Stay woke: Pro wrestling ‘realer’ than Alex Jones

I have a confession to make. I’m a wrestling fan.

I’ve snuck in two wrestling columns in the four years I’ve been working here, so if you’ve been an avid reader of my writing, first off, thanks, second, this shouldn’t really surprise you.

I get why people are ridiculed for being wrestling fans. “It’s fake!” Well yeah, so is Walking Dead but you don’t see me yelling out “unrealistic!” at the zombies.

My only defense of wrestling will be that it is purely entertainment. I do own various social media accounts and I have seen fans get mad at wrestlers because of the actions they take during the show, thinking that it’s real. But I think it’s fair to say most fans know the wrestlers are putting on a show.

I know that Bray Wyatt talking about controlling fear this past Monday night and harnessing it for his own use is kind of his shtick. I’m not going to call the police because he said he’s going to burn down the House of Horrors with Randy Orton inside. I know it’s an act.

After distracting myself with a bit of fakery, I went to the news and found out someone else in the real world, outside of wrestling, likes to put on a show.

According to Austin American-Statesman’s Jonathan Tilove, at a pretrial hearing, attorney Randall Wilhite told state District Judge Orlinda Naranjo that his client, Alex Jones, was a performance artist.

“At a recent pretrial hearing,” Tilove writes, “attorney Randall Wilhite told state District Judge Orlinda Naranjo that using his client Alex Jones’ on-air Infowars persona to evaluate Alex Jones as a father would be like judging Jack Nicholson in a custody dispute based on his performance as the Joker in ‘Batman.’”

Wilhite said Jones was “playing a character.”

“He is a performance artist.”

Jones is currently in what’s been deemed a heated child custody battle with his ex-wife, so comments such as wanting Jennifer Lopez to get raped or claiming Hillary Clinton was operating a pedophile ring out of a Washington D.C. pizza joint shouldn’t be taken seriously because they are comments from a character.

Except Infowars is a site set on the truth, allegedly. Pro wrestling doesn’t sell truth. Yet somehow, the realest thing I saw Monday was when the ring broke after Braun Strowman (real name Adam Scherr, a 6-8 behemoth of a man) slamming Big Show (real name Paul Wight, a 7-footer who weighs just shy of 400 pounds) from the top turnbuckle.

Whether you believe Jones is playing a character now due to this child custody battle or he was playing a character on his website all along, there is clearly a persona he wants to show off to the public for whatever purpose best suits him. If it’s winning this child custody battle or trying to sell “Super Male Vitality” supplements, Alex Jones is playing us, or at least trying to. Except just like in wrestling, I know that he’s putting on a show.

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Conspiracy theorists like to claim that certain stories are propped up to distract us from the real world. The “#StayWoke” crowd uses social media to spread “truths” that the “mainstream media” just won’t cover. But when they say “mainstream media isn’t covering this,” what they really mean is “these articles haven’t showed up on my Facebook, therefore they don’t exist.”

The nuclear “scare” with North Korea? Trust me, that’s being covered. News sources like CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times — they are all covering it.

One bad move and perhaps another world war begins, and that’s scary. But I know this not because of Facebook, but because I pay attention to the news.

There are plenty of times that the big bad “mainstream media” has frustrated me. I penned a column last week on victim blaming, talking about the United passenger dragging and why the articles about his drug convictions in the past had nothing to do with the way he was treated on that flight. I also grow angry when arrests photos are used for people of color while more glamorous shots are used for white people. But to say stories like the man in Cleveland who reportedly murdered an older gentleman and posted it live on Facebook is a distraction? That’s too much.

Working now for a small-town newspaper for a little over four years now, I’ve grown cynical. There’s nothing wrong with always questioning, wondering, investigation, etc. But I never let myself slip toward the deep end of the pool where the conspiracy theorists swim. What exactly is this coverage of the Cleveland killer distracting us from? News that’s currently out there already about North Korea?

Stay woke? It’s not hard to do so in 2017 where useful information is right there at our fingertips. Of course, “fake news” provides more of a road block to truth now than ever before, but it sure isn’t censoring the real news that’s out there. It might take a little bit of effort but I promise, if you venture out of Facebook and out of those conspiracy theory groups, you might find yourself some truth.