AUDASE

How Wrestling Explains Alex Jones and Donald Trump

By NICK ROGERS NY Times

Alex Jones, the conspiracist at the helm of the alt-news outlet InfoWars, used an unusual defense in a custody hearing in Texas last week. His ex-wife had accused him of being unstable and dangerous, citing Mr. Jones’s rants on his daily call-in show. (Among his many unconventional stances are that the government staged the Sandy Hook massacre and orchestrated the 9/11 attacks.) Through his attorneys, Mr. Jones countered that his antics are irrelevant to his fitness as a parent, because he is a performance artist whose public behavior is part of his fictional character. In other words, when he tells his audience that Hillary Clinton is running a sex-trafficking operation out of a Washington pizza parlor (an accusation for which he has offered a rare retraction), he is doing so merely for entertainment value.

Many of his liberal critics have since asked whether Mr. Jones’s devoted fans will abandon him now that he has essentially admitted to being a fraud.

They will not.

Alex Jones’s audience adores him because of his artifice, not in spite of it. They admire a man who can identify their most primal feelings, validate them, and choreograph their release. To understand this, and to understand the political success of other figures like Donald Trump, it is helpful to know a term from the world of professional wrestling: “kayfabe.”

Although the etymology of the word is a matter of debate, for at least 50 years “kayfabe” has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.

To a wrestling audience, the fake and the real coexist peacefully. If you ask a fan whether a match or backstage brawl was scripted, the question will seem irrelevant. You may as well ask a roller-coaster enthusiast whether he knows he’s not really on a runaway mine car. The artifice is not only understood but appreciated: The performer cares enough about the viewer’s emotions to want to influence them. Kayfabe isn’t about factual verifiability; it’s about emotional fidelity.

Although their athleticism is impressive, skilled wrestlers captivate because they do what sociologists call “emotional labor” — the professional management of other people’s feelings. Diners expect emotional labor from their servers, Hulkamaniacs demand it from their favorite performer, and a whole lot of voters desire it from their leaders.

The aesthetic of World Wrestling Entertainment seems to be spreading from the ring to the world stage. Ask an average Trump supporter whether he or she thinks the president actually plans to build a giant wall and have Mexico pay for it, and you might get an answer that boils down to, “I don’t think so, but I believe so.” That’s kayfabe. Chants of “Build the Wall” aren’t about erecting a structure; they’re about how cathartic it feels, in the moment, to yell with venom against a common enemy.

Voting to repeal Obamacare again and again only to face President Obama’s veto was kayfabe. So is shouting “You lie!” during a health care speech. It is President Bush in a flight suit, it is Vladimir Putin shirtless on a horse, it is virtually everything Kim Jong-un does. Does the intended audience know that what they’re watching is literally made for TV? Sure, in the same way they know that the wrestler Kane isn’t literally a demon. The factual fabrication is necessary to elicit an emotional clarity.

Despite superficial similarities, it is useful to distinguish kayfabe from the concept of satire. Satire depends on the constant awareness that what’s being presented is false. It requires frequent acknowledgment of that: winks to the camera, giggling breaks of character. The meaning comes directly from the disbelief. It depends on two conflicting mental processes happening at once, rather than the suspension of one in service of the other. It employs cognitive dissonance, rather than bypassing it. In that way, satire and kayfabe are actually opposites. Kayfabe isn’t merely a suspension of disbelief, it is philosophy about truth itself. It rests on the assumption that feelings are inherently more trustworthy than facts.

Donald Trump rode kayfabe from Queens to Trump Tower to “The Apprentice” to the White House. Alex Jones may find it is as effective in the courtroom as it is on AM radio. Cultural elites can fact-check these men and point out glaring rhetorical contradictions until they are blue in the face; kayfabe renders it all beside the point. If you’re among the three million people who have chuckled at the viral video of a crying man addressing his wrestling heroes at a Q. and A. session, you know how succinctly he summarizes the mind-set: “It’s still real to me, dammit.”

Are truth and kayfabe, then, irreconcilable? In some contexts, probably. But devotees of the former might be well served to think of the latter as complementary rather than competing. Rationalists can and should make the case that empirical data is more reliable than intuition. But if they continue to ignore the human need for things to feel true, they will do so at their political peril.

Nick Rogers is a sociologist and lawyer on Long Island.