Trail Runner's (girl)boss—a BOGUS activist and a LAZY editor—SLAMS faux-feminism, claims one-percenter women are TOTALLY UNDERPAID

On international shared holidays, it's every Wokish windbag for their super-important selves

Zoe Rom is the editor-in-chief of Trail Runner, meaning that she has a laptop job for a demoralized online publication. It's a position in which Rom, by all appearances, can blunder around in whatever ways she pleases until Robin Thurston, the slash-and-burn CEO of Outside, Inc. and a wannabe cryptocurrency impresario, cans her for reasons unrelated to her performance and directly related to Thurston cutting payroll to cajole his gruesome company closer to an IPO.

Rom is not great at her job. Like all boisterous Wokish people, she's bold and brave, unless someone too vehemently disagrees with any of her sweeping pomposities. She has expressed an open antipathy toward working with white men, an attitude that in white hetero-Wokestresses translates with few exceptions to “The right white guys aren't interested in marrying me.”

Rom is also openly hypocritical in her activism. Like every trail-happy click-hound who migrates to Boulder, she's fond of both banging the climate-crisis gong and traveling by car or plane for purely recreational reasons far more often than the typical yutz.

It therefore makes perfect in-universe sense that Rom chose March 8, International Women's Day, to wax dyspeptic about sham activism and underpaid women in the professional-managerial class.

#ZoeRom is undeniably a gifted wordsmith, even someone I’d trust myself to construct a convincing persuasive-style essay provided the underlying thesis wasn't a sprawling pile—or worse, deep pool—of horseshit.

Alas, she begins this essay by complaining that portraying women athletes as “empowered” in marketing campaigns without actually empowering them is pointless, maybe even malicious, because men are continually trying to steal back what women of her generation have scrabbled so determinedly for decades to gain. Basically, she says, “No thanks for the handouts, but give us more, this time with cooler titles.”

Rom decries feminism devolving into exploitative consumerism, as though companies using sex to sell things is a new phenomenon. She even writes “This girl-power framework is condescending” while admitting she has three “Girl Power” shirts. It's safe to say she's conflicted, even confused.

Still, I'm skeptical that she's really surprised at the number of substance-free story pitches she supposedly receives, because Wokism itself is Bullshit, Inc., a multinational corporation; she wouldn't even have her editing job without it and its rancid heft. Everything Rom is presently paid to do qualifies as playing some role—however unwittingly at times—in an enormous racket aimed at silencing the powerless and absolutely burying the poor.

The most telling aspect of this story is what's absent: Any concern for non-college educated women. Rom grouses about the paucity of women in the shitbag-hoarder class—CEOs, members of U.S. Congress—but is completely silent about the millions of girls and women in the U.S. who exercise and need to earn a living, but don't have college degrees or in some cases even complete high-school educations. (There will always be a preponderance of men in Congress, because that bombworthy body now consists entirely of criminals and shills, and men are more organically suited for success in most forms of financial fraud. Women should be proud of being chronically underrepresented there.)

Without looking up figures, I can confidently assert that a vastly disproportionate number of these under-educated (on paper) and under-utilized girls and women are nonwhite. And from the very start, “social justice” politics were allegedly about lifting up exactly these kinds of citizens, not about the already well-off gaining even more clout. Yet Rom writes:

I care less about you putting a strong woman in your March 8th Instagram post, and more about what the gender breakdown of your board room is

Rom wasn't intentionally dismissive of the poor and nonwhite in her piece; in fact, I'm certain she never considered them at all when assembling it. Rom talks a solid broad-community-oriented game at her peers in pieces like these and on social media, but at root she's another self-interested neurotic, competing—whether or not she realizes it—not against men on behalf of women for gender-wide gains, but against other women for individual atatus gains. And she only seems concerned about glass ceilings and wage gaps—and I suspect her sources on the latter are shaky—when it comes to titles she sees herself capable of one day securing, maybe by next week.

Rom should care less about becoming a boardroom dominatrix (hubba hubba) and more about doing the job she already has, even if it’s beneath her.

The extremely white, probably male, thunderously incomprehensible, and decidedly shifty David Roche has been Rom’s pet columnist for years. Rom is also a client of Some Work All Play, a nominal coaching business operated by Roche and his wife Megan.

Week after week, David Roche gets paid to prove me right about both Rom's incompetence and inattention as an editor and Roche’s own unsuitability for spawning what he megadubiously packages as science-centric research reviews. Even overlooking the blatant favoritism, Rom clearly doesn't even look at the trash Roche writes before it's uploaded; given her own facility with English, it's clear she'd spot most of the linguistic hee-haws, if not many or any of the contradictions and other formal miscues he supplies.

Better yet, Roche himself was recently named a contributing editor of Trail Runner, upping the official TR editorial staff by 50 percent (from two to three).

Roche somehow holds a law degree from Columbia and his wife has a medical degree from Stanford. These two are plainly one hundred percent about status and fulfilling presumed or overt expectations. So, somewhere along the way, the power-couple train must have been derailed, and now it's on to a different form of ego-enrichment.

Why the two of them have chosen to operate a dorky coaching scam for other educated-but-ignorant people is a mystery. But whatever the case, ignoring any perks the new job title beings, David Roche was making around a grand a month for churning out articles that to a one are almost unreadable.

I may have underemphasized this, but the main reason I mock Roche’s reliably abysmal clunkers is that he's not just blogging—he actually accepts remuneration for what he submits. Money that could be going to someone who's not a white lawyer married to a white doctor, neither of whom were starving as children.

If Rom were woke instead of Wokish, David Roche would not be the recipient of what amounts to a stream of free money. In theory, some, say, fresh-out-of-college or non-college-educated Latina with useful perspectives and less inherent earning potential would have wound up with the title Roche now holds, which may have even been created for him.

Everyone coached by these twits is a fool. It's obvious why his fans get pissed off at anyone who shares my posts about him, or about anything, without being able to say why. They know why. The Roches are frauds. I’d say they're completely full of shit, but this would leave no room for being full of themselves. Maybe they're full of shit, but high on themselves; perhaps they're high on shit but full of themselves anyway.

Roche and his hilariously feeble missives, along with his whining and tweet-deleting and blocking folx and ass-covering, is the problem. Or more specifically my rudeness in pointing it out and concomitant refusal to cave to bogus narratives about social justice. 

Never criticize The Narrative if you ever want a role in this rotten industry. But if you're okay with that and prefer self-respect and integrity to Wokish lies, and pussified hysterics, this is no quandary.

Another thing I don't think I've explicitly put out there is that if I find something sufficiently funny, no matter what it is, I'm going to laugh and the world will have to live with whatever I or anyone else writes about it. No one has to read it, but only a truly weak human being would get upset at its very existence. Cloth masks help prevent the spread. And if any of these whiners could think, they would understand by now what it is I'm attacking here and why.

I mean, come on. These "nonbinary" dudes all look like less-grouchy imitators of Saturday Night Live’s “The Church Lady,” which by itself is as slapstick funny as it is decadent.

People with advanced degrees barking through a two-layered face masks that men can give birth, while underscoring the speaker's inability to think for himself or herself whatsoever, is funny—even if that crowd's silence on women being raped by "women" in various prisons is not.

There is little funnier than someone blowing a gasket when out-groupers ignore an in-group compact and just bray laughter at them. And because Wokism is demented and self-debasing by design, there is plenty to laugh at, usually with no meanness intended at all.

The LieToya show is another example. It's morbidly funny that a 300-pound, lying, insult-spewing clown shovels goodies into her overworked craw all day on Instagram while posing as a runner, like a black and bulbous version of Elmer Gantry on crystal meth. And Christ, it's even funnier that she gets sponsorships and that pro athletes line up to praise her, with everyone knowing it’s an utter sham. But the clincher is these assholes expecting normies to not only keep a straight face, but treat the whole shambling display with reverence. I'm going to actually, literally hurt myself one time trying to keep my reaction to that one quiet.

The main reason I feel no remorse about any of this is that my targets know I have them pegged. They are self-aggrandizing sloganeers pretending to advocate for voiceless members of society while constantly pleasuring themselves to their own reflections. Special occasions such as group holidays have them so eager to clamor about their special selves that their “social justice” disguises become even flimsier and more transparent than usual.

Maybe this whole cohort of comfy, lazy bumblers, despite being above criticism, can find a way to consistently provide comedy—however dark, ribald, and unintentional—while also managing to at least address in some real way the social problems they occasionally yammer about. But this seems doubtful, because these people aren't interested in helping anyone but themselves or applying tools other than flags and metagenders. To them, getting the Church Lady Parade ready for the “nonbinary” awards ceremony after some ultra everyone involved had the means to fly to represents activism. That's at least as pathetic as everything else about them, and far less entertaining.

It seems like every day is a holiday now, but nevertheless I like being reminded that within every casual calendar-declared shout-out is a lot to think about. My housemate is a Nigerian Muslim pursuing a doctorate who had never been outside her home country until a few months ago. She wandered into an unusally cold Colorado winter, and I can only imagine how the culture shock feels on top of the weather wallop, with these niceties topped by a busy academic schedule. Yet you've never seen anyone happier to be anywhere. That kind of good cheer and grace has a way of infecting others, even the undervaccinated. And I even got to say “Happy International Women's Day!” while remaining a purist. (I have plenty of homegrown women to be appreciative of, too.)

(The author would like to acknowledge mimicking the styling and tone of a Daily Mail headline in this post's title solely to maximize the level of playful—if dickish—bombast projected therefrom. He emphatically believes Ms. Rom means well most of the time, although he expresses “low confidence” in this belief.)