UFC Freedom 250 patriotism gets a media blackout.
Travis Pastrana’s dirt-bike backflip over the South Lawn of the White House, one of several stunts by the Nitro Circus for UFC Freedom 250, saluted American ingenuity and daring in a celebration that most mainstream media ignored. The shunning was part of the cultural civil war in which the media attempt to control popular thinking about contemporary politics, especially when anything concerns the Trump administration. Media authoritarians even want to dictate our amusement.
Pastrana’s derring-do — using the White House as the backdrop of self-defense and self-invention — fell short of elitist criteria for journalists who had promoted the slightest trendy stunt during the Obama and Biden eras but who now selectively ignore Trump celebrations, even leading up to the nation’s 250th anniversary. UFC Freedom 250 (also known as White House 250) was a collaboration with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, staging military exhibitions and blue-collar sports pastimes — an extravaganza streamed exclusively by Paramount Plus but that TV networks did not televise. The suppression of information is real in the media experience of the Fake News era.
This cultural civil war evokes one of the famous terms from the dissident past, when poet-musician Gil Scott-Heron recorded “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (the lead track from his 1971 album Pieces of a Man). Scott-Heron’s famous phrase became a rallying cry for the Black Panthers, yet it is widely misunderstood. He explained its real meaning in a PBS documentary:
When we say that the revolution will not be televised, we were saying that . . . the thing that is going to change people is something that no one will ever be able to capture on film. It’ll just be something that you see, and all of a sudden you realize I’m on the wrong page, or I’m on the right page, but I’m on the wrong note, and I’ve got to get in sync with everyone else to understand what’s happening in this country.
But the mainstream blackout imposed on UFC Freedom 250 was another example of media censorship, intended to control popular sentiment. Surely UFC chairman Dana White realized this possibility when planning with President Trump to highlight American culture, featuring a military band, a 4,000-seat arena with an octagon stage — all going against the attitude of A-list culture-makers who detest Trump as well as, perhaps, the half of the country who voted for him.
White’s counter-programming extravaganza still garnered 130 million viewers this weekend, besting Jane Fonda’s leftist fundraiser Rise Up Sing Out at a small Manhattan theater. Most interestingly, UFC Freedom 250 outpaced Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, which grossed $44 million from 2.8 million admissions. Even the Tony Awards, last week’s progressive event dutifully broadcast on CBS, had only 5.06 million viewers and 50 million Facebook engagements.
UFC Freedom 250 outlined the cultural civil war through the difference between blue-collar activities and class-based entertainment, the former implicitly conservative, the latter liberal: country musicians, motor-bike enthusiasts, and enlisted folk versus Fonda, Spielberg, and Hollywood-Broadway ideologues.
Zac Brown Band sang the National Anthem, and to defeat A-list no-shows (according to pundit Sasha Stone, they hate Trump and “the other half of America”), a formation of six U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets, flown by the Blue Angels, and six U.S. Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons, flown by the Thunderbirds, performed a precision aerial display. Their synchronized maneuvers demonstrated U.S. military discipline, paralleled by Pastrana’s awe-inspiring bike flip with his six-person stunt team from the Nitro Circus, rising high, Evel Knievel–style, over the White House South Lawn.
UFC Freedom 250’s exhibition was personified in seven UFC title fights, staged to restore a lost sense of masculine endeavor — popularizing the Defense Department’s “warrior spirit” — for constituents who feel abandoned in the face of cultural attacks on American history and citizenship. The liberal trade paper Variety responded with pantywaist snark by an ex–Daily Beast writer who called the event “garish” and “vulgar” and said, “At no point has the Trump presidency more closely resembled a scene out of Idiocracy,” the latter jab moldering for use since 2006.
Against weak media support, UFC Freedom 250 should put some Americans “on the right page and get others in sync,” as Scott-Heron advised. That effort is no different from how local New York media cheered the Knicks’ basketball championship to pressure attitudes about “what’s happening in this country.” Connecting a show of power and pride makes patriotic sense (epitomized in the stirring opening video The Walk, narrated by Cole Hauser) except to those offended by national prowess. The beautiful defiance of UFC 250 proves the left does not own a monopoly on “resistance.”
