Fourth Reich Archaeology - #098 - UFC: Ultimate Fascist Consciousness

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

We are taking a hard turn this week and covering a topic that we would ordinarily have no business covering: sports. Or, more specifically, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). The immediate reason for doing a UFC episode is the upcoming “Freedom 250” fight extravaganza set to take place on the White House Lawn, at the express invitation of Donald Trump, for which UFC CEO Dana White has gone on a media promotion tour. It would be one thing if White was promoting the event amongst the typical UFC-friendly media outlets in the Joe Rogan manosphere, but he is branching out to the mainstream liberal media in a fascinating way. In this episode, we analyze White’s interviews with liberal outlets like NPR, the New Yorker, and the Breakfast Club, among others. To us, it looks a lot like Dana White and the UFC are serving as a bridge to create a new Blue-Brown alliance between MAGA and a liberal establishment coming to grips with the fact that the hard right MAGA movement now IS the Republican Party, and it’s not going away anytime soon. As we cover in the episode, it’s no surprise that the UFC has become a cultural bandage poised to heal the breach between left and right as we collectively stumble into ever-lower depths of hell. It reflects the classic American values of brutality, faux-equality of opportunity, and the myth of might makes right. Besides titillating audiences with the spectacle of bloodsport, of course. BUT THERE IS SO MUCH MORE!!! The history and ownership structure of the UFC places it at the beating heart of the Fourth Reich: it’s rooted in the military industrial propaganda complex, it’s passed through the skeezy filth of off-strip Las Vegas and Trump’s Atlantic City, and it’s now a global property held by a consortium of private equity capital fronted by Rahm Emanuel’s brother, Ari, the Hollywood super-agent who straddles the line between Clintonite neoliberalism and Trumpian fascism. Ari Emanuel was also the inspiration for “Entourage” protagonist Ari Gold.We dig into this incredibly rich tapestry that weaves together multiple nodes in the ruling class nexus that’s driving us all off a cliff of insanity and have a few laughs along the way. You won’t want to miss it.Patreon: www.patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeologyEmail: [e-mail]

The following passage comes from Jean-Baudriard's 2002 essay, The Violence of the Global. Faced with a global order without any alternative on the one hand, and with drifting insurrectionary singularities on the other, the concepts of liberty, democracy, and human rights look awful. They remain as the ghosts of universalization past. Universalization used to promote a culture characterized by the concepts of transcendence, subjectivity, conceptualization, reality, and representation.

By contrast, today's virtual global culture has replaced universal concepts with screens, networks, imminence, numbers, and a spacetime continuum without any depth. In the universal, there was still room for a natural reference to the world, the body, or the past. There was a sort of dialectical tension or critical movement that found its materiality in historical and revolutionary violence. But the expulsion of this critical negativity opened the door to another form of violence, the violence of the global. This new violence is characterized by the supremacy of technical efficiency and positivity, total organization,

integral circulation and the equivalence of all exchanges. Additionally, the violence of the global puts an end to the social role of the intellectual, an idea tied to the enlightenment and universalization, but also to the role of the activist, whose fate used to be tied to the ideas of critical opposition and historical violence. Imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine.

Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural We found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic. The Warren Commission was science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don't care what the facts are.

In 1945, we began to acquire information which showed that there were two wars going to. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The global, world domination. The primitive simplicity of their minds were There's the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure.

Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. A lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? Not more than the CIA. Fourth Reich archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Welcome back, listener, for another installment of our little radio program. We are excited to bring this one to you this week, as it is yet another synthesis of the many floating issues that hover around our analysis of this Fourth Reich reality

that we very unfortunately all live in. I want to thank you for tuning in. We want to thank all of our special patrons. If you are willing and able to contribute to the longevity of this project, please go on over to patreon.com slash forthright archaeology and sign up today. Got some specials and some goodies over there for you. And if not, that's cool too. We have always reminded you that you may contact us via email, Forth Reich Pod at Gmail, or on Twitter or Instagram at Fort Reich Pod.

And please do spread the word, word of mouth, posting, speaking, preaching the word of this podcast, of this intervention into the discourse, into the spectacle. Dick, you want to tee up what we're going to get ourselves on about today? Well, we're making a hard turn. We're making a hard turn away from history and politics and the economy. And this week we're going to try something new. And we're going to talk about sports. And specifically one sport, which is called UFC or Ultimate Fighting Champion. And we're going to talk about that.

And it's president and CEO, Dana White, who has been. making his rounds around the circuit of public media, around the circuit of liberal media. And we are talking about him for two reasons. First, because in just a few weeks by the middle of June, I think it's going to be June 14th, I believe. The UFC is going to do something it's never done before. Actually, I don't think any sports league has ever done this before, but they're going to host a fight on the White House lawn. And what's called UFC Freedom 250, Dana White and his crew are bringing ultimate fighting to the White House.

And so we're going to be talking about that today. And the reason we're talking about that is because folks, ladies and gentlemen, friends, all of you out there know that one of our foundational points in this program is that, unfortunately, the U.S. empire is in a state of terminal decline, and there can be no question about that at this point. And when that happens to any empire, there are some big questions that come up, some big questions that pop up. For example, who's going to manage this decline, and whose interests are going to be served as this happens? and what's going to happen to the masses of people who live in the empire under the regime who can the empire can no longer support and under which you know the empires the froth generated by imperial plunder and exploitation can no longer support the masses and the question of which

factions of the ruling class will fight the inevitable and insist on continued american unipolar hegemony these are questions, well, they get answered on the political sense and they get answered in economic sense, but to really get down to the real answer of these questions, you've got to look at the culture. And for us, where better to look at than what is often considered sort of a fundamental component of MAGA culture. Well, hopefully by the end of this episode, you'll see that the designation of UFC as a MAGA movement or a component of MAGA culture, why that might not be entirely accurate. But the reason that we are focusing on cultures is because in the

age of the integrated spectacle, where there are supposedly these different factions, these political and economic questions that are being raised by these different groups that at times may seem to have conflicting goals and may be seemingly to be in struggle with one another, i.e. the Republican and Democrat Party, when in reality, culture is used as a channel by which or a bridge by which to connect the ruling class on both of these sides, right? The ruling class will use culture is a way to seed the terrain for the future that it envisions under its control. Isn't that right, Don?

Yeah, I think that is right. I think, you know, this is our first sports episode. So that's exciting right there. And it's a way to take, as we are want to do on this podcast, some contemporary happening, some event or phenomenon that is seemingly all over the place, right? This guy, Dana White, as we'll get into, is doing a real publicity tour in anticipation of the big brawl on the white. House lawn that they're currently erecting a special octagon just for this event and it's drawing much fanfare and it is spreading the fandom of the UFC and spreading awareness of

the UFC from its more traditional audience into a much broader audience so what we are going to use the UFC to do is to trace these cultural trends that span political divisions and could even bridge political divisions because where there are cultural bandages or bridges that bring different factions together usually if you are wearing your fourth rike archaeology they live glasses to see things as they really are, those bridges are indicative of common goals that are shared by the ruling class. As we've talked about a lot, there are these factions within the ruling class that fight amongst themselves, that compete amongst themselves, and that certainly in the process of imperial decline that we're currently experiencing, they are sharp elbowed in

getting their piece of the pie. But that makes it all the more salient to look at where there are areas of common interest. And so today's episode is about the UFC serving as one such trend. And I want to shout you out, Brother Dick, for picking up on this because I think you picked it up first, just listening to NPR doing a little bit of research. Yeah, and I don't want anyone out there to get the wrong impression because it's not like I always listen to the New Yorker radio hour. I was on a drive over the weekend and I just so happened to have NPR on and I happened to tune in right when David Remnick's interview of Dana White was happening. And I couldn't believe my ears because it was so transparently this move by the New Yorker and NPR and let's just say liberal media in general.

It was this move to bring the UFC, which is obviously a very aggressive and brutal and barbaric form of fighting, which I would imagine that most of the New Yorkers audience and most of NPR's listenership, they're not very familiar with. But it was to bring that to the to the NPR audience, to the liberal sort of cosmopolitan audience that wouldn't otherwise have any sort of exposure to this. And I got to say, every now and then, we happen to. to see in the media landscape, these moments where culture is being shifted, where you're having things that are often viewed as something that's on the fringes or in the margins being shifted to the mainstream. And this felt exactly like that because you had this New Yorker guy talk in this almost academic way about this form of fighting that's been around for many, many years at this point, but trying to really get an understanding of it and trying to make it accessible.

for his listenership, which was very odd to me. Yeah, exactly. And as we sort of began to scratch at the surface, we saw that Dana White also did an interview with another NPR host, Steve Innskeep. He also was on the Breakfast Club recently. He is, what they say, making the rounds. This guy who was really a MAGA mascot who spoke at the R&SKHA.

and see on behalf of Trump and has been so central to the rise of Joe Rogan, another right-wing sort of front for these male-centric movements that are pushing back the clock on woken and DEI in the interests of the lonely white male. And it sure is, fact, fascinating and believe me when I say that the more that we dug into this stuff, the more artifacts of the Fourth Reich we discovered. It is a big story. It is far more than a sports story. It is part media criticism, part reading the cultural tea leaves, and looking down the pike at what's coming up next. So without any further ado, let's get digging.

And it's very different than a street fight because you're agreeing to it and you're training for it. You've got this other person who's like training, you know they're scary a shit, and they're on the other side of the cage and then you step in, and the two of you are about to go to war. It's the nudiest job in the history of the world. It really is. Other than war and being a firefighter or a cop, it is. is the nuttiest job in the history of the world.

When we started this, all the things that we've talked about in buying and building the UFC, now imagine if this wasn't allowed on paper view, imagine venues, right? Arenas did not want us. Yeah, right? What kind of people would show up to see an event like this, human cockfighting? Donald Trump owned the Atlantic City casinos at the time, and he had us come to the Taj. And every good thing that ever happened to me in my career after that, he was always the first guy to reach out, say congratulations.

I always knew this was going to be big. So Dana, so did UFC. came to me, do you mind if I use you? Nobody wanted to give him Marines because they said it's a rough sport, a little rough. I helped him out a little bit, and I went, and I said, this is the roughest sport I've ever seen, but I began to like it, and he loved it,

and nobody's done a better job in sports. And, you know, he's a very motivational kind of a guy, what he does. He gets these fighters, and they really go out, and it's become one of the most successful sports, enterprises anywhere at any time, doing so well. You want to talk about a fighter. I mean, that guy's a fighter.

One of the, you know, most resilient human beings I've ever met in my life. He's the most resilient, hard-working man I've ever met in my life. The most resilient human being that I've ever met in my life. You know, these things that he's a racist and he's a Nazi and he's this and that. I mean, Donald Trump, all this stuff's coming out now. You know, the Michael movie just came out. And you see all these videos now popping up of Trump. defending Michael Jackson and the type of person that he was and that Michael Jackson was

around his children and around his family a lot but we um I mean I'm not a political but what do you give him credit for his president securing our borders I mean how do you how do you not give him credit for that the Middle East look at look at the work he did in the Middle East during his first term and you're referring to the Abraham of course yeah Of course. And now? Yeah. I mean, the Middle East is a tricky place to navigate. And I think he does a better job than most.

Okay, let's start as we often do with a brief history lesson. Now, we're not going to do a super deep dive on the history of Dana White in the UFC, but we will give a 30,000 foot overview just because probably like us, a lot of our listeners out there are not super fans or they're not up to date with the UFC. and everything that's going on with it. Now, I will say at the top here, just a quick disclaimer, I am what you would call a casual observer of UFC. I do try and stay up to date to the fights,

the major fights that are happening. I kind of get probably a little more invested in the major rivalries that happen in the UFC, and I like the drama of it all and all of that. So for me, the UFC can mean a lot of things. It, you know, the drama means the drama is something that I, that sort of draws me to it. I'm also someone with a background in martial arts. So the, you know, seeing the technical fighting on the stage on TV in the arena, I should say, very, very interesting to me. And today I'll say that the UFC means many things to many people, right?

At its core, the UFC, the UFC is about discipline and hard work. and how someone who works at it, even if they're the underdog, they could get into the arena and they can beat the favorite pick. And it could be this blowout fight that was totally unexpected, totally electric. And it's because of nothing else, nothing other than that person's hard work and perseverance, right? The UFC can also mean something along the lines of diversity is strength, right? hybrid styles will yield a stronger result than orthodox homogeneity. Right. That's where the mixed comes into in mixed martial arts.

That's right. That's where the MMA, the M in the MMA comes from. That's exactly right. Now, UFC could also be an inspiration for self-improvement, right? Toughen up, train, be the best you can be, et cetera, et cetera. On the flip side, UFC can also signify a glorified. of violence. We cannot, we cannot ignore the fact that it is a very violent sport, and it's not just the glorification of violence, but it's glorification for violence for violence sake, right, for

its own sake. It can also signify the marginalization of the weak and the celebration of the strong who prove their medal through the use of force. And UFC can signify the exploitation of the global south of poverty-stricken societies, a poverty-stricken communities for the consumption of imperial core spectators. Now famously, Senator John McCain called UFC human cockfighting, and that's something that'll come up again and again in this episode. But we think that says it all right there. Isn't that right, Don? Yeah, for sure. And my disclaimer is, I don't think I've ever watched an entire UFC fight, I got to say, I'll get a little squeamish, you know? It just, I don't have the nerve for it, which perhaps is a weakness on my part.

Perhaps that says something about my brand of masculinity. You can make of that what you will, listener. but what I do resonate with is the history of this baby because that founding story is something that I was not familiar with previous to researching for this episode, but we got to share this with you. So the UFC was founded in the early 90s by three dudes, three dude bros, who wanted to answer the age-old question that has racked. the brains of 10-year-old boys for perhaps centuries.

And that question is, which fighting style is the greatest? If you put the best fighter from boxing up against the best fighter from jujitsu, who's going to win it, right? It is your classic, your classic, like you could imagine young pubescent boys having this debate, generation after generation, especially in the post-war era of U.S. Imperial Hedemone, where the television brings awareness of this variety of fighting styles to the living rooms of boys and girls everywhere. But there was some grownups that were into this question to, and they actually did the thing. They made it into a real thing.

And so we want to unpack a little bit about who each of these three OG founders were. So we'll cover them each and turn. I'll start us off with the Brazilian of the bunch because I'm a big, big fan of the country of Brazil. So, saddates for all the Brazilians who are to this episode. Be-vindus, all the world. I thank you for your

escutament of the program. So the Brazilian founder of the UFC was a guy by the name of Roryon Gracie. And you might be wondering about the last name there. It doesn't sound very Brazilian. That's because

it is Scottish. So the Gracie family of Brazil, as anybody who's like a real UFC head, I think, knows because they're kind of in the branding and in the history of the UFC itself, the Gracie family is associated with the invention of the Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighting style. And how did that come about? Well, it's a pretty fascinating little. tale if I may take a minute to tell it. So the Gracie family came to Brazil in the early 19th century as part of the waning days of what was called informal British imperialism, right? So you have like crown colonies, of course, but then you also have everything from piracy on the high seas to money lending to the imperial expeditions of other.

countries, including Spain and Portugal, and you also have emigration from the British Isles to these colonial possessions. And that was exactly what the Calvinist patriarch of the Gracie family did and migrated to Brazil and inserted himself into the ruling class of the Brazilian then colony and soon to be Republic, an independent republic declared in, I think it was like 1822, that Brazil gained its independence from Portugal. And over the generations, the Gracie family converted to Catholicism, assimilated into Brazilian culture, and also got some pretty high-ranking positions in the Brazilian government, and just, you know, through intermarriage, through all the classic rich people shit became one of these well-established families. And it was especially well-established

in a provincial city in the north of Brazil, kind of adjacent to the Amazon region, but, you know, closer to the coast, called Belain du Parah. And in that city of Belain, it just so happened that in 1915, a Japanese jiu-jitsu troop was traveling, doing a bit of cultural imperialism of its own, right? Sponsored by the Japanese government in the restoration era on the verge of becoming the Japanese empire that would shock the world in the 30s and 40s. And part of its growth strategy was to spread Japanese culture and one of those exports. were the martial arts. And just so happened that a young teenager by the name of Carlos Gracie,

who was the son of his rich, connected father, attended and was mesmerized by these Japanese fighters. And so he set up a meeting with one of the leaders and basically arranged for the Japanese to stay behind to train him in this jiu-jitsu technique whereby you know a smaller person can use their size as leverage against a stronger person that's kind of the fundamental principle of jiu-jitsu and to display the Japanese art of jiu-jitsu in one of his father's cultural outlets right and we're talking about the provincial Brazil of the 19-teens. So it's not a movie theater, it's not even a theater theater, it is the circus where Bloodsport had been a big entertainment. Bloodsport,

especially in the more African-based techniques of fighting like Capoeira that you might know about, you know, Brazilian dance fighting, as it's sometimes colloquially called, and other techniques that had emerged out of the enslaved populations of Brazil. And so the turn to the Japanese fighting style was a whitening of the art, a sort of cultural turning up the dial from lower brow to higher brow because of this belief that is a belief that persists to a disturbing extent today in Japanese cultural superiority. Anyways, to make a long story short, fast-forwarding a few generations, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the Gracie family in Belain de Barra becomes synonymous.

And the exponent, the sion of this family, Rojion, ends up moving. to the United States as many, you know, wealthy members of these prominent families do, and he goes to Hollywood, and he starts training actors, he starts training stuntmen, he starts advising on big budget Hollywood films like Lethal Weapon, for example, starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, of course, and his brothers come too, and how I want to just read these names because I love a Brazilian name. So the four brothers are named Roryon, Roycy, Rikissom, and Royler. So all these fellas live in L.A., and they found together the first ever Brazilian Jujitsu Dojo in Torrance, California. You want to take the next one, Dick? I sure do. Now, it was in California

that Gracie caught the attention of marketing executive Art Davy. Davy had served as a Marine sergeant, first in the Pentagon in the Commandant's Communication Center, where he held a top secret clearance, and then he deployed to Vietnam as well for combat. So fittingly, Davy was both a propagandist and a killer. He used both skill sets to become a wealthy marketing executive in L.A., and he was the one apparently obsessed with pitting these different fighting styles against each other. This was his idea, apparently. And turning to the third member of the original UFC Triumvirate, well, that's John

Millius, a Hollywood screenwriter and director famous for such scripts as the first two dirty, hairy movies. Millius also co-wrote the screenplay for Apocalypse Now with Francis Ford Coppola, and he directed such classics as Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn. You sense in a pattern here, Don? Yeah, I mean, it's your classic, like, red, white, and blue American Cold War cultural warrior. He, you know, for those not familiar, right, all of these movies, like Apocalypse Now, supposedly an anti-war film but was filmed under extremely sus circumstances that we won't get into here dirty hairy is the quintessential you know we need a tough guy who throws out the rulebook to clean up these

streets in the 1970s because if we don't the scum and the filth is going to run roughshod over the good people of the world and, you know, the rest of it is just anti-communist propaganda. Red Dawn, a favorite of Timothy McVeigh and the other members of the Patriot Movement, if I'm remembering correctly from Wendy Painting's great aberration in the heartland of the real. So, yeah, he is a libertarian, red-blooded, violence-loving America. American with a penchant for the blood sport in his own right. And a guy who, interestingly, I saw he, one of his big disappointments in life was that he was rejected from joining the Marines to fight in Vietnam because he had asthma. And so, you know, he wanted to contribute to the

cause in another way. So it's just really a kismet bringing together of these three. fellas in founding the UFC there in the early 1990s. I guess Millius was the one who also was the idea man behind the octagon as a novelty fighting arena. Now another thing to point out is that from the jump, the UFC was adjacent to U.S. imperialism and imperial violence. It wasn't just a cultural affinity between these factions. There was literal entanglement. And what do I mean by that? What I mean is that in 1994, following the formation of UFC, a small group of high-ranking military personnel from the most elite unit in the U.S. Army Special Operation Forces contacted Roryon and asked him to develop an objective hand-to-hand combat course based on the most effective techniques of Gracie's.

jujitsu. The result of this was the Gracie Combatives military course that was taught to U.S. Special Operations Forces, was taught to conventional U.S. military units, and was taught to CIA operatives. Now, in January 2002, those techniques were the foundation of the official U.S. Army modern combatives program MACP. And after the military had all of its fun, what do you think, what often comes next, right? The military gets entangled in this new form of fighting. What comes after that, Don? The Pigs.

That's right. The police aren't going to let the military have all the fun now. That's right. Yeah, the Gracie resisting attack procedures for law enforcement. which is summed up in the acronym Grapple with 1P, Grapple, I guess it would be pronounced, that was developed by Gracie as well as kind of an offshoot of what they'd done for the military to be used by police agencies across the nation. And those of you with the head of the class have already guessed it,

as is the case with many instances of the military and, law enforcement. The two courses, these courses, MACP and Grapple, they were later merged to create the Gracie survival tactics. So as is the case over the last couple of decades that we've seen, the merger of the military industrial complex with law enforcement. So too was the case here with these survival tactics courses. And so GST is a combative and defensive tactics course that serves both the military and members of law enforcement. Yep. Yeah.

So, you know, it really seems like we can't start a story on this podcast without rooting its origins in the military industrial complex. And the UFC is no exception to that pattern. But the military contracts were not enough to keep it economically afloat, or at least, economically prosperous. So the UFC at first, it was kind of floundering. It had these live shows. It had some audience, a niche audience to be sure, and it was airing on pay per view. But pretty early and pretty often, it was taken a lot of criticism for the brutality of the fights. And so, you know, regulators were intervening state legislators were intervening and making certain of their practices illegal for safety reasons.

And the point that Dana White always loves to make, and he repeats it verbatim, I think, in every one of the interviews we've listened to and more, I'm sure, is a paper view. They could show porn, but they couldn't show UFC. And so that was a big stumbling block to the growth of the business. And by 2001, it was on the verge of bankruptcy, which is where it gets real interesting. Yeah, exactly. So the original triumvirate, this trio of dude bro friends, they were doing okay with UFC and they were getting along just fine. but the UFC was not able to really take off.

It did just okay financially for the first decade of existence, depending on the pay-per-view broadcast, but it was very much a paycheck-by-paycheck organization and mixed that with all the regulatory trouble that they were having. Remember, these states and these actually U.S. congressmen were rallying against UFC because of its barbarism. And so the UFC didn't really take off. in its first decade of existence.

In fact, it was heading towards bankruptcy. And that's when our guy, Dana White, enters the scene. At the time, Dana White was simply a promoter and manager of various UFC fighters. He wasn't really involved with the operations and was not affiliated with UFC as one of the owners or whatever. He was just some guy who was managing fighters and some guy that was promoting fights. he catches wind of the UFC's financial troubles and along with his partners the Furtida brothers from Las Vegas from off the strip Las Vegas they scrounge together some money in 2001 and make this sweet heart of a deal acquisition where they acquire UFC for something like two

million dollars and considering that UFC today is a seven or eight billion dollar enterprise I'm going to say that it was a pretty good deal for sure I'd go as far as even calling it a legendary deal but let's take a moment don why don't you walk us through these for Tita brothers because they are truly characters right these are guys who cut their teeth in off the major strip in Vegas so these are some guys that were really getting down and dirty in Las Vegas. Yeah. I mean, just the name, too, the Fritita brothers. Like, you know that there's going to be some goofy shit.

And then you realize they're from Vegas. And then you realize that they are from off the strip in Vegas. And to me, like, off strip, Vegas, that is just synonymous with dirty, dirty money. And even if it's not mob money, which it probably is, a lot. allegedly, I mean, I couldn't find anything particularly linking the Fratita brothers to organized crime, but just think about the type of lives that they're praying on, the type of misery that they're profiting off of, right? Like, off the Vegas strip, these, like, huge warehouse-like casinos that lack the glamour

of the big properties that everybody's heard of, and that I just think of, like, some toothless old people, you know, pulling the slots and like, don't know what day it is, don't know what time it is, mortgaging like their children's futures and losing it all to the house and these fellas just raking in the cash. I kind of think of like a less charming version of if you've seen Twin Peaks, the return, the Mitchum brothers characters, right? Yeah, totally. Jim Balushi and the other guy that they own the silver Mustang casino. You know, it reminds me of when I think of like off the strip,

I think of the Chevy Chase Vegas vacation. I don't know if you've seen that one. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Forced to like make back all his money. He goes to this like bootleg casino where they're playing like war and like pick a number, like rock paper, scissors and shit. And they're gambling on that. But that's what that reminds me of.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or, yeah, like, even in the movie Casino, when Joe Pesci gets banned from the strip and has to, like, go off strip and is running, like, a casino in the back room of a novelty store or something. Like, yeah, so these are the money guys who, you know, put down a sizable investment, $2 million,

nothing to spit at, but I think little did they know that this train of the UFC was bound for glory. And we're not going to trace the rise of it. You know, needless to say, right, they made good with the regulators. They made good with the gaming authorities. You know, it's another classic thing that can be helped along by greasing the right palms and by pleasing the right powers that be. And by the time that, you know, the modern era comes about, obviously,

pay-per-view kind of goes the way of basic cable and the entire distribution model changes, although, you know, it still is something that's on demand and all the rest of it, but with the new technologies, it reaches new heights, reaches new audiences, and reaches the attention of new capital. So you want to talk about the next change of ownership when the Fratita brothers cash out? Yeah, and this is a major inflection point for the sport. UFC really took off what was like a decade ago. And even back, if you were back then a decade ago, you could see that,

this was the very first sign that UFC was destined to go mainstream because it was in 2016 when the Fratina Brothers sold the majority share of the company of their of their shares to a company named Endeavour, which was previously known as William Morris Endeavor, which was of course the famous talent agency in Hollywood, one of the oldest, and I think if not one of the, maybe the oldest and certainly one of the most prestigious talent agencies in Hollywood, not to be confused with the English socialist artist and designer of the same name, William Morris. Yeah, shout out to the arts and crafts movement. But then William Morris, you know, eventually merges with the company Endeavor.

And Endeavor was, I think even when it becomes William Morris Endeavor, it was run by a guy by the name of Ari Emanuel. Now that name might sound familiar for a couple of reasons. Oh yeah. I'm not a wallflower. I just kind of act the way I want to act. Hopefully I think I'm pretty honest guy and a pretty upfront guy. When you're trying to break things up and kind of create new businesses,

you have to be pretty forceful and not get deterred if you have a vision for it. When you bought the UFC, people said you were crazy. The value has since tripled. Right. What do you say to those people now? Oh, I don't really care what those people say. I really don't. What's the vision?

And how does it all fit together with a talent agency? TKO is live sports, the whole league, 52 weeks a year, pure play. The representation business at EDR is is all the other assets that had already existed before we pulled the UFC out. It's clean, easier for the street to understand it on the TKO side. And so I think that's kind of the two businesses. So anyone who came of age in the 2000 era would be familiar with the name Ari Gold and the TV show Entourage on HBO. But Don, I wonder if you could give us some more context.

Why is the name Ari Emanuel so familiar to so many of us? Well, let's look at his surname, Emmanuel. Ari Emanuel is one of the Emanuel brothers alongside the infamous Ram. Emmanuel, who of course was Barack Obama's chief of staff, a long-time political operative for the Democratic Party in the Chicago area, the Biden ambassador to Japan, and former mayor of Chicago. Rahm Emanuel, of course, shamefully covered up the Chicago PD's heartless and brutal murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot repeatedly on film, film that was suppressed under direct orders from Rahm Emanuel.

I mean, just a mover, a shaker, a fucking piece of shit. Yes, piece of shit, and also potential 28 presidential nominee. Exactly, yeah. And in fact, looking into all of the Emanuel family connections and their largesse as a brand, you can kind of get the sense why Rahm Emanuel would be under the delusional belief that it would be worthwhile for him to run for president because it's like who the fuck wants that who the fuck wants like a guy who thinks neither party is Zionist enough and yeah so ram Emanuel uh Ari's brother and I believe they have another brother too who occasionally makes a

contribution to the discourse. His last one that was memorable was he wrote an op-ed, I believe in the Atlantic magazine that said basically old people should just be warehoused and killed. And, you know, as an argument against universal health care and against Medicare for all, like old people cost too much to take care of. So let's just get rid of them. and their father, speaking of Zionism, fought in the Irgun militia in Israel, Palestine. He was born in Jerusalem and, you know, you've got to assume that he participated alongside his comrades in arms in the campaign of terror that was launched by the Irgun, the Haganah, the other. other organizations, Lehi, Betar, all of these militias that were carrying out essentially coordinated acts of terror against British mandate in Palestine, as well as, of course, the

Palestinian people in order to bring about the conditions that led to the Nakba of 1948. So a very, very nice, forthright family right there. I think actually Ari Emanuel upon inspection is right up there, if not worse than Rom, in terms of the slime that drips off of his resume. So do you want to talk a little bit about zeroing in on Ari and his feats? Yeah. So Ari Emanuel, Rom Emanuel's brother, the basis of Ari Gold on Entourage, billionaire playboy and one of the highest paid CEOs coming out of Hollywood. He's a big-time Democrat donor, but also used to be Donald Trump's agent and calls himself a friend of the Don and even offered to make a movie for Trump's inauguration, but that never

moved forward. So Ari is very much a big-time mover in Shaker, but where the rubber really hits the road for this guy is the transaction that took place in 2023 when the UFC was merged with when the UFC's holding company, I should say, was merged with World Wrestling Entertainment or WWE to form the TKO Group Holdings, a publicly traded company that Ari was running. He was helming that company. And many of the listeners will already know that at the head of the WWE at the time was Vince McMahon, the well-known pervert and alleged rapist and sex trafficker that was very much in the news at the time and very much a disgrace to himself and his business and everyone around him.

Well, this is a guy that was doing business with Ari Emanuel, and Ari Emanuel had no problems doing business with McMahon. Yeah, it's like it, I think that allegations hadn't become public yet when they announced the deal. but it was like months away. And so obviously anybody that was even remotely close to McMahon knew that these allegations existed. I mean, it's kind of like a Harvey Weinstein situation, right?

It's an open secret about Vince McMahon being a fucking sex pest and a rape enabler, if not an alleged rapist himself, which he is also. Yes, very much so. So what Ari Emanuel does is he takes the TKA Group Holdings, this holding company that has all of these difference, what he would call assets, right? He's got the WWE. He's got UFC. They now have pro boxing. They have this thing called power slap.

There are all of these different types of extreme sporting events. And then to round out the series of synergy creating efficiency, promoting profit, maximizing transactions in 2025. UFC entered into a seven-year, seven-plus billion-dollar distribution deal with Paramount Skydance. Yeah, and it's worth saying, you know, the decimal here is important. 7.7 billion. Like, that's $7,700 million for the broadcast rights to UFC fights. Just an enormous, enormous amount of money. Especially interesting when you consider where this all started in the mid-90s where no one would be putting the UFC on TV.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's really like a microcosm here. I think it's worth pausing on just what this all means. You know, we're talking about this ownership structure, right? It passes from basically some Hollywood fellas, you know, adjacent to the military industrial complex, passes on to Las Vegas Slees, then it gets legit, right? And what does it mean to get legit? It means it's scooped up by the biggest talent agency or one of the biggest talent agencies in Hollywood.

Incidentally, you know, who is another client of William Morris Endeavor and their literary department? Who is that? I know they have like a million clients, right? Some of the top names in any industry is basically a client of WME. The one that I have in mind is the author of Hillbilly Elegy, New York Times best-selling novel or quote-unquote memoir. Yeah, J.D. Vance. So Ari Emanuel and his company have represented both the president and the vice president. Right.

Nice. Ari even did publicity for the book back in 2018. So he was always like, and this is the thing too, right? Like this is why we are so on about the bipartisan nature of the Fourth Reich. Ari Emanuel, multi, multi-million dollar bundler for the Democrats, huge supporter of the Hillary campaign in 2016, you know, friends with the Clintons, obviously. and nevertheless, like right there with another foot in the right wing, paling around with J.D. Vance, paling around with Donald Trump, paling around with Elon Musk. I mean, I think it can't really be overstated how tight those guys are.

Like, not only did Ari Emanuel join Elon in his bid for OpenAI. He also invested in Elon's Twitter. So he is, you know, one of the co-investors of Elon Musk in the acquisition of Twitter. And I'm sure features prominently a shout out to Friend of the Pod, Jacob Silverman, who was the one that broke that story of all the investors in which, you know, Ari Emanuel's money intermingling with Saudi money, intermingling with Diddy money. I mean, kind of everybody in their uncle is on the list of Elon co-involving. investors to Twitter. But my favorite, my favorite Elon Musk Ari Emmanuel crossover is the listener

might be familiar if you spent too much time on the internet with the disgusting picture of a shirtless Elon Musk with a body that can only be described as disturbing. is the baron baron from uh dune yeah like a shade of white that almost breaks the camera lens and hurts the eyes to look at for too long um that picture was taken on r emanuel's yacht and r emanuel is actually standing behind elan in that picture sporting a pretty impressive set of abdominal muscles You know, you've got to hand it to Ari. He's got a physique. And he is spraying Elon down with a hose in that picture.

So it's a real tight relationship, which is reflective of the larger relationship between these different Fourth Reich power nexus or nodes in this Fourth Reich nexus of power. So you have Zionism involved. Although, to be fair, you know, before you say, but Ari is a critic of Bibi Netanyahu. He's called for Bibi Netanyahu to step down. That is true. In the same sentence, he called out the protesters demanding a free Palestine from the river to the sea as genocidal. So take that for what it's worth. You know, liberal Zionism doesn't exist.

sorry you got Zionism you got big tech you got private equity endeavor you know it was the buyer of the ufc but it was really a front because endeavor in turn is become a kind of bunch of private equity firms in a trench coat uh you got silver lake partners you got kkr you've got michael del's or family office, Michael Dell, of course, of Dell computers, another military-industrial complex profiteer. In other words, you know, UFC brings together all of these nodes. And with the TKO operation, you're bringing in also a lot of distribution and money from the Gulf from the Persian Gulf states, the Saudis and the Emirates have become huge market for UFC. So they've got skin in the game. And of course, now the David Ellison backed Skydance Paramount,

the same entity that made Barry Weiss, the head of CBS News, right, is the exclusive, or I don't know if it's exclusive, but is the most prominent distributor. of UFC fights, the most prominent broadcaster, who's, among other things, also handling all of the media, all of the broadcasting for this upcoming rumble on the White House lawn. So it really is like a wasp's nest, a hornet's nest, a sewer of the swamp, really, that brings together, just the worst of the worst. If you will, it is a microcosm of the Epstein class, at least the way that I see it. And I don't know, Dick, if you have anything to add to that. But it was mind-blowing to pull on these threads and just see, in fact, it was the Vince McMahon meme,

right, with the opening eyes that then glow red when he learned. more and more things is like yeah it's totally mind-blowing but if you look at this on paper when you look at this sort of broken down if you saw this on you know mapped out for you back in 2016 you would be like no shit this this UFC stuff is going to go mainstream because it's got all the major players involved all the cultural players involved to make it go mainstream right not to say that it's not super popular in it of itself in its own right because it is a very popular phenomenon. But it could not have achieved the status that it has achieved if it were not pushed and backed by the people that we were just discussing. And that brings us to today, right?

Or that brings us to what I listened to over the weekend where I just could not believe my ears, right? I could not believe my ears that UFC, Dana White, was on NPR. It's like a It's like it's like satire listening to this guy talk to someone like David Remick, right? Like I couldn't imagine that in my wildest imagination and and nonetheless it was happening. And that led me to believe like, oh shit, they're making a play. They're trying to get UFC to be accessible for the libs. Yeah. And it's like a Trojan horse for MAGA, the larger MAGA movement too.

Right. It's a Trojan horse for the larger MAGA movement and also for the, a large part of the MAGA base, which is men 18 to 34, right? White men 18 to 34. It sort of becomes this way for the New Yorker NPR audience to get an understanding of that base, right? To get a better understanding of what it is that these folks are. into. And I just want, so I just want to take a moment because we did talk about the history of it all, but I think it's important to take a moment and talk about the UFC as a sport in the place of, you know, in the margins of popular sports of pop culture, right? Because until there was a UFC, the U.S. market, consumers, sports fans, they weren't accustomed to seeing this style of fighting. And this is something that Dana. would mention in these interviews, right? It's like up until then, the fighting that we were used to

seeing, the United States were used to seeing growing up is like boxing, right? And on like TV and movies, the heroes were like the John Waynes. And the idea was that you don't fight a guy who goes down. That's un-American. And of course, UFC brings with it like effectively a no-holds bar, right? In the beginning, at least, there was not only kicking in elbows and knees, and grappling and all of that stuff. But in the beginning, you could literally do things like groin strikes and head butts and things that were so much more, I don't know, like a visceral fighting experience, right? A savagery to the fighting that just wasn't out.

And even in the early days, they didn't, the guys didn't have gloves on. So these were people fighting with their bare knuckles, like the first, I don't know, 20 or 25 UFCs, very early days. They were, these were, it was like street fighting almost in some ways. And a degree of barbarianism, a degree of barbarism that Americans were not used to. But nonetheless, there was something about it that just took off, right? And of course they sort of softened the, softened the fighting a bit, right? They took away the things like the groin strikes and the head puts, and eventually everyone was required to wear gloves.

And eventually they moved towards getting MMA sort of recognized and rules codified in all 50 states, right? And I think we mentioned 2016 was the year it really took off. And that was the year that New York, which was the last of the 50 states, to develop rules, codify rules for MMA fighting. Yeah, I think it's so funny, too, that it was John McCain who led the congressional attack against the UFC in the early days. Yeah, because someone had shown him a tape of the fight, of the fights, and he's like, that's un-American fighting. Yeah, we just shoot people from airplanes. So I think that this is what we're seeing now with Dana White. Obviously, there's a component of it that's like, you know, there's the Freedom 250 fight that's happening in the White House lawn in June just a few weeks away.

But I do think that this is an opportunity that the traditional, like, liberal center, center liberals would take to see what it takes to influence young voters, right? It's rather than go left and deal with working class issues to deal with things like a four. ability to deal with things like universal health care and free education, free college education, it seems like the liberal machine, the democratic machine, is more willing to turn to UFC. Yeah, for sure. And it's interesting, too, to put it in the context of other sports. Like Dana White compares it a lot in this way of casting, like, especially the NFL, which is another kind of brutal sport that has taken a lot of criticism, especially over the brain injuries that result from careers in the NFL and things like that. And Dana White casts a contrast with

the UFC and says, yeah, of course it's dangerous. Of course you could get a traumatic brain injury. But guess what? You know, it's honest. It's transparent. When these guys sign up, for it. They know what they're getting into. There's not somebody's telling them that this helmet is going to protect you. So it's like consent. Everybody's consenting to get the shit beaten out of them. Right, right. And this actually brings us to the next part of the episode that I wanted to talk about, right? It's like, so you have this barbaric fighting that's happening in the UFC and you have these interviewers that are trying to make it excessive. to the

lives, the mainstream lives. Like I am David Remick and I want my audience to get into UFC and so in, at least in the New Yorker and the NPR interviews, the question that inevitably came up is

look, our listening audience might not have the, let's say the appetite to enjoy a combat sport like this. Why should we care about this even when there is this risk, this very real risk of physical harm, like you mentioned, the CTE stuff. And so Dana goes almost in this rehearsed way.

Well, definitely in this rehearsed, I should say definitely in this rehearsed way, goes through these talking points. It's like, why should we care about this sport? And that one you mentioned is always on the list, right? It's like, yes, there is the risk. There's undoubtedly the risk of brain damage and CTE and all of that. but unlike football, unlike hockey, unlike these other sports, the UFC is honest about it. Fighters go in knowing the risk and they choose to do it anyway, as he says, because they're consenting adults.

Yeah, it's wild. And it makes me think, too, about this kind of fake appeal to transparency and honesty that he's making through this ploy. Right. And it reminds me even of like the. 2015-2016-2016 Donald Trump campaign when he would say all this shit about Jeff Bush and about Little Marco and just call these people for the filth that they are and hypocrites totally and everybody loved it I mean it was hard not to mm-hmm right well he's being honest yeah he's being honest he's calling it how he sees it right yeah and in

In both of these interviews, they do, he does this trick where he's, I don't know, he must have been rehearsed. He must have some PR guys and gals that are really helping him out. Well, he has the whole of Endeavor William Morris at his disposal. He's got the best of the best. Exactly. Because he hits all of these cultural points in such a like expert way. Because another part of the whole brain damage CTE thing that he'll say is, you know, he'll say something like 30 years in the business. And you know how many deaths we've had? Not a single one. He'll say, you know, cheerleading can't even, professional, you know, cheerleading can't even hold that title. Doesn't even hold that title. We haven't had a single death. And he pivots to talking about something that Libs will very much understand, which is health and safety. in science and he says things like well you know at UFC we take health and safety very

very seriously we have medical professionals that are monitoring the fighters before the fight during the fight after the fight they're you know measuring all of these markers for these fighters and making sure that they're doing you know the best and everything they can to make sure everyone stays healthy which to me sounds like a bunch of like utter bullshit right because it totally leaves out the reality that there are so many current former UFC fighters that have made it into the news because of their aggressive, violent criminal behavior that has, in some cases, ended up with the death of someone, right? Maybe not the UFC fighter himself that's getting killed, but those around him.

And it bears mentioning that, you know, to go back to the NFL comparison, that there has been also media coverage of the NFL as kind of a petri dish for wife beaters that remember Ray Rice caught on film brutally attacking a woman, what was that like over 10 years ago? It was a long time ago, but it was national news. And the incidents of gender violence in the UFC among UFC fighters, is something like four times as high as the NFL's in terms of like reported gender-based violence. So it's something that certainly, I think, is inherently a part of the UFC.

You know, even the notion of the women fighters standing up for themselves and, you know, they can be just as strong as the male fighter. and can get in the ring together and whatever. For example, you know, Dana White famously got into a physical fight with his wife on film. And she slapped him first and then he like goes after her. And I don't think anybody got like really seriously hurt in that. And according to him, it was the only time that things had ever gotten physically violent between them, but it's nevertheless part of the sauce, right? It's part of the recipe that this aggressiveness is a great leveler, right? The violence is a great leveler between people of all sizes,

and the UFC fighters seem to take that to heart, much to the detriment of their romantic partners. Or anyone around them. Could just be some poor guy, or, girl that's driving the car next to them, right? Like there have been noted cases of road rage. So yeah, it's, I mean, it's true. The idea that UFC is creating a safe environment for those involved and those around, that's just that can't be further from the truth. But the other thing that comes up in all of these interviews is this question about, you know,

it's along the same lines of like, why should the listener care? Why do we care about fighting in this day and age? It's so barbaric. They're so the savagery. Why would anybody want to watch this? And I think here again, Dana has this very elegant response, right? And he says that, well, everyone's a fighter. Yeah.

Which there is some, there is truth to that, right? Sure. Yeah. And he actually pitches it in, again, this very scripted. very focus, groupy, sounding corporate-speak way of selling his product. And I think he does so effectively. Like I came away from listening to him as he's not an idiot, Dana White. Like he's a pretty good, effective messenger for his product.

And when he makes this pitch, when he does this spiel of talking about, you know, everybody gets up every day, like you go out, you try to provide for your family, you're a fighter. You know? And it, again, it's a leveler. It's a flattening device to associate the spectator with the physical prowess of the UFC fighter. Like, you're at the top of your game and making spreadsheets just like, you know, John Jones is at the top of the game and knocking people out.

Exactly. And it's this, it taps into this idea of like hard work and discipline and going in day and day out and working towards a goal, right? And this model of meritocracy, this idea which we are measured not by, you know, where we're born or how, you know, how wealthy we are when we're born, but about the grit, about the work ethic that we have. And this is a lens through which the United States, through which United States citizens, through all of, you know, the lens through which all of us view the world, right? Through which we view geopolitics, to which we view our country through this propaganda machine, this metaphor of like, in America, you are able to make it by sheer hard work. Yeah, and I think the comment you made about viewing geopolitics through that lens as well is another thing that, you know, I feel like Americans always have kind of viewed geopolitics through the lens of team sports, this team and that team, conceiving of the nation as a monad, a kind of atomized group that fights on the world stage or, competes on the world stage that all the nations are in competition with each other and they're making alliances and they're having disagreements and they're battling it out and it's kind of funny that today that metaphorical lens of nations as fighters is really casting the U.S. in not such a great role. And even the jiu-jitsu style of the smaller, weaker nation using its small size and

using its advantages against the stronger colossus is on full display in the Iranian defeat of the U.S. in keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed and inflicting pain on a much bigger military adversary. So it falls apart a little bit in that respect. Of course, nobody in the Trump administration would want to use Jiu-Jitsu as the lens to discuss the Iran aggression that is not going well for them. But it is kind of funny how, you know, you set this up and then it's going to work for sometimes a lot of the time it's not. But nevertheless, they'll just steamroll over it anyways through the sheer force of rhetoric, which is their want.

Yeah. And I think that's a good segue to our last little piece on this guy in this episode, which is how politics inevitably comes up in all of his interviews, right? And I think on this point, I don't think we've said it so far, but it's no secret that Dana played a critical role in the 2024 election and that he is very good friends with Donald Trump. Of course, Donald Trump was the first hotel and casino to actually allow UFC to come in and play and have their events. I think the first two major UFC events happened at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. and so Donald Trump is very much someone that is in Dana White's inner circle and has been for the last 30 years. And so inevitably in these interviews, the issue comes up where, you know, the interview will ask Dana like, hey, so you're very close with Donald Trump.

Let's talk about that. Let's talk about where he stands politically and whether you, you know, support him. And again, it's like a masterclass in like playing PR, right? Because what does he say? Dana says, you know, well, I don't like to talk about politics. I try and stay out of politics. I'm not a political guy. I went, for example, I went to the RNC for the 2024 election and I spoke about Donald Trump as a person, as a friend.

And my speech about Donald had nothing whatsoever to do about politics. And what do we say to that, Don? Oh, my God. That sounds like the steam. You can, it's the type of bullshit that you can actually hear the steam evaporating off of, you know. It makes us a low hissing sound. That's how hot and wet this heap of dung is. Yeah, it comes, I mean, it all comes back to politics, right?

And it's like, of course it's political. the guy is having a major fight in the White House, on the White House lawn in three, four weeks or something, right, in middle of June. So, like, of course he's very much connected to politics. And what I love is when they ask him, like, okay, we'll tell us about Trump. What's so great about Trump? I think in both interviews, he says, well, I'm not a political guy. And in the same breath, he'll say, well, you can't deny Trump's achievements in the Middle East, right?

Like the Abraham Accords or something comes up. And it's like, well, what are you doing, man? Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, and it's just like transparently false. He doesn't even really pretend to not talk about politics when he gives these speeches. He just goes out and blatantly lies about it. But, you know, because he's kind of playing the role of the nice guy, these interviewers don't really press him on it. They just kind of, they press him maybe once, maybe twice, but they don't have like the clips at the ready or, you know, enough to kind of trap him into the blatant lie that he's telling their audiences and, you know, whatever.

Like, they just kind of move, move on from it because at the end of the day, you know, the idea of dividing culture from politics is in the shared interest. of the entire ruling class. That's one of these issues that I think is very common to both the lib elites and to the conservative elites that there's certain things, you know, that should be insulated from politics, that shouldn't be involved from politics. And what does that mean? Of course, it means that those things are vessels and vehicles for the propagation of nationalist, sometimes genocidal political propaganda. You know, think about the NFL, for example, that if somebody takes a knee during the national anthem,

that's politics in the NFL. If a fucking B-52 bomber flies overhead and fireworks blast off during the national anthem, that's apolitical. So it's a zooming out of the lens upon political economy to the level of the nation where it is mythologized that there are no disagreements, that we're all Americans. You know, another Dana White soundbite that he repeats is, those people that say Donald Trump's not my president, well, I got news for you. If you're an American citizen, he is your president. Just like Barack Obama was your president, just like Joe Biden was your president, the person that wins the election, that's the president for all the Americans. It's, you know, a way of wrapping that up, wrapping up right-wing, hyper-nationalistic, imperialist politics, aggressive politics on the geopolitical level in the flag and calling it neutrality.

Right. And on that point, too, I think it is important to note the other thing that came out in these interviews when, you know, Dana White is saying he's not political. Well, Dana White endorsed the president in 2024. And he also got another guy to endorse the president, another media mogul, if you will, fella by the name of Joe Rogan. Because, of course, Joe Rogan is one of the key commentators on UFC. right he's one of these key guys that sits ringside and will do the commentating for the UFC for many many many years now I think close to the entire existence of the UFC uh Joe Rogan has been doing that and so Joe Rogan and Dana White very much boys right

and I think it was in the David Remnick interview where you know Dana all but um virtually brags about the fact that like things were coming to close during the election cycle and he hits up Joe Rogan and he's like, hey, who are you voting for? And Joe Rogan says, I'm voting for Trump. And Dana White goes, well, why don't you endorse? You got to endorse. And so he in this interview is taking credit for the Joe Rogan endorsement of Donald Trump. Yeah.

And also he takes credit for Donald Trump going on podcasts. and spreading the word directly to the American people by sitting with Rogan for four hours or however long it was. Or the Nelk boys. Right. Yeah. Steve will do it, right. He takes credit for getting Donald Trump to invite the Nelk boys onto Air Force One and do a podcast or stream or whatever they do with Trump. And to reach this young male.

target demographic like it's one thing after another that makes the whole notion that he's apolitical somehow just so utterly absurd and he actually another kind of telling phenomenon another telling rhetorical trick that Dana White pulls repeatedly is to flip the script so that it's defensive right so when he's asked about his support for Donald Trump, he'll always say, well, look, this is my friend. And people out there calling him a fascist and calling him a racist, I know that he's not those things. So I felt an obligation to my friend to get out there in the public and use my platform to say, this is a good person. And it's like a good person whose policies are genocide at home and abroad. Right. And it's pretty

outrageous that he can get away with saying all of those things. But yet, in even the liberal framing, there's still the fundamental belief. We talked about it in one of the contra-Iran episodes when we were discussing, I think, the New York Times interview with General Stanley McChrystal and David French of the New York Times, another one of these liberal commentations. obviously sits on the editorial board of the paper of record, the liberal failing New York Times, and nevertheless spouts shit like, well, I'm against the war in Iran. I don't think it's the best idea, but now that we're in it, by gum, I sure hope that the USA pulls out the victory here, is this type of jingoistic, imperialist, cultural nationalism that is

creating not a red-brown alliance, but what I've come to start thinking of as a blue-brown alliance. The liberal establishment, rather than continuing to feed the outrage machine, which is profitable and not saying that that is going away overnight or is short for this world, but in the longer-term vision, I think that many elements of the liberal establishment, especially at the upper, upper levels of the socioeconomic pyramid, are accepting the fact that, yes, the Republican Party has become the party of Donald Trump. It is the party of MAGA. MAGA's not going away. We're not going to go back to a Bush family. branded Republican Party. We're not going to go back to a John McCain branded Republican Party.

It's going to be UFC. It's going to be Dana White. It's going to be this brash in your face, blood sport, kind of low, lowbrow culture, and it's not going anywhere. Right. It's becoming mainstream. It has become mainstream. And it's become mainstream, not just in our pop culture icons, but also in the so-called leaders of industry, right? Like this idea of being brash and braggadocious and, you know, being aggressive and training and fighting and all that shit, it's permeated some of the places you at least expected. And that is these software companies, right, where these nerds are getting trumpified.

They're getting magified, right? You have Trump and his ilk come about. You have the MAGA movement come about. you have this UFC movement coming about. And all of a sudden, you got guys like Zuck who are, you know, working out doing the training, doing the fighting. You have them claiming, you know, they're killing all the animals they're going to eat, right? It's like the magification of the mainstream has very much already started to take hold. And that's the direction we're heading it.

And like I said before, it's like you. shouldn't even expect the mainstream libs to after all of this to go back to something that was before 2016 because from all accounts it looks like the at least the major powers in the media are the major powers in the culture are very interested very keen on you know taking adopting the UFC culture figuring out a way to bring the UFC culture into the fold than, you know, dialing it back and searching for something else. They very much want to be a part of it. Yeah.

And, you know, as we've kind of talked about ad nauseum on this podcast, it's really, if you want to see the direction things are likely to take, you look to those overlaps, those nexus points between the various factions of the ruling class. And so here, the base structure really does. reflect the superstructure of what we're seeing. And what I mean by that is the ownership structure of the UFC, that we were talking about earlier on in the episode, it brings together Silicon Valley with Wall Street and with private equity.

And it's firmly rooted in the military industrial complex. And their means of growth are through this predatory acquisition of the competition and, you know, consolidation under a single mega corporation with too big to fail interconnections with all other too big to fail corporations in this kind of capitalist death cult of we know it's a bubble. We know that it's based on this froth. Now, of course, throw into the mix the gambling industry as well, right, that is rampant in all sports, in all things really, and opens up those activities to an undermining of the competitive spirit through the always present possibility that people will throw these fights for some

sort of a corrupt win. I remember when the World Series. series was fixed in the Chicago Black Sox days way back at the beginning of the last century. Well, we've come full circle to the point where nobody will ever know if any sports game or contest is on the level ever again. But how do we how do we muscle through that? Again, by these myths, by this constellation of myths that that is. propagated by a media that is also owned and enthralled to the very same financial interests, right? Paramount Skydance is owned by David Ellison, but his seed money, obviously, this is a nepo baby we're

talking about, the son of Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who for all intents and purposes is CIA, right? The company and the guy who first came up with the idea for a a single surveillance state that combines inputs from all surveillance tracking systems into one database for the government to take advantage of. I was reading last night the debates on the House floor, on the Senate floor around the USA Patriot Act, around the expansion of the surveillance state, and they're actively citing opeds written by Larry Ellison at the time. So the dream of these fucking freaks is coming true. And, you know, it's literally thanks to a circus owner from Brazil a hundred years ago,

that today's bread and circuses are distributed to the masses in what is reminiscent of the fall of Rome. You know, here we are, once again, Pluto is in Aquarius, as our astrology heads will be aware of. It is the alignment of the fall of empires and of great geopolitical chaos. And here we go again. As Philip K. Dick said, the empire never ended. And we are all living again in the time of the fall of Rome, we're in that black iron prison, and the circus is loud, and it is making them rounds. One other thing that I wanted to say, too, is, you know, the UFC, not only is it kind of a cultural signifier that guys like Zuck can latch onto, and even Jeff Bezos, too, right?

like his whole roided out physique and cue ball bald head and shiny suits and just his kind of sleaze ball persona that he's developed over the years is in a same line with all of this magification that you were talking about dick um but i'll say too that these guys are picking up right where the mk ultra scientists left off and just like the enslaved people on the plantations were used as so much fodder for human experimentation just like the victims of the nazi holocaust were used as human test subjects for the likes of dr mangola uh once again the ufc is a site of all this body maximization shit, you know. Like you mentioned earlier how Dana White talks about the best doctors are examining these guys before, during, and after the fight.

Right. Like, there is a very sinister takeaway from that process. You know, these are experimental test subjects that are a part of the same immortality industry that we talked about. last week with the regulation-free zones in Honduras that they're setting up to study this shit. You know, the UFC is like, how could we make a Superman, whether that be to genetically program some sort of a super-soldier cyborg, or whether it just be to come up with more ways in which these rich fucks can max out all of their body stats like Brian Johnson and, you know, work their way into God status, immortality in their little bunkers,

while the rest of us fight over the scraps they leave behind. It is pretty bleak. It's a pretty bleak vista onto the future that these people want to create for us. It's bleak, but fret not listener because you have friends, including two friends who have their own noided leftist podcast. That's right. your boys, Dick and Don. What do you say?

We call this one? I think so, yeah. I think so. You know, let's continue to root for the underdog. Definitely. Definitely root for the underdog. And, you know, you can watch UFC. Like I said, I watch it sometimes.

There is an element of entertainment that I think cannot be ignored when you're talking about hand-to-hand combat. It's been that wave for so long that. it's um i don't know i as dana would say if a fight broke out in this room everybody would watch it but if it's not your cup of tea that's perfectly fine too because it takes all types to make a society run and i think more than anything the alarming thing is how this ufc stuff is becoming mainstream because it does signify this adoption of MAGA culture to the mainstream. And like I said, listener, fret not because you have friends out there including Don and I.

And we will be right here waiting for you same time, same place next week. And until then, I will just say that I am Dick. I am Don. saying farewell And keep on digging Well I stumbled And until I am all Drunken full of smoke

My wife and I have had an out Death said I'm sick Get out So I stumbled down to Kelly's boat Across the edge of town And I told the boys We story And we had another round

Oh That would make