Stick for thee but not for me

Linda McMahon was confirmed as America’s Secretary of Education this week. She is more well-known as the former CEO of WWE, current minority owner of WWE, and current defendant in a lawsuit regarding her alleged knowledge of and alleged general indifference to her adult employees in positions of power sexually assaulting boys. McMahon’s knowledge of child molesting employees did not prevent her from getting a gig in the first administration of the President of the TV either. Per a David Bixenspan investigation in 2020: 

After Trump nominated Linda McMahon to run the Small Business Administration, "WWE's alleged culture of sexual abuse" was well-known enough to be marked down as a potential "red flag" in the Trump transition team's vetting file on McMahon, according to a copy leaked to Axios in 2019. But it never came up at her confirmation hearing, and McMahon faced no questions from her opponents about the allegations during her two failed Senate campaigns in Connecticut.

You see, McMahon, like most of the current executive cabinet, is insanely rich, and that matters a lot more than other people’s health and safety, their abilities to earn a decent wage, their access to education, boring hoi polloi stuff like that. And she’s insanely rich because of the sport of pro wrestling and the gobs of money its millions of fans have spent for years while she and her garbage husband (who is currently named in a different workplace sex abuse lawsuit) helmed the sport’s biggest organization. And her insane riches have granted her special access multiple times now into a presidential administration–this time with a job as the top dog of a department for which she has zero prior experience.

As Garrett Martin at Paste notes:

With so much happening all the time Linda McMahon’s insane appointment isn’t going to spark the outcry it deserves, despite her being manifestly unqualified to run the Department of Education both morally and professionally. And of course the finishing move to this putrid onslaught of embarrassing bullshit is that McMahon’s primary goal is to destroy the department she’s now in charge of, dealing a potentially fatal blow to the already at risk public education system here in America. WWE’s treated its fans like they’re all idiots for decades, and now one of WWE’s founders is going to make Americans even dumber—and there’s apparently no way to stop this from happening.

What Martin is referencing is McMahon’s true mission at the Department of Education, which is to make her own department cease to exist. It was already well-known that whoever was tapped as the next SecEd in the current administration was doing so with the knowledge of acting as a giant auger to put a hole in the department, then fill it with plastic explosive, and then detonate. McMahon is all too happy to move toward pushing that plunger. Independent journalist Marisa Kabas was first to report that shortly after being confirmed, McMahon sent an email to staff titled “Our Department’s Final Mission” with a plan “to send education back to the states.”

Then late Wednesday night reports surfaced of a draft of an executive order circulating that “recognizes that the president does not have the power to shutter the Education Department. It would take an act of Congress and 60 ‘yes’ votes in the Senate, which is unlikely given that Republicans hold only 53 seats. Rather, the draft calls on Education Secretary Linda McMahon to ‘take all necessary steps’ to facilitate the closure of the department ‘to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.’”

McMahon apparently did not care about the wellbeing of the “ring boys” who worked pro wrestling events for her because those were not her kids or the kids of anyone who mattered to her, particularly anyone with money. With her task of drowning the department she now heads to the point of it no longer existing, she continues to show that other people’s kids don’t matter to her. But, really, that’s always been the case for people in McMahon’s sort of circles.

It’s interesting that the “stick to sports” barf line has not been applied to this wealthy woman given a political job without experience. Had McMahon been someone who instead were to use her status to, say, speak out about how the push for “school choice” has screwed taxpayers and the non-wealthy, she might have been told to “Shut up and wrestle” to a wide audience by school choice proponent Laura Ingraham because any wealthy person speaking on behalf of the marginalized instantly cedes their privilege of voice respected by other wealthy people and people who suck up to them. But McMahon is not being told to stay in her lane as simply a sports magnate because sports magnates–who disproportionately lean a certain political way–and others in the sports world who lean similarly are not held to the “stick to sports” tsking. Because, like other sports-adjacent commands from on political high, it’s not really about what it claims to be about. It’s sticking for thee but not for me.  Most just get the stick while a few get the carats.

Ingraham herself has shown that hypocrisy multiple times, most recently by platforming Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker and praising his anti-LGBTQ political action committee. He, like McMahon, is not required to stick to sports by those most likely to scold such a command.

Neither are sports media personalities if they are doing softball interviews with POTVS. Pro football brass can push for players doing social protests to “get back to football” while themselves making public endorsements for Supreme Court picks and doing political ads for fracking. Team owners are fine to host fundraisers for politicians, but players should not be criticizing them for it, lest it be a “distraction,” which spending money on a politician is not. (Quietly donating to politicians and PACs and overtly conservative causes could be argued as not actually speaking up about non-sports, but a pesky catastrophic Supreme Court decision lets us know that political donations are very much speech.) The leader in sports programming can grant space to a demagogue for a self-congratulatory message but an up-and-coming candidate with a genuine sports penchant is too spicy for one of its podcasts.

So again we see the double-standard play out where, if one has a level of power that comes with money and thus a likely leaning toward a certain political direction, “stick to sports” does not apply. In fact, one is then very much encouraged not to stick to sports and to use that power to facilitate the squashing of most Joe Q. and Jane X. Fans whose cable and PPV subscriptions and ticket and merch purchases birth or sustain that power, as well as any rogue millionaire otherwise seen on TV moving a ball in a particular way who might speak truth to billionaires. They should just stick to sports while the din of the people-eating machine grows louder.

Linda McMahon is just the latest example, a person megarich from sports who seems to have knowingly fostered a horrific sports workplace, which has then garnered her the political honor of playing her part to make the rich richer while Swiss-cheesing the futures of mostly non-rich children and sticking it to families she will never have to know or care about. Carats for a select few with a stick for the rest.

And that should stick in any decent person’s craw.