Wokesters greet sincere efforts to engage them with silence, yet clamor for cancellations over April Fool's Day jokes
It's no wonder their media heroes are despicable human beings
Other than Letsrun.com, running’s pundit class has universally failed to even acknowledge—let alone try to rebut or merely decry—Sonia O’Sullivan’s March 24 editorial calling for the restoration of fairness in female sport. Its members have also ignored another sweeping treatment of the subject in the March 30 British edition of the New Statesman by Tanya Allred, “There’s got to be a better way to include transgender women in sport.” They will probably also ignore this piece by cyclist and Olympic gold medalist Nicole Cooke.
It’s funny how quickly the “believe women” battle cry that reached its zenith during #MeToo gave way to progressively more disclaimer-saddled versions, and has been gradually whittled down to approximately, “believe women who say the right things, i.e., women known until recently as men, women who are not Tara Reade, women who are not conservative SCOTUS nominees, and women who attack other women.”
More than ever, it’s clear that any statement that contravenes the self-contradictory narrative “trans women are biological women”—however neatly the contravening statement conforms to incontrovertible scientific realities—is simply tossed into the “transphobic” bin, with no need for anyone to even examine its content.
Running’s staunchest current crusader for anti-women “women’s rights,” Erin Strout, provided a perfect example of this childish mode of argumentation in an exchange last week with the @runnersweb Twitter account.
So instead of admitting that she has no rational response, Strout uses her interlocutor's phantom transphobia as an excuse to peace out. She even directs that interlocutor to consult a glossary of ad hoc gender terms, when she herself either needs to review the absolute basics of human reproductive biology or just admit that she’s arguing an anti-scientific position founded on rank emotional static and a desire to be seen as “good” by people themselves unmoored from moral and general sanity.
The twin turdic pillars upon which the crapslab of Wokism rests are intellectual dishonesty and abject cowardice, the latter being a common but not obligatory consequence of the former. It’s not surprising, then, that these supposedly serious and reform-oriented running fans and humanists have avoided engaging with the ideas of women like O’Sullivan, Allred, and Cooke, and instead have taken aim for the millionth time at their favorite whipping boy for having the nerve—on a day dedicated to finding humor in organically humorous situations—to take the piss out of supposed science advocates now pretending by the tens of thousands to be legitimately confused by the basic anatomical differences between male and female human bodies.
When Letsrun.com posted an April Fool’s Day Joke underscoring the inanity of “trans women are biological women,” these (selectively) fierce and (in their fantasies) courageous warriors for (various perversions of) moral rectitude were eager to unfurl another burst of Twitter performative art, knowing that anyone who makes Letsrun.com a punching bag in the winking bunghole of leftist fever-dreams Twitter has become will have plenty of company as well as the option to simply ban unwanted input.
For those who lack the willingness to read through the replies to these tweets, they include deep thoughts like, “They give too much coverage to something that isn't affecting the sport in the way they feel like it is,” “They pick & choose when to have journalistic integrity,” “They don't even try to hide their partisan takes these days. Something needs to give. There should be consequences for this sort of behavior,” and “How can we raise awareness about this? LetsRun needs to be held accountable. If not now, when?” One guy with eleven followers suggested trying to somehow get Letsrun in trouble with USATF.
(It's too bad Mark Remy, also known as “Dumb Runner,” is a leftist clown himself, because he's a talented humorist whose political inclinations have forced him to ignore an unprecedented trove of potential running-related laughs, as 95 percent of the raw material for giggles across all American institutions now emanates from Wokish antics. He's like a guy with a raging purple hard-on who has a chance to bang the whole Victoria's Secret catalog waiting for him in the next room, but chooses instead to fall on his face and start wildly humping the floor.)
iRunFar.com posted an April Fool’s Day joke of its own, this one about the Hardrock 100 gender controversy. But the pushback from orcs and buzzards in the comments must have been too much, because the site owner(s) unfortunately caved and deleted their work. You can view an archived copy here.
Dammit, everyone knows you should never give children screaming and banging silverware on the highchair tray what they want.
I don’t think I need to point out the glaring ironies to which these people are absolutely immune: Twitter users deriding the level of discourse on other platforms; cancel-happy leftists—i.e., proud, if fake, liberals—accusing others of partisanship and intolerance; lying, incompetent journalists and sterile, humorless drones suggesting that other people can’t do journalism and aren’t funny, either.
It’s also worth emphasizing that anyone who points out that transfemales are in fact males—be it using a joke as a vehicle or simply stating it as drily as “one plus one equals two”—is speaking the truth, no matter what transfemales call themselves to feel better in a judgmental world, what drugs they take and what surgeries they elect to have to improve this mimicry, and how many people the trans-activist community—which is laden with sociopaths and other obviously deranged people—try to gaslight into oblivion. Some trans people, in fact, do not contest such characterizations.
So, the Wokish fundamentally want Letsrun.com vaporized for the crime of being honest about the ongoing dishonesty promulgated by “inclusion” advocates—“activists” who themselves lie nonstop, often viciously and without retribution.
These whiners give away their real source of fear when yammering uncontrollably within their Twitter safe spaces: That, thanks largely to the intense coverage of Lia Thomas, the public is catching on to the fraudulence of the “transwomen don’t have an advantage over legitimate females” claim—a deceit the Wokesters quite stupidly expected to survive stunts like Thomas suiting up as a woman or anything in this thread. Emily Bridges may be the next athlete to offer the public an important lesson that Wokish people dearly don’t want taught in the correct way.
When David Pinsonneault typed, “This is harmful & not landing the way you think it is outside of your thin, partisan, bubble,” what he was really saying, whether he knew it or not, is, “We can’t control how that’s going to land outside our partisan Woke bubble, and that’s not fair!”
Twitter threads like these are flatulent displays of powerlessness and dismay. By coupling takes like “This is absolutely unacceptable! Can you believe it?!” to “This is classic, they’ve always been like this, no surprise at all,” this crew is giving away that the root of their frustration lies not in anything specific in the Letsrun.com story, but in the fact that anyone is even allowed to make jokes they don’t like, over and over, especially the owners of a site with a huge runner following.
Strout, as is often the case with the humor-starved, has become a parody of her already darkly comical self. It was absurd enough that she of all people wrote an article last week calling for more kindness; Strout—the only known member of the Lollipop Guild to survive the trek along the Yellow Brick Road all the way from Oz to Arizona—is the antithesis of kindness, as are most loud leftists who use inclusion-jabber as a front for personal-resentment-fueled attacks on people and institutions.
As a result, Strout attracts similarly entertaining people into her tent of victimhood, like the “sportsbra expert” who wrote “the day after a day trans day… The privilege… privilege.. I can’t.” Sorry, ma’am, but April Fool’s Day was here long before all these ad hoc “awareness holidays” were. And anyone who really expects no one to laugh at “holidays” like “Gay Uncle Day” has a serious psychological problem.
The thing that sends me over the edge with these zealots, and the reason I won’t shut up about them until something changes, is how cavalier they are about trying to permanently eliminate people’s income streams. I have intense personal reasons for this that will never disappear, but people’s casual dismissal of the very livelihoods of their rhetorical adversaries was never a thing until about five years ago. This is a trend that should upset everyone, because anyone can now become a cancellation target.
How is getting someone canceled any different from literally disabling that person so that he or she can’t do their job, or get another one in the same—or maybe any— field? At least in the case of actual physical harm, the “deplatformed” have access to government insurance money.
But the clincher, another angle impossible to over-emphasize, is that these people are the liars. At a minimum, people who believe it’s fair to allow transfemales into female sports are absolutely wrong, but most of them know at this point that they are pushing a fiction. They want to cancel people not for getting in the way of legitimate progress, but for refusing to buy into Wokish fictions. This is ugly, but not surprising, since the only way to keep a lie-fueled movement afloat in the longer term is to systematically eliminate voices of dissent, or, failing that, portray these critics as the dishonest and loony ones in the mix.
The most telling example of Strout’s recent Twitter behavior is easy to miss if you don’t follow criticism of The New York Times, now an unabashed government-propaganda outlet and employer of hyper-privileged, brain-dead social-climbers.
Strout either has no idea who Taylor Lorenz is and what she’s done or—more likely—completely agrees with Lorenz’s unusually vicious and stalker-like approach to dealing with her own self-loathing.
I’ve mentioned Lorenz and her appalling ways, but that was before her campaigns to destroy people became even worse. Lorenz, technically a reporter, is from Greenwich, Connecticut, which makes Boulder look like a shanty town. and boasts of having attended a Swiss boarding school. Knowing these facts alone and with access to photos of her, it’s easy to see why Lorenz hates herself and makes women her primary targets. Her face looks like a cross between a flounder’s and a Shar Pei’s.
You may not think she’s unattractive, but believe me, Taylor Lorenz—who has the same basic hole in her soul and zombie-like affect as her feckless NYT colleague and conduct-defender, Lindsay Crouse— thinks she is. If anyone can produce a better reason for a why a supremely privileged white woman with media credentials consistently gaslights women better-looking and more successful than herself, I’ll entertain alternative theories. Lorenz is simply too unremarkable for her own social standing and self-concept, rendering her suite of other remarkable advantages irrelevant in her insatiable, careerist, badly damaged mind.
Fortunately, she’ll only grow to hate herself even more as she grows older and saggier (she has given her age in recent years as being anywhere between 36 and 43), so even if her career somehow remains intact, her self-image will slide further into the toilet and soon she’ll just be another drunken, Valium-popping character on Archer.
In response to NBC’s talking possum, Chuck Todd, giving Lorenz a place to spill fake tears and screw her already haggard face into something even more grotesque, Glenn Greenwald published a long piece on Friday on the eagerness of members of the corporate media to ruin people’s lives, focusing largely on Lorenz:
Lorenz has left behind a long list of victims — from teenagers whose old tweets and family history she dug up and published to a businesswoman whose life she destroyed to journalists and others about whom she maliciously lied. She was one of the media leaders mocking and shaming a college student for having published an op-ed in The New York Times on how intolerance for dissent from liberal pieties on college campuses has made her afraid to speak out. She's the vintage mean girl. So malignant and deceitful and destructive are Lorenz's shoddy journalistic methods that it took more than an hour for this investigative reporter to document in this great YouTube video all the lies and destruction Lorenz has left in her wake.
Please do watch the video below. It’s 78 minutes long, yet remarkably lean and information-rich. It’s also infuriating. If you can watch it and come away with the idea that Lorenz is any better a person than Harvey Weinstein, you may want to clear your head of static and run that analysis again. Preying on teenagers, targeting successful women, flat-out making things up in plain sight and keeping her standing anyway—it’s all here.
This post is getting too long to send by e-mail, so think of the one that was posted seconds later as a primer. You should also read Lize Brittin’s analysis of how the reluctance of the media to do its job is actually hurting women athletes, which is great other than failing to solve the problem of most Wokesters wanting this damage and disruption to happen. If white men built it, then it needs to be razed, full stop, and Lord help the genuine runners and fans plunging to the ground amid the wreckage.
This “movement” and others in the Wokish bag of reputation-scorching tricks is not about human rights, or about the fair distribution of athletic or other forms of equity. This is about people maligning other people and their accomplishments owing to garden-variety personal animus, envy, and the grisly nurturing of victimhood as a means of career advancement. If you’re seeing the production as anything else at this point, you’re probably one of its cringeworthy managers.