Professional wrestler turned Tennessee local mayor Glenn Jacobs wants to reunify the conservative movement.
Professional wrestler turned Tennessee local mayor Glenn Jacobs wants to reunify the conservative movement.
O n the evening of October 5, 1997, a demon appeared in Missouri.
At the Kiel Center arena in St. Louis, more than 20,000 fans of the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) had gathered for the company’s “Badd Blood” pay-per-view event. In the show’s climactic bout, Shawn Michaels faced the Undertaker in the world’s first “Hell in a Cell” match.
But suddenly, the lights darkened and the shriek of an organ echoed throughout the arena. From behind the backstage curtain, a towering figure clad in a red and black mask and bodysuit began to march toward the ring. With his long, greasy hair and studded leather outfit, he seemed to have escaped from the set of a Mad Max sequel.
“That’s gotta be Kane!” WWF CEO Vince McMahon screamed from the commentary table.
In the fiction of “kayfabe” — wrestling parlance for the illusion that characters and storylines are real rather than staged — Kane had risen from the underworld to take revenge on his abusive older brother, the supposedly undead Undertaker. Jerry Springer would have blushed at such dysfunction.
In reality, the man behind the flame-streaked mask was Glenn Jacobs, a mild-mannered former substitute teacher and college football player who had grown up in the St. Louis area. After a knee injury forced him to abandon his dream of playing in the NFL, he entered the wrestling business in 1992 on the recommendation of a friend. Initially, he moved between promotions with limited success, performing as such ignominious characters as the Grinch-like “Christmas Creature” and Dr. Isaac Yankem, an evil dentist. Shockingly, neither gimmick became a sensation.
Yet Jacobs persevered, intent on becoming a star. When he was offered the chance to portray Kane and feud with the Undertaker, one of the WWF’s major attractions, he knew that his lucky break had finally arrived. Kane, the “Devil’s Favorite Demon,” was an immediate hit. Jacobs has played the role intermittently ever since.
But in 2018, Jacobs stepped away from wrestling and into a new arena: the race for mayor of Knox County, Tenn. Running as a Republican, he won the election by a decisive majority. In 2022, he was reelected. His second and final term will conclude this year.
Jacobs isn’t the first pro-wrestling politician. Jesse Ventura formerly served as mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minn., and governor of the North Star State. But in recent years, American politics has become increasingly indistinguishable from the sort of vulgar entertainment that the WWF epitomized in the ’90s. Rabid tribalism, meanwhile, has led many Americans to treat political debates like the black-and-white moral battles that define wrestling storylines. In such a climate, should we be concerned about the rise of candidates who treat governance as performance art?
Jacobs doesn’t think so. He believes that Democratic figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have done as much as Donald Trump to transform politics into a form of car-crash television. Every politician has embraced kayfabe. The issue is how they use it.
“In wrestling, the characters that I was not successful with, they just weren’t me,” Jacobs tells National Review, in a phone interview from his office in Knoxville. “Despite what Trump does as far as bringing the entertainment aspect to it, in the end, that’s him. . . . The Democrats are different. They’re using the entertainment to sell something that they’re not. I think he uses the entertainment factor to sell something that he is and we know he is.”
How, then, do the tools of show business shape Jacobs’s own political persona?
“In the end, it’s me,” he says. “I try to do things that in many cases are humorous or at least entertaining to get people to watch and to listen to me. But at the end, I’m not saying anything that I don’t believe. . . . People like Donald Trump, people like me, use entertainment to try to bring the truth out. The other side uses the entertainment to try to hide the truth.”
The primary truth Jacobs has tried to reveal in his political life is that conservative policies work. He’s lived in Tennessee since 1995 and began to consider running for office as his wrestling career approached its end. With a population of more than 500,000, Knox County is one of the largest counties in the Volunteer State. The opportunity to influence such a sizable community appealed to Jacobs. As mayor, he’s resisted tax increases, slashed regulations, and promoted school choice. But he’s also tried to emphasize that healthy civil institutions are a better solution to social problems than government intervention.
Addiction, for instance, has become an epidemic in Tennessee. Deaths of despair are grimly common throughout the state. Jacobs, who views the opioid crisis as principally an “issue of the spirit and the soul,” sought to address it shortly after taking office. He partnered with other elected officials in Knox County to assemble a meeting of pastors and church leaders, where they discussed the scale of the problem and how it might be solved. “Within like a year they had set up an addiction therapy center,” Jacobs says. “We’d still be talking about that as government and doing studies and trying to figure it out. They already had it up and operational. And it’s changing lives.”
Politics, like professional wrestling, is a theatrical profession. As an English major, Jacobs prepared for both careers by familiarizing himself with the performing arts. His time in wrestling granted him the media training and interpersonal skills necessary to manage the public-facing work of a politician.
“People always say I learned how to chokeslam my competition,” Jacobs says. “Not at all. I learned how to work as part of a very successful organization. And I learned a lot about leadership as well while I was there.”
Beneath his brutish on-camera persona, Jacobs was fascinated with ideas. He’s an avid student of conservative intellectual history who cites Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Albert Jay Nock, and Ronald Reagan as his primary influences. There’s a distinctly libertarian flavor to that list, but Jacobs would rather define himself as a “conservatarian” who appreciates the need for a strong social fabric, despite his enthusiasm for minimizing the relationship between the individual and the state. As the prosperous child of parents who sometimes struggled to make ends meet, he’s a proud beneficiary of the American Dream. A desire to defend America’s unique tradition of liberty drew him to politics.
“I found something to do in a very niche industry,” Jacobs says. “I worked hard and took advantage of opportunities, created some opportunities for myself. And that’s freedom. . . . As Reagan said, ‘Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.’ That really resonated with me. And I decided that, to the extent I could, I was not going to be part of the generation that was going to allow that to happen.”
Jacobs believes that preserving the promise of America will require a focused, unified Republican Party. But he fears that the GOP may crumble under the strain of its own divisions. Today, the right’s various factions seem increasingly at odds over issues as fundamental as national identity, the morality of capitalism, and the truth of America’s founding propositions. If Jacobs were president, he’d resist the urge to clobber his intellectual opponents with a steel chair. Instead, he’d urge conservatives and libertarians of all stripes to “concentrate on the intersection of ideas” that has made the modern right such a consequential political force.
What ideas should unify us? For Jacobs, patriotism and a commitment to states’ rights immediately spring to mind. So does a “serious push on deregulation and cutting taxes” — he’d like to see America lead the world in nuclear energy and other industries where dynamism has been suffocated by red tape.
Even on some of our most contentious policy questions, Jacobs believes that common ground is closer than it may appear. Immigration is the most obvious example. “Milton Friedman said you can’t have a free immigration system and a welfare state,” Jacobs says. “I would say we actually had worse than that — we had a system which encouraged people to come here to live off the system. . . . I think even for a lot of hardcore libertarians, they saw what was happening and now there’s a more realistic idea about immigration.” The solution, he argues, lies in removing those perverse incentives and establishing clearer standards.
Now that American politics has become a glorified wrestling event, the logical next step might be more wrestlers in public office. Jacobs claims to be unsure about his own future political ambitions. But with the experience of higher office that he’s gained in recent years, a future run for governor of Tennessee cannot be ruled out.
“I still think that a lot of the advancement of freedom in our country is going to happen at the state level,” Jacobs says. He’s drawn to the idea of making Tennessee “the conservative powerhouse that the rest of the country looks at and says, ‘That’s how you get things done.’”
Any state would certainly attract more attention with a “Big Red Machine” in charge.