📣 New #openaccess #BJPIR article out now! 'National gimmicks as soft power strategy: WWE’s Clash at the Castle and the performance of the Cymru Wales Brand' by @daimoon.bsky.social. 🔗 buff.ly/UGQ5otS @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social

New article out in @bjpir.bsky.social that investigates the #WWE + Welsh Government 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 deal to host “Clash at the Castle 2002” in Cardiff. Mixing nation branding & pro-wrestling literature it analyses how WWE fit the Cymru Wales Brand into its broadcasts. (1/?) journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

TBC: The BBC claims there is no suggestion Lord Mandelson met Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, except that she explicitly claimed to have met him at Epstein’s house - a fact reported in UK newspapers in 2024. 🤷🏻

BBC: “There is no suggestion that Lord Mandelson ever met Giuffre.” Virginia Giuffre: “I remember [Mandelson] being at the house in New York and I was introduced to him at a dinner party. He and Jeffrey talked business together. I assumed they were in business together.”

With #WWE announcing it’s taking WrestleMania to Saudi Arabia in 2027 for heaps of government money… good timing to say I’ve an article coming out soon about *another* time the WWE was paid by a government to put on a show and promote their national brand. Clash at the Castle 2022 - Cardiff, Wales

Since the question of Keir Starmer’s judgement is suddenly on the menu, maybe time to remember he was deemed to “culpable” for the phone hacking scandal and failing to review evidence. www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/amp/entry/jo...

Imagine someone asking you “hey, what’s the deal with your political ally spending time at a pedophile’s house when they were in jail” And you say “I don’t know anymore than you do” And if that’s true (wut) you then have ZERO curiosity to maybe find out about that? Feels like something to check!

Keir Starmer on Mandelson/Epstein before appointing his Ambassador: “I um don’t know anymore than you do um” Vetting flags obvious concerns Keir Starmer after *appointing* Mandelson: “um this is um … the extent and breadth is … um more than I knew”

Truly car crash exchanges. The logic of Starmer’s position is well summed up as “it is fine to stay in a convicted paedophile’s property if you think they are guilty, but not if you think they are innocent” Still the lobby journos’ great “noticing” is years late www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

On the UK media and #Mandelson. Imagine your job is to sell newspapers, and you decided on THIS front page. 2010 Article: www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news...

One month ago. Prescient.

The U.S. media breaking UK political Kayfabe today - the game is the political-media class ‘suspends disbelief’ and acts as if they don’t know the things they know so they can pretend that the system is what they need it to be to enjoy playing along with it.

The thing with the British political/media class' big weapon of just 'not noticing things when they're inconvenient' is that the Americans aren't aware of the 'things you're not allowed to notice' list.

The frustrating thing about all this is that this stuff has been public info for decades - the New York magazine piece is from 2003. Nobody thought it was worth asking about the fact the person being made Ambassador to Trump’s White House used to attend social dinners with him, hosted by Epstein?

Keir Starmer: “I don’t know any more than you do, umm, and therefore, umm, there’s not really much more I can add to, umm, what you already know.” If only the Prime Minister of the UK had access to some sort of intelligence briefing before appointing the U.S. Ambassador. Ah well. 🤷🏻 #BritPol

Pyro, entrance music…

I’m not sure how many people in the media + academic political studies are listening to the live stream, but the disconnect between the abject horrors being described by British surgeons, etc. and the political discourse/focus of the professional BritPol ‘bubble’ feels insurmountable. A real crisis.

Good journalism is when your news show is hosted by the husband of the Home Secretary, who is also the former Shadow Chancellor, and he gets to tell the interview subject they’re bad for taking votes from his party. The public learn a lot.

🚨 Job @ Bath 🚨 The Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at @uniofbath.bsky.social is hiring a teaching focused lecturer w. experience in IPE & Enviro Politics (1 year fixed term) Closing date: 8 Sept Interview date: 18 Sept Start date: 29 Sept www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/Vacancy...

“In Search of Left Wrestling” An excellent piece in Tribune looking at the leftist potential of storytelling in pro-wrestling through the lens of AEW’s Hangman Page. A useful corrective to the image of wrestling WWE’s current closeness to the Trump regime presents tribunemag.co.uk/2025/08/in-s...

“In Search of Left Wrestling” An excellent piece in Tribune looking at the leftist potential of storytelling in pro-wrestling through the lens of AEW’s Hangman Page. A useful corrective to the image of wrestling WWE’s current closeness to the Trump regime presents tribunemag.co.uk/2025/08/in-s...

Ritchie Torres’s interview w. Adam Friedland is getting a lot of coverage due to his upsettingly robotic responses to Friedland’s attempts to talk about the genocide in Gaza - as it should. w. my work, I also note Torres’s discussing his ‘Attitude Era’ pro-wrestling fandom youtu.be/q0Eeht171HQ?...

it's just very funny that there's an entire keyfabe around treating Donald Trump as a normal president when he's doing shit that makes America look like Italy in the 1920s

I’m quoted in the Nikkei on Donald Trump, WWE, and UFC - and how his team uses those ties to strike a (phoney) ‘anti-elitist’ pose, reaching out to disengaged younger male demographics: www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZ...

▫️Paramount: $7.7bn (£5.6bn) to be exclusive home of UFC events in the US for next 7 years ▫️ESPN: $325m (£240m) a year over next 5 years to show all WWE PLEs ▫️Netflix: $5bn (£3.69bn) over 10 year to show regular WWE programming TKO’s rise feels part of Age of Trump observer.co.uk/news/busines...

Trump plans to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence—literally on Independence Day, July 4— by hosting a cage fight between two men at the White House time.com/7309114/ufc-...

Circus music fit for a carny

“one of WWE’s most recent overtures to Trump and his MAGA movement appears to have gone unnoticed: The company just provided the niece of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, an opportunity at becoming a WWE Superstar.” 😘👌

WWE fans boo Trump when shown on the screen at SummerSlam I think this is the first time the WWE has put any images of their Hall of Fame member up. Can see why. But further evidence the wall they’ve had between themselves and Trump is cracking, even if not UFC yet. youtube.com/shorts/ZWWa7...

The attempt to keep portraying WWE as “not political”, while celebrating Trump in the strangest ways - he “admits when he’s wrong”? Trump? Yeesh. Note the shout out to Saqiq Khan from HHH, a man Trump continuously slags off, but there’s still negotiations over a London WrestleMania ongoing.

“He is one of the most intuitive people, I think, that I’ve met … My world is not a political world. My world is a world of entertainment. I’ve always enjoyed my interactions with him … and he’s in our Hall of Fame. So my hat’s off to him.” - HHH on Trump www.cagesideseats.com/wwe/2025/8/2...

This is America

TKO’s wall separating UFC’s embrace of Trump and WWE’s hesitant silence about him is further cracking: The official account posts a video of HHH doing ‘the water spit’ outside The White House, as Trump signs an EO reintroducing the ‘Presidential Fitness Test’. www.fightful.com/wrestling/tr...

“It would be an exaggeration to say that Hogan is responsible for what America is today. But not much of one. Hogan, like his friends Vince McMahon and Donald Trump, was both a symptom and a cause of what we have become.” www.thebulwark.com/p/how-hulk-h...

“the return to childhood is what the impulse to fascism is always about. That’s why Hogan was such a dangerously effective weapon for the Republican Party that he so dearly loved …” Searing stuff, by @josie.zone 💪 www.thehandbasket.co/p/hulk-hogan...

On Trump & Hogan together: “The message, messenger, symbols, language, audience, and the meaning and emotions they created together were all one. A type of rare semiotic unity had been achieved. The Democrats had — and continue to have — no real answer for such power.” www.salon.com/2025/07/27/w...

“Hulk Hogan … was basically Donald Trump with muscles and a mustache.” www.politico.eu/article/hulk...

The Guardian has made a video package celebrating Hulk Hogan that at no point mentions the on (hidden) camera racist slurs he never truly apologised for - then ends with him choking Booker T. Just incredible failure to tell the full story by the UK’s main liberal newspaper. youtu.be/2DZ_inQwde0?...

“Live coverage starting soon”

BBC News giving Hulk Hogan’s death the live rolling news treatment usually reserved for a Royal? Brother. I guess we’re waiting to hear the President of the United States’s eulogy. Such is politics now. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cw...

Since we’re all discussing Epstein now, here’s a nice vignette that says a lot about how politics works: In 2003 Peter Mandelson, the current UK Ambassador to the US, attended a meal with Donald Trump, the current US President, and Jeffrey Epstein (& other luminaries). nymag.com/nymetro/news...

In my niche role as ‘the academic who wrote about Kayfabe and politics’, I’ve had a bunch of people send me this. @blindboyboatclub.bsky.social chatting the same on Novara. Good stuff - spread the word on #kayfabe: youtu.be/58V91oKE0MQ?...

It really is remarkable the point we’re at.

So, the public can’t alter their government’s position on this by voting (party consensus), peaceful protest (ignored, over-policed), or non-violent direct action (“terrorism”), and they can’t chant against it at music festivals (“racism”). Have they thought at all about the consequences of this?

Zohran Mandani being a pro-wrestling fan is perfect 👌

Incredible tag-team

‘Congratulations to Mya Lesnar on the WIN — Great Genetics!' Those genetics would be WWE/UFC’s Brock Lesnar, currently named in the sex trafficking lawsuit against Vince McMahon www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/others...

By contrast, CM Punk attended the “No Kings” protest - hanging out with the teachers union (currently battling Linda McMahon as Education Secretary)