The White House UFC fights showed us the America we needed to see [View all]

Column by Monica Hesse

The phrase “Platonic ideal” refers to the philosopher’s conception that real life and meaning exist on an abstract spiritual plain beyond our physical existence and comprehension. You think you have seen a donkey, say, but no, you have only seen a shadow of a donkey — a hypothetical representation. You cannot even begin to comprehend the real thing. All of us go through life like dogs seeing in muted colors, not knowing what we’re missing, except on Sunday night when anyone with a subscription to Paramount+ was allowed to experience the Platonic ideal of what it means to be an American in 2026, the real donkey, and it was a UFC fight on the White House lawn.

“There’s only one person more incredible than the Incredible Hok, and that’s my Lord and savior Jesus Christ,” brayed Josh Hokit in his victory speech after winning his heavyweight bout in the event labeled, insanely, Freedom 250. “And lastly, Michelle Obama is a man.”

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I feel the need, before continuing further, to make it clear that I actually have no problem with the concept of mixed martial arts at the White House. I don’t know where any of you were when Conor MacGregor challenged Floyd Mayweather in a landmark 2017 boxing crossover, but I was hosting a pay-per-view pizza party at my house. I have watched the early 1990s matches, the ones where a dude in a karate gi would challenge a dude in a sumo mawashi to ostensibly determine the best martial art. MMA is a deeply violent sport, and always has been. We are a deeply violent country, and always have been. But there’s artistry to the MMA fight, and discipline, a body pushing itself to limits that are simultaneously sickening and exhilarating.

But the Ultimate Fighting Championship event that happened on Sunday night was not a celebration of a sport, it was a celebration of slop. It was a pseudo-patriotic grift that tried to convince us that fighters wheel-kicking each other for the chance of $1 million in crypto deserved the same level of hero admiration as the boys who launched onto the beach at Normandy; it was an infomercial that paused every seven seconds to advertise Starlink internet or Starry soda or Ram trucks or flavors of Monster energy drink that God forgot.

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