Well, we finally found the line that UFC fighters can’t cross. Sort of. In a theoretical sense, at least.
And if you’ve been paying any sort of attention to the regular ramblings of some of the UFC’s most notable conspiracy theorists, it should come as no surprise that Bryce Mitchell was the one who finally leapt over that line by sticking up for Adolf Hitler on the very first episode of his ArkanSanity Podcast.
“I honestly think that Hitler was a good guy based upon my own research, not my public education indoctrination,” Mitchell said during the 90-minute show uploaded to YouTube earlier this week. “I really do think before Hitler got on meth, he was a guy I’d go fishing with. He fought for his country. He wanted to purify it by kicking the greedy Jews out that were destroying his country and turning them all into gays.”
Again, just to be clear, this was the first episode of Mitchell’s podcast. He decided to lead with his Nazi sympathies, arguing that it was only when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union that he “went full nutty.” Prior to that, Mitchell insisted, “he was fighting for his people, and he wanted a pure nation.”
Here’s where you might be wondering, did Mitchell also deny the existence of the Holocaust? Well of course he did, telling co-host Roli Delgado (a former UFC fighter himself) that there was “no possible way they could’ve burned and cremated 6 million bodies,” and therefore “the Holocaust ain’t real.”
It’s not exactly a shock that Mitchell might hold these views. It’s also not all that surprising that he’d utter them into a microphone on purpose. He’s previously claimed that the earth is flat and gravity isn’t real. At his last UFC appearance he made headlines by saying he doesn’t believe in wearing a seatbelt, since he might need to dive out of a moving car at any moment. (Seriously.)
The MMA world has mostly reacted to Mitchell’s many attempts at asserting his own ignorance with something close to an eye roll and an exhausted chuckle. Oh, Bryce. There he goes again. But this time finally went so far that UFC CEO Dana White felt the need to proactively condemn his comments.
“I’ve heard a lot of dumb, ignorant sh*t in my day, but this one’s probably the worst,” White told reporters at a press conference following his Power Slap event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Thursday. “Hitler is one of the most disgusting and evil human beings to ever walk the face of the earth, and anyone who tries to take an opposing position is a moron.”
Of course, the logical follow-up question was what, exactly, the UFC would do about this. If Mitchell played on an NFL or NBA team, this kind of thing would almost certainly earn him some form of punishment from the league.
In the past, the UFC has fired fighters for less. Miguel Torres was briefly cut from the UFC for paraphrasing a sexual assault joke from a TV show on his Twitter account in 2011. The UFC severed ties with longtime cutman Jacob “Stitch” Duran after he very lightly criticized some of the company’s business practices.
Talking out of turn — especially in a way that threatens to mess with the money — has definitely gotten people fired from the UFC before.
But now? White said he and the UFC were “beyond disgusted” by Mitchell’s comments, but stopped short of outlining any potential punishment as a result.
“It’s free speech,” White said. “I don’t have to love it. You don’t have to love it.”
If people were angered by Mitchell’s comments, White suggested, they could tune in to a future fight in the hopes of seeing him “hopefully get his a** whooped on global television.”
And so it seems that there’s no such thing as being too bigoted or too ignorant to fight in the UFC. Such is the UFC’s commitment to letting people say whatever they want without the least hint of consequences.
So it seems that there’s no such thing as being too bigoted or too ignorant to fight in the UFC. Such is the UFC’s commitment to letting people say whatever they want without the least hint of consequences.
It’s a tricky position to take, since it suggests that a fighter could get on the microphone after a big win at a UFC event, shout a stream of racial slurs on live TV, maybe argue for a return to the practice of slavery, and the worst he’d face from the boss is a strongly worded disagreement.
Obviously, that’s not true. There are definitely things a fighter could say that would force the UFC to take some action. Let your imagination run wild. Picture the fallout as it extends to UFC sponsors and broadcast partners. Freedom of speech might be a legal protection, but it is not and never has been a blanket immunity from consequences.
Somewhere out there is a line that a UFC fighter really can’t cross without the company deciding it would be better off without him. What White just told us is that advocating for Adolf Hitler isn’t it. Not yet.
White is definitely right about one thing, though. When he referred to Mitchell’s brand of ignorance as a symptom of a world that offers so many ways of amplifying the worst and most disgusting ideas, he was onto something.
“That’s the problem with the internet and social media,” White said. “You provide a platform for a lot of dumb, ignorant people.”
Just seems like it’s not only the internet and social media providing that platform. And it seems like it’s not going to stop any time soon.
