How UFC boss Dana White became the glue between Maga and the manosphere | UFC

When Dana White barrel up to the microphoneat Donald Trump’s request, to deliver his speech on election night, it represented an affirmation of the UFC CEO’s status as one of the key members of the president-elect’s inner circle. But White’s brief speech also signaled his own growing importance as a kind of impresario for a new class of Trump-supporting influencers, podcasters, streamers and wellness bros. “I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ with the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and mighty Joe Rogan,” White enthused.

With the exception of Rogan, who is about as close to a household name as the podcasting world has today, none of these figures would likely be familiar to anyone observing the election through traditional media or cable television. Theo Von is a comedian and former reality TV contestant whose podcasts, like many of his peers, often span several hours; Bussin’ with the Boys hosts a few NFL players; The Nelk Boys are former college pimps with a brand of hard seltzer and a taste for casual cruelty; Adin Ross is a streamer who has been banned several times (most recently permanently) from the gaming platform Twitch for hateful behavior. These online “creators” form a network: they all appear on each other’s shows, which often feature far-right streamers like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate alongside more mainstream Maga movement figures like Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro and Elon Musk.

Trump happily sat through long interviews with each of them, often more than once: he appeared on Full Send, the Nelk Boys’ podcast, three times during the campaign. This support was likely key to securing Trump’s seismic victory among young men. At the center of this sprawling alternative media universe sits the UFC supremo, whom Trump often named as the key link between the creator’s finances and his own presidential campaign during his appearances on these podcasts. White must now be considered more than just a surrogate for Trump: by aligning his own business interests with a certain style of new media built on podcasting, gambling, crypto and violence, he has become the glue between Maga and the so-called “manosphere” .Trump didn’t just ride a wave of popular support to victory in this election; in a very real sense, he also rode to victory, and White was one of the main orchestrators in securing the testosterone vote.

It has long been argued – correctly – that the UFC represents the sporting arm of the Maga movement. Trump was an early supporter of the UFC at a time when it was emerging as the nascent mixed martial arts competition – derided as “human cockfighting”, shunned by the sports and media establishment and barred from hosting events in most states across the United States – – was on the brink of failure: In 2001, he allowed the organization to host two consecutive events at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, and a lifelong alliance was forged. Trump himself is now a fixture at UFC events, often staying right until the end of shows that can run for five or six hours, and he has used his entrances into arenas with UFC cards to signal his enduring strength and support in the face of adversity: the twice-impeached president’s first public appearance following his conviction on 34 felonies by a Manhattan jury earlier this year was at UFC 302 in New Jersey. (Trump also used the event to launch his TikTok account.) The relationship between Maga and the UFC is more than just transactional, though: There’s a real stylistic symbiosis between Trump and White, both of whom see themselves and their constituents as maverick outsiders, undoing the smug old certainties of politics, sports and culture. Kid Rock’s rap-rock anthem American Bad Ass (“I’m an American bad ass, watch me kick / You can roll with rock or you can suck my dick”) became the unofficial anthem of Trump’s 2024 campaign. But it first became popular among the Trump core as a standard title campaign opening at UFC events.

However, White’s influence extends far beyond the fighting cage; it extends into media, politics and the never-ending culture wars, making him a sort of cultural czar of the Maga movement. The UFC now regularly brings in more than $1 billion. in annual revenue, enough to make White, who lives in a $50 million mansion. in Las Vegas and has vacation rights on a $2.8 million. week’s yacht, for a unusually wealthy man. Displays of wealth and fortune are key to White’s personal mythos, as they are to other leading figures in the right-wing grift economy: in September White won big at a blackjack night in Vegas and immediately offered Barstool Sports reporter Robbie Fox $20,000 to pay for Fox’s wedding. “I’m about to be the greatest Power Slap reporter in the world,” declared Fox; in Dana-land the gift and the pleasure are never far apart. The episode featured the central role of White (or “Uncle Dana” as Fox later called him in his own post about the gift) is now recording as an orchestrator of various elements of the Trump-aligned cultural universe, with its orbit around podcasts, casinos, testosterone-fueled sports like football, boxing, wrestling. and mixed martial arts and bro-heavy media organizations like Barstool. Each of these is a node in a mutually enforcing network built on protein, supplements, risk and anger; boosterism is the key to this network’s success, and criticism its greatest enemy.

Power Slap, for those unfamiliar, is White’s latest business venture – a face slapping competition launched in 2022 where big-jawed men with arms like hams take turns slapping each other into submission. The clips that Power Slap generates are tailored to social media and modern “highlight culture” — blood-soaked snacks that serve as tributes to both the tension of violence and that the majesty of the lower jaw. Other new or emerging sports are being invented to tap into the online public’s insatiable thirst for short-form TV shots of excitement—among them SlamBall, a trampoline-enhanced hybrid of basketball, football, hockey and gymnastics, WWE Speed, a short form. wrestling competition held at X, and CarJitsu, a car-based adaptation of jiu jitsu, which looks as unpleasant as it sounds. But no one fuses shock value with sheer face-dissolving idiocy into compulsive content as effectively as Power Slap.

The point here is not that Power Slap is about to take over the world; that seems unlikely, and netizens were quick to dismiss the Whites recent claim that the Power Slap has more followers than any other sports team on the planet. Rather, it’s to underscore the extent to which White has understood that brevity, virality, and action are key to winning the war for attention across sports, politics, and culture. Many of the leading media properties in the manosphere may produce podcasts that stretch to two or three hours, but they are all consistently mined for their highlights and seams of potential virality: Arguably, the most memorable media moment of the 2024 presidential campaign was when Theo Von told Trump: “Cocaine will turn you into a goddamn owl, mate.” White’s aggressive promotion of gambling and crypto – crypto.com is the UFC’s biggest sponsor – adds to the appeal of his high-speed, high-shock model of culture and entertainment; to his fans, he embodies an against-the-odds, chips-on-the-table spirit of risk-taking and defiance. Trump’s fist pump and “Fight! Fight! Fight!”Conor McGregor’s endless comebacks and Musk’s moonshots are trying to populate Mars and father every child on earth. Trump is “so resilient,” Theo Von told Rogan recently that “at a certain point you’re like, I’ve got to bet on this dog.” Adin Ross did this literally, put $1 million on a Trump win. But no one has bet more forcefully and meaningfully on Trump than the UFC’s heaviest tongue. And no one has been as effective as White in harnessing the energy of what critic Ted Gioia has called “dopamine culture” – an energy built on provocation, gambling, short grab, the viral clip – to serve a political and cultural agenda.

White and the Maga right are not alone in mobilizing short-form video for campaign purposes, of course; all those clips of Harris dancing and laughing, an outgrowth of the slightly desperate “Kamala is shit” energy of the Democratic candidate’s first few weeks on the campaign trail, followed the same template on social media. But the grifters and gabsters of the MMA-aligned right, with White as their godfather, seem far more adept at exploiting the root and speed of clip culture than risk-taking liberals, who remain in thrall to legacy media and apparently still see conventional celebrity endorsements as a meaningful way to draw the youth vote. In entertainment terms, the liberal order, like the Democratic Party that has come to embody it, represents the last gasp of the old studio system. The Trump right’s infotainment addiction industry, with its phalanx of brawlers, talkers, gamblers, grifters, vloggers and floggers, increasingly feels like the future. And the UFC boss is now its leader. Trump may lead the party and soon take control of the country again, but Dana White is the instigator of the American right.