“There’s a few reasons why,” says Peter Irving, head coach at Newcastle Fight Centre. Pride of place in the centre of the fascist hangout was a bar built around an MMA octagon. On the other side of the frontlines, until its closure in 2019 over financial issues, the neo-Nazi members of Azov Battalion ran the ‘Reconquista Centre,’ a social club named after the 15th-century expulsion of Muslims from Spain. In the UFC’s first show in Moscow in 2018, the warlord was front row royalty. Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin’s puppet dictator known for assassinating journalists and leading anti-gay purges, runs ‘Akhmat Fight Club’, an MMA school with 15 branches across the Chechen republic he lords over. Fast forward to the warmongers of today, and martial arts are still upheld as quintessential right-wing pursuits. Reports from 1937 show it included in Nazi leisure centre adverts for “typically German” disciplines such as swimming, horse-riding, and callisthenics. In Nazi Germany, despite their home-grown nationalistic pretences, the Japanese martial art of Jujutsu was adopted at a pace unmatched by most Western countries. It’s nothing new with their ideological fetishization of physical dominance from the early days of fascism, hand-to-hand combat has been an obsession of right-wing ideologues. From the capitalistic excesses of the big promotions to openly neo-Nazi competitors, as with most aspects of popular society, the right has staked its claim on the martial arts community. Junior lambasts the “socialist” Democrats and their supposed role in the George Floyd protests, calling demonstrations a “planned and coordinated deal” where “vans of bricks and two by fours magically show up at locations for antifa.” Masvidal heaps praise on the Trump administration for reforging American dominance across the globe, urging the audience to “re-elect Trump and keep America great.” He ends on a comically patriotic note “God bless America… God bless the greatest country in the fucking world.” The overall message is clear: anything short of a vote for Trump is a downslide into an impoverished, gulag-riddled, socialist hell hole. They speak of the glory of Trump’s reign and the dangers of the left wing.
#ANGRY BOTS ALWAYS COMES WITH UNITY PROFESSIONAL#
Jr’s father is a close friend of UFC president Dana White and the first US president to host an MMA champion at the White House Colby Covington, the former interim welterweight champion known for being the closest thing the UFC has to a professional wrestling ‘heel’, homophobic slurs, and MAGA rants accusing the Black Lives Matter movement of being “terrorists.” Masvidal and Jr enter the convention centre, where, in front of a packed audience, the pair stand atop a stage designed to look like an MMA cage. He is joined by a grinning Donald Trump Jr.
UFC star Jorge Masvidal, decked out in a black and gold tracksuit, walks around the side of the bus to stand in front of a large piece of text printed on the side: “Fighters Against Socialism,” it reads. Of the suited delegates and bodyguards that emerge, one person cuts an unfamiliar figure. A bus pulls up outside of the Tampa Bay Convention Centre in Florida, USA.
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