Premium Episode 124: Redpilled Royal Rumble feat David Bixenspan (Sample)
Professional wrestling, some sordid WWE history, the redpilled referee Drake Wuertz and the retired pro wrestler who could be the real father of Congresswoman Lauren Boebert. We discuss a lot with our journalist friend David Bixenspan of the Between the Sheets Podcast. Then Jake Rockatansky has written a royal rumble with a slew of characters you may recognize if you're a frequent listener.
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Episode music by Doom Chakra Tapes (http://doomchakratapes.bandcamp.com) & Nick Sena (http://nicksenamusic.com)
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 124 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the red-pilled professional wrestling episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Liv Agar, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Today, we'll be diving into the world of professional wrestling, which is essentially a highly athletic form of theater with massive cultural cachet here in America.
Even I, as a small child in France, was a fan of the WWE, or WWF as it was called at the time, And played with Ultimate Warrior, Bret the Hitman Heart, and Jake the Snake figurines in a small ring I built out of bits of wood and elastic bands.
Having no way to tune in to the pay-per-view events in pre-internet France, I was reduced to buying translated magazines and hardbacks about the history of WrestleMania.
I remember pouring over still photographs of a bleeding Hulk Hogan or Macho Man Randy Savage getting married in the ring, and I'd read play-for-play descriptions of the title matches.
My Nintendo 64 provided extra context by allowing me to organize Royal Rumbles in Super WrestleMania.
By the time I drifted away from it, the Central Saga at the core of the WWE was a grudge between the All-American Lex Luger, who by the way looks pretty German, And the supposed Japanese sumo, Yokozuna, a man who was in fact born in San Francisco and of Samoan origins.
Yokozuna lost his belt in 1994, but he was not the first nor would he be the last heel, pro wrestling's term for a villain, built on racist caricatures related to American anxieties.
In this case, the fears of Japan's rise as an economic power in the 80s and 90s.
Since my experiences are over 20 years old, we've invited David Bixenspan to be our guide into the contemporary history of the WWE and the figures pushing far-right conspiracy theories between the ropes.
Plus, Liv is going to be asking him about the long-standing, decently substantiated rumor that QAnon-friendly Congresswoman Lauren Boebert's real dad is a notorious wrestler called Stan Lane, who is accused of abandoning her family.
Finally, the episode will end with a jigs story about a Royal Rumble, I'm told.
So let's jump right into it.
David Bixenspan is a pro wrestling journalist.
He writes the Babyface v Heel newsletter.
He's the co-host of the Between the Sheets podcast, which is not about sex, it's about wrestling.
I believe, is it the sheets of the newspaper that you're referring to here?
Of the wrestling newsletters, the dirt sheets, yes.
There it is.
And he was a researcher on the latest season of Dark Side of the Ring on Vice TV.
Welcome to the show, David.
Great to be here!
We've got some interesting things to talk about, and I hope I don't kind of blather on too much, because a lot of it is very weedy.
You're kind of a WWE historian, right?
As well as a journalist that covers stuff that's coming up.
Tell us a bit about this Between the Sheets podcast, which you can, by the way, find at BetweenTheSheetsPod.com.
So basically what we do, myself and my friend Chris Zellner, who is I'd say more just on the historian side, we take a week in wrestling history, we put together notes from how it was covered in the various industry trade newsletters and sometimes other places like newspapers and like entertainment industry trade magazines, and we go over what happened, we play clips from TV in the given week, And then on our Patreon, patreon.com between the sheets, every month we do a deep dive on a single topic where we've found that when you kind of put everything next to each other from week after week after week, there are a lot of things that you notice that you wouldn't have otherwise, and it also becomes apparent that the people writing the newsletters weren't looking back at their own stuff that much.
Of course, yes.
And so, I mean, the average listener might not know too, too much about the WWE or professional wrestling at large or in the US.
So before we get into the weeds, can you just kind of give us a bit of background about the WWE, specifically the culture and politics of its owners, Vince and his wife, Linda McMahon?
Vince McMahon bought what's now WWE from his father in 1982 after working for him as an announcer and a local town promoter for several years, and a few years later took the company, which was regional here in the Northeast, and expanded nationally and became this big superpower that wiped out a lot of the competition.
And Linda was his right hand kind of on the business side throughout all of this.
Politically, it's weird because they'll do a lot of, like, free speech posturing.
Not even necessarily in, like, the current conservative free speech, like, anti-cancel culture way, but more general.
But...
They've always pretty solidly been Republicans.
I know that Vince McMahon had, like, some kind of William Buckley hammer on his wall in his office for years.
But, generally, they were just kind of generic conservatives, albeit, you know, tinted by the various racism and stuff in wrestling.
And they became more, like, outwardly politically active with Linda's two back-to-back failed Senate runs in Connecticut.
When I say back-to-back, I mean literally both seats opened up in back-to-back election cycles two years apart and she ran and got the Republican nomination both times and lost badly and spent about a hundred million dollars on the whole exercise total.
Oh my god.
In the meantime, they also have a long-running relationship with Trump going back to 1988 when he paid a site fee to host WrestleMania at what they called Trump Plaza but was really the Atlantic City Convention Center, and he would be involved in stuff on and off since early in the boom for The Apprentice.
He appeared at a Wrestlemania where he put his hair on the line against Vince McMahon's hair, where they each had personal representatives, and it was honestly one of, like, the first signs of, like, Trump as we know him now.
The hearing something and then immediately misunderstanding and repeating it in the most self-flattering way possible.
There is one instance where they show a video of different celebrities picking who they want to see get their head shaved, and I think it's John Travolta says he wants Trump's wrestler to lose so Trump gets his head shaved, and then Trump sends in an interview to promote the match.
It's like, oh yeah, yes, John Travolta said he wants me to win.
It's great.
And that actually is, to date, the most successful wrestling pay-per-view of all time.
It did like 1.3 million buys, I think, worldwide and about 900,000 domestically.
They were more in the Trump orbit from then on.
In 2011, I believe it was, it came out that they had donated several million to the Trump Foundation.
When I believe it was the smoking gun was going over the tax records once they got filed.
And at the time it wasn't that big a deal.
It was a small bit of a story about how Trump was like the least generous billionaire, I think as they put it.
But the interpretation everyone had and the WWE didn't take issue with at the time was that it was a fairly standard thing.
Donation in lieu of payment for his appearances.
But then when it became an issue the following year, because there was all sorts of stuff about whether or not, like, Trump would be spending their money when he offered a bounty for Obama's college records or some bullshit like that, they started coming out and saying, oh, no, no, no, no, no, we paid him a separate appearance fee.
The assumption, I think, is that once it became controversial, they tried to distance themselves from it as much as they could.
Also, even though the tax record said it was WWE that made the donation, they claimed it was the McMahons personally, so who knows?
All this eventually leads to Linda being nominated for the Trump cabinet and being the administrator of the Small Business Administration, which she was for... I forget if it was two years or three years, before leaving to run what's more or less the official Trump super PAC.
America First PAC, which now has kind of transitioned into her running other affiliated, like, think tanks and stuff for them.
But that's kind of where they sit politically.
They're not afraid to be either contradictory or try to appear less Republican-y or conservative-y than they during Linda's second Senate campaign.
She specifically ran ads that were like, you know, you don't have to vote down ballot all the way.
Like you don't have to flip the one big switch.
You can vote for Obama and me.
And then, you know, you can kind of weave in all the various racist wrestling storylines and racist and misogynistic and all that wrestling stuff in there, if you'd like.
Tell us about her relationship with an announcer called Mel Phillips.
What happened there?
So, Mel Phillips was kind of their second string ring announcer.
Ring announcer being the Michael Buffer as opposed to the John Madden.
The guy in the ring and saying, you know, in this corner, etc, etc.
And he also ran one of their ring crews, the crew that put the actual wrestling ring together and did related, you know, go for work and would carry the wrestler's jackets to the locker room, all that stuff.
That kind of fell within the ring crew.
And in wrestling, and this was more of kind of a territorial tradition, there would always be teenage kids and like tween kids Who would volunteer, basically, and sometimes get paid a small amount of money, as they would in WWF, to help set up the ring, because it was a way to try to break into wrestling.
By and large, I mean, it was just considered kind of a normal thing.
I mean, the child labor aspect of it looks a little weird now, but I would say in most of the wrestling business, it was a relatively wholesome endeavor.
Mel Phillips, and really there are, I mean, all sorts of accusations in some form going back to the 70s.
He was accused by multiple people of molesting them, or at the very least playing with their feet in a sexual way when they were underage.
The other thing I really should note, though, Vince McMahon admitted to two different reporters when this all went public that he had fired Phillips for having, I believe, a peculiar and unnatural relationship with children was how he put it.
And then rehired him a few weeks later as long as he promised to stay away from kids.
Oh god.
And then everyone just kind of forgot about that for decades for some reason.
They were investigated by the DOJ for child sex trafficking.
Yeah.
As fallout from all that.
No one was charged with that.
But it did lead to the indictment of Vince for defrauding the FDA and conspiring to distribute steroids, which he was acquitted of.
Having explored that bit of dark history, let's jump into this particularly red-pilled figure at the center of the contemporary WWE.
His name is Drake Wurtz.
He used to go by Drake Younger, and he's 36 years old, so he is younger than me by one year.
Now, before we get into his recent antics, can you just give us some background on this guy?
Because it does seem like he's had a wild life.
So, Drake Younger started wrestling in 2001 in Indianapolis, started up on, you know, the smaller independent wrestling scene, and within a few years built up a little bit of a good reputation as kind of a both like a talented wrestler and someone who had a particular motivation and talent for doing what's generally called death matches, a lot of slice and dice, cutting yourself, Broken glass, barbed wire, etc.
kind of stuff.
His most famous match in that era was called the Saw Deathmatch, where in Germany he wrestled a fellow by the name of Thumbtack Jack in a wrestling school.
In other words, a ring in the middle of a warehouse.
And it was the Saw Deathmatch called that because they'd constantly just call out and reenact stuff from the Saw movies.
Famous torture porn movies.
Over the next few years, he built up more and more of a rep, but he also developed a terrible drug problem at the time, especially with meth.
And eventually, in 2011, he gets clean, builds up more of a name as kind of a up-and-down, athletic-style wrestler.
He gets a WWE tryout in 2014.
While they don't have anything for him as a wrestler, At the time, smaller guys had less of a chance to get hired by WWE.
Everyone there loved him.
They loved his attitude.
They loved his work ethic.
I mean, everyone outside of WWE loved him, too, and they had an opening as a referee, and they offered him the job, and he was hired, and he's been there ever since.
For a time, he was the head referee on his part of WWE, their NXT talent development brand, and he also books the extras.
When I say extras, literally the, you know, the non-WWE talent brought in to either be extras or to lose matches, and he's also been doing that for NXT, but he lost the senior referee job for reasons we'll get into.
And so to clarify the role of a referee in what is kind of a theater sport, this is a person who isn't actually refereeing the match.
They're an active actor in the kayfabe, as they say, the kind of soap opera aspect as well, right?
So they become central characters as well.
Yes, but there's more to it than that.
So, yeah, contractually, too, referees in WWE have the same contracts as wrestlers.
They're just considered talent.
But the referees have more and different responsibilities.
All the referees have an earpiece, and I believe it's two ways now, so they can hear from and talk to the production truck and everyone else that has a headset on.
So, especially if a wrestler gets hurt, it's the referee who's relaying information back and forth, calling for help, etc.
Also in WWE, because they have generally a no-blood policy, because they're trying to be family-friendly because of their toy deal with Mattel and stuff like that, the referees are also who put gloves on and try to close cuts if a wrestler starts bleeding.
And in general, like, a referee's most important job is probably the safety of the wrestlers.
And sometimes to get knocked out, right?
Playfully knocked out so that somebody can do an illegal pin?
Yes, because for some reason, referees, if a wrestler bumps into them, even if they've been a wrestler before, they are knocked completely unconscious.
Yeah, for the rest of the match.
So, okay, so he's not just a referee.
It appears that he's also some sort of medic.
He's talent.
He's kind of a production manager.
There's, you know, a bunch of different things that are part of his job.
So how does he become radicalized, essentially?
That's still not entirely clear, and there are a bunch of different theories.
For a while, one of the things that you'd hear a lot was that when he got sober, the church he went to for NA meetings was one that radicalized him.
And he did also become religious, but it was never something that alarmed people.
You know, he was not, like, extreme in his Christianity until recently.
You know, it was just part of his personality, and even if you look at his old social media posts, if you look at his Instagram posts from before July of last year, like, if he talks about religion, it's just uplifting Bible quotes, it's promoting, you know, food and clothing drives, stuff like that.
So because of that I'm not sure it's strictly that.
Some people blame his wife because his wife clearly has similar if not more extreme beliefs.
I don't want to go too far down that road because she's not exactly a public figure and I don't like having to talk about her role in things unless I have to.
And so you were speaking of the summer of 2020, which was the fateful summer in which it became very clear that Drake Wurtz had fallen down the rabbit hole and started working with Operation Underground Railroad and Tim Ballard and people around him.
So you actually wrote an article for Vice.
So could you tell us about this situation?
Yeah, so I see these promoting Operation Underground Railroad, and I knew at least that it was kind of hue-adjacent.
Now, in the last few weeks, we always kind of knew they were pilled, but I think at this point we can consider them officially pilled after Jim Caviezel went off on adrenochrome when he's playing Ballard in the official Operation Underground Railroad movie.
But that hadn't happened yet then.
Really the strongest sign we had was Ballard's video saying that kids are really sold the way that people thought Wayfair was selling them and that nonsense.
So he starts posting about this and he starts hyping that he's gonna be doing a fundraiser movie night where they play A Dog's Purpose at a park in Longwood, Florida.
What is the meaning of life?
Are we here for a reason?
Is there a point to any of this?
And why does food taste so much better in the trash?
This was me.
And then this was me.
Then I came back as this little guy.
A lot of lives for one dog to live.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Let's start at the beginning.
For me, it all began with a boy.
His name was Ethan.
Bailey, Bailey, Bailey, Bailey!
My name was Bailey, Bailey, Bailey, Bailey.
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