We* need to push back against bad people who interfere with our freedom, but we must also appropriately narrow our targets
The media are desperately fueling the very "-isms" they claim have arisen organically and are destroying America
The Boston Athletic Association, the signature event of which is the Boston Marathon, is an unusually demoralized organization even for our deranged times. It’s been driven into the gutter by the same kinds of deeply damaged people who consciously try to ruin whatever institutions, groups, or boards they decide to infiltrate or are designated by paymasters to destroy; this they accomplish by bullying, gaslighting, and expelling any dissidents not 100 percent on board with the suite of open-faced degeneracies that define and power Wokism.
Between allowing a cheating, dilapidated slob into a theoretically capped Boston Marathon field in the fall of 2021 and then adding a “nonbinary” division this spring, the Boston Athletic Association has signaled that is fully in the command of malicious, willfully incompetent ESG-driven vandals.
After this April’s marathon and the expected episode of blunt-force provocation fomented by anti-white racist and grifting powerhouse Alison Desir, the president and CEO of the B.A.A., Jack Fleming, lowered himself to issuing a statement bowing to the slavering lunatics like Desir in which he apologized for an anti-black racist event that never took place. Everyone watching knew that the entire thing, from Desir’s querulous outburst to Fleming’s contrite press release, was crap and might as well have been scripted from the outset to the last fist-humping line.
Perhaps among the lesser known of the B.A.A.’s recent sins is its banning citizens of Russia and Belarus from running the Boston Marathon in both 2022 and 2023.
There are many ways to demonstrate the both the evil and the absurdity of this policy. The evil lies the presumption that people who live in a certain country are in agreement with the worst foreign-policy decisions of whoever rules the place where they happened to be born and now live. Did anyone reading this disagree vehemently with anything Donald Trump did as president? Are any of you currently dissatisfied with the machinations of the Joseph Biden Jr. administration?
The absurdity is evident in the ease with which every country on Earth could ban Americans from their events by applying the same standard. The United States has repeatedly invaded and ruined country after country for decades on end. The American military ruined Iraq, is currently occupying one-third of Syria for the purpose of stealing its oil (which Trump at least admitted), and under Barack Obama helped return Libya to a slave economy. Trump is credited with starting no wars, but he sure as hell was enthusiastic in his perpetuation of the “conflicts” (i.e., empire-expansion salvos) he inherited from Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama, warmongering neoliberal pocket-stuffers and cocksuckers all.
It should be easy enough for American runners to manifest the basic humility required to embrace this conclusion if they consider it for all of ten seconds.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t always seem to work that way. Last spring, a Boston television station surveyed some local runners to gather their opinions about the just-announced ban, which the B.A.A. issued on April 6, 2022, when the war was less than six weeks old. Some agreed that the ban was uncalled for, but others supported it.
The comments of both Dan Fitzgerald and Seymon Dukach take the form of “There’s no good reason to ban anyone, all things considered. But it’s the right thing to do, all things considered.”
It’s possible that neither man would have given the answer he did had he not knowingly been talking to a news reporter. At least I hope so. You can sense that these people had been recently propagandized into accepting an inappropriate moral decision, and that their minds were dimly aware of this, but that in the end they were afraid of sounding too logical because that would upset someone. Going against media narratives is functionally not allowed in the U.S. anymore, and these two interviewees—over a year ago, no less—exemplified, or appeared to exemplify, this unconscious self-censoring. (It’s especially disconcerting that Dukach spent much of his childhood in the U.S.S.R., wound up in the U.S., and still presents the mien of a Stalinist despot, over thirty years later.)
The media are expressly inviting people to hate and mistrust not just Russian president Vladimir Putin and his soldiers, but everyday Russian and Belarussian people, including those we know nothing about other than the fact that they, like us, enjoy running, in large part to forget about wars and warmongers and conflict in general. So much for Wokism being about increasing social harmony and strengthening community bonds.
In addition to projecting the idea that Russian people suck, the media also portray the good people of Ukraine as blameless victims. While it’s true they didn’t deserve to have their country invaded, given that white supremacy is supposedly among the leading threats to American democracy, why is the U.S. so keen on a citizenry that forms probably the most white-nationalist place (it’s not really a country anymore) on Earth?
There was a time, not all that long ago, when headlines like this made the rounds:
Funny enough, but the widespread Nazism and endemic distaste for sexual diversity formerly characterizing Ukraine must have magically vanished since late February of 2022, because there’s no hint of these banalities even existing anymore. Unless, that is, you check out reliable outlets such as The Grayzone and its YouTube channel, which provide grim but accurate information about the extent to which Ukraine and its people are progressively and methodically being hammered to pieces.
At the same time, Ukrainian people don’t deserve our automatic distaste or mistrust, either. I have one friend from back in the day (c. 2001-2003) from the Ukraine and another from Russia I met more recently. Both are runners. Like me, both have bachelor’s degrees in physics; unlike me, they both pursued the discipline to a far more thorough extent than that.
I have no doubt these two men would enjoy each other’s company. They’re into the same things. In fact, when I met the second guy in 2018, he reminded me so much of the first that I wondered for the first time in years how Oleg was doing. That might just be the racist in me eager to conflate Russians with Ukrainians, but I still thought it.
The people behind the war should be rounded up and shot. Most of the people now occupying the B.A.A. as well as the New York Road Runners are ruthless jerks, but at a more drone-caliber level. And the organization still retains some quality, running-centered people trying to do their jobs without landing in the line of fire of vicious morons both within the organizations and bloated sacks of couch-bound malice like Desir who flit between events looking for joylessness to spread and fights to start. Those stoics won’t be there much longer, but their quiet resistance and continued work in the running sector is appreciated.
Russians are not automatically jerks. Neither are Ukrainians, anyone from the Middle East, Chinese, or Mexicans. I feel like I have to state the obvious because the media and government are busy successfully demonizing everyday people from all these places, sometimes insidiously, while simultaneously exalting depraved and bumbling wastelords like Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelenskyy. And even Zelenskyy himself is a puppet.
Most countries are by definition governed by sociopaths; since most people are not sociopaths, most people do not agree with the nasty things their own countries’ leaders do. And even if they do agree with distressing precepts, if they don’t say or do anything that unfairly disrupts anyone else’s life, it’s not up to us or anyone else to police anyone’s privately held convictions.
In 2022, the hallowed tennis tournament Wimbledon banned Russian and Belarussian players from playing in its July extravaganza. The ban was lifted for 2023, but Great Britain of all places ever taking such a moral stance was pretty rich. Great Britain was all-in on the 2003 invasion and subsequent near-total destruction of Iraq, which never did dick-all to the British.
In the meantime, bunghole-class “journalists” continue to hector star tennis players from the two maligned nations at press conferences. Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus is the number-two-ranked women’s tennis player on the planet, and reporters at the now-in-progress French Open have been hectoring Sabalenka with war-related nonsense. In January, Belarussian player Victoria Azarenka endured the same treatment at the Australian Open.
In a better world, Sabalenka would address the people flinging these verbal turds at her by telling them, “Look, I’m 24, a knockout, and one of the best athletes in the world. You’re a talentless hack with an iPad who serves as a stenographer for Western imperialist nonsense. I’d say I’m doing a lot better than your soft ass is. Now shut up and lick my clam.” But merely imagining this scenario playing out has considerable entertainment value.
I’ll be churning out a few similarly themed posts soon. The idea of exercising critical restraint probably looks funny coming from someone who systematically seeks out people and institutions to dump on, but this side project is one way to try to keep myself between certain rhetorical guardrails while illuminating the ways the media subvert nuance and drive up the level of blind hatred against everyone in every definable human creed, culture, and subpopulation.