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“Everybody knows the fight is fixed / the poor stay poor / the rich get rich.” -Leonard Cohen
I discovered professional wrestling in 1969, when I was ten. Some underpowered Milwaukee UHF station—channel 18, if memory serves—broadcast grainy images, made even grainier by occasional bursts of static, of what looked like fights-to-the-death between depraved foreign psychos like Mad Dog and Butcher Vachon and all-American dudes like The Crusher and Dick the Bruiser. Sometimes their matches featured real blood. Though the possibility of fakery was obvious, for at least a few months I didn’t fully accept that it was all staged. The almost schizoid ambivalence of wondering whether the contestants were really trying to kill each other, with part of me hoping they weren’t and another part wishing they were, added a poignant frisson to the otherwise tawdry experience.
Today, watching the American political spectacle from the cheap seats of Morocco, 5,000 miles away, reminds me of my discovery of professional wrestling. At first glance, the cage fight between left and right, with Trump playing the hero for one audience and the heel for another, looks like an all-too-real death match that could easily escalate into civil war. (How could two sides who hate each other this much ever live with each other?)
The audience’s passions have been whipped up to a fever pitch. Both sides break the rules, Trump by furiously contesting a media-annointed election outcome, Biden by launching a frenzy of legal low blows against his predecessor and likely successor. The supposed referees—the courts—tear off their official stripes and get in on the action, mostly on behalf of Team Biden.
It’s certainly quite a spectacle.
But what does all this sound and fury signify? Is Trump, the all-time greatest heel/hero in the history of American politics, really the voice of the dispossessed? Is Trump v. Biden a spontaneous brawl, its outcome still in doubt? And will the identity of the victor signify something momentous and chart the future course of the Republic?
Musk vs. Zuckerberg
As the Trump vs. Biden show dominates politics, another apparent cage match—this time a literal one—looms atop the world of social media. Elon Musk (leans toward Team Trump) and Mark Zuckerberg (sides with Team Biden) have been threatening to go at it mano-a-mano.˙
As with Trump and Biden, there appear to be real political differences between Musk and Zuckerberg. Musk bought Twitter in part to save it from the censors, or so he says, while Zuckerberg went all-in on suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story (throwing the election to Biden) and banning honest discussion of COVID origins, among other indiscretions.
But is Musk’s opposition to the censorship regime principled or merely cosmetic? Musk began his Twitter tenure by slamming the prior management for censoring Constitutionally-protected speech. On April 26, 2022, he tweeted:
“By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”
Keeping Twitter’s speech policies close to the law’s would mean prohibiting libel, incitement, conspiracy, true threats, and to some extent obscenity and pornography, while treating all Constitutionally-protected speech—especially political speech—precisely equally. That is what Twitter and other social media companies, as well as internet service providers and telephone companies, ought to be required to do. These companies are “common carriers” and are today’s de facto public square. Though they are (unfortunately) privately owned, that shouldn’t give their billionaire owners the right to ban or restrict some people and reward or amplify others based on how closely people’s speech aligns with the billionaires’ views. If ATT had tried that with telephones in 1970 there would have been a bloody revolution.
But Musk’s support for free speech on common carriers, like his proposed cage match with Zuckerberg, turned out to be fake. On November 18, 2022, Musk tweeted:
“New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach…You won't find the tweet (that I don’t like -KB) unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from the rest of the Internet.”
Then on April 17, 2023, Twitter elaborated on that “no freedom of reach” policy. To Musk’s credit, the new policy imposes transparency, meaning that Twitter (now X) will supposedly let you know when your tweets have been shadowbanned. But in reality, that still hasn’t happened, ostensibly due to technical difficulties. Meawhile, Musk’s recent move to “Throttle Traffic to Websites He Dislikes,” including The New York Times and Washington Post, alongside his shadowbanning competitors like Substack (and people like CJ Hopkins and presumably me) raises questions about whether he’s really any different from Zuckerberg.
Oligarch vs. Oligarch: Cage Fight or Professional Wrestling?
Ultimately, despite Musk’s First Amendment pretensions, it seems that the two billionaires, Musk and Zuckerberg, agree that gigantic, ubiquitous, de facto monopoly common carriers like Twitter and Facebook should not only be privately owned, but that their billionaire owners should have the right to reward or punish Constitutionally-protected speech according to whether or not it aligns with their views. So the Musk-vs.-Zuckerberg cage fight is fake. The two billionaires are on the same side—the side of the oligarchs. They want to make sure that a handful of super-rich plutocrats like themselves continues to dominate the media and control what ordinary people say and think. To that end, they stage fake fights in order to obfuscate reality and con people into cheering for one oligarch or another, rather than standing up for their own interests and overthrowing the oligarchy.
Turning back to Trump and Biden, the same dynamic is in play. Neither has ever shown the slightest sign of even questioning, much less opposing, America’s downward trajectory from a middle-class-based quasi-democracy circa 1960, to the grotesquely unequal draconian oligarchy we see today. And while Trump makes endless rhetorical gestures signaling past greatness, he (like Biden) has been unable to support and/or implement policies that would reverse the slide into oligarchy—policies that ought to include:
*Recognizing common carriers as de facto public utilities that must obey the First Amendment and act transparently.
*Recognizing banking as a public utility and running the banking sector as such—coining money through building public infrastructure, not private lending for casino-style speculation.
*Returning to Eisenhower-era tax rates on the highest earners, and adding a wealth tax specifically designed to decimate and remove the cancerous oligarchy from our body politic.
*Returning military spending to pre-World War II levels, and dismantling the Evil Empire.
Instead of a fake fight between two empty-suit blowhards of insalubrious morals and meager intellect, what the USA needs is a real battle to dethrone the oligarchs and establish a middle-class-based democracy.
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