BY: Walker
Published 5 months ago
Newly installed FBI Director Kash Patel declared this week that he wants the bureau to partner with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), part of a massive overhaul of the agency championed by President Donald Trump.
According to a Thursday report from ABC News, Patel wants to partner with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) mixed martial arts league to help up the fitness standards of FBI agents. Purely coincidentally, the UFC is headed by pro-Trump businessman Dana White, who regularly appeared alongside the president at campaign events, donated heavily to the president’s reelection effort, and even spoke alongside him at his Election Night acceptance speech. Again. It’s coincidental.
According to ABC News, during a Wednesday meeting with the heads of the FBI’s 55 national field offices Patel indicated that he wanted to begin an official relationship between the law enforcement agency and the UFC in order to create fitness programs for agents. According to sources that spoke to ABC News, despite having covered a wide variety of topics in the meeting, rumors of the proposed collab between the bureau and the entertainment giant quickly spread throughout the agency.
Rich Frankel, a former FBI agent and current ABC News contributor, told the outlet that while the bureau frequently brings in experts in different martial arts to help train their agents (the FBI uses Krav Maga as the basis for it’s hand-to-hand combat training), he wouldn’t “want [the] UFC to take over the gym.”
Amid Patel’s past promises to purge the FBI of “deep state” boogeymen, a partnership with the gritty, often bloody fighting league once described as “human cockfighting” by former Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is bizarre, though not necessarily unexpected in the era of Trumpian politics.
White previously told Rolling Stone that he’s “very close to Trump and very loyal to Trump, and Trump is loyal to me.” During the 2024 election cycle, White served as the nexus between Trump and a slew of “manosphere” podcast influencers who buttressed his campaign, helping secure appearances for the then-candidate on shows hosted by Theo Von, Adin Ross, comedian Andrew Schulz, and podcasting king Joe Rogan.
Trump’s victory saw White gain new influence in areas far outside the realm of mixed martial arts. When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg found himself scrambling to smooth over his historically tumultuous relationship with the president, one of the overtures he made to Trump — alongside large donations and general groveling — was to appoint White to Meta’s board of directors.
The rich who went all in on their support for Trump during the 2024 election are seeing their loyalty to the president paid back in spades. Elon Musk, for example, is securing large government contracts despite clear conflicts of interest with his role in the Trump administration, while plenty of others have been appointed to key government roles.
White would only be the latest in a string of Trump sycophants to see his devotion to the president repaid, should the UFC land a training contract with the FBI..
via: Rolling Stone
