UPDATE: UFC Freedom 250 posted an impressive average viewership of 7 million in the U.S. on Paramount+. So it turns out that the game did garner an audience as big as a football bowl, just not the Super Bowl. UFC Freedom 250 came close to matching the 2025 Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl between Penn State and Clemson, which averaged 7.6 million viewers. So, congrats to all on posting bowl-like numbers.
ORIGINAL: We must be living in some kind of simulation. There is no other way to describe the staggering amount of duplicity and ignorance of people talking about the UFC White House event like it was one of the defining events in world history. And Joe Rogan is the latest to fall into line.
Going all the way back to the first inauguration of Donald Trump and the obsession over crowd sizes, there has been a decade-long effort to convince the American public that we are living in an alternate reality where the truth is whatever someone decides on any given day in spite of what facts, figures, and the most minute amount of common sense would prove otherwise.
But that ethos is also alive and well in UFC, where head honcho Dana White has made ridiculously laughable claims over the years, including the ridiculous notion that Power Slap is more popular than any other major pro sports league.
When you combine the UFC and the MAGA movement, the potential for astronomical lies and distortions is unlike anything we’ve ever seen since humans first learned how to communicate by using words.
That has almost immediately been the case this week as RNC chair Joe Gruters claimed the UFC White House event was watched by more people than the Super Bowl, the most-watched television event in the history of the United States.
Not to be outdone, podcaster and UFC analyst Joe Rogan put a number on it. He claimed 150 million people tuned in and that the number would grow by 50 million the next day.
Joe Rogan on the UFC White House card: I don’t know what the total overall views are as of now, but I know that it was like…I think it was 150M just by Monday.pic.twitter.com/bmHsZHcqCv
— Jed I. Goodman © (@jedigoodman) June 18, 2026
“It is one of the most-watched sporting events in the history of the world. I don’t know what the total overall views are as of now, but I know that it was like well over, I think it was 150 million just by Monday. Just by Monday. So that’s like the night of and then people that watched the replay that weren’t there when the fight took place because they heard about it. But between then and now, now we’re dealing with Tuesday. It’s probably another 50 or 60 million people,” Rogan claimed.
This is obviously one of the most ludicrous things that has ever been spoken.
The real numbers for the UFC White House event haven’t been released, but you can reasonably gather from available data that it was watched by several million people. That’s great for the UFC! That’s great for the White House! That’s a good story to tell. There’s absolutely no need to inflate numbers to such a preposterous level that the whole thing is now seen as a total joke.
Paramount+ has 79.6 million subscribers. That means that for Rogan’s numbers to be true, every single subscriber was watching the UFC. show…. plus hosted out-of-home viewing parties… plus tens of more millions of people are either signing up for the service or watching replays.
Netflix, with 325 million subscribers, drew 27.5 million viewers for the much more popular NFL games on Christmas Day. And we’re to believe that a UFC event outdrew that by multiples with an exclusive streaming show on a much smaller platform?
You want to tell us the moon landing is fake, the earth is flat, or that ivermectin is the cure for every ailment known to mankind; that’s one thing. But don’t mess with our sports viewership numbers. That’s one alternative fact too far.
