By The Western Journal (Politics) | Created at 2024-11-23 20:36:14 | Updated at 2024-11-23 23:44:39
4 hours ago
A guy who’s built his fortune on the spectacle of two fighters beating each other bloody in a cage might be expected to have a strong stomach.
But when it comes to American politics, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White has seen enough for a lifetime.
And the man who’s being credited with playing a key role in Donald Trump’s re-election in November is making a promise.
“I’m never f***ing doing this again,” White told the uber-liberal magazine New Yorker in an interview published this week.
“I want nothing to do with this sh*t. It’s gross. It’s disgusting. I want nothing to do with politics.”
The quote comes at the end of a report pegged to President-elect Trump’s attendance at a UFC event Nov. 16.
The report details — in typically colorful, bordering-on-bloated New Yorker style — the gladiator-ring atmosphere of the UFC fight lineup at Madison Square Garden (the same venue where Trump had staged a mammoth campaign rally in the final days of the presidential campaign).
Trump’s entrance was saluted by a crowd going crazy, with UFC commentator and popular podcaster Joe Rogan pointing out the obvious.
“It’s always loud when he comes here, but now that he’s won? Now that he’s the President again? Oh, my God,” Rogan said, according to the report by the New Yorker’s Sam Eagan.
Are you a fan of mixed martial arts?
The report contains a condensed history of the UFC and Trump’s role in making the brutal, mixed martial arts sport part of mainstream American entertainment.
“As the UFC has grown, there’s been a lot of people that have jumped on the bandwagon and became fans,” White said, according to Eagan. “Trump was there from the beginning.”
And that history might have played a major role in the Nov. 5 election by combining UFC’s target audience with a voting bloc Republicans courted.
“Young men, one of the most unreliable demographics in politics, make up a large part of UFC’s audience,” Eagan wrote.
Podcasts devoted to UFC news and personalities might have helped reach that demographic — outside the octupus-sprawl of the establisment media and its relentless anti-Trump bias.
“You’re getting conversations in these podcasts, and you yourself, as a young kid, get to really see who Donald Trump is,” White said, according to Eagan. “Not the bullsh*t you hear from the far-left media.”
Considering that Democrat Kamala Harris made targeting progressive women the cornerstone of her campaign — talking abortion at every opportunity — the Republican attempt to get young men to the voting booth might have been the necessary corrective.
Rogan himself contributed an 11th-hour endorsement of Trump that made headlines just before polls opened.
And Eagen attempted to draw a parallel between UFC competition and the GOP candidate himself.
“The product White is selling—two people locked in a cage, engaging in a mixture of boxing, wrestling, Brazilian jujitsu, Muay Thai, and karate among other martial arts—mirrors Trump’s own appeal in many respects,” he wrote. “The U.F.C. alternates between the camp theatrics of show business and a kind of abject brutality that is impossible to look away from. The sport is now fully in the mainstream, but it still has a chip on its shoulder, casting itself and its fans as widely misunderstood.”
To many Americans, Trump has good reason to have a chip on his shoulder when it comes to the political and media establishment.
The role of the Democratic Party, deep state bureaucrats and media outlets like CNN in pushing the “Russia collusion” investigation that bedeviled his first term is indisputable.
After that collapsed, the same parties teamed up for Trump’s first impeachment in 2019 — and again for his second impeachment in 2021.
After he was out of office, the same forces aligned in savage legal attacks that included the FBI raiding Trump’s home at the Mar-a-Lago Club in South Florida, flimsy legal prosecutions at the local level in New York and Georgia as well as special counsel Jack Smith’s pursuits in the federal courts.
Through all of that in his first term, Trump persevered — as able to take a beating in the figurative sense as White’s fighters can take and deliver one inside a UFC cage.
“Donald Trump is tougher and more badass than anybody,” White said, according to Eagan.
“You can only pray that you’re a quarter of the man that Donald Trump was when a guy tried to take seven shots at his head with a high-powered rifle with a f***ing scope on it.”
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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American
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