How the UFC Went MAGA
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.
President Donald Trump prepares to watch an Ultimate Fighting Championship match with UFC CEO Dana White and Elon Musk at the Kaseya Center on April 12, 2025, in Miami, Florida. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
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.
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