Matt Flegenheimer
speaker
78 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Matt Flegenheimer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Trust your gut. And I think the lesson was that Dana White believed then and believes now that he knows his audience better than anyone. And to him, that audience respects somebody who will do what he believes in or at least project that he is doing what he believes in. He has been somebody with an antenna for this stuff and for knowing where his audience would be across the decades.
Well, it comes during a pretty dark time across the sports landscape and otherwise, and it's COVID. Obviously, sports are sort of shut down across the board. People are thirsting for any kind of content of any sort.
The NBA stopped playing, and there is this real appetite to get something fresh and live on the air. And Dana White sees an opportunity. He's trying to find workarounds. And he finds it in Florida, an empty arena in Jacksonville. The UFC becomes the first major American pro sporting event in the COVID age to reopen.
And certainly the expert consensus and the medical consensus was that this was not necessarily a fantastic idea. He is sort of bulldozing through that concern. And it was a moment when obviously the sports landscape was barren. He had a pretty captive audience and it was really a showcase opportunity for the UFC.
That's a huge piece of it. But it's interesting. White, obviously, for years, despite the speech in 2016 at the convention, had kind of positioned the UFC as the apolitical sport in contrast to what he and I think a lot of UFC fans saw as kind of an overt intrusion of politics and protests and social justice initiatives into the NBA, the NFL. The UFC was supposed to be sort of insulated from that.
Of course, in this case, COVID became a great piece of the culture war. And by opening, reopening at all, that's a political stance and certainly was aligned with where Trump was in that moment as he was pushing for a kind of broader reopening of the economy.
Absolutely. And it's been building for some time, but this is the moment that really establishes White as a MAGA superstar of the highest order in a way that even the convention speech didn't. And you see the Trump orbit and the UFC orbit, the white orbit kind of merge.
And this cultural moment starts to form around disaffected men who feel slighted, who feel like the world has not been conspiring in their favor for some time.
the manosphere. And these fights become a gathering place for the leading lights of that intellectual space. This sort of amorphous, right-wing, anti-woke, anti-establishment sentiment. And in his period of not being the president anymore, starting in 2021, Trump is kind of one of those figures. He becomes somebody who shows up at these fights, frankly, in moments of
sort of public turmoil for himself. One of the first public appearances he makes in his period of being kind of a pariah after January 6th in 2021 is at a UFC fight. Interesting, huh? After he's indicted, he goes to a UFC fight. It becomes a sort of balm, and he's walking in and getting a giant ovation among a lot of his supporters.
And that obviously expanded over the course of these four years in between his terms.
Absolutely. And White has accumulated a ton of cultural capital and political capital from being this grand figure in that space. And he knows when and how to use it. And I think the most interesting example of this in recent times is with Bud Light. Like the beer. The beer. Bud Light, the beer. Are you familiar with Bud Light as a brand?
So in the spring of 2023, you see the beginnings of a huge backlash to Bud Light on the political right.
Over a promotion they did involving a transgender influencer.
And Dana White is in the process of negotiating a beer sponsorship with Anheuser-Busch, Bud Light's parent company. And he's in a tough position because he sort of stands accused of selling out for associating with Bud Light after this major backlash. But obviously the sponsorship is lucrative for the UFC.
So what he does is he sets about trying to uncancel Bud Light.
Yeah. And what White does is call himself as a character witness.
He goes on with Tucker Carlson, with Sean Hannity, with Charlie Kirk.
The message being essentially, if Bud Light wants to do business with me, that tells you all you need to know. And privately, he is back-channeling with a lot of these figures. Kid Rock, who had been a part of this effort to protest Bud Light. He is talking to the Anheuser-Busch CEO in White's green room, and they're sort of talking it out and finding a way forward.
And then Trump himself, even months after that, is continuing to sort of hammer Bud Light on social media, and White speaks to him on the phone. And after that phone call, Trump posts a sort of follow-up saying that the company deserves a second chance, going through a lot of talking points that echo White's thoughts.
Showing 41–60 of 78 · page 3 of 4
← Previous
Next →