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Freedom isn’t free, and neither are tickets to UFC Freedom 250 Fan Fest. Technically you won’t pay money, it’s true, but getting in requires one of two things: cardio or endurance.
Picture this: You arrive two hours before the gates open, like the responsible citizen you are. You are standing in line alongside everyone else, daydreaming about whatever, when, out of the corner of your eye, you see a few men sprinting down the street in the opposite direction. Then, a few more. Then, right behind them, a stampede of men in UFC T-shirts: the Running of the Bros. So you are running too now, dodging and weaving past all the rubes who haven’t yet figured out the score. You, on the other hand, have realized that somewhere far ahead of you, some official has once again decided to move the beginning of the line to a different location with no warning or communication, which means you can either sprint to the front of the line or walk with dignity to the back of it to wait for hours.
Perhaps, because you ran quickly and showed no regard for your fellow man, you end up being among the first thousand or so in what becomes the final line. You only have to wait 90 minutes in the crushing D.C. heat to make it past the Secret Service checkpoint and into the Fan Fest proper. Strains of “Sweet Home Alabama” greet you—first the original, then, immediately afterward, the Kid Rock version—as you emerge onto a White House lawn transformed for the occasion. Vendor tents, meet-and-greet stages, and sponsored activities form a ragged circle, but most of the middle remains clear so that thousands of screaming fans can have a clear view of the stage, flanked by two enormous monitors, at the north end of the Ellipse. These screens will show the fight to all us plebs come Sunday night. Beyond the stage, and framed perfectly by those two screens, sit the glowing, cheesy arches where the actual fights will take place. People are calling it the Claw, which is apt: The thing looks ready to snap together any moment, then rise and carry the White House clumsily toward the prize chute for some demented child to collect. A birthday present for our commander in chief, perhaps.
You continue to wander, and hear a cheerful female voice emanating from the enormous onstage speakers to inform everyone that water is available for purchase at any of the bar tents for just $4. (A Bud Light is $12 and a double-shot cocktail is $28.)
If you would rather not pay $4 for a can of water with NO DAYS OFF emblazoned on the side poured into a commemorative Made In The USA plastic cup, there are free water stations (as with the airport, the Secret Service forbids outside food and drink). The Freedom 250 Fan Fest app claims there are four water stations; I only ever saw two. As with the tickets themselves, this free water comes at a cost: infinite, slow-moving lines that only grow and never shrink. At a line’s end, attendants hand you a small paper cup’s worth of fluid—two if they’re feeling generous. The event’s official app will eventually start sending notifications reminding fans to stay hydrated and to seek medical attention if needed, but the water remains $4 and the free cups remain petite.
Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images
Wonders abound within the confines of these fences. A giant inflatable UFC Freedom 250 boxing glove that looks vaguely like the Black Lives Matter fist. A giant fake UFC championship belt. A giant fake WWE belt with a WWE ring behind it, which is confusing until you remember that UFC’s parent company recently acquired a bunch of pro wrestling and boxing promotions. (One perk of being Donald Trump’s friend, apparently, is getting to own a monopoly.)
That WWE ring sees unexpected action late Sunday afternoon, while MMA fighter and professional annoying person Logan Paul is taping an especially irritating episode of his Impaulsive podcast. The crowd, which greeted Paul with boos before settling into sullen, begrudging applause when prodded, is fully prepared for a distraction. It’s the perfect time for UFC middleweight champion Sean Strickland to sneak into the venue, jump into the WWE ring, and begin to make a scene.
Strickland had to sneak in because Dana White allegedly banned him from UFC Freedom 250.
His crime: not wanting to fight at UFC Freedom 250 because he didn’t want to “hang out with the Epstein list.” Before you praise him for his brave anti-Trump stand, know that he also called the event “straight Israeli slop” and claimed he was banned for being “not Israeli enough.” Strickland’s issue with UFC Freedom 250 is that it’s insufficiently right-wing, and plenty of people agree with him, both online and right here at UFC Freedom 250.
The drama is a welcome respite from Paul’s loud and horrible voice, and I once again find myself sprinting toward this new center of gravity. I arrive at the WWE ring just in time to see black-clad cops climbing through the ropes and into the ring—not a surprise, since the entire event is crawling with law enforcement of every description; Park Service, Homeland Security, federal marshals, Drug Enforcement Administration. The officers remove Strickland and began to escort him out of the event. The crowd surges after them, chanting “Free Sean!” until they hit the border of the event.
But borders are borders, and once Strickland has been ejected, it doesn’t take long for everyone to get back to Fan Festing at the various octagons scattered around the Ellipse. Fans line up for a chance to snap a photo of themselves in the regulation-sized octagon—a duplicate of the one inside the Claw where the fighters will actually go at it—then hit the octagonal Bud Light Knockout Zone bar (the woke days are over, I guess). By far my favorite octagon was the one with a Ram truck crashed through it as part of the larger Ram truck sponsor area. Occasionally, its operators revved its engine until the tires burned out, which sent gouts of flame and plumes of foul white smoke into the scorching air to block our view of the Washington Monument. Happy 250th birthday, America.
Justin Gaethje and Ilia Topuria at the UFC Freedom 250 event.
Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC
There are also synchronized motocross jumps in front of the White House, which feels like a 12-year-old’s doodle come to life. The stuntmen are presumably here because their parent company, Thrill Sports, also distributes Power Slap, Dana White’s passion project. I am aware that Power Slap sounds stupid but trust me: However stupid you think it is, it’s worse. This “sport,” which White insists will be the Next Big Thing in combat sports, involves two contestants taking turns slapping each other as hard as they can—not little slaps, but open-palm blows to the side of the head. The match ends after three rounds, or when one contestant falls over and fails to rise for a referee 10-count. They are not allowed to flinch or protect themselves in any way. It is, as one Bluesky user so eloquently put it, “CTE as entertainment,” depraved sadism, by and for sociopaths.
And on the lawn of the White House, UFC Freedom 250 Fan Fest has a Power Slap booth where aspiring punch-drunks can test the strength of their slaps against a slap-measuring machine. In a slightly more normal corner of this event, fans can measure their strength by punching a more traditional punch-measuring bag.
Fight fans exhausted from all this slapping and punching can make their way to the octagonal (obviously) Monster Energy X pavilion for a free can of the company’s commemorative 250th anniversary flavor: Red White & Blue Razz. The enormous light-up can at the entrance features doodles of fireworks, a monster truck, and an eagle in American flag sunglasses. It reads: “It’s like an AP honors U.S. history book packed onto a can. Not a tiny Euro can… an American-size 16oz can!”
There’s a lot of fantasy on offer here at UFC Freedom 250. There’s the Total Wireless Weigh-In, which allows fans to take shirtless pictures of themselves flexing the way fighters do at weigh-in the day before they fight. The Main Event Protein Bar booth offers a UFC walkout experience in which you can emerge from a blow-up tunnel full of lights, cheers, and smoke, just like a UFC fighter traveling from locker room to Octagon. “Everybody deserves a championship walkout,” the booth’s app description reads, and I feel my heart sink. It’s true—we are the participation-trophy generation.
By far the most immersive fantasy experience comes courtesy of Meta AI, which apparently has money to burn. Using the equivalent of a small town’s electric grid, their station A.I.-ifies anyone into a badass UFC fighter with their very own promo poster, Those willing to wait in an even longer line could even get a Meta AI virtual tour of a locker room.
After all that hard work, head to the UFC booth to purchase your replica championship belt for $800: It’s a lot of money, sure, but peanuts compared to the actual work of becoming an elite athlete and winning one. If you put all these activities together during your visit, it’s sort of like being a fighter, except for the part where you fight each other. And hey, if you still don’t feel like enough of a man after all that pomp and circumstance, there’s always the concessions stand, where you can buy a Giant Western Sausage for $20.
Most of these activities are very silly. A few are genuinely demented. But none of them are inherently political. Sure, the fans are mostly Republican at this point. Sure, they cheer loudly for Trump, and louder still when Josh Hokit, after clumsily defeating a fighter well past his prime, declares that Michelle Obama is a man. And sure, the America-backing crowd delivers fevered chants of “USA! USA!” at any provocation. But the vibes at UFC Freedom 250 have been far less intense than any pure-MAGA event I’ve attended. A red hat here and there, a scant handful of Trump T-shirts, and very little talk of politics at all. When it comes to the political arena, most fight fans are filthy casuals. They’re Team America in the most sports-adjacent way imaginable. It really is that simple.
The core problem with UFC Freedom 250 is that it makes no sense. Only the location and name render it anything more than a UFC state fair: Comic-Con for fight nerds. If we lived in a better world, nobody outside the fandom would care about this event. It would not be headline news.
But UFC Freedom 250 isn’t just for the fans. It’s a spectacle intended to enrage the libs while further bending our country’s psyche toward war. When the main stage sits unoccupied, the big screens play prerecorded video. Some are straightforward commercials for various sponsors, as one might expect from a grift-forward event like this one. But many others twist themselves into knots attempting to explain why sweaty guys punching each other are a core component of the American Way. “Lincoln was a feared wrestler who competed in hundreds of matches,” one such video proclaims. “Very American!”
The mixing of government and combat sports does not end there: Kash Patel cut a segment to promote his UFC training camp program for federal agents. On-screen footage shows UFC fighter Michael Chandler explaining to an FBI agent how to neutralize an armed assailant with hand-to-hand combat.
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And then there are The Troops: so many troops, everywhere you look. Troop bands playing music onstage, troops putting on military combatives exhibitions in the octagon, troops sitting, uniformed and visible, beneath the Claw to watch the spectacle in person. They are thanked, and thanked, and thanked, by the emcees and by many tributes on-screen, including multiple A.I. slop videos commemorating soldiers past and present. There’s slop Revolution, slop Normandy, slop 9/11.
Politicians love to pretend these obsequious displays of gratitude are for the sake of making our troops feel appreciated and seen and loved. Speaking as a former troop myself, I have my doubts. It seems to me like these public displays often serve to link The Troops to something else—a cause, a person, a political position. The desired link at UFC Freedom 250 is between the armed forces and the MMA athletes. Fight footage is interspersed with troop-glorifying clips.
During the main event on Sunday evening, every fighter walked from the White House down to the octagon flanked by an honor guard of two “American Heroes.” The Trump administration lined this path with armed service members on either side. Military personnel salute those who outrank them, but all military personnel, regardless of rank, salute Medal of Honor recipients. And so, as these fighters walked stone-faced to the octagon, we bore witness to the revolting spectacle of the troops saluting fighters. As if these athletes are somehow the pinnacle of military splendor.
Justin Gaethje is escorted to the Octagon at the UFC Freedom 250 event.
Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC
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It’s this melding that concerns me more than anything. I’m a lifelong fan of the sport, but that’s all it is—a sport, a game, a contest. War is not a game. It is not glamorous or good. War is a terrible thing that ought to be a last resort when all other means have failed. It would be bad enough if the Trump administration were merely equating soldiers with cage fighters, but it’s so much worse to see them actually elevating the cage fighters above the service of actual military members. The instinct goes even further, suggesting that what should be celebrated above all else is the idea of the lone hero, the one who covers themselves in the glory of gladiatorial combat. It’s hard to describe how profoundly that misunderstands what the military ought to be.
As I wrote recently, I’m not asking anyone to like MMA. I understand why people wouldn’t want to watch a blood sport. All I’m saying is: Wouldn’t it be nice if activities could just be matters of preference again, nothing more? It’s good and healthy to forget about the world’s problems for a little while, to give our poor amygdalas a rest with a concert, a bowling league, some really good jujitsu. So long as this culture-war nonsense persists, however, rest remains virtually out of reach. We continue to find ourselves stuck in fight or flight—which, I suspect, is exactly how Trump wants it. He is, after all, the worst kind of fight fan.
