The term “kayfabe” refers to insider pro wrestling slang akin to what theater producers might call “diegesis”: the elements internal to the performance as staged for the audience. For example, WWE or AEW wrestlers who are close friends behind the scenes will meet with scriptwriters prior to a show to discuss the “in kayfabe” improvisational beats of their on-camera blood feud in order to advance a storyline about this or that contested championship belt or other plot device. Contrast with “shoot,” which would be some sort of breaking of character, an example being a wrestler with real-life personal enmity of another purposely inflicting injury on that IRL antagonist in front of the audience instead of pulling punches. Or punching Vince McMahon like Bret Hart did once.
Jim Jordan is not a pro wrestler – even though, fucking hilariously, Amazon classified listed 2022 book “Do What You Said You Would Do” as a “Wrestler biography” alongside various unauthorized bios of WWE figures such as John Cena and Cody Rhodes. He’s just a former NCAA Division I sport wrestler who was legitimately very successful at it if less so at preventing his charges from being sexually molested by a sick fuck doctor while Jordan served as an assistant coach at Ohio State.
And yet it’s pretty difficult not to see the very goddamned obvious kayfabe of this Axios article about Jordan issuing subpoenas to eight major Obamacare market insurers – Elevance, CVS, Centene, GuideWell, Oscar Health, Kaiser Permanente, Health Care Service Corporation and Blue Shield of California – in what the “Be Smart” bullet-point factory writes is “part of a widening investigation of potential fraud surrounding the use of premium subsidies in the individual market.”
Which in normal-people speak translates to “Republicans did not do shit to prevent people’s health insurance costs from spiking and will not do shit to bring them back down. So the plan instead is to have this turgid wrestling freak spittle at executives in a televised hearing as the centerpiece of a pretty limp dick effort to make it look like (A) It’s the insurers’ fault for not policing ‘fraud’ (B) Illegal immigrants something something (C) Executives for companies whose bottom line literally depends on a fraction of their customer base suffering and dying every day are suddenly pissing their pants over a vague, performative subpoena from a party they’ve heavily invested in for decades.”
Whether the execs are actively in on the kayfabe or not doesn’t matter. They know Jordan would rather be calling Matt Taibbi in to expose an internal Facebook memo from 2019 detailing the network’s plans to suppress disinformation about Hunter Biden, so they’ll suck it up for a day, and then wire $10 million to the NRCC to try to limit the GOP’s losses in November. Whatever beating they take by people dropping their now-unsubsidized coverage is worth it to stave off a permanently disabling beating they’ll get if the economic populism mind virus cannot be contained.
The insurers will issue a joint statement affirming a commitment to rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse by their policyholders, Jordan will declare victory and use the moment to remind voters that only Republicans are fighting to reduce costs while Democrats nearly destroyed America with their Satanic Obamacare scheme to turn your healthcare into a dysfunctional socialist nightmare.