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So Long and Thank For The Fish, Man 107: AEW vs. ICE

So Long and Thank For The Fish, Man 107: AEW vs. ICE

Posted on by Marc Alan Fishman

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.

Continue reading “So Long and Thank For The Fish, Man 107: AEW vs. ICE” →

Brainiac On Banjo: You Say You Want An Insurrection

Brainiac On Banjo: You Say You Want An Insurrection

Posted on by Mike Gold

“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we’re finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio.” From Ohio, written by Neil Young.

The New York Times, which nearly half the American electorate conflates with Pravda, said yesterday “Under an 1878 law called the Posse Comitatus Act, it is normally illegal to use federal troops on domestic soil for policing purposes. But an 1807 law, the Insurrection Act creates an exception to that ban for situations in which the president decides that ‘unlawful obstructions, combinations or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States,’ make it ‘impracticable’ to enforce federal law.”

Over the next month or so, it is likely you will be inundated with two words: “Superman,” and “Insurrection.” We all know the former is a big-ass movie about a boy and his dog, but what is an insurrection?

In 2006, George W. Bush considered intervening in the state of Louisiana’s response to Hurricane Katrina back in 2006 — you may remember the photo op of Bush impotently performing a flyover in Air Force One. Louisiana’s governor refused. In 2020, Donald Trump said he would invoke the Insurrection Act in response to the protests following the murder by police of George Floyd. Trump told “every governor to deploy the National Guard in sufficient numbers to re-establish civil law and order until the violence has been quelled.” Like the governor of Louisiana thirteen years earlier, the sundry state officials in question did not cave in to Trump’s demand. Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo: You Say You Want An Insurrection” →