First, I should tell you where I’m coming from.
For the better part of a decade, I was an avid MMA fan. Not a casual one — I studied the sport. I learned to read ground positions, to anticipate submission setups, to appreciate the chess match inside a grappling exchange that looks like chaos to the uninitiated. I trained Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, first in New York, then in LA where it’s extremely popular. I rolled on mats, got choked out by people half my size, and came to understand, in my body rather than just my mind, how technically demanding and genuinely beautiful the sport can be. Whether on bottom or top, your character changes, inverts, like a chess match of black and white attempting to gain initiative and tempo against each other until the final checkmate is delivered.
I have watched matches that moved me. Two fighters at the absolute limit of human capability, and then, when it was over, an embrace — genuine, warm, the kind that only people who have been through something grueling together can share. I have seen MMA produce moments of remarkable grace. I admire these men for being true warriors, who never back down against adversity—the type of men that I want defending me, my family, and my country.
I have also seen a man’s arm broken in half by a hyperextended elbow lock. I have seen knees bent in directions knees do not go. I have seen fighters go limp in ways that make you hold your breath and wait. I have seen things I cannot quite unsee. Eventually, I had to stop watching, because my body started to get so tense from watching that I felt real physiological symptoms sympathetically.
I tell you all of this because what I am about to argue is not the complaint of someone who finds combat sports distasteful in the abstract. It is something more uncomfortable than that. It is the admission of a fan who spent years loving the sport and has arrived, slowly, at the conclusion that MMA asks us to look at something most other sports work hard to conceal — and that this distinction matters enormously when we talk about what is about to happen on the South Lawn of the White House on June 14, 2026, the same day I write this.
What Sport Is Actually For
Nearly every sport contains, somewhere in its DNA, a simulation and expression of binary conflict. Two sides, one winner. Territory gained and defended. Strength, speed, and cunning deployed against an opponent. Football is war with yard lines. Boxing is a duel with gloves. Even tennis — even golf — encodes the structure of contest, of one person’s will and ability against another’s.
This is not accidental. Human beings are creatures with a long history of violence, and sport, I would argue, exists in part to do something with that history. To take the aggression, the tribalism, the hunger for dominance that evolution built into us, and to transmute it — to reshape it into something bounded, rule-governed, and ultimately civic. The crowd roars. The blood rushes. The primal thing gets its moment. And then the whistle blows, the players shake hands, and everyone goes home. When the Knicks beat the Spurs last night, I felt the primal delight of tribal victory encoded into the sport that fuels and energizes fans worldwide.
Sport, at its best, is one of civilization’s cleverest inventions: a container for the uncivilizable, a ritual that honors the beast in us by giving it a specific, very limited arena in which to run.
Most sports do this successfully. The violence is present but transformed. A football tackle is an act of physical dominance rendered safe by pads and rules and a structure that points at something beyond the hit itself — strategy, teamwork, territory, score. The hit is never the point. It is in service of something larger—stopping the ball from advancing into the arbitrary end zone.
MMA is different, and I say this as someone who enjoys it, but also disapproves of it:
The entire logic of the sport is the direct submission or incapacitation of another human body. There is no ball, no territory, no score that accumulates independent of physical damage. The point system exists mainly to adjudicate fights that do not end by force — but force is always what the sport is reaching toward. A knockout. A tap. The moment one body overcomes another. And unlike in chess, if the adversary doesn’t quit when checkmated, the game goes to the next untenable level: the king is killed. Meaning, if someone doesn’t tap when locked in a submission hold from which there is no escape, the next thing that happens is awful: the limb is destroyed, or the neck squeezed to the point of unconsciousness.
Ultimately, this means that MMA cannot fully perform the transmutation I described. It tries. The rules are there: no eye-gouging, no groin strikes, no fish-hooking. Referees stop fights when a fighter can no longer defend himself. The sport has been systematically regulated since the early days when it was accurately described as human cockfighting. These are genuine civilizing efforts, and they matter.
But the broken arm is still real. The unconscious fighter hitting the canvas is still real. The blood is not metaphorical. And the crowd — I know this crowd, I have been this crowd — it does not roar for the technique alone. There is something else in that roar, something older and more raw, and the sport does not quite succeed in disguising it as something else.
Other sports put enough structure between the primal thing and the audience that we can appreciate the sublimation without confronting what is being sublimated. MMA keeps pulling back the curtain. The hug after the fight is real and beautiful. So is the pulverized face and the mangled limb. You cannot watch long enough without seeing both, and the sport does not give you a clean way to hold them together.
And this is why I believe tonight’s UFC fight at the White House is ill conceived, and serves more as a repayment of loyalty to Dana White than it does as a shrewd or advisable political move.
The White House South Lawn is not a neutral outdoor space. It carries meaning precisely because it has been reserved, historically, for the functions of governance — state arrivals, solemn ceremonies, moments that point at something larger than whoever lives there. Its symbolic power derives from restraint. What does not happen there is as important as what does. It is not the Pentagon. It is a place where conflict is adjudicated with words and arguments, not fisticuffs.
The choice to hold this particular event in this particular place is not, then, a trivial one. It places the apparatus of state alongside a sport that — as I have argued — is the one sport least able to complete the civilizing transformation. Other sports conceal the bloodlust and redirect it. MMA reveals it, frames it, and invites you to feel it directly. That is a meaningful distinction when the backdrop is the seat of a constitutional republic.
The Roman satirist Juvenal coined the phrase panem et circenses — bread and circuses — to describe what he saw as the Roman citizenry’s great bargain: they surrendered political agency in exchange for entertainment. His critique was not that entertainment is evil. It was that the games replaced something. Civic deliberation, the dignity of public institutions, the shared understanding that government derives authority from reason and law rather than from the excitement of the crowd, gave way to the roar of the Colosseum. I would go farther than Juvenal—we want to live in a world where might doesn’t make right and where ideas prevail. We want to believe the ideas are real, and that we are not merely animals fighting over scarce resources, one of which is power. The job of the righteous is to convince the world that concepts exist. And therefore, the job of the devil is to convince the world that concepts do not exist and that all that matters is might. And while we need to give the devil his due, our society should be trying to foil his plan, not feed into it.
I want to be fair. The UFC paid for the event. The fighters are consenting adults. But what we celebrate reveals what we value, and what we place at the center of our most sacred civic spaces tells a watching world what we believe those spaces are for. The 250th anniversary of the American republic deserved a ceremony that honored the idea at the republic’s center: that human conflict is resolved through words and laws, not through the submission of one body to another. Tonight’s event sends the wrong signal to the world, and as importantly, to ourselves.
MMA, of all sports, is the one that most nakedly contradicts our ideals. It is the sport where the broken arm is not an aberration but a possible outcome built into the rules. Placing it on the South Lawn of the White House, framed as a celebration of American greatness, is not a neutral act. It is a statement — made in the language of symbols, which is the only language that civic spaces speak.
I still occasionally enjoy and am somewhat fascinated by the sport. But attraction to a thing does not equal endorsement. And some things belong in arenas.
The South Lawn is not an arena. And while some may argue that this event will have no meaningful or transformative impact on a culture that already has deep roots and mores, I would argue that all of our actions matter in terms of their effects across every dimension: the physical, the political, and even the spiritual.
What we place at the center of our celebrations is, in the end, a prayer about what we hope to become.
-Michael Friedland
June 14th, 2026
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