A UFC Match For All of the American People*
*who pay for Paramount+ and aren’t Michelle Obama
This is all Joan Rivers’ fault.
The Matron Saint of Shade wasn’t known for her restraint. She was the first woman I remember being elected to the formerly exclusive Society of People Who Could Say Anything and Get Away With It. The only thing she hated more than an apology was her original nose.
In July of 2014, an early prototype of a content creator asked Rivers on the street if we’ll ever have a gay president. She replied that “we already have it with Obama,” and added: “You know, Michelle is a trans.”
I still wonder if this was something fed to her by a 4chan-lurking employee or if this was just bigotry on the comedian’s own volition. This moment mainstreamed a conspiracy theory out of the deep, dark message boards it had been confined to since 2008. Much to Alex Jones’ excitement.
In 2016, a New York co-chair of Trump’s presidential campaign, Carl Paladino, “accidentally” forwarded the conspiracy and other abhorrent statements about the Obama family to a local outlet. A sign of those times: The Trump transition team slammed Paladino’s comments as “absolutely reprehensible,” adding they have “no place in our public discourse.” Imagine that.
The theory respawned with fervor in 2023 — this time spurred on by the same cultural acceptance, casual acknowledgement, and outright insistence that delivered Trump the White House again in 2024. MAGA fitted the former first lady with a nickname I don’t feel the need to amplify. I’ve seen it thrown around regularly since then on my right-wing feeds.
Michelle Obama breathes or blinks or exists at all and it’s seen as an opportunity to sow seeds of doubt, watered with humiliation. Josh Hokit’s epilogue at UFC Freedom 250 was no exception. This junkie-like craving for viral fame remains a fixture of Gen Z men with brain damage. And there are millions who ate it up.
The morning after, Benny Johnson posted a YouTube video celebrating the “storybook” moment (unclear what storybooks he’s reading). I reluctantly flipped it on. Nothing to write home about, mostly BJ straining to laugh through a Joan Rivers-sized dose of Botox in his forehead. Then I saw the comments.
What I’ve uncovered about the next level of the Rivers-Obamas conspiracy, whether the left is fighting fire or spreading it, and how the UFC event’s social media impact got overshadowed by the weirdest controversies … all below!
NEWSFLASH: Major, major, major event for those in NYC next week. I’m hosting. A crazy lineup of comedians will be performing monologues. George Washington will be there.
DENIAL IS A RIVER(S)
I’ll just get right to it: There are people walking among us who believe that the Obamas had Joan Rivers killed in September 2014 for her comments about them that July. As soon as I saw the comments on YouTube, I leapt over to Twitter. Here’s what I found:
WallStreetApes | 1.3M followers: “At one point in time people were afraid of making this statement because they thought they could be killed. Now today, no one is afraid. We’ve come a long way.”
Sassafrass84 | 634k followers: “Joan Rivers called it out first. … Weeks later, she’s dead after a ‘routine’ outpatient procedure. Crazy how that timing works, huh? You can’t make this stuff up. 👀”
TheSCIF | 319k followers: “Joan Rivers confirmed the alleged rumor years ago and then passed away not too long after. There are no coincidences.”
SmartassBrunette | 70k followers: “There are NO coincidence!” (sry, but lol) “It’s a FACT and Joan Rivers paid the ultimate price for telling the TRUTH!”
There are many many many many more examples. Revisiting the 2023 wave of this conspiracy reminded me just how fucking zooted Donald Trump Jr. permanently looked during that era. (See above).
“Nothing is a coincidence” culture amazes me. As if it’s beyond the realm of possibility that an octogenarian with a well-documented plastic surgery obsession could die sixty days after making a comment to a camera (her lifelong profession) … hello???
I hesitated to even put this in front of you guys because this edged close to the line I try not to cross with Who Broke It: when raising mass awareness becomes risking mass appeal. These ideas take hold so much faster than we think, especially as media literacy craters and digital discernment is challenged in the age of AI. It’s a conundrum I don’t have an answer for, so let’s explore it a bit together.
PRICE PER SHARE
Between the 10M Knicks fans lighting up the streets (and the internet) + the feel-good (and feel-bad) World Cup stories, the White House’s UFC event barely broke through my algorithm. I do blame Paramount’s paywall, but also the surprising lack of influencers credentialed to cover the event.1
Turning Point had a logo printed on the Octagon — but seemingly no one capturing content on the ground. This creates a ground war between clipaholics at home. Nick Sortor had one of the first Josh Hokit clips to pop off. His usual 🚨🤣💀 included. The Blaze followed one minute later, with 3x the views. Why?
Tim Miller’s “twilight of liberal democracy” repost is closing in on 14M hits. His take — and its offshoots from every influential liberal or leftist imaginable — injected the clip right into the timeline of every active Never Trumper. From there, creators chose one of two routes: condemnation with amplification or condemnation without it.
DOUBLED DOWN
The 8,000 reposts represent the conundrum I’m talking about. The left got legitimate kindling to light a fire under the base’s ass — flexing their protective muscles that have never been out of use long enough to atrophy thanks to the right’s unending fixation with the Obamas.
The inseparable other side of this coin, the gamble you make in sharing a clip like that with no edits, millions of times, is it will inevitably drop the conspiracy into thousands of minds primed to accept it, or at the very least, consider it.
Everyone has a different (read: loose) definition of responsibility in contemporary digital media. I have lost infinite hours of sleep over this. It’s something we’ve been debating in The Recount newsroom since the dawn of time (2019). Do we perpetuate stereotypes like this by sharing them? Are we bringing undue attention to them? Or is it the fundamental duty of a journalist to make sure our audience bears witness to the good, bad, and especially, the ugly? I would love to know what you think! Drop a comment below.
LEFT OUT
No clip accompanying statements and commentary for this group. The unexpected: Dave Portnoy said the ‘de-rog-erty’ (derogatory) comment “has to be an immediate denounce.” Shane Gillis who peddled the conspiracy with Joe Rogan in 2023 said, “I don't like that shit.” UFC’s Dana White: “I hate that kind of nonsense.”
Then the athletes jumped in. Shannon Sharpe had an incredible (and for the most part, one-way) conversation with his “Nightcap” co-hosts. Fellow NFL alum Robert Griffin III called it a “disgrace … Especially with the history behind calling black women men.” WWE’s Titus O’Neil wrote a long tribute to Michelle. UFC’s own Derek Brunson (no relation to Jalen) deemed the stunt “super unnecessary.”
YouTuber @delamomanny had the funniest post I saw, with a good dose of perspective:
“That would be like Jalen Brunson when he won the finals MVP, he was like, ‘I’m so happy to bring the Knicks their first championship in over 50 years. Also, Nancy Reagan was a whore. Thank you, New York!’”
PLUGGING LEAKS
Here’s the thing. Even if Josh Hokit hadn’t decided to use the one moment he could’ve gotten millions of new fans to be a troll, I still don’t feel certain Trump’s event would’ve gotten close to the “one billion” viewers they wanted to reach. Here’s a chart of total posts mentioning “UFC” across social media in the past 12 months, tracked by Junkipedia.
Here’s a chart of the total engagements on that same tracked content. That red line is TikTok engagement. They’re a ways away.
The UFC is the fifth most followed sports league across the big four platforms,2 according to Sportingpedia. It should be able to produce its biggest numbers ever for a once-in-a-lifetime gig like this. And that’s before considering the engagement the Trump admin, other sports outlets, and right-wing accounts can bring. But random chaos can strike at any time.
“So much for weather predicting”
The Rapid Response 47 account took issue with, of all things, a weather report, warning of “heavy downpours,” “brutal D.C. humidity,” and “massive swarms of mosquitos and gnats.” Getting mad because you feel like being mad. Been there.
Heather Delaney Reese put it nicely:
“The administration spent part of Flag Day attacking an accurate weather report and the person who delivered it for describing the sky. Then the sky did exactly what he said it would do. That is the whole presidency in a single morning. He can insult the forecast. He cannot move the clouds.”
Eric’s crypto-nite
Deleted tweets, tens of millions of views, and what briefly looked like a pending fraud investigation — what happened here? Former UFC champion “DC” posted some alleged DMs he exchanged with Eric Trump, who was hunting for inside information to place bets on some of the fights. Caption: “I’m probably going to get a lot of flak for bringing this to light.”
ET posted that the DMs were fake. Then, that post was scrubbed. Daniel Cormier tells a creator on his way to the White House that his account had been hacked. After he shares that he “got hacked or something,” a series of crypto promotions show up on his account. Those are later deleted.
I recognized one of the crypto links (pump.fun) immediately, thanks to an unbelievably disturbing piece I just read by Teddy (T.M.) Brown. The full CNN article and its Substack supplement are essential reading.
“Pump.fun announced a new feature called Pump.fun GO, in which users could offer public bounties, payable in crypto, for people who complete various tasks. … In this case, leveraging the power of money seemed to mean convincing someone in a region where many laborers make less than $10 per day to permanently disfigure his own face.”
This is bizarre. Was this a crypto stunt by DC? Was Eric Trump actually on the other end of this? Are there connections here to shady bounty betting? I’m not sure which truth is more fucked up: that all of it is possible or that we’ll probably never know.
LOOSE ENDS
📺 Something you should watch today: A selection of great coverage of how Trump and the UFC are enriching themselves through this event!
🕵️ Someone you should know today: For all the sports chatter lately, one thing I can all but promise you is that this Substack is never going to talk about baseball. Except for right now. Brent Suter of the Los Angeles Angels has undertaken the noble and massive task of pushing fossil fuel advertising out of sports. Great piece from Sammy Roth.
🥹 Something to make you smile today: I took another woodworking class. What do we think Freud would have to say about my ash wood cutting board coming out looking exactly like a chicken wing?
Influencers did tour the set up in the days before
big four: FB, IG, TT, X — ranking remains the same on YouTube
I pay for Paramount+ and wouldn’t watch that crap if they paid me
You threaded the ick needle well.