Podcast Jay's Parasocial Assault
Public Health Isn't a Wrestling Show
As a pitiful excuse for a man whose only contributions to the world are an endless mountain of social media posts largely made up of completely false disinformation, it’s not surprising to see a recent photo from the joke infesting the office of National Institutes of Health Director posing with a fake golden championship title around his belt alongside a flat earther, AJ Styles (who has interesting thoughts about “The Gay Community”) among others. It’s worth noting that here is a federal agency leader making a public endorsement of a corporation that is currently engaged in a legal brawl over vile sexual abuse on location at their corporate headquarters. Jay Bhattacharya and World Wrestling Entertainment are truly a match made in heaven, in more ways than one.
Most notably, how they’re obsessed with having an overwhelming presence in the public’s eye one can’t seem to get away from.
The Parasocial Nightmare
When we think of a parasocial relationship, we often think of incidients where a random stranger develops an unhealthy obsession with a social media personality. Most typically this happens when a random schmuck decides a woman who livestreams videogames is actually the love of his life. Yet this can work in reverse as well, as World Wrestling Entertainment tried in the 2010s to try and expand on their monopoly of the professional wrestling industry.
Attempting to expand upon their dominance in the social media era, World Wrestling Entertainment unintentionally began to create a backlash amongst many diehard wrestling fans. Every week, WWE puts on a leviathan of programming:
Monday Night RAW (Netflix)
RAW Talk
Main Event (YouTube)
NXT (The CW)
Evolve (Tubi)
Smackdown (USA Network)
Talking Smack
Lucha Libre AAA (YouTube)
This makes up around a dozen hours of programming a week, and a multi-hour Pay-per-View at the end of the month, as well as a bounty of social media video content. It doesn’t matter how many writers you lock in a room, (including former 24 star Freddie Prinze Jr.) this is a nigh-impossible feat to maintain quality programming. Dedicated wrestling fans began to look for alternatives, especially after WWE agreed to a deal to produce propaganda for the Saudi royal family.
Why were these fans staying up into the early hours of dawn to watch livestreams of New Japan Pro Wrestling and other foreign promotions? Truth be told, the corporate brand of WWE (an extension of the McMahon family) had become so obsessed with itself that it began to overshadow the wrestlers themselves. An ambitious young talent who made a big impression with fans would find themselves punished for interrupting corporate’s plans. Fans would be shrouded in red and blue spotlights and branded as the “WWE Universe;” essentially property of the company.
A wrestling promotion’s purpose is to serve as a platform to elevate the talent, not the other way around. In the same way, Jay Bhattacharya has abused the office of NIH Director to promote nobody but himself, instead of taking a back seat to celebrate the great work of American research scientists and doctors. In a now infamous commercial for Hulu, one superfan brandishing a WWE logo tattoo exclaims, “I’m not a wrestling fan. I’m a WWE fan:”
If you spent any time between 2020-2024 hunting for accurate or reliable information about COVID-19, it was not hard to find Jay Bhattacharya’s smugly, willfully ignorant face spouting off nonsense, peddling disinformation, and making childish insults. He sold himself to the public as a heroic crusader for freedom, while deep in the pocket of creeps like a literal cape-wearing neo-Confederate champion of teen smoking and child labor. Even a skilled reporter like Walker Bragman of Important Context struggles to keep up with every obscene bit of nonsense Jay has spewed without an ounce of self-reflection.
It’s important to remember that Bhattacharya did nothing except talk throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, showing no remorse when this contributed to needless deaths of many Americans. His sole priority was promoting himself as some sort of wise sage, regardless if he was giving his “fans” harmful medical advice. So yes, Podcast Jay truly earned his WWE branded “championship.”
As NIH Director, Jay Bhattacharya has made it his mission to make his smug grin inseparable from the National Institutes of Health. Sharing the same overzealous ambition of the WWE to become an inescapable part of your daily life. Neglecting his duties as a civil servant, “Podcast Jay” has recorded so many hours of blathering in front of one camera or another that he’s become woefully unaware of how inconsistent his ramblings are, much akin to the nonsensical storylines of the worst of WWE.
Podcast Jay Talks Too Much
Just recently, Jay Bhattacharya said he seeks to make the NIH the “research arm of MAHA,” an explicitly ideological brand that demonizes vaccines, gives handouts to wellness grifters, and seeks to make it easier for tech companies to use the general public as lab rats for unproven, often utterly broken “artificial intelligence” devices. There is absolutely nothing scientific about any of this by any rational standard - it’s purely ideological.
Yet, weeks later on a separate podcast with notorious anti-vaccine quack Sharyl Attkisson, he claims that he is “removing ideology from science.” Don’t get confused, this is merely an evolution of an argument from those who demonized masks & other non-pharmaceutical interventions: that their opponents are dangerous irrational political radicals seeking to corrupt your children by establishing a “Covidian” biomedical security state - and that people like Jay who championed COVID-19 in the unvaccinated, especially children, are purely apolitical, evidence-based rational thinkers with no ulterior motives. This is manipulative language, and Jay is doing it again to sell himself as this neutral arbiter of “non-ideological science.”
On top of this, the ideology behind the current demolition of the National Institutes of Health is that these research scientists should be working at private companies, and only corporate CEOs should be dictating what research happens in America.
Congress needs to be dragging this NIH Director (and acting CDC Director) before them and giving this obnoxious brat a stern reminder that the American taxpayer isn’t paying him to promote himself on social media. The agency is in major disarray, and the budget wasn’t passed to fill the campus with extra podcast microphones. This obnoxious parasocial assault against the American public’s psyche must end.
