Politics and the Death of Kayfabe

For Giant Gio

As long-time followers of mine will know, I am a lifelong aficionado of pro-wrestling, especially of the 1980s and 1990s. However, my fandom does not extend far into the 2000s, I am much more likely to go back to the 1970s than range forwards to the modern era, and there is a very good reason for that: the death of kayfabe. As almost everyone knows, pro-wrestling isn’t ‘real’, by which I mean the participants are not really fighting each other and the outcomes of matches are predetermined; in some cases, whole matches are scripted ahead of time. In wrestling parlance this is known as a ‘work’, the wrestlers – or ‘workers’ – cooperate in creating the illusion of a real match and in keeping the fans invested in the outcome. Fans who do not know that wrestling is ‘worked’ are called ‘marks’, this is old carny terminology from the days when wrestling was a side show on travelling carnivals. Back then, the pro-wrestler would challenge anyone in the crowd to face him and some brave volunteer would put their hand up. Only the volunteer was secretly another worker, and hence the crowd were literally ‘marks’ for this ruse. Over the years, the volunteer element was dropped, and promoters would instead put on marquee matches of star wrestlers and eventually whole cards. The maintenance of the illusion that wrestling was real was called ‘kayfabe’ and wrestling promoters and their workers would go to great lengths to ‘protect the business’. Pro-wrestling matches were typically worked between babyfaces and heels, or if you prefer heroes and villains. On television, announcers would use euphemisms such as ‘fan favourites’ and ‘rulebreakers’. Protecting the business was taken so seriously that babyfaces and heels had to keep to separate locker-rooms and were not allowed to be seen to socialise in public. Workers would also go to other lengths to protect the business, for example, by getting into bar fights with any punks who dared suggest that wrestling was fake. The opposite of a ‘work’ in wrestling is a ‘shoot’. A shoot is anything ‘real’ and ‘unscripted’. The workers who would takedown real-life punks were known as ‘shooters’; such workers were hard men in real life and promoters would also occasionally use them to enforce locker-room discipline. Famously, the young Hulk Hogan had his leg broken by Hiro Matsuda, an enforcer for the legendary Florida promoter, Eddie Graham. If you watched WWF pro-wrestling in the 1980s, you might remember a Polynesian wrestler called Haku, he was later known as Meng in WCW. He was a shooter who beat up many a punk in a bar fight.

In any case, all this was to change by the end of the 1990s and kayfabe would soon die forever. The opposite of a ‘mark’ is a ‘smart’, that is a fan who is wise to the tricks of the business. At one time most fans of pro-wrestling were marks and there were only a few smarts who read newsletters about insider gossip that circulated around a few thousand people. Today virtually everyone is a ‘smart’. How did this happen? There were three main causes. First, there were a series of high-profile court cases in which WWF-owner Vince McMahon had to admit on record that pro-wrestling was not real but merely ‘sports entertainment’. Second, as the 1990s wore on, the creative teams began to become more postmodern and ‘playful’ and ‘meta’ with the angles and storylines on the screen which increasingly featured insider terminology such as ‘booker’ – the person responsible for arranging the cards and deciding who wins and loses matches. The most notorious example of this was the ‘finger-poke-of-doom’ wherein Hulk Hogan poked Kevin Nash, who promptly threw himself on the floor to be pinned for the title by Hogan. In addition, workers – especially in the upstart promotion, ECW, run by Paul Heyman – started doing more ‘shoot’ promos in which real-life insider politics were mixed in with kayfabe elements. Vince McMahon himself, who to that point had just been an announcer, was now an on-screen heel called ‘Mr. McMahon’ and the acknowledged owner of the company. This was all the wrestling equivalent of ‘breaking the fourth wall’ and winking at the camera. Third, the internet started to make it impossible to maintain kayfabe at all, especially as disgruntled workers between employers, or perhaps who were retired, started doing ‘shoot interviews’ for money in exchange for thoroughly exposing every aspect of the business. The genie could never go back into the bottle. Eventually, for me at least, this completely ruined the experience of watching wrestling owing to the rise of one of the worst things in the history of the world: the ‘smart crowd’. Rather than simply cheering for babyfaces and booing for heels, these crowds frequently ‘rebelled’ against the booking and ‘put themselves over’. They would voice their appreciation for what they saw as ‘good work’ – which had a wrong-headed bias towards feats of athleticism – and their displeasure for anything else. This is to watch wrestling in its fallen state, and I still long for the more innocent and halcyon days of genuine kayfabe. We will never get back there.

Now let’s talk about politics. The politics we see on television which pits The Democrats versus The Republicans, or The Conservative Party against Labour, is, in every respect, exactly like pro-wrestling. I am sure I am not the first person to point this out. In fact, I believe the hardcore wrestling fan likely has deeper insights into politics than 99 percent of professional journalists. However, there is a superficial sense in which wrestling, and politics are the same and a deeper sense; I am going to assume you’re smart enough to immediately see the former so let us focus on the latter. First, the kayfabe in politics is that there are two parties competing for power. In reality, there is just a single oligarchical ruling class and a ‘uniparty’ which is

permanently in power. The two parties are an illusion. When Andre the Giant managed by the villainous Bobby Heenan faced off against everyone’s favourite American hero, Hulk Hogan, in 1987, the mark believed that these were two genuinely different sides and that Vince McMahon was just a bloke with a microphone, the same as any other announcer. In reality, Andre, Heenan and Hogan were all friends who had known each other for years, and they were all employees of Vince McMahon. And so it is with the two sides in politics, red and blue, Republican and Democrat, Labour and Tory: they are all friends, they have known each other for years, and they are all employees of the same donor class and lobby groups – you can speculate in your own time as to who the political equivalent of Vince McMahon might be.  Second, just as in pro-wrestling there are babyfaces and heels in politics. The media makes this very simple for you: the left-wing are babyfaces and the right-wing are heels. You are supposed to cheer for The Democrats, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Labour and anyone else who is on the ‘right side of history’ and you are supposed to boo The Republicans, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Tories, Boris Johnson and so on. Third, in classic pro-wrestling booking, the babyfaces are supposed to win in the end as good always triumphs over evil. The heels might get a few cheap victories here and there – usually through cheating – but eventually they will have their comeuppance. And so, of course, it is in politics: the GOP and the Tories are not supposed to win, their role is to be false opposition who are overcome in the march of history. They might hold out on a position for a while, but in wrestling parlance, ultimately, they must ‘do the job’ and put their opponents ‘over’: in other words, take the pinfall loss, 1-2-3 in the centre of the ring, so the heroes can have their moment in the sun and pop the crowd. It does not matter who wins elections so long as this process continues unabated. In the UK, the Conservatives are nearly always in power and yet continue to play the heels who do jobs to the left.

So where does that leave ‘us’ – by ‘us’ I mean the dissident right, the sort of people who write and read articles like this. Well, we are much like those early ‘smart’ fans exchanging newsletters who see and understand the workings of the business and who simply cannot go back to believing in the kayfabe reality. Political Substack is Wrestling Observer circa 1988 and most politics fans are still reading the Apter Mags (which maintained kayfabe). We know all of the above and so the spectacle of television politics is very difficult for us to take seriously. On a recent edition of Unpopular Opinions, one commentator upbraided us for being so apathetic and for not covering, for example, the recent story about illegal refugees being deported – or rather, not deported – from the UK to Rwanda. It’s worth quoting this comment:

I’m placing zero importance on the ‘2000 mules’ documentary (in its ability to change anything other then present actual evidence of election fraud). However, the fact that both AA and Dee have not seen this, and it’s taken literally months before anyone mentions it on any of AA’s streams, shows how apathetic this lot have become. No mention of the Rwanda deportations; Linton-On-Ouse; Indy Ref 2; nothing about Prince Charles interventions in the deportations. In fact, hardly a word about the current British situations at all … And guess what, I don’t watch or listen to any mainstream news either, but I follow enough alternative sources to know exactly what’s affecting my country right now. Red Ice, PA and even Lotus Eaters are WAY ahead of this bunch of half-arsed content providers.

Now to me and to most of us ‘smart’ politics fans, the Rwanda deportations story was a total nothing burger from the start. And when Red Ice, PA or Lotus Eaters take such stories seriously, they are doing the work of the regime and playing into kayfabe storylines in much the manner that the old Apter Mags did. The Tories are heels, and their role is to do the job for the left. They need to be seen to do something about immigration to maintain kayfabe. The UK government has access to some of the best lawyers in the world, the idea that they didn’t know the European Court of Human Rights would intervene and ground the flight is farcical. This is a classic pro-wrestling angle. The Tories can claim they tried to do something but were thwarted by Europe and now uber-heel Nigel Farage can rant about it. In the process, more Gammon-rage can be manufactured to provide some more easy wins for the leftist heroes of the regime. Dominic Raab has already announced that the government have no plans to leave the European Court of Human Rights. In other words, they are taking the pinfall loss in a news cycle where the left got to paint them as Nazis for two weeks straight and in which – in real, material terms – the left got their way because no illegal immigrants are leaving. This was the scripted outcome of the storyline. We knew this from the start. When you know this from the start, it’s much more difficult to become invested in it because it literally doesn’t matter. The Tory Party are not Vince McMahon, they are Andre the Giant to the left’s Hulk Hogan. Vince McMahon doesn’t want illegal immigrants being deported to Rwanda. That’s why Vince McMahon booked an angle in which the Tories hatched a cartoon villain scheme – befitting of Bobby ‘The Brain’ Heenan – that was thwarted very publicly. Of course, The Tories played along because this is what they are employed to do.

Once you understand this, the otherwise baffling actions of establishment right politicians start to make perfect sense. Thus, when Mitch McConnell – literally for no reason at all – starts capitulating on the issue of gun rights and cuckolding the GOP base, the mark feels betrayed, but we smart fans understand that this is just Mitch McConnell’s job. He put over Joe Biden too, if you recall, and before that he put over BLM. Now a good booker, might start to worry about the fact that McConnell has done too many jobs of late. You see, even heels need wins occasionally to maintain some heat, but McConnell puts over the Democrats so often that even kayfabe fans have started to wonder if he’s been paid off. Sloppy booking. Mitch McConnell, a very old-school worker, has struggled in the Trump era of worked shoots. A ‘worked shoot’ is when a wrestler gives the appearance of going off script for the sake of an angle – Mick Foley was a master at this in the 1990s. Trump is also a master of it, but the form is currently being perfected by Ron DeSantis whose masterstroke is to sell the idea that he isn’t really controlled opposition by giving the appearance of actually opposing the regime. However, as I’ve covered previously, DeSantis is still working and this is still kayfabe. DeSantis’s gimmick is that he’s really opposing woke, but if you dig a little bit you’ll find that he’s advancing an egalitarian agenda so radical that it would make even Jean-Jacques Rousseau raise an eyebrow. DeSantis hopes to defeat woke, it appears, by being more authentically communist. This would be baffling, of course, were he for real, but as you should know by now everything in pro-wrestling is a work.