WWE TV 06/10 - 06/16 Operation Car Wash is a fraud and Lula is a political prisoner

[Log]

9 hours ago, Johnny Sorrow said:

"Guy attacks widow trying to rehabilitate name she owns for clicks" should be the fucking headline. It's fucking weak sauce. That bit on wwe.com was full of cool shots and quotes from lots of folks, including some wonderful pics of Pat Patterson with some young talent. So what if Dana fucking Warrior wore facepaint? Maybe she never liked her husband's hateful bullshit. Maybe she did at the time but has evolved. Maybe she wants to rehab the name she carries and own it for herself and what she believes. What a fucking non-story done only for clicks. Yuck.

I love ya, Johnny, but you're wrong here.  This is a giant corporation using the imagery of a man who made it his life mission to advocate against LGBTQ+ causes for a Pride Month promotion.  

I saw the other images and that was nice, but it doesn't undo this.  Definitely not a non-story.  This is gross and WWE needs to be held accountable for it.

The Ultimate Warrior was my favorite wrestler when I was a kid.  I painted my face and tied shoelaces around my arm to look like him.  Wrestlemania VI was on my 12th birthday, and I watched it with my friends and lost my mind when he won.  None of that changes the fact that he was a disgusting human being.  He was a bigot in every sense of the term.  WWE should not be using his image and name for anything, let alone a "courage" award.  The man was a coward who wanted force his narrow little worldview on others.  He should not be celebrated.

[C.S.]

More Warrior insanity:

 

[Bix]

On 6/18/2019 at 12:21 AM, Johnny Sorrow said:

"Guy attacks widow trying to rehabilitate name she owns for clicks" should be the fucking headline. It's fucking weak sauce. That bit on wwe.com was full of cool shots and quotes from lots of folks, including some wonderful pics of Pat Patterson with some young talent. So what if Dana fucking Warrior wore facepaint? Maybe she never liked her husband's hateful bullshit. Maybe she did at the time but has evolved. Maybe she wants to rehab the name she carries and own it for herself and what she believes. What a fucking non-story done only for clicks. Yuck.

Everyone else has covered several of the important beats, but setting aside your dumber points that have nothing to do with the issue at hand (I don't get paid by clicks, even if I'm glad the article was widely read) did you just...not read the article? All of this is covered in the article, including links to sources every single time, but, in case you need Cliff's Notes in lieu of doing the reading: 

* Dana Warrior did a pride tweet last year with a photo herself in a rainbow shirt. It passed without comment as a nice gesture because she was her own person tweeting as herself on her own merits.

* In October, for GLAAD Spirit Day, she did a post for WWE.com's community blog built around her in purple Ultimate Warrior paint/gear. The response to the WWE tweets about it was exactly as negative as it was to her tweet last Thursday because of the whole "using dead chud homophobe husband as a gay pride mascot" thing. She and WWE would have known this going into last week, when they did the same fucking thing again.

* Her only public comment about her husband's general shittyness—this was not specific to LGBTQ+ issues, in part because she was contacted at a time when WWE was doing the "Unleash Your Warrior" Komen stuff—was this to VICE Sports in 2017: "I will not be disloyal to my husband's memory or speak ill of a man who is not here to defend himself. I can, however, tell you his heart was changed by conversations with his two daughters. The true testament of the man behind the character is his ability to evolve. My husband did just that." Note the complete lack of specifics: His heart was changed on...who or what, exactly?

* Two days after the VICE article came out, Ultimate Creations sent a DMCA takedown notice to The Internet Archive, demanding they pull their archives of UltimateWarrior.com from The Wayback Machine. Since Archive tends not to fight takedown notices because they don't have the resources for a legal fight, the most complete copy of Warrior's spate of homophobic/racist/bigoted/xenophobic/anti-aboriginal/inexplicably anti-cancer patient blogs—with the best provenance of their legitimacy as well—has been removed from the public internet.

* Warrior's blogs included comments about his intent to raise his daughters as bigots, particularly homophobes (thankfully someone saved one where he said that and I could authenticate it) and he went off in his DePaul speech about his then-kindergarten age daughter was too feminine to ever be gay.

* Warrior, as a political and non-wrestling figure, is best known for his homophobia, even if it goes MUCH deeper, like his ties to the Charles Martel Society that I found in March.

* The WWE and Dana Warrior "Warrior as pride symbol" is being done without a hint of irony, just like the Warrior Award stuff, which Stephanie basically admitted from the jump was a cynical marketing tactic.

* There's still sufficient evidence that Dana Warrior, even if she wasn't joining in on the "Warrior as gay pride mascot" thing, is/was complicit in her husband's bigotry and the attempted whitewashing thereof, to the point that she has plenty to answer for.

* The whole idea of the photos, both times, is so obviously dumb on its face that it only makes sense if it's an intentional gaslighting of the public to try to reinvent awful-ass Jim Hellwig as a symbol of unity and strength. Which he fucking isn't.

Now, with that in mind, go do the fucking reading.

[NintendoLogic]

If I can play devil's advocate, it could be that Dana considers the Ultimate Warrior to be like Captain America or Duffman, an immortal icon who exists independently of the actor who plays him. Also, I don't know if Hellwig can be considered the greatest bigot in WWE history when Dick Murdoch worked for the company and was literally a member of the Klan.

[Bix]

45 minutes ago, NintendoLogic said:

If I can play devil's advocate, it could be that Dana considers the Ultimate Warrior to be like Captain America or Duffman, an immortal icon who exists independently of the actor who plays him. Also, I don't know if Hellwig can be considered the greatest bigot in WWE history when Dick Murdoch worked for the company and was literally a member of the Klan.

But Jim Hellwig changed his legal name to "Warrior" to better link himself to his wrestling persona and his widow is billed by WWE as "the widow of the Ultimate Warrior."

Also, Warrior is/was much more famous and vocal than Dick Murdoch.

[The Thread Killer]

We'll see how deep this problem really goes if for the Hall of Fame next year, they announce the Dick Murdoch Award and name the Harris Brothers as the first inductees.

[Bix]

40 minutes ago, The Thread Killer said:

We'll see how deep this problem really goes if for the Hall of Fame next year, they announce the Dick Murdoch Award and name the Harris Brothers as the first inductees.

I know you're being facetious, but this is part of why I stressed the specific context of the standby legends and the degree to which they've gone so ridiculously far with Warrior: It's pretty clear now what the origin of the larger lionization of him and using him as the face philanthropic of their Philanthropy As Marketing actually was. Dude dying as soon as he touched down returning from the Mania weekend with his HOF induction made him weirdly magnetic and sympathetic, at least momentarily. Simultaneously, it gave them a newly-dead legend who died with such bizarre timing—the promo on Raw helped, too—that, with an inspirational-sounding name ("he's THE MOST ULTIMATE OF WARRIORS!"), the character became too obviously useful to mold into whatever they wanted him to be.

But since he changed his real name to Warrior to blue the line, WWE does even more to blur the line with framing The Ultimate Warrior—not Jim Hellwig/Warrior Warrior—as the dead guy who Dana Warrior was married to, and so on, you cannot separate the character from the man at all. And their hubris with regards to what actual campaigns to use the Warrior imagery in shows that they know what they're doing. Actual LGBTQ+ groups trying to claim the character as a pride symbol independently would have been cool, and WWE and Dana doing a campaign about trying to change him to a positive figure would have been risky but better than what they did. Hell, doing it with some irony, even if they didn't outright say it, would have been better than what they did, but there was none.

[sek69]

Warrior basically calling his own death on Raw made him into a ready made PR bonanza ripe for the picking, and WWE jumping on that almost immediately was kind of icky even before all the other stuff happened. 

[Bix]

1 hour ago, sek69 said:

Warrior basically calling his own death on Raw made him into a ready made PR bonanza ripe for the picking, and WWE jumping on that almost immediately was kind of icky even before all the other stuff happened. 

Absolutely, but I always thought it the "precognizant promo" thing was a bit overblown, even if ripe for exploitation, because it didn't sound that unusual for a Warrior promo, plus he had long been convinced he wasn't going to live past his 50s because his dad and grandfathers didn't. And even if he knew more...well, he did look like he was having a heart attack all weekend and it was being commented on during the speech and promo.