Vince Russo's Flimsy WWE/AEW Conspiracy, or I Melted My Brain For You People, You Better Read This

"IT'S ALL A WORK, BRO. ALSO LISTEN TO MY OTHER PODCASTS WHERE I BITCH THAT I PAY MONEY TO LISTEN TO DAVE MELTZER."

So, if you're like me, you're beyond excited for All Elite Wrestling. A wrestling promotion with national cable television distribution and deep pockets backing it with "the boys" in leadership position is exactly the thing needed to counter the national hegemony of WWE. If you're Vince Russo, however, the first place your mind goes to is WWE AND AEW ARE IN BED TOGETHER, BRO. It's the surest sign that you're dealing with a poisoned mind. However, any look at Russo's creative output in Attitude Era WWE, death spiral World Championship Wrestling, or in TNA, well, it's not that hard a leap to make. Russo from beginning has been beating the drum, and he promised a podcast detailing his thoughts. Being the self-loathing sadist who doesn't respect his own time or mental well-being, I had to listen to what Russo and "The Conspiracy Horsemen" (Bin Hamin, Big Sal, Papadon, and Stevie Richards) had to say on the matter. The episode dropped yesterday, and I listened to it so you did not have to.

I was expecting some flimsy reasoning, so when I got just that, maybe it was my confirmation bias, but I was not surprised. As with any conspiracy theory, it relies on people who are on the outside looking in — Russo proudly brags about how he's "blackballed" — looking to make tenuous leaps that defy common sense on the paranoid supposition that everyone is always lying. Granted, everyone in the upper echelons of business, especially wrestling, ARE lying, but the thing is discerning what they're lying about rather than looking at it as a binary between truth and deceit. Which lie makes the most sense to make? The funniest thing about the entire podcast is that by the end, Russo was making the point that WWE is currently in its state right now because Vince McMahon is an incompetent septuagenarian as an alternate theory for why what's going on right now is going on, and stopped short of saying "Everything I just said is bullshit, bro" before course-correcting that his mumbo-jumbo is indeed what was happening. Hell, anytime someone made an InfoWars-y point, the "devil's advocate" or the sanity counter actually sounded like what was really happening.

Anyway, I will go point-by-point that they made, almost a Fisking by audio regurgitation. Anyway:

• Because Extreme Championship Wrestling was a WWE subsidy from its inception, history will repeat itself. - While history repeats itself time and again because mankind has hubris enough to forget the way things happened to lead to atrocities and mistakes, the circumstances here are different. ECW was never backed by money, so finding Vince McMahon as a glorified sugar daddy makes more sense than the Elite guys running back to him when they found Tony Khan instead. Had they gotten McMahon or even Paul Levesque (Triple H) funding promises, would they have waited for Khan to come aboard as a front? I believe they would have probably created a simpler lie, like it was a joint venture with money from their combined merch sales and Stephen Amell's wealth amassed from acting. It might not have stood up, but wrestling liars are usually not particularly good unless it has to do with kayfabe.
• But Tony Khan has a NFL franchise and wants to get into wrestling. Vince McMahon has a wrestling company and wants to get into football. - This was another point brought up by more than just Russo, and it feels flimsy just because McMahon doesn't play nice with other people. It's why he left the National Wrestling Alliance. Starting the XFL was his outlet to football, and note that now, he's rebooting it with no other funding to back him up. He didn't need Dick Ebersol this time; WWE had enough money in it that he could use it as collateral. This idea is wishcasting at the highest level, especially since Khan and the Elite have no real reason to want to work with McMahon or Levesque since he has the money and they have the wrestling know-how.
• Vince McMahon would never let Cody Rhodes use his last name or Billy Gunn to take his name with him. - They debunked the former themselves when they said that at no point in any graphics or official press releases that he was ever billed as anything but "Cody." Did the commentators call him Cody Rhodes? Sure, but one of those commentators was Jim Ross, who is insanely washed and doesn't care what he calls what. AS for Gunn, he came up in an era before McMahon started trademarking every name he could. By the time he passed into that era, Gunn probably was already grandfathered in. Besides, the profitability of the name "Billy Gunn" compared to any other name is close to zero.
• If it had been a shoot, Triple H would have cut a promo on RAW the Monday after Double or Nothing to bury Cody. - This is so asinine that I didn't even want to address it, but Russo backed it up by saying WWE buried Hulk Hogan after he left for WCW. I mean, yeah, they tried, but Hogan gave WCW legitimacy after jumping and then his turn to join the New World Order did more to hurt WWE than "The Huckster and the Nacho Man" did to hurt WCW. Levesque "burying" Rhodes after Double or Nothing, had that been their "shoot" reaction, would have just polarized everyone further. AEW partisans and WWE partisans would just have gotten bolder in their claims.
• DDP and Bret Hart are on Legends Deals. No way they appear at AEW events without McMahon's or Levesque's knowledge or consent. - This is the closest they got to a concrete point, but only because I have no idea what a Legends deal entails. However, given that guys on Legends deals make appearances for indies all across the country, I can only assume that Hart and Page made agreements to appear without talking to anyone in WWE beforehand, which I might add would be their right given that a Legends Deal gives the same fucking independent contractor status that real WWE wrestlers SHOULD be getting. The difference is that they're not beholden to weekly television. IF you think either guy — Hart who has longstanding distrust of McMahon and Page who is rich now independently of wrestling — is clearing any appearances with McMahon or Levesque, you're nuttier than a can of cashews.
• They pulled Undertaker and Kurt Angle from Starrcast, but why were they even able to sign on in the first place? - I mean, Russo knows Undertaker, right? The dude was already a "respected locker room leader" by the time the Attitude Era rolled around. By the mid-aughts, he had the most influence backstage of anyone not currently married to McMahon's daughter. Now, he works apparently when he wants to and again probably didn't think he had to clear anything by McMahon or Levesque. Angle might seem like a sturdier piece of evidence for Russo except for the fact that he had wrestled his last match and was already off weekly television. Again, he doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who checks all his appearances when he's not needed on television by the front office.
• Triple H mentioned AEW in his Hall of Fame speech. - Yes, he did, while standing next to a dude who was his friend and stablemate who'd be going there to work, in a setting where you speak off the cuff. Yes, Robert Evans got fired for Hart mentioning McMahon, but McMahon is a fucking weirdo. Also Levesque has power comparable to McMahon in the company, and thus he can say what he wants.
• Sami Zayn mentioned it in a scripted promo. - Yeah, and if it was indeed scripted, the context was he was a heel making a threat to fuck off to the competition as a slam. CM Punk talked about taking the WWE Championship to New Japan during the most celebrated promo in the last decade. The point that "WWE doesn't mention the competition when it's on top" is out the window when they're trying to be edgy and shooty.
• They hired Bruce Prichard again, and he's tight with Conrad Thompson, who works with AEW. There was Starrcast merch on WWE Network! - They acknowledged that McMahon doesn't watch NXT during this episode. What the fuck makes them think McMahon would watch a fucking podcast of a dude telling stories from back in the day?
• They fucked over CM Punk, but not Jon Moxley. - CM Punk walked out while holding a list of grievances that included them not caring about his health. Moxley as Dean Ambrose served the rest of his contract out and did business, according to WWE, "the right way," and it still wasn't good enough to pay him a decent rate for his last show with the company.
• They haven't humiliated Renee Young in response. - I get that WWE is vindictive and spiteful and sexist, but they're not making Young do HLA because of the rating and the push that the company now "respects" women, and they're not going to do anything spiteful to her because stockholders are watching. They even made the fucking point as to what they're going to do with her, and that's give her more and more responsibilities that she's always on the road with WWE and not able to see Moxley at all so that their marriage falls apart. Like, their devil's advocate bullshit was the actual right explanation. Fuck. Oh, and double fuck to Russo who called Young "not good," which is a falsehood and probably rooted in some deep-seated misogyny of his. But I digress.
• They let Dean Malenko and Arn Anderson go, and they're SMART. Why would they let them go? - Anderson let Alicia Fox work a house show drunk. Dean Malenko has been accused of being a locker room drug dealer, but that's hearsay. Even so, they're agents. They're not lighting the world on fire. That's why WWE lets them go more easily than wrestlers. It's not right, and it's not an excuse for WWE, but I mean, it's an easier explanation than "They're going to make AEW more profitable."
• How did Tony Khan know how to cut and live-edit a wrestling show? He must have gotten a crash course from Kevin Dunn. - Kevin Dunn sucks, and cutting and editing a live wrestling show is similar enough to live sports that you can pick it up, and different enough that it'll look janky, which according to people who watched, is the case.

Basically, it's hard to take people seriously who compare McMahon to Sun Tzu (really, Russo did that) or who think everything is interconnected like the Illuminati. I mean, the One Percent sticks together inasmuch as they want the same policies so that they can continue to collectively fuck over the poor, but within their industries, they compete ferociously. Wrestling is no bigger example, especially with McMahon whose entire history in business saw him seeing himself as an underdog protagonist who battled against his father, the territories, the federal government, and Ted Turner. What makes you think that he would actively work with Khan, or even as the lads on this podcast said, allowed Levesque to have that kind of relationship? It all relies on the gullibility that an outsider has a better understanding of a hairy situation than the people inside of it, and on misinterpretations of what's presented to make analysis that the ghouls in charge are telling different lies than the ones they're actually speaking.

But the most disappointing thing here is how much contempt they have for the people who disagree with them, or even worse, whom they want to listen to their shit. Their use of the word "mark" was off the charts in this episode, which is funny, because no one who watches wrestling from the outside, even people who used to work for wrestling companies, is NOT a mark. The fact that Papadon explicitly intimated that people who were "snowflakes" or "SJWs" were bad is even more disappointing, because everyone agreed with him. It's not like I had any respect for Russo, Bin Hamin, or Papadon, or even knew who Big Sal was before, but whatever respect I did have was lost. As for Richards, I guess I just didn't see he was a shitty person because I actually met him and he was nice to me once. Regardless, no one on that show is worth listening to.

Oh, and one more thing, Russo said the word "bro" 61 times by my count. I admit that my eyes glazed over a few times, so I may have missed a few or overcompensated. I don't know. But what I do know is, if you were playing a drinking game and took a pull every time he said that word, you'd be dead by now.