In the lead-up to the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event in Miami on April 13, an undercard fight drew an unusual level of attention.
The fight, which pitted Bryce Mitchell, a featherweight ranked thirteenth in the UFC, against unranked prospect Jean Silva, was largely indistinguishable from the hundreds of low-profile UFC contests broadcast from a near-empty Las Vegas event space week to week on ESPN+. The reason this bout generated outsize attention was that earlier this year Mitchell had revealed he held a number extreme far-right views, which included sympathy for Adolf Hitler and Holocaust denial.
“I honestly think that Hitler was a good guy,” Mitchell said during a ninety-minute podcast in January, the debut episode of his ArkanSanity show. He praised Adolf Hitler for trying to “purify” Germany by expelling “greedy Jews” and dismissed the Holocaust as fake.
Mitchell’s comments were roundly condemned by UFC president Dana White as “beyond disgusting” shortly after they caused an outcry on social media. But despite having broad powers under the standard-form UFC contract to terminate or suspend him, the promotion declined to take any disciplinary action against the fighter and later decided to match Mitchell up in a high-profile pay-per-view fight. White cited “free speech” as the grounds for his inaction. On Piers Morgan’s Uncensored podcast. he made the case that “hate speech is the most important speech to protect.”
White’s claim is especially unconvincing because, since its founding, the UFC has hardly been what could be described as a champion of freedom of speech. Moreover, the UFC’s hypocritical approach to free-speech issues over the two decades since its founding bears a remarkable…
Auteur: Jacob Debets
