Compromise and Conceit

Here at the Faustusnotes Academy we’re big fans of the signifiers of elite culture, mixed martial arts (MMA) in particular, which means we have to bring all our analytical tools to work on UFC Freedom 250. That’s right folks, I watched this fascist slop so you don’t have to, and I’m going to give you a review.

This review may involve spoilers for the fight outcomes (let’s face it, who cares?) but let’s get the big two spoilers out of the way first: nobody was struck by lightning[1], and there was no false flag Israeli terror attack that could be blamed on Iran. My main interest is not in the MMA, which was good but not particularly inspiring, but in what we can learn about America’s weird sense of macho and its masculine insecurities from this very public display of its manhood, as well as a general review of its fascisty-ness.

The format

Since my reader(s) is less cultured than me, I will assume he/she (they?) wasted their time on low-brow stuff like concertos or reading books or something instead of watching this highpoint of modern human artistic achievement, so first of all I’ll give a general account of the format of the event. Let’s get the most preposterous sentence in the history of America out of the way first:

UFC Freedom 250 was a mixed martial arts event that was held on the lawn of the White House under a specially-constructed metal shelter to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the foundation of the United States of America, that also just happened to be held on Trump’s 80th birthday.

Okay, now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s go through the format. The event was opened with a trooping of the colors by various members of the US armed forces, a rendition of the national anthem, a flyby by some of their obsolete jet fighters, a walk-out by Trump to take a seat ringside, and then a series of MMA fights. In between the fights they had brief animated descriptions of events in the history of the USA, mostly a pastiche of (likely AI-generated) images with one of the UFC announcers giving a voice over. The imagery was almost all war and mostly focused on the only two wars in history that reflect even vaguely well on the USA (the revolutionary war and world war 2, which they joined late after waiting to see which side was winning). There was also a weird animated interlude set to Ronald Reagan’s “inspiring” 1986 speech where he declared Flag Day[2].

There were 7 fights with two title fights, which means that this was really just a typical UFC main card (UFC events typically have 5-7 prelims and 5-7 main card events). Each fighter walkout led them through the White House itself, with a camera recording their walk and soldiers saluting them as they passed through the halls of the building (this part was actually pretty cool coz the White House is a great building). When they exited the White House to the stairs they were flanked by two “American Heroes”, one a former soldier (what the American regime refer to as “veterans”) and one a “first responder”, either a cop or a fireman. These men flanked the fighter until he reached the edge of the octagon, where he would bump fists / shoulders / give a manly hug to each of them. Sometimes the fighter walked too fast and the old dudes had to scuttle to keep up, which is definitely very dignified, much respectful. Some of the fighters came out to a live performance by a US military band, which was actually really good – they may not be able to fight wars well, but the marines can certainly sing for their president.

The fights proceeded as normal, except that perhaps the referees stopped the beatings a little quicker than usual (maybe thinking that the prime time crowd would be a little grossed out by the usual brutality, since they aren’t as sophisticated as me). They were average fights, and I’m a little concerned about the title fight – Gaetje looked gassed by round 2, obviously a bit unready, yet somehow delivered enormous damage to a much-fancied opponent. I wonder if he put on the wrong gloves? This could happen if the changing rooms were not up to the usual standard. It had a bit of a sense of America vs the world – all but one of the fights had at least one American participant – but in the end America was 2-2, which is a bit embarrassing really. Given the advertising on display here I would have thought they’d have rigged the fights a bit better. Speaking of which …

The advertising

Let me say first of all that I was disappointed that the company DudeWipes hadn’t booked out the whole Octagon to advertise its classy, masculine-focused alternative to toilet paper. I think it would look really tasteful for a 250th anniversary sporting event to be entirely advertised by wet wipes for men’s shitty arses[3]. Instead it was advertised by far more classy and sophisticated companies, primarily a mixture of crypto, sports betting , and AI scams. It was sponsored by Meta AI and Anduril – more on them below.

Besides placing sponsorship on the cage floor itself some of these companies had adverts in the gaps between AI-driven fascist war cartoons and fights. These were adverts for highly risky financial activities revolving around dubious crypto, sports bets, and sports bets made using dubious crypto. Most of them drew on the image of America as a land of risk, the brave and the bold, rugged individualism, etc., with the obvious implication that if you cash out your 401(k) and blow it on a meme coin you can achieve the same pinnacle of manly ruggedness as Jim J Raccoon Tail from the great American West.

Not all the adverts were entirely dedicated to this explicit representation of America as a Scam Nation. There was one about an insurance company that takes on risk so you’re free to take risks. There was a whiskey company called Buffalo Trace, which is weird because in normal english an animal’s “trace” is the shit it leaves on the ground that hunters follow, so I’ll be steering clear of that whiskey. Then there was Anduril, which is a company using AI to enhance American “war-fighting”[4], which didn’t have a video advert but did have its name painted on the octagon mat, along with its slogan: Fight Unfair.

It’s very weird to have two men fighting in a supposedly unrigged match while they circle each other over the slogan “Fight Unfair”. At the same time as this event was happening the USA is hosting the FIFA world cup, which is very fond of plastering the phrase “Fair Play” over everything. That just goes to show how unsophisticated those football types are. Don’t you know you can name a killer robot company after a famous fantasy sword and slap the slogan “Fight Unfair” on it, and if you pay enough money men will beat each other to death over that slogan? Those amateurs over at FIFA …

Incidentally, what do you think Tolkien would make of a killer AI company called Anduril using the slogan “Fight Unfair” to advertise their wedding-bombing software? Do you think he’d see that as a company that worked for Sauron, or not? I have a sense that he wrote a whole trilogy of fantasy novels in which a magic item played a metaphor for that kind of technology, do you think he’d approve?

The fascism

It’s always a bit confusing to talk about American fascism, and the particular visual manifestation of it under Trump, because the empire is so bad at so much of it. Just for example, this celebration of 250 years of the USA took place on the day that Trump announced his empire’s capitulation to Iran[5]. Perhaps they should have announced that tomorrow, or something? Or, you know, won the war with the country that has half their population, a tiny fraction of their money, and basically no planes? But America is incapable of winning wars, though it’s very good at starting them, and very good at mythologizing them, which was what this celebration of 250 years of nationhood was really all about. When the fighters did their walkouts they weren’t accompanied by a broad cross-section of American society – scientists, nurses, baristas, artists, one of the many porn stars Trump fucked and didn’t pay, a dreamer waiting for DACA approval, a genre fiction writer, or a spam email manager – but by soldiers. The (probably AI-generated) visual stories between fights focused mostly on the wars the US won, the band was a military band, and there were multiple advertisements for military-adjacent services. At one point it was announced that Meta would be providing free spectacles to every visually-impaired US veteran, and there was also an advert for a very scammy-looking charity called Tunnels to Towers (WTF?!) that provides some sort of support to injured veterans. This featured a comically Starship Troopers-style advert in which soldiers on a fun run jogged through a crowd of Tunnels to Towers volunteers who were all wearing t-shirts that said “Honor. Duty. Country.”

Not fascist at all.

Did I mention the AI killer robot company named after a fantasy sword with the slogan “Fight Unfair”?

Then of course there were the “American Heroes” who accompanied the fighters. One of each pair was a former soldier, a “vet”, which is a bit unfortunate because it means that almost all of these American Heroes was a veteran of a war the US lost, them having won only one in living memory[6]. The oldest was a 101 year old veteran of the Korean war, who shot down four planes. Four! Of course the US lost that war, despite trying to win through attempted genocide, so he probably should have shot down eight. Still, you go to the Octagon with the American Heroes you have, not the ones you want, as one American Hero once said. It’s a good idea not to google the names of any of the heroes on that walk, since if they’re a soldier they were likely involved in some kind of shady business in one of the many war crime-rich conflicts the US bungled, and if they’re a “first responder” there’s a good chance there’s a news report about an “Officer-involved shooting” with their name in it. I googled one, a cop from Palm Beach, thinking this was a very weird inclusion given Palm Beach police’s association with a certain pedophile scandal, and sure enough his name turned up in a stand-your-ground case that did not reflect well on him.

There was also a moment where everyone was asked to stand and give applause for all the American first responders. Ironic in an event where fighters often tap out when they can’t breathe.

In another nod to the actual mechanics of fascism, rather than to its aesthetic, the ringside was lined with the captains of industry (including the CEO of Anduril, which Tolkien would definitely have approved of!) and the fighters had to kind of push their way through to get to the ring, and the cameras sometimes focused on one of these dweebs with a little caption so you know which scam they’re running, just to make clear how the political economy of fascism is organized. It’s interesting to think that if this event had been held in 1936 rather than 2026, in a different (but maybe not that different) country, those industrialists would have been the leaders of manufacturing ventures like Volkswagen, Mercedes, Focker-Wulfe, or maybe Hugo Boss, but at this event they were all crypto-, AI- and whatever-Meta-is-this-week -type companies, a mob of scammers clustered around the ultimate scammy president (who the American fighters all had to come and talk to after the fight).

The fact that America is just bad at the nuts and bolts of fascism doesn’t mean it isn’t trying though, and we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that this fascist dream world pastiche is just a pose. They really do want to do this fascist project, even if it is updated for a post-modern, consumerist world. All the machinery is there, but at the heart of it is something that I think is particularly American, that wasn’t present so much in the German and Italian originals, a truly unique American contribution to the world’s most pernicious and yet strangely persistent ideology: masculine insecurity, a kind of scared and desperate machismo that was strongly on display at this event.

The machismo

Now, it might appear strange to non-Americans, but a lot of people in America really seem to believe that their weird, queeny, very petty and petulant, soft, fat, lazy and cowardly president is actually a real man’s man, and they seem to genuinely think he’s a paragon of masculinity. This is a strange contradiction to people from the rest of the world, since he is the quintessential incarnation of the soft cosmopolitan who is the central hate figure of republicans and he is deeply involved in dubious networks with people like Roy Cohn, as well as being a draft dodger and a failed artist (no relation). Also he’s really not very manly and kind of camp. But American culture often confuses macho and camp, in a way that reflects on some deep and fundamental insecurities that were on display very clearly at this event if you knew where to look.

First of all there were no women involved in this event. There were no female fights, even though a UFC event typically has 1-2. There were no female American Heroes, neither soldiers nor “first responders” (what, they can’t find one female cop who committed an admirable level of police brutality? What about Kirsti Noem?) Laura Sanko wasn’t invited to commentate, and they didn’t have the usual female roving reporter like Megan Olivi. The only women involved in this event were the ring girls, who were dressed far more modestly than usual[7] and who did not get the usual amount of camera time or name-checking[8]. So it was a sausage fest from woe to go, leavened with a bit of healthy gay action: the band played YMCA at one point, and the camera focused on a group of sailors in sailor uniforms who were dancing to the song in the crowd, one even turning his back to the crowd and wriggling his bum. Don’t these people know? Are American sailors like a kind of camply ignorant version of French people, who don’t know that their accent is considered sexy all around the world?

Perhaps you doubt me that the UFC might seem like an environment in which to prove your macho credentials – after all, in the rest of the world men don’t need to be violent to show they’re men. Thai men in Muay Thai are the quintessential example of this, little nerdy dudes with very boring hairstyles who step into the ring and suddenly are killer demons with a 400 fight record who can’t be knocked out and love the taste of blood. But American fighters have to trash talk and American male politicians have to pose, they have to show it all off for the camera, and the camera knows it – there’s even talk in American media about how just attending this event will burnish Trump’s macho credentials at a time when they’re fading, at least partially due to his failed war-fighting (there’s that euphemism again). Even the idea that attending a fight makes you macho doesn’t work over here in Japan, where MMA and fighting crowds generally are half female, and the sport is popular and respected across a wide swathe of society, but in America this juvenile conception of manhood – my president could beat up yours! – has real currency. Indeed, one captain of industry who was notable for his absence was Musk, probably because Zuckerberg was there and Musk famously challenged the Zuck to a cage fight, even though Zuck actually trains with some serious fighters and has jujitsu fighting experience. Is there any other country in the world whose tycoons challenge each other to cage fights?

This weird macho insecurity is, I think, at the root of its fascist resurgence, and is also connected to the pervasive daddy issues that drive its obsession with its presidential figure. They’re also connected to the strange obsession with homosexuality and sexual prowess that drives a lot of American cultural product and that also makes so much of the population vulnerable to homophobic political language based on images of purity and inviolability. These dudes are scared, but of what? The barrage of war imagery at this event perhaps drops us a clue: they’re scared of being seen to be losers, of the facade of empire and power and rugged individualism and high achievement being torn away so that they see themselves and their genocidal, slave-holding nation for what they really are. This terrified inner essence needs to be constantly appeased, with super hero movies and tales about how they won that war that the communists actually won and images of strong manliness and using their dollar power to hold every nation on earth subservient to them, and huge trucks and spandex leggings and a president who doesn’t have to prove he’s a man by actually displaying any masculine virtues but just by turning up and cheering other men while they beat each other up on top of the slogan “Fight Unfair”.

What do you reckon Tolkien would think of that?

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fn1: If Trump had been struck dad by lightning at his 80th birthday party on national tv, I was really thinking I would have to rethink the whole atheist thing. I’m only an atheist for a lack of scientific evidence and, well…

fn2: This speech is not inspiring. Reagan sat in his office wearing very casual clothing, reading rapidly and without emotion or affect from a piece of paper. This is probably why they cut away from the visual recording of him giving the speech to a pastiche of various images of American soldiers fighting in the various wars they have lost.

fn3: This isn’t a far-fetched proposal, since DudeWipes had a big sponsorship role for the PFL. I guess they must have gone bankrupt over-estimating the typical American man’s concern for anal hygiene.

fn4: This is the euphemism-du-jour for “mistakenly” bombing wedding parties or girls’ schools

fn5: Imagine that you had to announce you lost a war on your 80th birthday. What a downer!

fn6: I refuse to consider Grenada as a war even though technically they won, that’s like invading a suburb of a small town and claiming a military victory

fn7: Maybe they were dressed more modestly than usual out of a sense of decorum towards the flag, but that’s not going to help – the problem with this flag isn’t the amount of flesh the bikini exposes, but the blood soaked into it that no amount of washing will leach out.

fn8: It’s pretty normal for the cameras to focus on the ring girls at the end of each round break, filming them going back to their seats and giving cute little gestures to the camera, and usually the fight commentators say their name, and occasionally talk about aspects of their lives outside ring-girling