The UFC Is Bringing MAGA Politics to Canada

The first time the UFC brought an event to Toronto back in 2011, some 55,000 fans packed Rogers Centre to watch Georges St-Pierre, Canada’s gentleman gladiator, as he defended his 170-pound title against Jake Shields in the main event of UFC 129.

Tonight, when the UFC rolls into Scotiabank Arena with a pay-per-view event headlined by 185-pound champ Sean Strickland taking on challenger Dricus du Plessis, the vibe is bound to be … different.
 
For one thing, there’s the size and scope. While UFC 129 set North American attendance records, Saturday’s UFC 297 is set to play to a much smaller, though likely still very enthusiastic crowd of some 18,000 fans. (That’s the attendance figure UFC President Dana White announced two days before the event, at least. A quick search of Ticketmaster shows plenty of good seats still available.)
 
But maybe even more glaring is the great, yawning chasm between the principals involved and the type of appeal they bring with them.
 
Back in 2011, St-Pierre was sort of like the UFC’s finest wine: aged to perfection, welcome at dinner parties, enough of a kick to be fun but not enough to ruin your life. Strickland, on the other hand? He’s the UFC’s Four Loko: aggressively and unapologetically unpalatable with an aftertaste of self-loathing and regret.
 
Take Wednesday’s pre-fight media day, for example. Strickland showed up in a T-shirt that read: “A woman in every kitchen, a gun in every hand.” You know, just in case we were in danger of forgetting that this is the same fighter who has repeatedly insisted that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote or hold jobs.
 
When MMA journalist Alexander Lee attempted to ask him a question about his many anti-gay statements over the years — including an insistence that he’d view having a gay son as a failure — Strickland went off.
 
“If you had a son and he … said he was gay, you’d be like, ‘ah man!’ You don’t want a grandkid?” Strickland said.
 
When Lee replied that he’d have no problem with having a gay son, Strickland replied: “Well, you’re a weak fucking man, dude. You’re part of the fucking problem. You elected Justin Trudeau, and he seized the bank accounts. You’re just fucking pathetic. And the fact that you have no fucking backbone, and have him shut down your country and seize fucking bank accounts, and you ask me some stupid shit like that? Go fuck yourself.”
 
Again, just to clarify, this was in response to a question about whether Strickland would love and support his hypothetically gay son. And that’s a son that, as far as we know, Strickland does not have.

Support Independent Journalism.

Then the conversation turned to UFC sponsor Bud Light. Strickland had previously blasted the beer brand for supporting a transgender influencer and vowed to go after the company for that decision in a future post-fight interview. Was he still planning on doing that, Lee asked?

“Here’s the thing about Bud Light,” Strickland said. “Ten years ago, to be trans was a mental fucking illness. And all of a sudden, people like you have fucking weaselled your way in the world. You are an infection. You are the definition of weakness. Everything that is wrong with the world is because of fucking you. And the best thing is, the world’s not buying it. The world’s not buying your fucking bullshit that you’re fucking peddling. The world is not saying, ‘you know what, you’re right, chicks have dicks.’ The world’s not saying that. The world’s saying, ‘there are two genders, I don’t want my kids being taught about who they can fuck in school, I don’t want my kids being taught about their sexual preference.’ Like, this guy [gesturing to Lee] is a fucking enemy. You want to look at the enemy to our world? It’s that motherfucker right there. Asking me stupid fucking questions.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, this is an absolutely unhinged way to answer this question. Because the question, just in case you forgot amid that culture war word salad, was whether Strickland was still planning to call out Bud Light in his post-fight interview. That’s it.

Somehow, seconds later, Strickland was calling the person who asked the question “an infection,” while also claiming he was “everything that is wrong with the world.” (So presumably the list of things wrong with the world goes something like: 1. A reporter asking if Strickland is still planning on doing the thing he said he’d do. 2. The threat of environmental catastrophe. 3. Man’s inhumanity to man.)

What’s really crazy is it’s not like these questions about human sexuality or corporate expression were completely out of nowhere. These were all conversations that Strickland has publicly engaged in, often repeatedly, as part of an ongoing and mostly successful attempt to get attention from fans. He was giving his opinion on trans rights and women’s suffrage when no one was asking. Then someone asked and he lost his mind.

To a lot of people, it might not be so remarkable that a man who makes his living fighting other people in a cage would act this way with a microphone in his hand. Strickland, after all, has admitted to going through a “weird neo-Nazi, white supremacist phase” as a youth, during which he was “kicked out of school for, like, hate crimes, all this crazy shit.”

He also recently broke down on comedian Theo Von’s podcast while talking about his abusive childhood, then threatened to stab his opponent in Saturday’s fight for making fun of him. (Other people’s emotional trauma is pure weakness, but Strickland’s is sacred and must be respected.)

Strickland has very clearly and seemingly intentionally branded himself as the UFC’s far-right, anti-gay, misogynist champ. What’s surprising, at least to someone who was covering the sport back in those St-Pierre days, is just how much the UFC itself does not appear to care that this is what it’s rolling into Toronto with on Saturday.

There was a time when the UFC had to work very diligently to counter the assumption that its fighters were, as one early critic claimed, nothing but a bunch of “tattooed, skinhead bar bouncers.”

Back then, the promotion would respond by pointing to champions like St-Pierre, with his squeaky clean public image and Hollywood looks, but also fighters like former high school math teacher Rich Franklin. Cage fighters might be rough and tough, the message went, but they were also smart and thoughtful.

Now you have an admitted former neo-Nazi calling for women to be relegated to the kitchen and gays to be shunned by their families, and it’s apparently all fair in love and fight promotion.

It’s no secret that the UFC has lurched to the right politically in recent years. Its longtime president Dana White is a very vocal supporter of Donald Trump. The UFC even produced a puff-piece video package about Trump entitled “Combatant In Chief.” Trump has attended several UFC events, flanked by great replacement theorist Tucker Carlson and (I swear I’m not making this up) Kid Rock, all while the UFC broadcast went to great lengths to highlight their entrance as if they were a pro wrestling tag team.

The UFC seems to have decided that it wants to be the right-wing sport of choice.

Some of that may stem from White’s own political affiliations. Some of it could just be the same financial calculation that’s led to everything from coffee companies to cell phone carriers positioning themselves as the “anti-woke” alternatives.

But with Strickland out there doing his best Handmaid’s Tale impression at press conferences, followed by nary a word of even mild disapproval from the company brass, it appears as though there’s no such thing as too bigoted for today’s UFC.

And these aren’t just views we accidentally found out he had. It’s become an essential part of his pitch to fans: he wants you to know which groups of people he hates in the hopes that you’ll agree and support him because of it.

What’s really demoralizing is the very strong chance that it will work. Not on everyone, obviously. The UFC actually does have a surprisingly resilient contingent of gay and trans fans, not that the company can be bothered to tell them it disagrees with Strickland here or ask them nicely ask them to stick around despite the open hostility.

But a lot of the current fanbase is exactly who Strickland hopes they are, and they can’t wait to tell you how much they loved his rant. (Finally, someone willing to hate gay people in public! What a relief after these painful few years of tiptoeing toward treating all people as people.)

That’s a weird vibe for the sport of MMA just generally, but it’s also a strange shift for a fight promotion that, not so long ago, was trying so hard to make its case for the broadest possible appeal.

Fighting was for everybody, White used to tell us. It’s in our DNA. We get it and we like it. But in this current moment, it’s hard not to find yourself wishing that it didn’t have to feel so gross to support it.