red.
Throughout 2021 and 2022, Alison Desir, who had already begun using the February 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery as a springboard for grifting and an excuse to label running a hotbed of “white supremacy” and “whiteness,” continued to enjoy reputational and material ascendancy throughout the running industry despite being a warbling racist who by all bloated appearances no longer regularly exercises despite once proclaiming that running saved her life. She’s also as gutless as the rest of the Wokish twerps, unable to defend a word of her blithering idiocy and quick with the block-button instead.
Meanwhile, sociopathic starch-and-lipid vacuum and globular drama-goblin Latoya Shauntay Snell has continued to enjoy sponsorships, free race entries, and protection from criticism simply because she’s fat, black, and—this is critical to the swindle—eager to blame the oppressive structure of the world for her real and invented physical and mental problems without being able to actually point out any specific villains.
Wokism is all about “dismantling” and “disrupting” and “problematizing” “structures,” which translates to “ignore every rule, even those rooted in simple common decency.” Victims don’t have to identify individual aggressors or hostilities; that a fat black loudmouth must be a victim of systemic racism is axiomatic in this demented stew of unhappy philosophies.
Under Wokism, recklessly indecent humans like Desir and Snell are invariably situated in places where they can do the most damage. The whole scheme, honestly, is “Give us what’s yours because it’s actually ours, even though we damn straight ain’t working for any of it. And fuck the poor.” It’s an equity movement, not an equality movement; the distinction is vital.
Every single person who has written a favorable profile of Desir, or hosted her on a podcast, or plugged her book, or retweeted any of her defiant brainfarts, or otherwise suggested that her blatantly racist stances and imbecilic jibber-jabber signify a bold push for equality or humanistic overtures is guilty of demoralizing the sport (and may need to see a neurologist or an addiction specialist). But it doesn’t matter what their intentions are—although these are rarely cryptic and usually center on maximizing page-clicks and looking good to other demoralized persons and businesses in the industry, not a belief that any of her self-serving machinations are helpful.
What they’re doing is feckless and clearly sick-minded, even dangerous. But why should any of them care? They didn’t start the problem.
That such me-me-me rhetoric disguised as progressive oratory is not helpful is evident in the deterioration of black lives under the “Black Lives Matter”-rich Biden administration. Desir, last I checked, has never mentioned this awful problem; she’s probably unaware of it, because despite her skin color, she’s basically one more spoiled white girl from the New York City suburbs gifted a pair of degrees from Columbia. As a petty, raucous flea-brain repeatedly given opportunities she visibly does not deserve, she is the precise opposite of oppressed.
This shit, Mr. Beverly, is what is “not helping any cause.” Excepting, that is, the promotion of divisiveness, the sizes of the bank accounts of a coterie of social-grievance swindlers, and the ESG scores of demoralized CEOs worldwide. I didn’t start launching salvos at people in a vacuum after decades of writing about and otherwise being involved in distance running.
There is a vast element of Wokish lunacy missing from this post, and it is currently the one in the brightest spotlight: the self-derailing yet unstoppable train overloaded with social hazards—severed teenage sex organs, stolen sports victories, neo-pronouns, and a hatred of beauty and normalcy—that flies the banner of LGBTQIA but in fact is entirely the operation of TransLunacy Railways, with normal gay people advised to rely on alternative means of travel.
Trans people are people with gender dysphoria, a difficult but treatable mental illness. They have traditionally walked among us in numbers approaching one in every hundred souls. Trans rights activists, or TRAs—not all of whom identify as trans people—are a different, darker story. They are in the main young victims of a curiously potent social contagion that in past decades might have led them to be “Cure-Heads” (1980s) or “Goths” (1990 and beyond, earlier in the U.K.). Many are depressed, autistic, sad, with covid not helping. They are kids in need of some sort of anchor, even if that anchor is a deranged online cult. Empowerment is empowerment.
Lately, an interesting and inevitable war has broken out between the editorial offices of The New York Times and TRAs both within and outside the NYT. I’ll write a separate post about the vast impact of this stuff on running soon, but for now, in short, the NYT decided to start publishing some stories that were not one hundred percent behind the loopy notions TRAs propose, such as the idea that parents should maybe know when their kids are going by a different name and gender at school or are making plans to have their breasts or genitals surgically reformatted.
TRAs can’t have anything hinting at accurate coverage of gender issues, so a couple of weeks ago, both GLAAD and a group of people calling themselves “New York Times contributors”—some of whom are current staffers, but most of whom just wanted to remind everyone they were once published in the NYT—used open letters to blast the paper for its sudden abandonment of unconditionally cheering for whatever the craziest TRAs were saying.
This time, editors at the NYT actually pushed back. That garnered a scolding about “enabling a hostile workplace” from a union representative, which in turn led about a dozen current employees to tell the union and others to suck it. Vanity Fair has a round-up of the kerfuffle to date, but the main thing to remember about the ceaseless media focus on a tiny, needy, hapless fraction of the population is that it’s a distraction.
The media, the government, and the WEF/Davos types now enthusiastically enacting their “Vaccinate everyone and feed them bugs” plans throughout Western nations, and there is only so much lying they can do about Ukraine, Wall Street and the economy, crime, the U.S.-Mexico border, climate action, poverty, healthcare costs and access, censorship and surveillance, student loan debt relief, the coronavirus, public schools, and Sino-Martian balloons without supplementing this propaganda with chum about the silliness that commoners—people in households that clear less than, say, $500,000 a year—are brawling over.
TRAs really are disgusting people, psychotically childish in their demands and sense of justice and malignant “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck that!!!” attitude toward essential genetics and the standard social contract alike. But knowledge deficits are not what hold them back from accepting reality. It doesn’t matter how patiently you explain to them scientific basics that a typical eight-year-old could grasp, because the whole point is that they, as Wokish people, are in the business of dismantling systems.
When they complain that people are using pseudoscience or outdated science to refute their dingbat claims, they are lying. They know that biological science is aligned squarely against them. They only pretend to care about science because people constantly remind them that their claims are laughably unscientific. Being unscientific, irrational, disruptive, and as much of a jerk as possible is the entire point.
Ruining nice things built by others—sports for girls and women, road and trail races, gear companies, running clubs, magazines, careers—is not merely a consequence of imperfect concept of fairness but an animating and guiding force of Wokism. Some of the agents commissioned for this far-flung cultural demolition are too legitimately unbalanced and unwell to understand the roles they’re playing in this madness; they’ve simply percolated into visibility on placed like Instagram and in the “pages” of Trail Runner or Women’s Running because shifting sociocultural winds have altered the natural selection process and sucked this people in previously unthinkable upward commercial directions.
Virtually every incentive at the citizen level of running today is rooted in an immoral or unethical stipulation or principle. The New York Road Runners, Brooks Running, HOKA, Hansons Running, Strava, the Boston Athletic Association, Altra, and Oiselle (ahead of the game and setting the general tone by glorifying a fat white female cheater over five years ago) are just the companies whose antics come immediately to mind. Nike is in its own category of degradation for having excessive, invariably diabolical influence on nearly every athletic enterprise on the planet and for helping to ensure that doping dictates the competitive landscape not just in running but across sports.
It’s one thing for pro athletes and others to play along with this for attention and personal gain, or merely to look like an ally, even knowing that the allyship demanded is violently sick. And if companies want to lend support to fleet but unwell people like Nikki Hiltz, or pure eating-and-insult machines posing unconvincingly as runners, that’s their capitalistic prerogative.
But the idea that the rest of the world should have to obey the rhetorical and labeling mandates spilling from mentally deranged ego-trippers and grifters, or otherwise be expelled from the scene, is several bridges too far. Some of us would rather be canceled and retain our principles than debase ourselves in the face of this avalanche of obvious stupidity to remain in good standing with an entire industry of wayward actors.
Between covid, Wokism, and the decreasing purchasing power of money, everyone with a delusional disorder seems to feel freer than ever to just lie, lie, lie. A good example of a total reprobate in this area, an incorrigible gasbag of fantasy-proficiencies, is Aysha Mirza. Mirza hates Snell and pretends this is because Snell is a liar, but it’s actually because Snell has managed to monetize her dishonesty and Mirza has not.
Mirza was a huge fan of my writing about Snell and used to send me cannon fodder from her parents’ house in New Jersey, where she lives in her forties. But it was clear all along that she was lying about being a healthcare professional, and in her eyes, I became an instant adversary for finally calling her out. She blocked me on Twitter and immediately made me a target of her posts, revealing herself to be one more loser who lies about herself on social media and is too chickenshit to own up to it or deal directly with critics. And anyone can see from her comments about masking and air purifiers that she’s unhinged.
This woman has privately admitted to me the fictitious nature of her nuttiest claims, all of which are centered not on convincing anyone she really has a brain but on getting a dude with money to marry her and fund her life. That’s often the deal with these bimbos who unconvincingly fake being intelligent, and she probably can’t tell that everyone can see this.
I’m not upset at her for being a loon, or a “Muslim” who poses almost naked and routinely gets hammered. Insecure bitches gonna bitch, insecurely and incessantly. I’m pissed at her for wasting a good chunk of my time pretending to be on the side of integrity.
See how her Twitter bio shifted like Picasso’s cat(s) as soon as covid presented an opportunity for her to make herself look important.
In a haste to once again look smart, Mirza uploaded evidence that she doesn’t have a master’s degree, just some certificate. And it wouldn’t matter if she did, given the startlingly stupid things she says about covid and biology in general.
People like these are not charming. And sharing a society with an increasing number of people who make up private, clashing, absurdist realities is not what anyone sane and conscious signed up for. As Curtis Yarvin of Gray Mirror recently put it:
In case anyone wants to read any of these fallen articles: