On Thursday, February 12, 2026, reports in the dirt sheets (internet-only pro-wrestling “news” gleaned from inside sources) told the tale that AEW talent Brody King was benched due to the recent upswing of anti-ICE chants that accompanied him to the ring. I know that’s a loaded sentence that likely nixed three quarters of my immense audience — pro-wrestling? And now politics? UGH! — but this eventual non-story deserved a few column inches this week. Hear me out.
Not to bury the lede here, but the story was falsely reported. Brody King wasn’t benched at all. He was simply not slated to be on the card. Full stop. AEW is a big company with a lot of moving parts. They also don’t like to overload angles between wrestlers, and King’s upcoming title shot against Maxwell Jacob Friedman has already been perfectly set up. Nothing else needed but to ring the bell and let the violence commence.
Rather than dwell on how the story got falsely picked up, spread like wildfire, and so on… I’d rather talk about the deeper implications of had it been true, why it was believable in the first place, and how politics are now starting to seep into pro-wrestling (and why it both rules and sucks).
The briefest of backstories so you’re up to speed on why an anti-ICE chant even started at AEW events. In short: Brody King (real name Nathan Troy Blauvelt) is himself a SoCal native who has been wrestling since 2015. At the same time he started hurling folks in the ring, he also started a band, God’s Hate, a hardcore punk band. For the rest, let me simply cite Wikipedia:
On June 18, 2025, King wore an “Abolish ICE” shirt before a match in Mexico City. King wore the shirt “as a show of support for the protestors in his home region rallying against the Trump administration’s deportation policies and tactics.” After the match, he sold “Abolish ICE” t-shirts, with all proceeds, totaling over $27,000, donated to the Local Hearts Foundation. In January 2026, he partnered with comic book artist Daniel Warren Johnson to release merchandise to raise money for the Minnesota Rights Action Committee, which as of February 2026 raised $59,000.
So, it shouldn’t be too big a surprise when King entered the arena on February 4th, 2026 in Las Vegas, NV, the hot crowd backed the tattooed titan to a rousing chant of “FUCK ICE” so long, and so loud, it even caused MJF himself to spike the lens out of character. 
The match itself on the 4th was an eliminator match where, should King prevail, he’d earn himself a title shot for the Big Beautiful Belt that MJF so lovingly brandishes. Much to this writer’s surprise… Brody beat MJF in less than a minute — setting up a titleshot in Australia this past Saturday. It was a smart move by Tony Khan to elevate King, who continues to be a celebrated babyface on his roster. That he now comes part-in-parcel with a rousing swear-fueled chant is maybe less desirable to cable stations carrying the AEW television programs… which led to that false report dropping. Upon hearing it? Folks just shrugged and accepted yet another instance of free speech dying in the second Trump tenure in the partially demolished White House. Before torches could be lit though, it was announced the story was false, and we could all breathe a partial sigh of relief.
Partial, you say? Oh yes. Because in the fracas of all this ICE razzmatazz, digital sleuths figured out that Warner Bros. Discovery actually owns a part of AEW! And wouldn’t it be easy for a stakeholder to pressure the top brass to maybe downplay the wrestler currently synonymous with such hullabaloo? Well, it hasn’t happened yet, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that the Internet Wrestling Community (the IWC, yes, we named it) was raging for that kind of fight.
Anyone paying attention to the Goliath to AEW’s David — the WWE — would note the continual support and camaraderie between the TKO-owned Sports Entertainment brand and the Orange Despot. WWE Chief Creative Steroid Abuser Paul Levesque (aka “Triple H”) is presently serving at the pleasure of the Pantshitter in Chief, as his vice-chair of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition (three things Trump himself knows literally nothing about). The Don himself was part of WWE programming — with over a dozen on-air appearances — including being inducted into the celebrity wing of the WWE Hall of Fame (add it to his list of useless accolades). Simply put, the WWE is clearly pro-Trump alongside their parent brand. AEW to date, has really not leaned into any political messegry… save only the time when they needed to pivot hard with former talent Jake Hager — who himself was (and is) a very vocal Trump supporter.
Pro-wrestling has dabbled in the political arena from time to time. Whenever politics takes over the zeitgeist… the carny spirit that pro-wrestling was born from simply can’t not take the bait. Whether it was the aforementioned Hager’s run in the WWE between 2013-2014, or all the anti-American heel characters throughout history (The Sultan, The Iron Sheik, Nikolai Volkov, Muhammad Hassan, etc.), pro-wrestling has long eaten its lunch off of utilizing politics to prod pugilism.
But America itself has turned heel.
With immigration enforcement now empowered to murder citizens, the threat of nationalized voting, alternative “Pro-America” halftime shows, and pedophiles being shielded by our Attorney General by way of citing the current state of the DOW… our country on the global stage is no better than Ric Flair in his prime — preening, prancing, and celebrating his predilection for kiss-stealing.
Pair this narrative with the cancelling of Steven Colbert’s Late Show under pretenses so thin they sublimate on sight, the attempted stifling of Jimmy Kimmel, or the rampant destruction of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, and suddenly AEW feeling faux-pressure to bench Brody King, and you wouldn’t bat an eyelash, would you?
This is why I’m personally so torn over politics bleeding into my weekly guilty pleasure of watching people beat one another bloody. I loathe the idea that WWE is pro-Trump. I actively celebrate AEW pushing Brody King because of the fan reactions and loud anti-ICE chants. But same as with the Superbowl halftime show… I’m baffled we live in a world so divided we now have to make all entertainment choose a side. It’s asinine. Not that it wasn’t just as bad when Vince McMahon painted every foreign wrestler as an America-hating savage, but it feels like that waste of villainy finally washed out of wrestling (for the most part…), and before the dust settles, we have to fear talent being benched for their political beliefs.
Someone should call Colin Kaepernick.
For now, I’m glad that Brody King is still actively wrestling programs throughout AEW, and the “fuck ICE” chants that follow him continue to gain in volume. I’m proud he’s taken this wave of support and found a way to turn it into dollars to give back to the cause. And I’m proud that AEW hasn’t yet taken steps to discourage the groundswell. Meanwhile, the WWE is taking Saudi blood money as often as they’re willing to give it, are continuing to elevate American and German talent wrestling under a luchador mask above actual luchadors, all while actively crying over fans not purchasing WrestleMania tickets due to the “fuck family-friendly” pricing. I can’t wait until Kid Rock is lip-synching the Star Spangled Banner to a half-filled arena in April.
