Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room: People aren’t as afraid of yelling at Dwayne Johnson as they should be.
Johnson is one of the wealthiest performers on the planet. He created a persona built around his ability to compare his physicality to that of a rock and not have anyone question it. His eyebrows are more toned, statistically speaking, than your calves. He is a man to be feared: Strong enough to perform great and terrible feats; so unafraid in the face of potential damage to himself that he’s willing to star in Baywatch.
So why, in a video that went viral in the early days of February 2024, did a crowd of Las Vegas onlookers boo the once and future Scorpion King? Was it, as some social media provocateurs claimed, due to Johnson’s arguably tone-deaf handling of the Maui wildfires of 2023? The answer may surprise you, unless you guessed “no, it’s not that.” If you guessed “No, it’s not that,” then the answer won’t surprise you at all.
Why did a Nevada crowd boo Dwayne Johnson? The real reason for the outrage in Viva Rock Vegas, explained
In a video posted and reposted by, I don’t know, maybe not bad actors, but certainly community theater ones, Dwayne Johnson stands on a stage, mic in hand, torso in a tanktop. Onlookers boo. They jeer. They – confusingly, if you’re trying to follow the narrative laid out by the people who posted the video – repeat the name “Cody” a bunch of times.
“CROWD IN VEGAS BOOs ‘THE ROCK’ DEMANDING HE FOLLOW THROUGH WITH AID FOR MAUI,” one particularly popular Twitter post on the subject from far-right independent journalist and full-tilt internet crank Nick Sortor states, claiming that Johnson’s collaboration with Oprah Winfrey to raise funds for victims of the 2023 Maui wildfires had failed to live up to its guarantees. Victims, according to the post, were “promised TENS OF MILLIONS to the victims of the Maui fires, but many victims still have not seen a dime. It looks like the audience is fully AMERICA FIRST and is demanding The Rock and Oprah follow through with their commitment to take care of the people of Lahaina.”
It’s powerful stuff. It’s also made up. As is pretty clear if you watch the video with the sound on all the way through to the 20-second mark, the crowd booing Johnson is doing so over the wrestler’s recent return to the ring at WWE.
In a stunning, highly upsetting move, Johnson’s wrestling persona stole a hard-won spot at Wrestlemania 40 from Cody Rhodes. It’s what wrestlers call a “heel turn.” It’s also pretend. Essentially, some nerds on the internet took the equivalent of a shot of a Disney Cruise audience booing an actor playing Cruella de Vil and labeled it “PATRIOTS boo fashion designer for Hurricane Katrina response! One share = One pray!”
This wasn’t lost on Dwayne Johnson as the video picked up steam on social media. In a not particularly safe-for-work response, the superstar stated that he doesn’t normally respond to these sorts of things, but this time he had to as “when you use Hawaii’s tragic events to draw attention to yourself I won’t stay quiet.”
Johnson went on to point out that the fund that he and Winfrey started had provided more than $50 million “to over 8,000 survivors who were affected by the fires,” and stated that he was “grateful to the bone that we’ve been the primary funders.”
In short, there are so many reasonable excuses to boo Dwayne Johnson – Young Rock was pretty blatantly self-serving, and the way he keeps flirting with a presidential run doesn’t do a lot for that spasm the country’s developed over celebrity politicians – but his (admittedly divisive) platforming of Maui wildfire relief probably isn’t one of them. Also, and we’re not saying that he would, but he could knock you unconscious with his left pec, and he seems like he’s had a lot of frustration ever since Black Adam sucked asphalt at the box office. Maybe leave the jeering for wrestling events where nobody’s taking anything too seriously.
Original poster Sortor, for his part, retweeted a post pointing out that his claims had been faker than any WWE storyline but has yet to post a redaction or an apology. His Twitter page remains one of the internet’s most prolific exporters of that red alarm emoji, followed by all-caps renditions of what could generously be called “contemporary historical fiction.”