A week ago, on Dynamite, the flagship TV show of All-Elite Wrestling, former World Champion
Jon Moxley was scheduled to wrestle Brian Kendrick, a veteran of over twenty years who
has worked and found success in WWE, Ring of Honor, TNA (now called Impact Wrestling),
and New Japan.
Then, the day before the show, a video clip of Kendrick from 2011 began circulating on
Twitter.
In the clip, which is taken from an interview Kendrick did for the conspiracy theory website
Truth is Scary, Kendrick endorses a number of antisemitic conspiracy theories, including
the idea that a medical team sent from Israel to assist in relief efforts following the
2010 earthquake in Haiti had actually been dispatched to harvest organs from quake victims.
After the clip went viral, AEW owner and president Tony Khan tweeted that, due to his “abhorrent
and offensive comments,” Kendrick had been pulled from the show.
While not widely known to the general public, it was no secret among wrestlers and wrestling
fans that Brian Kendrick is a conspiracy theorist.
He hasn’t exactly been shy about it.
The Truth Is Scary clip being shared on Twitter was only 30 seconds long.
The video it was taken from lasts eight minutes in total.
In it, Kendrick also asserts that the killing of Osama Bin Laden was a hoax; that the 9/11
attacks were an inside job, the airplanes that appeared to crash into the Twin Towers
were holograms, and the towers were actually destroyed by hurricane force winds created
by a device developed by HAARP, the defense department research project that has been
a favorite boogeyman of conspiracy theorists for decades; that the Moon is a secret base
controlled by Reptilians which they use to keep our souls trapped here in the third dimension
so that we can’t access the fourth dimension where they exist — Kendrick believes this
in part because, as he puts it, the Moon “just doesn’t look right”; and that the world
is controlled by the Illuminati, which of course consists of the descendants of thirteen
bloodlines which are also part Reptilian.
The secret Zionist organ harvesting in Haiti is the most egregious bit in that particular
video, so it’s no wonder that’s the clip that got folks talking.
The rest of it is pretty wacky but superficially innocuous.
Kendrick comes across as the sort of affable doofus that many of us know in our own lives
— the cousin or uncle or friend from high school who smokes too much weed and mistakes
his own misinformed incredulity over widely accepted facts for a kind of renegade wisdom,
who warns us not to trust the government or the media, and harbors a wide range of sincerely
held but poorly reasoned beliefs about the way things really are.
In the Truth Is Scary video, Kendrick doesn’t seem angry or malicious or hateful.
He expounds upon his preposterous theories with bemused detachment, and leaves the impression
of a dude who believes this stuff because he’s too dumb to know how dumb he sounds.
He’s a fool, but he seems harmless.
The problem is, while Kendrick and the conspiracy theories he is endorsing in that video might
seem mostly harmless, that doesn’t mean they are.
Two years after that Truth Is Scary video, Kendrick appeared in a video produced by Highspots,
a company that specializes in wrestling shoot videos — and for you non-wrestling fans,
a shoot video is when a wrestler gives an interview talking about their career and the
wrestling business from a real-world point of view, out of character, as it were.
In this video, titled Brian Kendrick Presents: The Kendrick Theory, Kendrick — have I said
fucking “Kendrick” enough already?
— Kendrick voices his belief in even more conspiracy theories.
The actual video is no longer available on the Highspots website, so I’m quoting from
a summary written by Andrew Lutzke and published on the website Culture Crossfire shortly after
the video’s release in 2013.
According to the summary, Kendrick believes that the Sandy Hook massacre, where more than
two dozen people, including twenty children, were murdered, was a hoax designed to facilitate
gun confiscation; that JFK was actually shot by someone in his own car; that Elvis and
Michael Jackson faked their deaths; that the U.S. government is developing a zombie virus
and has been orchestrating the release of more zombie-related media in order to prepare
the public; that the Moon landings were faked — by Stanley Kubrick; that the CIA controls
politicians by drugging them and staging photoshoots with child prostitutes; and that the Earth
is hollow and Hitler once sent 10,000 troops to Antarctica to search for the entrance to
the inner Earth.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot: he’s a Holocaust denier, too.
According to the Culture Crossfire summary, Kendrick says that the number of deaths in
the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated in order to justify the creation of the state of Israel,
that the gas chambers were actually for delousing, and that Allied troops staged concentration
camps in order to further the lie of the Holocaust.
After all of this became news last week, and he was pulled from the AEW show, Kendrick
posted a series of tweets that read:
I apologize for all the hurt and embarassment I have caused with my words.
These are not my beliefs and never were beliefs of mine, and I crossed the line.
I spread the most vile comments without thinking of the damage it would cause.
I will live with this regret for the rest of my life.
I am truly sorry for the pain I have caused.
Apologies for past sins that are only offered after those sins have been uncovered are always
suspect in my book, but if his regret is genuine, I hope he uses it to motivate change, and
growth, and learning.
And, the first thing I hope he learns is that it doesn’t matter if he ever actually believed
any of that stuff or not.
I’m dubious of his claim that “these were never beliefs of mine,” since he stated
them, repeatedly, in detail, in public, and never gave any indication that he was being
ironic or sarcastic or anything other than genuine when he did so.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s just give him the benefit of the doubt and assume
he’s telling the truth in his apology and that these conspiracy theories were not things
he ever actually believed.
It doesn’t matter what he believed.
What matters is what he did — and specifically, what he said.
The conspiracy theories promoted by Kendrick in the clip from 2011 may have appeared harmless.
I’m of the opinion that there is no such thing as a harmless conspiracy theory, because
even the most seemingly innocent ones — like the notion that the Earth is flat — encourage
people to abandon critical thinking, reject expertise, and remain willfully oblivious
to their own ignorance and bias.
A population full of proudly ignorant people who reject basic facts about history and the
world is not something any of us should want.
But, beyond that, even the seemingly harmless conspiracy theories espoused by Kendrick mask
something far more sinister and pernicious.
After I found out that Kendrick believed Israeli relief workers were part of a zionist organ-harvesting
conspiracy, it didn’t surprise me to learn, a few hours later, that he was also a Holocaust
denier.
Once you’ve embraced one antisemitic conspiracy theory, why stop there?
Dig deep enough into almost any conspiracy theory and eventually you find a core of antisemitism.
Hatred and suspicion of Jews, and conspiracy theories, are so inextricably intertwined
that you almost never find one without also finding the other somewhere nearby.
Sometimes it’s right out in the open, as with Holocaust denial.
Sometimes it’s disguised in euphemisms and dog whistles, like “the media,” or “the
intellectual establishment.”
But, it always winds up pointing the finger at the same imagined enemy, and enticing those
gullible enough to take these ideas seriously to ask the same question: what are the Jews
up to?
Jewish people are not only othered, they’re framed as threats, as ruthless authoritarians
whose influence is felt everywhere, and as chameleons capable of infiltrating any institution
and bending it to their will.
In the years since the end of World War II, antisemitism has often hidden behind legitimate
criticisms of the actions of the government of the State of Israel, making it even more
dangerous, but Jewish people have been targeted by this sort of hatred, and vilification,
and dehumanization for centuries.
There’s a reason why antisemitism is sometimes called the Mother Hate — because, in western
civilization, at least, that’s what it is.
It has existed in our history, in our art and literature, in our religion.
For as long as western culture has existed, it has been with us.
It has been the driving force behind some of the most horrific atrocities ever committed,
and to this day Jewish people are targets of discrimination and violence because of
it.
Do I think Brian Kendrick intended to promote or endorse any of that?
Do I think he wanted credulous, impressionable wrestling fans to be introduced to these ideas
through him, and start down a road that would inevitably lead some of them to ideologies
that are unrepentantly hateful and vicious?
I honestly don’t know.
But, like I said, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he didn’t want
to do that.
But that’s what he did.
Regardless of his intentions, that’s what he did.
Regardless of how sorry he is about it now, that’s what he did.
There’s a tendency among many of us to treat belief systems as though they’re morally
neutral.
It seems like a tolerant and enlightened approach at first.
Why be judgmental of others’ beliefs?
Wouldn’t the world be a boring place if we all thought the same way and believed the
same thing?
Maybe we should all just learn to embrace the diversity of thought, and when we’re
arguing with someone and we reach an impasse, just agree to disagree.
We should still be able to shake hands and be friends, right?
I find this odd.
If the disagreement at hand is over something innocuous, yeah, absolutely, no hard feelings.
You’re a Yankees fan, I’m an Orioles fan — no big deal.
I mean, if there’s a Hell, you’re definitely going there, but that’s not up to me — not
for me to judge.
We can still be friends.
But if you hold and espouse a belief system that frames an entire group of people as villains
on the basis of nothing other than bigotry, and that promotes ignorance and paranoia and
unfounded suspicion and intolerance, and that has connections to other beliefs that have
motivated some of the most appalling crimes against humanity ever committed — how is
that morally neutral?
I think a lot of people who believe in conspiracy theories are probably like Brian Kendrick:
dipshits who are drawn to these ideas because they make them feel like they’re in on something
everyone else is missing.
They get to tell themselves they’re smart without having to actually put in any of the
work to, you know, learn things.
They watch some videos, browse some websites, and tell themselves they’ve got it all figured
out.
Just reject whatever the “official story” is and say it was actually aliens, or the
CIA, or — as it always is, ultimately — the Jews.
Conspiracy theorists often claim that their ideas promote critical thinking, but they
actually do the opposite.
They tell people to reject expertise, to accept vague speculation and innuendo as evidence,
and to treat questions as though they were answers.
People who believe and spread conspiracy theories haven’t thought through the literal, factual
implications of the claims they make.
Given that, it’s no wonder most of them haven’t thought through the moral implications,
either.
If you’re the parent of a child who was murdered at Sandy Hook, does it matter if
some of the people claiming that you and your child are crisis actors perpetuating a hoax
don’t really mean it?
If you’re a journalist being harassed by people who accuse you of suppressing the truth,
is it relevant that some of your harassers are just trolling?
If you’re a Jewish person whose synagogue has been targeted by a mass shooter, or whose
cemetery has been vandalized by white supremacists, do you care that some of the people spreading
antisemitic canards don’t actually believe in them?
So, yeah, I’m glad Brian Kendrick lost his spot with AEW.
It’s a shame, because he is genuinely a talented wrestler — I’ve enjoyed his in-ring
work a great deal over the years.
But the views he expresses in those videos not only suggest that he’s not a terribly
sensible or thoughtful person — they’re seriously harmful.
Because no matter how laughable they may seem on the surface, all conspiracy theories, if
you follow them long enough, can take you to dark places.