by WorldTribune Staff, June 15, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
The UFC Octagon on White House grounds was the stuff of leftist nightmares. It was held amid America’s 250th anniversary on the 80th birthday of President Donald Trump.
But the Left had hope. Thunderstorms were predicted for Sunday night. Would UFC 250 be cancelled by weather?
Would not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob stop this travesty? Apparently, appeals to the lesser god of social justice did not penetrate beyond Low Earth Orbit.
Human Events editor Jack Posobiec posted to social media: “The storm the Left was praying for suddenly parted just as it passed over and missed Washington DC completely. How is this possible?”
The New York Post reported: “The card more than delivered on its promise, with each of the first six fights not even reaching the end of the second five-minute round as many of the service members who made up the lucky 4,000 ticketed guests who filled the temporary arena chanted, “U-S-A! U-S-A!”
“An estimated 80,000 more watched the contests on the Ellipse just to the south of the executive mansion, while thousands more sought an elevated space on the National Mall and craned for a view of the giant screens showing the action.”
The storm on Sunday night was in the Octagon, where a huge upset occurred in the Main Event for the UFC Lightweight Championship where Justin Gaethje dethroned Ilia Topuria.
The Post noted: “It was a stirring end to an evening where thousands of fight fans, left-wing protesters and Trump supporters descended on the nation’s capital to celebrate the commander-in-chief’s 80th birthday by watching some of the most exciting mixed martial artists going.”
In the Co-Main Event (Interim Heavyweight Championship), Ciryl Gane knocked out former two-division champion Alex Pereira in the second round.
Other showcase bouts featured stars and rising prospects who largely handled business in highlight-fashion. Notable early knockouts included Sean O’Malley stopping Aiemann Zahabi, Mauricio Ruffy dispatching Michael Chandler, Bo Nickal over Kyle Daukaus, and Diego Lopes defeating Steve Garcia
Before their reliance on the less-than-predictable weather, the Left did attempt to stop the event via its usual go-to, the courts.
The National Park Service said in a court filing Tuesday that the UFC and its sponsors had spent “well over $60 million and tens of thousands of hours of labor” on the event. The NPS was responding to a lawsuit from the leftist Public Integrity Project, which alleged the fights amounted to a “corrupt use of our most sacred national monuments for private gain.”
DC federal Judge Amit Mehta dismissed the suit Friday, finding that neither of Public Integrity Project’s clients were able to show they were “directly affected” by the fights.
Alan Rechtschaffen wrote in a June 13 op-ed for the New York Post:
This controversy isn’t about mixed martial arts, but about who gets to decide what counts as American culture.
“Notice that few critics are debating security, logistics or cost.
Their real objection is something else entirely — taste, and who gets to define it.
For decades, a relatively small group of gatekeepers decided what counted as respectable and acceptable in American culture.
They chose the celebrities and the entertainers.
They chose which athletes deserved admiration, and which should be dismissed as unworthy of serious attention.
And they determined whose tastes mattered: theirs.
For much of the 20th century, that system worked — enforced by three TV networks, a handful of newspapers and a smattering of Hollywood studios and record labels.
But now the audience has seized the remote control.
A podcaster today can command a larger audience than a network anchor.
A UFC champion can have greater cultural reach than a movie star.
We’re getting information, entertainment and inspiration from sources the traditional gatekeepers neither control nor fully understand.
President Trump recognized the shift long before most politicians did.
While others sought validation from Hollywood and established institutions, Trump built relationships with entrepreneurs, athletes, podcasters and personalities who speak directly to millions of Americans.
The result is that many Americans look at a UFC fight card on the White House lawn and think, “That sounds like fun.”
The cultural establishment looks at the same event and sees a crisis.
That disconnect tells us far more about the establishment than it does about the UFC.
For Trump it was a literal double whammy on his many detractors on the Left and in legacy media.
The thunderstorm they hoped for blew by. The president had his spectacle at the White House on his birthday, which also occurred on the day he announced an end to the Iran War.
Meanwhile, here’s what the Left put on to counter UFC 250:
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