Will Latoya Snell, Emilia Benton, and other race-grifters follow through on their offer to improve the Boston Marathon experience for ALL runners?

This is like termites threatening to stalk out of a newly built house

On the eve of the 2024 Boston Marathon, I posted an article about relentlessly self-beclowning race-baiter Emilia Benton’s glorification of Liz Rock, the founder of the grifting-in-motion group TrailBlazHERS. In a completely ordinary move for diversity-extortionists, Rock was planning to run the race using a free, diversity-program-provided number right after filing a frivolous, discrimination-based lawsuit against the organization that hosts the marathon, the Boston Athletic Association.

It didn’t take a Nostradamus-caliber prognosticator to foresee that these same people and their more prominent online allies would find something to whine about after the marathon was over. But before we* get to that, we need to examine an Instagram post on April 13, two days before the marathon.

The post, contributed by “The Runtrovert,” was another delusional defense of Alison Desir and the campaign she launched against the B.A.A. and others for the nonexistent instance of anti-black racism at last year’s Boston Marathon. In an unusually pompous and untethered manner even for a standard-issue Wokish harridan, The ‘Vert proposed that the race itself was likely to disappear if not every invented offense by slavering idiots like Desir, Rock, and Latoya Snell is henceforth met with anything besides unquestioning handouts.

I contributed a comment that The ‘Vert hasn’t deleted but has apparently hidden, perhaps because she was disgusted by my ruthless beatings of the words “honesty” and “dialogue.” It’s almost exactly what I would have written if “responding” to the comment here, so this saves me some typing, an exercise I conspicuously struggle with.

The next day, on marathon eve, the Boston Globe’s Instagram account praised the virtues of not a single race-grifter but an entire event devoted to the “This won’t actually help the people we say it’s for, but it will sure help us!” The caption’s lede:

The unmissable fact that the Boston Marathon is overwhelmingly white helped fuel the creation of a new race in 2021: 26.TRUE (@26.truemarathon), a marathon course entirely within the city of Boston that organizers and advocates say is crucial to ensuring that people of color see long distance running as a viable and welcoming sport.

The Boston Marathon may be “overwhelmingly white,” being held in a state and country that’s overwhelmingly white and charging $275 to enter, but the only parts of it that matter to running fans seem to have a diversity “problem” in the opposite direction, based on the below image of the 2023 Boston Marathon men’s lead pack.

I again responded just as I would have in an indirect retort here on Beck of the Pack.

Rock completed the race in 6:01:57, which would have placed her 10,830th of out the 10,909 women credited with finishing the race had she been counted in the official results. I’m not sure what the story is with her omission and I don’t feel it’s important.

In the aftermath, Rock declared that she might never return to the Boston Marathon again, a heroically watery sentiment the water-headed Benton declared an instant philosophical classic.

This signaled Snell to maneuver her bulk into the conversation and emit a few characteristic grunts of rowdy assent, triggering digital applause and, yes, another courageous instance of STANDING WITH GRIFTERS.

If the entire distance-running segment of the American population had its say, I’m pretty sure the overwhelming majority of survey respondents would be greatly relieved if this class of chronic troublemaker lost interest in the running scene for good. Benton has wobbled through a marathon at around 8-minute-per-mile pace (in supershoes) while offering comically uninformed training advice, while Snell, Desir, and Rock can barely move. All would nevertheless be welcomed without controversy at races across the land if they weren’t such malignant presences, but of course controversy is their stock-in-trade and their only reason for infecting the running environment and its mass-communications structures in the first place.

The uglier side, increasingly so, of these grifts is their absolute insincerity. Any stories emanating from sporting culture, including the “diversity”-centered ones, involve exclusively comfortable people. Meanwhile, black Americans in inner cities are wiping each other out at fantastic rates, and their lives are being further complicated by the explosion of migrants being directed predominantly to such locales.

Black people as a rule have caught on to Biden being as unconcerned with them as he is with the poor white American rubes Biden continually derogates, as they tend to appreciate the impacts of things like food prices doubling over five years and a roll-back of the policing, prosecution, and sentencing of Americans “of color.”

Snell, like many black Americans, has taken a “pro-Palestine” position. Yet she, the married mother of a teenage son, also claims to be “queer” and is aghast that U.S. embassies overseas will be unable to display pride flags.

In addition to not appreciating the tragicomic conflict between these two positions, this gibbering, lying clown who’s been the recipient of underserved handouts and image-cleansing from all angles for five-plus years feels a lack of support.

Snell, Benton, and the rest of running’s small but noisy coterie of flagrantly insincere social activists are certainly welcome to take their bellowing elsewhere from now on in mid-April. But that’s only a start. They should also all delete their social-media profiles, and Benton should never again submit another piece of the alphabet-butchering garbage she calls writing for publication. If these activists are truly committed to improving the sport of running, the best and most emphatic way for them to demonstrate this would be for them to disappear from the scene without uttering a single squawk as the waddle dejectedly away, their inevitably finite purpose to corporations finally and blessedly spent.