Wrestling Darkness

The most famous and emblematic American hero of his time, he defended us against the offenses of foreigners, fairies, and egoists. He abused illegal steroids, but denied it so he could be a good role model for generations of children for whom he recommended more traditional vitamins. Behind the scenes, he ratted out his fellow wrestlers as they sought healthcare and labor protections from a boss w...

In part 1 of my interview with Sisonke Msimang, I brought up the phenomenon of “Black fatigue” by telling her a story about a white man who had attended a Black Lives Matter rally during the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. After the police shot him with a rubber bullet, he decided he would no longer attend such rallies. From there, Sisonke and I agreed upon a basic definition of “Black fatigue...

Attempts to address racism are fruitless unless we find paths that lead to healing. This is one of many epiphanies I found in reading Sisonke Msimang ’s acclaimed memoir, Always Another Country . We talked at length about South Africa and the United States, our two, sister nations each struggling to free themselves from caste systems that date back to colonial times. The emotional heart of Always...

On the evening of April 2nd, 2013, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II proposed what would become the Moral Monday movement to an emergency gathering at a North Carolina church. Within three years, they had taken down a governor and transformed the national conversation about the role of morality in civic life. Today, Rev. Barber faces the challenge of his life as the leader of the Repairers of the Brea...

“This molten thing about interracial sex” was always at the core of fights about integration and equality, explains historian and author Dr. Timothy B. Tyson. “The Southern Rape Complex” fueled a century of hate crimes & white dominance of our political process. But this racist lie and covenant was gradually vacated by white women, and its simmering rage now targets women in general, as well as no...

Without hiding her pain or her vulnerability, Nina Jankowicz describes how hundreds of thousands of grotesquely sexual and violent online assaults have hurt her, frightened her, and impacted her life. We must “fight for a world that recognizes that our rights as women to free expression online are just as valuable as our abusers’,” she writes in her most recent book, How to Be a Woman Online . And...

“A deluge of content sorted by incentivized algorithms and shared instantaneously among aligned believers has enabled us to immerse ourselves in environments tailored to our own beliefs and populated with our own preferred facts.” So writes Renée DiResta in the era-defining book Invisible Rulers . She traces the history of human-to-human influence from the local tavern in preindustrial times to th...

When we buy a ticket to see a movie or a play, the worst that can happen is we’ll be bored, or disappointed, or we won’t be able to maintain our suspension of disbelief. As viewers, we do all we can to believe in worlds of make believe, and in return we get escapism, catharsis, a good cry, a laugh, or a scare. But what happens when the form of entertainment to which we have committed ourselves fol...

A $5 billion dollar deal to stream World Wrestling Entertainment on Netflix kicked off on January 6, 2025 with 4 matches sprinkled across three hours of pageantry. But the headlines were stolen by Hulk Hogan. Boos and screams of “Nobody cares!” and “f***ing b******t!” drowned out his pitch for a beer brand he launched as part of a right wing backlash against a Bud Light commercial that featured a...

Seasons Greetings! The holidays have snuck up on me. I have added the documentary 9500 Liberty to the Wrestling Darkness feed as a bonus episode. In the opening seconds, you’ll understand how it relates to the podcast and to the present day. —Eric Arc of justice It looked pretty bleak for immigrant advocates in Prince William County, Virginia. On July 10th, 2007 the Board of County Supervisors had...

My guest in episode 4 of Wrestling Darkness is Professor Lawrence Lessig who explains in his essay, The Age of the Fantasist , how and why algorithmic media came to reward narratives that lie to us. “The fantasist doesn’t worry that he will not please everyone. He’s not aiming for everyone. Indeed, he is aiming precisely to avoid appealing to everyone. Division drives attention in a world of fragm...

Oscar Keohan and Jacob Johns traveled from Australia to tour the U.S. in the weeks leading up to the 2024 presidential election. But an unexpectedly dark turn at a Trump rally in North Carolina overshadowed their de Tocqueville-like experience. Supplemented by video recordings, they share with us why they felt sickened by the way the president-elect manipulated his fervent supporters, and the way...

Abraham Josephine Riesman, author of the best-selling biography Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America ., explains how the production of cheap, addictive entertainment such as pro wrestling, cable news, and reality TV, changed the culture of American. Our conversation traces a cultural transformation that began in the mid-1980’s, as the truth-bending madness of professional wrestlin...

Dr Sharon Mazer is the author of Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle , and the only woman in the Netflix documentary Mr. McMahon , argues that Donald Trump’s political career and persona are direct outgrowths of his appearances in Wrestlemania and other professional wrestling programs, and that the structure and format of wrestling has “escaped the arena” and warped American culture. We dr...

A woman once told me she got divorced because of a film I made. Seeing the film deepened her misgivings about her husband’s racism, and after years of questioning herself, she left him. The woman was Asian and her husband was white — just like my mom and dad, and just like a couple played by Ryan Kutrona and Takayo Fischer in American Knees. Above: Selected scenes from American Knees . Below: The...

The Headless Klansman of Selma is the story of a Confederate monument that venerates the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Like the Trump political phenomenon, the statue originated as a backlash against the results of a free and fair election. The people of Selma, Alabama elected the city’s first ever African American mayor on September 12, 2000. The defeated mayor, a former segregationist,...

Courtney Hester-Green is a U.S. military veteran whose daughter was born with Edwards syndrome and not expected to survive a year. Today, at age 5, she has a full life thanks in large part to Medicaid. This is Courtney's impassioned plea to the United States Senate to block efforts to cut $716 billion from Medicaid — the largest cut in the program’s history — to pay for tax cuts for the super rich...