There is a phrase true pro wrestling fans are familiar with “being a mark.” A mark is someone emotionally vested in their favorite wrestler’s every action. I have mentioned, or some might say, confessed to being a big fan of professional wrestling. My memories do not go as far back as Karl Gotch or Lou Thesz, but I sat at my granny’s knee rooting on Bruno, Bobo, and Chief. When Bobo bled, I grabbed a bandage. When Bruno yelled from an excruciating headlock, I got a headache, and when the Chief went on a warpath, I beat an empty grits box as if it were a tom-tom. Finding out the chair was ‘gimmicked’ and a loosened fist to the face was part of the show was like…shhhhhh, finding out there is no Santa Claus. By the time I turned eleven, my obsession had become a reality, and my reality became a guilty pleasure.
Kayfabe
Another word in wrestling jargon is kayfabe, which blurs fantasy and reality. Ric Flair was indeed a limousine-riding, jet-flying son of a gun, and if you ask his multiple ex-wives, he did have a hard time holding his gators down. Tucker “Macho Man” Carlson fed his marks the past two nights a loosened fist and gimmicks to deny the truth. Unlike professional wrestlers, real people are being hurt by Tucker Carlson’s promos. Carlson and his tag team partners, Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiromo, and Laura Ingraham, at Fox, helped fuel the rage of the nearly 1,000 people arrested and over 500 who pleaded guilty or were convicted of serious and sundry crimes. All indications are they did it for the money, but how much was pure evil? Ashli Babbitt took a real bullet when she tried wildly to enter through a shattered window into the Speaker’s Lobby during the January 6 insurrection. Officer Brian Sitnick died a day later of a stroke after taking bear spray to the face and fighting for his life and the lives of his colleagues.
Carlson was inexplicably given exclusive access by the Speaker of the House[Kevin McCarthy] to over 40 thousand hours of security footage of the January 6 breach on the Capitol to do with what he might. Fox, which calls itself a journalistic enterprise, was caught with a foreign object in its tights when it was revealed it knowingly and willingly lied to its audience about the 2020 election results.
Watching Fox and its emissaries flail around with experts whose sources include a woman who claimed to be an “internally decapitated” time traveler. “Who am I? And how do I know all of this?... I’ve had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl...I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live...The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it,” said the unidentified mark. The previous passage was part of an e-mail sent to Fox host Maria Bartiromo before the appearance of Trump attorney Sidney Powell, who forwarded it as proof to Bartiromo. Yet Bartiromo gave Powell a platform to spew her nonsense.
Fox has become the pro wrestling of journalism, full of bluster and braggadocio, resplendent with flashy villains and meek voices of reason. Pair that with the once respected Rudy Giuliani, whose running hair dye press conference and Four Seasons Garden supply gaggle will live in ignominy. Maybe Tucker will open by ripping open his t-shirt and asking his audience; WHATCHA GONNA DO BROTHA WHEN WE REPORT, AND YOU DECIDE?
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