MMA used to be home to oddballs unified by a love of beating each other up inside cages. But since Donald Trump’s first presidency, the UFC has rebranded the sport as a refuge for the “anti-woke sports fan,” while breaking unions and censoring the media.
In the lead-up to the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event in Miami on April 13, an undercard fight drew an unusual level of attention.
The fight, which pitted Bryce Mitchell, a featherweight ranked thirteenth in the UFC, against unranked prospect Jean Silva, was largely indistinguishable from the hundreds of low-profile UFC contests broadcast from a near-empty Las Vegas event space week to week on ESPN+. The reason this bout generated outsize attention was that earlier this year Mitchell had revealed he held a number extreme far-right views, which included sympathy for Adolf Hitler and Holocaust denial.
“I honestly think that Hitler was a good guy,” Mitchell said during a ninety-minute podcast in January, the debut episode of his ArkanSanity show. He praised Adolf Hitler for trying to “purify” Germany by expelling “greedy Jews” and dismissed the Holocaust as fake.
Mitchell’s comments were roundly condemned by UFC president Dana White as “beyond disgusting” shortly after they caused an outcry on social media. But despite having broad powers under the standard-form UFC contract to terminate or suspend him, the promotion declined to take any disciplinary action against the fighter and later decided to match Mitchell up in a high-profile pay-per-view fight. White cited “free speech” as the grounds for his inaction. On Piers Morgan’s Uncensored podcast. he made the case that “hate speech is the most important speech to protect.”
White’s claim is especially unconvincing because, since its founding, the UFC has hardly been what could be described as a champion of freedom of speech. Moreover, the UFC’s hypocritical approach to free-speech issues over the two decades since its founding bears a remarkable resemblance to the doublespeak of the second Donald Trump administration. Like Trump, the UFC has deployed lofty rhetoric against “anti-woke censorship” while using repression and censorship against its ideological enemies.
The UFC Has Been a Trailblazer in Silencing Dissent
The UFC’s refusal to censor Mitchell stands in glaring contrast to the promotion’s historically iron-fisted attitude toward journalists and critics who speak inconvenient truths, or whose conduct interferes with the promotion’s commercial interests and reputation.
As partially chronicled by Sports Politika’s Karim Zidan earlier this year, the UFC has been extraordinarily trigger-happy when it comes to media members who’ve refused to toe the company line.
This practice stretches back to the mid 2000s, not long after White (bankrolled by billionaire casino moguls Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta) assumed the role of president and part-owner of the UFC promotion after buying it from the ailing Semaphore Entertainment Group. Back then, mixed martial arts (MMA) had yet to achieve acceptance in the mainstream sports-entertainment world. It wasn’t even the premier destination for fighters and fans; Japan’s PRIDE Fighting Championship held that distinction. In a brazen attempt to stop nascent MMA websites and publications from providing coverage to the competition, the hypersensitive White liberally threatened to revoke press credentials in retaliation against journalists who refused to focus their writing primarily on the goings-on within the UFC.
This evolved to instituting lifetime bans against veteran MMA journalists who weren’t content to operate as appendages to the promotion’s public relations arm. Full Contact Fighter editor Joel Gold was the first to be shown the door, which White allegedly explained was due to him giving PRIDE too many front pages. Sherdog’s Josh Gross was next to be blacklisted after he turned down a role as editor of UFC.com circa 2005. Loretta Hunt, also a reporter for Sherdog, was subject to the same treatment after she reported that the promotion had attempting to circumvent dealing with fighter-managers by revoking their backstage credentials in 2009. And Bleacher Report’s Jonathan Snowden was exiled for writing an exposé on the UFC’s highly restrictive fighter contracts in 2013.
These were not isolated instances, nor were they confined to an era in which the sport was still fighting for cultural legitimacy. In 2016, the UFC infamously attempted to blacklist popular MMA media personality Ariel Helwani. Helwani had built an enormous online following for his MMA Hour YouTube show, which provided overwhelmingly positive coverage of the organization. But he ran afoul of the UFC when he reported, ahead of the organization’s own announcement, that Brock Lesnar, a professional wrestler and former MMA fighter, was planning a return to the octagon.
Helwani was ultimately reinstated after fan backlash, but less prominent (and more critical) voices were not so lucky. Writers like Zidan, who has consistently produced critical reporting on the UFC, including about its relationships with foreign dictators, is banned to this day from receiving media credentials for live UFC events and alleges the UFC has gone to extreme lengths to obstruct his reporting, including when he was doing so as a representative for the New York Times. Other critics of the UFC’s business practices, like twenty-year MMA media veteran Luke Thomas, have spoken about the “profound” harm that the UFC has done to his career in retaliation for his reporting.
A Free Press — UFC Style
The UFC’s repressive tactics have not just been deployed in reaction to criticism but have been proactively used to keep the media in line. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the promotion required fighters and media members to sign sweeping liability waivers that included nondisparagement terms preventing participants in UFC events from criticizing the promotion’s health and safety protocols or lack thereof.
The promotion also released video packages attacking journalists who criticized the organization for continuing to hold live sporting events during the pandemic, circumventing stay-at-home orders and in defiance of the broader sports and entertainment ecosystem, which largely went into hibernation to stop the spread of the virus.
Building on these practices, today the promotion curates its press pool so that it overwhelmingly consists of sycophants, influencers, and other media “personalities” (some of whom are directly paid by the UFC). These individuals are under no illusion that their roles are restricted to churning out promotional content rather than ask even mildly critical questions. Hardly the conduct of an organization that prioritizes the “marketplace of ideas” above all else.
The Anti-Woke Octagon
The UFC has only become more iron-fisted in its treatment of the media in recent years. However, in tandem with its embrace of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement more broadly, the promotion has become more forgiving of certain kinds of speech and behavior that formerly would have led to fighters being disciplined or “cut” from its roster.
Whereas the promotion had previously done little to differentiate itself from major sports leagues in its response to athlete misconduct, this changed during President Trump’s first administration. Between 2016 and 2020, the UFC positioned itself as a refuge for the “anti-woke” sports fan. But prior to then, the organization actively investigated misdemeanors and suspended or terminated the contracts of fighters who had committed domestic violence, breached the UFC’s code of conduct, or even made offensive jokes on Twitter.
Suddenly former NFL star Greg Hardy, who’d been run out of the league for serious instances of domestic violence, was being given the red-carpet treatment as he transitioned from football to fighting in the UFC’s heavyweight division. Overtly jingoistic and hateful rhetoric espoused by then top welterweight and Trump cheerleader Colby Covington toward his Brazilian and African American opponents was suddenly a selling point of his fights, rather than an embarrassing distraction.
A race to the bottom ensued. Fighters like Sean Strickland embraced extreme and hateful rhetoric against female fighters and the LGBTQ community more generally during interviews and on social media, en route to becoming an unlikely UFC title holder and fan favorite.
In this new environment, a culture emerged in which it was justified to ignore domestic abuse and rape. Video footage of White slapping his wife at a Mexican nightclub during a 2022 New Year’s Eve party, or a jury verdict last November that UFC star Conor McGregor had sexually assaulted a woman in 2018, had little effect on the careers of either. This culture of rampant disregard for sexist violence set the stage for Mitchell’s fight at UFC 314.
Union Busting and Freedom of Expression
The UFC has been highly selective in its choice of which kinds of speech it chooses to protect. While Covington was headlining cards and describing Brazilian fans as “filthy animals,” the promotion was actively suppressing the unionization efforts being pursued by its fighters. Leslie Smith, then ranked in the top fifteen of the organization’s female bantamweight division, was released from her contract in 2018 following her very public effort to organize the UFC’s roster and petition the National Labor Relations Board for a union election and a determination that UFC fighters should be classified as employees rather than independent contractors. Kajan Johnson, who organized alongside Smith, was let go the same year, despite possessing a winning record (four wins, three losses) in the UFC’s hypercompetitive lightweight division.
The UFC has also done more than perhaps any other combat sports organization in history to suppress fighters’ freedom of expression via the extraordinarily restrictive standard-form contract.
In its early days, the MMA was a delightfully weird melting pot of athletes and fighting cultures, with events often showcasing unique walkouts and personalized fighter apparel. But some years after the UFC consolidated the majority of the industry under its banner (including by buying, and then shuttering, PRIDE), it controversially forced its fighters to start wearing UFC-provided uniforms, homogenizing a sport that had previously boasted novelty as one of its selling points.
This has made the UFC an unconscionable amount of money by funneling sponsorship and advertising revenue to the promotion’s head office and out of athletes’ hands. But it’s also made it far harder for fighters to express themselves through their craft or publicly identify with causes or issues they care about. This has extended to the UFC instituting, and then reversing, a ban on fighters displaying their national flags in 2022–23 after Russia invaded Ukraine. When the policy was reversed however, it conspicuously excluded Palestinian champion Belal Muhammad, whose UFC.com profile was the only one which didn’t have a flag attached to it (this was eventually fixed after Muhammad complained about the omission on social media).
Once again, fighters and issues on the left of the political spectrum have been muzzled, whereas those on the Right have been given much greater latitude to enjoy the protections the UFC claims it stands for.
A Blueprint for MAGA
The UFC’s virtue signaling on the sanctity of free speech while routinely censoring athletes, media, and other stakeholders does not take place in a vacuum.
The same event where Mitchell fought — and, gratefully, was choked unconscious — played host to President Donald Trump and a coterie of subordinates who have been pursuing a frontal assault on the United States’ First Amendment rights while claiming to do the opposite. This includes Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk, who has suspended or shadow-banned left-wing users on X/Twitter with abandon since purchasing the platform in 2022; Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is currently leading the State Department’s effort to revoke the visas of hundreds of international students studying in the US as punishment for engaging in pro-Palestine political activism; and FBI director Kash Patel, who has vowed to use the law enforcement agency to harass and prosecute Trump’s political enemies. Trump himself has spent the past few weeks attempting to seize and reshape cultural and legal institutions — universities, law firms, the judiciary, the media — that do not share the worldview of his supporters.
None of this is accidental. UFC boss Dana White has spent years greasing the wheels of this movement — stumping for Trump at the Republican National Convention, sharing the stage with him on Election Night, and plugging him into the manosphere podcast circuit. For his trouble, he now sits on Meta’s board and presides over a combat sports empire where dissent is punished and hate gets a push notification.
The UFC’s performative free-speech posturing, just like Trump’s, is a con. It’s not about principles — it’s about power. And while the Bryce Mitchells of the world are given a mic and a platform, those who speak truth to that power are left fighting for air.