Kayfabe.Ink

It’s nearly impossible to not have parasocial relationships with people involved in making the art you love.

But it’s important to remind yourself once in a while that the image, the personality, and the values you map onto these people are not who they actually are.

Last week a lot of folks were put out when James Hetfield of Metallica announced at their show at The Sphere in Las Vegas that Metallica shows were politics-free zones. While this came a surprise to folks old enough to remember …And Justice For All, it probably shouldn’t have been surprising given that nobody but cops and ICE agents listens to Metallica anymore.

I kid! I kid! Kind of! But it’s important to remember that the members of Metallica are all almost unimaginably wealthy (Remember in the movie when they gave Trujillo a million dollar signing bonus?). And so, like all wealthy people, their primary allegiance is to money and to their wealthy peers, no matter what they might have said in 1989. Whatever they meant to you in your teen years, they’re not your friends.

But isn’t this a wrestling blog? Sure! So let’s talk about Tony Khan for a little while. Tony is a huge wrestling nerd who founded a company that employs a lot of great wrestlers and puts on wrestling shows that, at the moment, feel fun and fresh and full of energy and basically everything WWE is not.

He also employs Evil Uno, which means he’s indirectly responsible for Mystery Wrestling happening, and Mystery Wrestling is, of course, the best thing.

But Tony Khan’s dad is not only the lead investor in AEW. He’s also a Trump supporter, having donated a million bucks to Trump’s first inauguration.

Also Tony’s company currently appears on networks controlled by fascist billionaire David Ellison.

I am a fan of AEW, but I think it’s very important to remember that Tony Khan is not my friend and that if the fascist who owns the networks tells him AEW is too queer and the “Fuck ICE” chants need to stop, he’s probably going to do what the money guy says and not what the fans want. I believe the guy genuinely loves wrestling. And, furthermore, he hires great talent and books great shows (see caveat, below). But he’s not our friend.

But also? I feel like because most of the criticism of Tony Khan comes from WWE partisans, AEW fans kind of reflexively defend Tony Khan, kind of the way liberals reflexively defended the stunningly ineffectual presidency of Barack Obama because the loudest criticism came from white supremacists.

Having terrible people hate you is a good sign, but it doesn’t make you perfect. And so it is with Tony Khan.

Let’s start with AEW’s women’s division, which is incredibly stacked with talent and almost always only gets one match per Dynamite or Collision show. Why does AEW consistently underutilize the women’s roster?

But also: when I found out that Chaotic Wrestling’s Rich Palladino had worked for Major League Wrestling, I started checking out some shows and even attended one in June, which I think may be about to air this week! Anyway, I dug the aesthetic and the goofiness and felt like MLW was trying to be a spiritual successor to Lucha Underground, down to employing Luis Fernandez-Gil, who played owner Dario Cueto on Lucha Underground, and having its evil faction, Contra, somehow wanting to, like, take over the world via a semi-obscure wrestling promotion—a plan so crazy it just might work!

I asked on Bluesky, which has a robust wrestling community, why MLW didn’t get any love there, folks explained that people didn’t like that they employed people like Matt Riddle, Austin Aries, and Joe Coffey, all of whom were credibly accused of being pieces of shit during wrestling’s Speaking Out moment.

I didn’t know that and started doing some research on the Speaking Out movement that happened before I got back into wrestling. And folks? I’ve got some bad news for you about AEW’s Will Ospreay and Darby Allin. (tl;dr: they too are pieces of shit.)

(Sure, sure, they showed Tony some texts. Puh-leeze.)

Look: being less of an absolute garbage human being than Vince McMahon is good, but it’s also an incredibly low bar to clear. I’m not suggesting that folks should boycott AEW or anything like that—they put on 6+ hours of really good wrestling every week and employ some great wrestlers and provide, for now, a way to enjoy a national wrestling promotion that is not run by enthusiastic fascists.

But I am saying that venerating Tony Khan will eventually lead to heartbreak. Because, like James Hetfield, he’s not your friend.