I had hoped the book might offer a window into how our culture got this way. After all, the New World Order wasn’t some edge case. Rather, as the book jacket puts it, “In the late 1990s, pro wrestling was the hottest thing in American pop culture, with companies making millions in action figures, video games, and simple black T-shirts emblazoned with three little letters: nWo.”
While Say Hello to the Bad Guys offers less insight than I might have wished into what made these villains so successful or why pro wrestling went mainstream during the Clinton era, Raimondi offers up a series of observations that struck me as terrifically relevant in making sense of today’s performative education discourse.
Early on, Raimondi notes, “In wrestling, promos are as important as the matches, arguably more so. A promo, which is short for promotion, is a talking segment (or interview) that builds to a match or the next beat in the story.” He observes: “If you’re a good promo artist and you can get people to believe in your persona, it almost doesn’t matter” if you’re lousy “in the ring.”
In the age of social media, podcasts, and ubiquitous smartphones, the platform for promos is boundless. Debates over DEI, gender, higher ed, or education choice have been driven by good promo artists—left and right—with robust personas. Statehouse debates over vouchers and education savings accounts are shaped (pro- and con-) by the messaging of school choice “celebrities” whose primary qualification is an energetic social media presence and a taste for vitriol. The DEI surge and attendant backlash were fueled by self-promoters (think Ibram X. Kendi or Robby Starbuck) who mastered a popular shtick. It almost doesn’t matter whether they know what they’re talking about (i.e. if they’re lousy “in the ring”). Relevance demands that advocates and policymakers devote significant time and energy to cutting their own promos. The problem is there is often an inverse relationship between promos and wisdom: Embracing the persona that makes for a good promo tends to work at cross-purposes with deliberation, nuance, or complex realities.
In pro wrestling, cheating plays a pivotal role. As Raimondi explains, “It gives the good guys an excuse when they lose—the bad guy had to do something underhanded to gain an advantage.” The shorthand for this dynamic is “keeping someone strong”—as in, “The bad guy only won by cheating, which means the good guy is still the ‘real’ champion.”
Hello! Welcome to the “my side always loses” cultural politics of 2025 . . . but only because the other side is breaking the rules and violating norms. Every setback is just another excuse to insist that the fix was in.
