Daily Archives: September 17, 2021

Autumn is in the air! Or it was, briefly. This weekend brought the predictable rites of mid-September, from the sad annual remembrance of the 9/11 attacks to a Phillies pennant-race collapse and the wild optimism of a first-game Eagles win that has some fans pricing out Super Bowl LVI tickets. But now ... back to a heat wave and the new normals of the 2020s.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up at inquirer.com/bunch to get it every week in your inbox, as we head toward a heck of a fall.

Portland, Oregon, may be the American city most associated with constant chaos in the 2020s, with its frequent protests by the extreme left and right and spasms of violence, but its police want people to know theyre in control of their own affairs, anyway. In recent weeks, cops in the Pacific Northwest city have been criticized for not responding to recent street clashes. But Portland law officers did manage to take down one political figure when they successfully told Mayor Ted Wheeler to take his vaccine mandate and shove it.

With the delta variant of the coronavirus exploding nationwide, Wheeler last month declared that city police would be part of a statewide vaccine mandate for health workers handed down by Oregons Democratic governor. But when Portlands police union blasted the move and insisted many officers would quit the force rather than get the jab, city attorneys sheepishly said cops might be legally exempt from such a mandate and Wheeler backed down.

The win for Portland cops over their boss and, arguably, public safety (including their own) is part of a full-blown revolt nationwide, not just in Oregon where a statewide cop union and scores of firefighters and troopers are suing Gov. Kate Brown over vaccines, and where one now-suspended state police officer filmed a video in his cruiser, in uniform, blasting those who get the shot out of fear.

This week, six Los Angeles police officers sued their city over its mandate, calling it a scheme to embarrass, humiliate, shame and deprive [their] liberty... In New York City, city officials who initially wanted a straight-up vaccine mandate agreed after heavy police union pressure to also allow for weekly testing of unvaccinated officers yet the Patrolmens Benevolent Association is up in arms over even that. Angry cops and their unions are threatening legal action across America from San Jose to Cincinnati, often in the overwrought verbiage of right-wing resistance.

The head of Chicagos police union, John Catanzara, seemed to capture the zeitgeist of this growing cop counter-revolution when he said: Were in America, goddamn it. We dont want to be forced to do anything. Period. This aint Nazi (bleep)ing Germany, [where they say], Step into the (bleep)ing showers. The pills wont hurt you. What the (bleep)?

READ MORE: Why do police unions talk and act like the Mafia? How can we stop them? | Will Bunch

Thats an outrageous statement, but there is also something tragically sad about the massive resistance among U.S. rank-and-file police to getting the COVID-19 vaccine. Although exact numbers are hard to come by, its been estimated that at least 300 police officers have been killed by the virus, more than all other causes of active duty deaths combined. Yet despite their elevated risk of exposure while out patrolling the streets, in many departments only about half or fewer of officers have taken the free and readily available vaccines, Instead, growing numbers of cops echo misinformation about the coronavirus widely circulating on social media.

The seemingly cultural resistance among police officers given a loud voice by their union leaders is deeply troubling on several levels. The fact that city leaders from Portland to New York City have so caved to police union pressure on whats literally a life-or-death matter involving the health of citizens is doing nothing to dispel the wider fears of creeping authoritarianism within an American police state where armed men in uniform are ruling the streets.

Cop unions have already relied on political intimidation and decades of police-friendly legislation to beat back many of the radical reform proposals made after millions took to the streets to protest 2020s police murder of George Floyd. Their show of force in fighting vaccine mandates puts this crisis of public authority in stark relief.

But the sweeping mandate resistance also raises the question: Who do the police even work for? Refusing to get the shots which so far have proven both safe and remarkably effective in fighting the virus suggested that many not all, but way too many officers care most about their personal freedom to own the streets as they please, with little regard for the health and safety of the citizens they come in contact with. Their unwillingness to protect their home communities from a killer on a loose the coronavirus confirms 2020s harshest criticisms of Americas cops. Does Blue Lives Matter really mean that only blue lives matter?

Scores of cops are threatening to quit their jobs even surrender their potentially lucrative pensions rather than get a COVID-19 shot. In a moment where America should already be radically rethinking public safety with fewer warriors on the beat and more caring first-responders like mental-health workers we ought to let them walk. In fact, I cant think of a better way to not only meaningfully defund the police, but to get rid of problematic officers.

The Ted Lasso effect feels in full bloom at the start of Only Murders in the Building, the new Hulu limited series which merges a prime-time-TV-caliber murder mystery, a gentle but needed spoof of Americas addiction to true-crime podcasts, and the boomer nostalgia pairing of Steve Martin and Martin Short with singer Selena Gomez replacing Chevy Chase as the third amiga. The kickoff episode moves a little slow like its presumed audience but the appeal of its two former wild-and-crazy guys endures.

They might as well hand out next springs national magazine awards right now, because they all should belong to Anand Gopal of the New Yorker for his tour de force of investigative journalism called The Other Afghan Women, which looks at how 40 years of non-stop fighting capped by the American war devastated the countryside of Afghanistan. Gopals interviews with anguished mothers who lost as many as a dozen relatives during Americas 20-year intervention is 100 times more informative than the steady flow of retired generals on U.S. cable news.

Question: Why do reporters feel the need to ask certain politicians if they will accept the result of an election before the results are in? It happened again, this time with the potential recall in California. Drew McQuade (@creekmud) on Twitter

Answer: Drew, youve seized on a true dilemma: How to handle the growing dominance of the GOPs Big Lie around voter fraud in America the latest conspiracy theory in which journalists must decide whether to ignore a fast-spreading falsehood, with the idea of not giving it oxygen, or confronting it head on. I think the current crisis poses no alternative to fighting lies with facts. Here at home, The Inquirer has taken a stand by refusing to call the Pennsylvania Legislatures unwarranted review of the 2020 election an audit, since the process in no way resembles a valid audit. A new kind of journalism to defend the truth is slowly emerging.

President Bidens more aggressive approach on the COVID-19 pandemic, including vaccine mandates for federal workers and large and mid-sized employers, has sparked a furious Republican backlash (albeit mostly verbal ... for now). Their reaction carries many echoes of how the American South responded to a stepped-up federal role toward ending racial segregation in the 1950s and 60s a movement that came to be dubbed massive resistance. Alabamas Republican Gov. Kay Ivey is a case study: Shed broken ranks with many of her GOP colleagues earlier this summer by lashing out at her states unvaccinated people, but has now shifted with the political winds. You bet Im standing in the way, she tweeted Friday in response to Biden. And if he thinks hes going to move me out of the way, hes got another thing coming. Im standing as strong as a bull for Alabama against this outrageous Washington overreach. Bring it on.

READ MORE: Live free and die: Inside the bizarre political philosophy of Americas unvaccinated | Will Bunch

You know what other Alabama governor built a national reputation for standing in the way? The 1960s segregationist George Wallace, who famously stood in a schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama in 1963 in what amounted to a nationally televised stunt to show his opposition to enrolling its first Black students. Incredibly if that throwback allusion wasnt enough Iveys vow to be as strong as a bull also reminded readers of the eras other leading Alabama politician against racial progress: Birmingham police leader Eugene Bull Connor, whose men attacked 1963 civil rights marchers with dogs and fire hoses. Iveys words made clear how vaccine resistance is rooted in the same impulses that once battled Southern integration a warped definition of freedom that really aims to lock in privilege for white people.

In Americas tangled modern history, theres more than one important anniversary. In my Sunday column, I looked at the overlooked and vitally important legacy of the Occupy Wall Street protests that launched 10 years ago this Friday. Wrongly spun as a failure by the end of 2011, the veterans of the movement never stopped working and have put issues like canceling student debt and the $15 living wage on the front burner, while building democratic socialism into a political force.

Over the weekend, I wrote a column digging into what appears to be the worst blunder of Joe Bidens eight-month presidency, the Aug. 29 Kabul drone strike meant to stop a terror attack that apparently killed a U.S.-allied aid worker and seven children instead. I dug deeper into the hubris of Americas need to project power and military control in the world, and the tragedies from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan that have resulted. Hopefully, the senseless death of Zemari Ahmadi marks a turning point.

My home county Delaware County, Pa., better known as Delco has been having quite a moment in 2021, largely thanks to HBOs Mare of Easttown which portrayed the middle-class suburb as a land of colorful, vaping Eagles fanatics addicted to Wawa coffee and hoagies. Reality, as always, is more complicated. Delco was ruled by corrupt GOP machine politics through 2019 and has long had a nightmare criminal justice system; this week, The Inquirers ace injustice reporter Samantha Melamed toppled another domino when she exposed the countys long history of jailing people with mental health problems rather than seeking proper help. Citizens rarely learn about these kind of problems without a strong local news org with the resources to expose them. Support the power of local journalism by subscribing to The Inquirer.

More here:

To infect and serve: The cop vaccine crisis | Will Bunch Newsletter - The Philadelphia Inquirer

I. WHATS IN A NAME?

Ahead of the forthcoming university academic year, I was tasked with creating a new fourth-year seminar at my department of English. I settled upon a course on African futurisms. My goal was simple and noble: offer as much insight as possible into how a people may shape their future through stories about themselves. I wanted my students to engage with how peoples descended from the African continent however much removed from it by distance, time, and/or lineage create ideas of themselves in the future. This seemed a simple and sturdy platform on which to stand, until I came to the very first point of ingress: what exactly was I to title the course?

This is the same conundrum faced by the editors of the critical collection Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century, Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek. At first glance, it may be easier to assume Lavender and Yaszek have taken the easy route by claiming Afrofuturism in the title, therefore signaling to the reader where they stand on the nomenclature for describing futurisms created by peoples descended from the African continent. But right from the introduction, Imagining Futures in Full Color, it is clear that the stance of the editors is anything but. They soon engage various authors on how they posit Afrofuturism be defined. Though a decent portion of the voices selected end up being somewhat tied to the North American continent a situation I was hoping would be otherwise even they do not quite agree on what exactly Afrofuturism is or should be. The editors eventually decide that while the term will be employed throughout the book as a shorthand for everything in related discourse, it is by no means all-encompassing.

What, exactly, is Afrofuturism, then?

This is not the question the collection sets out to answer, and rightly so. But what do fellow connoisseurs of the field do when we simply need an expression to communicate this envelope of ideas and concepts? I found that other academics who had come before me opted for Afrofuturism or a variation of it for their courses. But I was determined to represent the global collage of ideas, concepts, and media that this term encompasses, a desire that came more from a personal than an administrative place. So I set out to find a way to do so.

II. The Future Is Divergent

When I, a born-and-raised Nigerian, first came upon the term Afrofuturism, it immediately read, to me, like a term specifically used to describe futuristic impressions of the Black experience in the African diasporas, especially in North America. This sentiment is echoed by the four non-American authors in the first chapter, Author Roundtable on Afrofuturism, which features the editors in conversation with seven authors from around the globe. Each goes on to point out that the matters of interest and import examined under the Afrofuturism label differ greatly depending on locale between (and even within) the continent versus its diasporas.

Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican-born Canadian, for instance considers Afrofuturism a filter, a lens through which her work can be viewed, but prefers not to define herself as an Afrofuturist. It can recognize work like mine, but cant completely encompass it, nor should it have to, she says. Nick Wood, a Zambian-born South African, considers it an attempt to hang a conceptual umbrella over a range of cultural products. Chinelo Onwualu, a Nigerian, believes the term defines a particular type of literary, artistic, and musical aesthetic that is born out of the unique experiences of the African diaspora. Minister Faust, a Kenyan Canadian, even considers the term of no significant analytical value due to its relative recency and believes that we need a term of our own devising.

Wildly differing views such as these are not a conceptual problem. Even American authors have similarly varying dispositions. N. K. Jemisin mentions barely applying the term to her own work, and insists Afrofuturism must not be a shorthand for science fiction and fantasy written by Black people. Nisi Shawl considers the term a convenience for critics first, a marketing tool second, and third as a moment of attention in the stream of pop-culture consciousness. Bill Campbell considers it a movement, but one that lacks a coherent doctrine or manifesto. Yet, all agree that their connections to the African continent however far back shape their experience of the world, and it is impossible to separate their work from this experience.

As an author, I feel the same frustration. I consider the global Black and African existences to be highly interconnected but too multifaceted to be grouped together under a single conceptual frame centering the outlooks of people of African descent. This is why other authors qualify Afrofuturism or reject it outright, like Nigerian American author Nnedi Okorafor, who reorients her work toward Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism.

Like Okorafor and the authors from the roundtable, I consider my longtime roots on the African continent an inextricable part of my contemporary existence. I also believe that whatever varied pathways storytellers descended from the African continent take to envision alternative existences for ourselves, our stories spring from that interconnected heritage. For us, the future is always the past is always the present the embodiment of Afrofuturist consciousness and telling our stories means we are always looking through this prism.

In this sense, I may be closer to Hopkinsons school of thought: that Afrofuturism is more a consciousness, an acute awareness that this shared history however long past creates a lens through which not a single story is seen when peered through, but a divergence into a rainbow of futures.

III. The Afrofuturist Consciousness

In the 1994 essay collection Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke University Press), editor Mark Dery published a series of interviews with Black futurist authors such as Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. It is in this essay, titled Black to the Future, that the term Afrofuturism is understood to have been coined. Since then, Afrofuturism has oscillated in and out of the American cultural zeitgeist. But two notable incidents in recent times have nudged Afrofuturist consciousness onto a wider and more global platform.

The first, in 2018, was the massive global success of the Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole film Black Panther, which served as a wake-up call reminding Blackness, wherever it is situated in the globe, of its origins, riches, and prospects. The second was Americas reckoning with racial oppression in 2020, sparked by outcries following the murder of George Floyd and exacerbated by a global pandemic and economic crisis which highlighted the harsh realities of American inequality. This reckoning had far-reaching effects, offering many the courage and confidence to stand up to oppressive systems in their countries. Together, these events sparked a flurry of discussions about what the futures of Blackness may look like both in America and the rest of the world and what steps might be taken to achieve them.

With this consciousness came a rush to define what Afrofuturism actually is and who should be authorities on the discipline. And here, minefields rooted in the multiplicity of Afrofuturism were exposed. The questions asked were seemingly simple: Whose work do I read to get introduced to Afrofuturism? Who gets to be interviewed as an expert on the subject? Whose insights are most true to the spirit of the discipline? Each new question revealed the error of the approach: searching for a seminal authority on the concept in the first place.

Luckily, Literary Afrofuturism never quite sets out to do this. The collection mirrors how amorphous the discipline itself can be, moving across the spectra of gender, age, science, spirituality, language, geography and place, time and space, etc. For instance, Sheree Rene Thomass Dangerous Muses considers the role of feminist writers in Afrofuturist thought, including discussions of novelists Andrea Hairston, Hopkinson, Okorafor, Sofia Samatar, and other short fiction authors, such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kiini Ibura Salaam, and Nisi Shawl. She discusses how their work helps frame Black womens agency and aesthetics in a world that often denies the existence of both. I consider her focus on the intersectionality of Black futurism and other axes of identity gender, sexuality, queerness, etc. groundbreaking, as these are aspects often ignored under Afrofuturist discourse. She presents the characters in these authors works as conjurers and seers, ancestors and witnesses, immortals and muses, travelers and jigganauts, rightly engaging with Afrofuturistic thought as a spectrum of intersectionality.

Themes within the Afrofuturist consciousness also discussed include the colonial intrusions on indigenous storytelling and the science-myth-spirituality spectrum. Gina Wisker draws comparisons between postcolonial literature and speculative work, especially regarding African-descended history, in Middle Age, Mer People, and the Middle Passage. By examining work from Black artists such as Merle Collins and Hopkinson, Wisker figures speculation as a pathway to righting the false histories often prevalent in postcolonial spaces, particularly noting Hopkinsons work as combining the critical insights of postcolonial literature with the utopian bent of SF. She concludes that embracing the liminality of postcolonial spaces offers speculative stories the opportunity to produce both new narrative perspectives and literary forms.

One aspect that doesnt often see much engagement within Afrofuturist cultural production or critical discourse is the centering of younger generations concerns. Rebecca Holden attempts to rectify that with Young Adult Afrofuturism, where change is a principal theme. Holden posits that the ability of YA speculative fiction to break genre boundaries, mixing fantasy, SF, horror, supernatural, and mystery with little fanfare, makes it a fitting vessel to break down our notions about how science, history, and technology might be defined. There is a strong argument for how young Black protagonists best demonstrate the dual consciousness of the African-descended experience: they must exist in the present, which continues to be oppressive to them, and cannot simply grow up and find their place in society. With the lines of identity becoming increasingly blurred due to advancements in technology, the future may be much closer in their consciousness than in that of older generations.

An essay of import to the centering of Blackness in our present geological epoch of the Anthropocene is Lisa Dowdalls Black Futures Matter, which engages with the geontology of N. K. Jemisins Broken Earth series. Dowdall posits that Jemisins series is a literary innovation that uses geology to question widespread cultural assumptions about the natural divisions between race, species and matter and promotes new ways of theorizing the human in connection to the mineral substance of our world. By depicting ecosystems as alive and granting them personhood, Dowdall explains that Jemisins work celebrates the relationships between all things, living and nonliving, by imagining a network of interconnected, mutual becoming.

IV. Mess and Making

I ended up naming my fourth-year seminar African-descended Futurisms, each word selected with intent. The plurality of futures possible as demonstrated by this collection and its myriad of voices, approaches, and matters of interest was behind my choice of futurisms over futurism or even futures. Like the contributors, I am well aware of how Africas uniquely undervalued contribution to global development has forever welded its past to its future. Futurisms offers up space for the understanding that multiple paths exist for creators to take toward imagining possible existences for peoples descended from the African continent.

The collection closes out with similar tendencies, ranging from Jerome Winters Global Afrofuturist Ecologies to Marleen S. Barrs musing on global interdependence You Cant Go Home Again to Nadine Moonsamys reframing of Amos Tutuolas The Palm-Wine Drinkard as at home in the global lexicon of global SF. It cements my personal joy with this collection: that each contributor gets to offer their distinct angle and approach to one piece of the pie that makes up the Afrofuturist consciousness. For a descriptive term that is still in its nascent stages, Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century does the important work of paving the way for said agreements and disagreements, acceptance and reluctance, and stands firm in the messiness of it all, proclaiming that messiness as, in fact, a part of its making.

Suyi Davies Okungbowa is a Nigerian author of fantasy, science fiction, and general speculative work. He is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Ottawa.

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The Future Is Divergent: On Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century - lareviewofbooks

Mixing It Up: Painting Today

Hayward Gallery, until 12 December

Newport Street Gallery, until 12 December

Painting has always been dead, Willem de Kooning once mused. But I was never worried about it. The exhibition Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery is crammed with work by 31 artists who likewise dont allow the allegedly moribund state of their medium to keep them away from pigments and palette.

This is well worth a visit, not only to see such good things as Hold the Right Rail by the 87-year-old Rose Wylie, containing a patch of yellow curtain that somehow holds the eye and stays in the memory; the kind of magic that paint can work like nothing else. Elsewhere there is plenty of evidence on show of ebullient pleasure in the material itself, whether thick or thin, loose and free or applied with a delicate touch.

Mixing It Up also provides a handy introduction to various star exponents of the easel and brush who have risen in recent years. Oscar Murillo is one of these: prominent enough to have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2019 (and would perhaps have been the winner had all the contestants not asked for the award to be given jointly). He works in other ways, including sculpture and video, but at the Hayward Murillo shows a series of huge pictures all entitled manifestation (201920) which pack a considerable punch. These have the feeling of shimmering water you get in Gerhard Richters abstracts, but in a much harsher, messier manner. There is a suggestion of black, beating wings, wreckage, chaos. In early autumn 2021, they have a rather timely feel.

Mixing It Up, however, makes few claims to have caught the zeitgeist. As the title jokily implies, it is a bit of a jumble, containing a sprinkling of fabulous things and quite a few others suggestive of the village art show. There is no proclamation of a new movement or -ism (wisely).

If there is a presiding influence, it might be Peter Doig. This is not so much a matter of how he paints (though there are signs other artists have been paying close attention to his softly saturated colour). Its more that Doig, born in Edinburgh, brought up in Canada and the Caribbean, educated in London, now living and working partly in Trinidad, is a perfect example of the global painter. Although the artists included in the show are all based in the UK, many of them have had similarly cosmopolitan careers. Murillo originally hailed from Colombia, while Jonathan Wateridge, another of the stars of the show, spent his early life in Zambia. Among painters who were new to me and caught my eye, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami and Sophie von Hellermann were brought up, respectively, in Zimbabwe and Munich.

Of course, art always has been a bit globalised. What art historians called influence is appropriation by another, less hostile name. We all borrow from each other, and always have but maybe nowadays even more.

One element that isnt much in evidence is photography (the rival wrongly believed to have murdered painting in 1839). Admittedly, Hwami works from a digital collage of her own photos and found images, which she then renders on the canvas. And Wateridge, until recently, operated in a manner almost like a film director, setting up scenes with actors, which he then photographed, using the camera images as a basis for the final painting. But he has recently moved towards a looser, brushier idiom.

Over at Damien Hirsts Newport Street Gallery, there is a large exhibition of work by the doyen of American photorealist painting, Richard Estes. Except, as usual with stylistic labels, that one isnt quite correct. When one talks to Estes, one quickly discovers that he just thinks of himself as a realist artist something rather different. He first came to attention in the late 1960s with pictures of New York that seemed to have a bit of a pop art vibe, full as they were of neon signs and shiny cars and plate-glass windows.

However, the works on show bear out his claim that he is a part of a long line of artists, such as the Americans Thomas Eakins and Frederic Edwin Church, stretching back to Canaletto, who used a camera as a tool (in Canalettos case a film-less camera obscura). But that is not the same thing as slavishly copying photographs. It involves a process of translation. Ironically, in reproduction an Estes painting does indeed look rather like a photo. But when you stand in front of one, you are aware of Estess neat, decisive brushstrokes, the satisfying physicality of the paint (which Hirst has called yumminess); of all the beauties that only paint can produce. These painterly pleasures explain why, far from expiring, the medium has never even been seriously unwell. It certainly seems sprightly just at the moment.

Read more from the original source:

The yumminess of paint - Spectator.co.uk

It was during the moment of silence honoring the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks that a drunk woman began yelling obscenities at the crowd in attendance at Saturdays Triller Fight Club event.

This isnt fucking Venezuela, the woman, who donned a bandana emblazoned with the American flag, yelled as she was being escorted out of the building.

Go fuck yourself, someone in the crowd fired back.

As the commotion took place ringside, the pay-per-view broadcast maintained focus on former President Donald Trump, who was seated in a booth overlooking the arena as one of the featured commentators. Dressed in a black suit with a blue tie, the former president watched as 9-year-old DCorey Johnson deliver a stunning rendition of the national anthem prior to the evenings main event. As Johnson exited the ring, the raucous crowd performed their own chorus of We love Trump, much to the former presidents delight.

What a great evening, Trump told the crowd on the night marking the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I think youre going to see an incredible fight.

Even by Trumps standards, that statement could not have been further from the truth.

The main event pitted two fighters with a combined age of 102: boxing great Evander Holyfield, months shy of his 59th birthday, and 44-year-old former UFC champion Vitor Belfort. It was a one-sided beating that saw Belfort drop Holyfield, who was ten years removed from his last pro fight, before the referee stepped in to stop the bout at just 1:49 in the opening round. By all accounts, it was a necessary stoppage that potentially saved Holyfield from life-altering damage. But why was Holyfield there in the first place? How had a commission sanctioned a fight between a fighter close to pension age against a competitor 14 years his junior? And why was the former president of the United States calling the action?

What I mean to say is: How the hell did we get here?

Well, for starters, Holyfield wasnt even supposed to be the one fighting on Saturday. That role belonged to Oscar De La Hoyawho retired in 2009before he was hospitalized after testing positive for the coronavirus. With less than two weeks notice, Triller brought in Holyfield to replace De La Hoya but were unable to get the fight sanctioned in California (for obvious reasons). So instead of finding another fighter, preferably one who still a competitive athlete, Triller moved the entire fight card across the country to Florida, where an incompetent athletic commission had no qualms about allowing a 58-year-old to step into the ring.

Triller added fuel to the fire when the organization announced on Tuesday that Trump and his son, Donald Trump Jr., would be providing commentary for the event in a special gamecast. The next day, renowned boxing commentator Jim Lampley, whom Triller had secured to call the fights, pulled out in objection to Trumps involvement in the event. This resulted in a broadcast featuring the former president, his son, former UFC champion Junior dos Santos, and Jorge Masvidal, who campaigned for Trump on numerous occasions during the 2020 presidential election cycle. Trump spent much of the broadcast reminiscing about old boxing fights, his days hosting boxing events in Atlantic City during the 1980s-90s, and his favorite boxers, all while chugging bottles of diet coke.

Trump has always had a flair for the absurd. Apart from his history of hosting UFC and boxing events in his Atlantic City casinos, Trump was also involved in a World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) storyline with Vince McMahon in 2007. The storyline culminated in a Battle of the Billionaires showdown between the two at Wrestlemania 23. Trump continues to maintain ties with McMahon and UFC President Dana White, both of whom have publicly and financially supported his presidential campaigns. Vinces wife Linda McMahon even became head of the Small Business Administration during Trumps presidency, which she later left to chair the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action.

And while Trump was relatively tame in comparison to the way he approaches his rallies, and was actually engaged in some of the fightshe seemed genuinely surprised when Anderson Silva knocked out Tito Ortiz, whom he called a very smart guyhe did manage to sneak in several political jabs at President Biden during the broadcast.

Its like elections: it could be rigged, Trump said when describing the way referees and judges decide boxing matches.

Meanwhile, those who paid $50 to watch the pay-per-view were treated to a live chat filled with adherents of the far-right QAnon conspiracy movement discussing topics such as Hunter Biden, election fraud, and whether John F. Kennedy Jr. was still alive. In other words, a hellscape that was both absurd and entirely reflective of the state of combat sports.

Triller, an entertainment app that views itself as a competitor to TikTok, formed its fight club in response to a growing interest in celebrity boxing and exhibition matches, fueled by the rise of YouTube sensations Jake and Logan Paul. Both have arguably more star power than any active fighter on the UFC roster not named Conor McGregor (and even he is far past his prime, both in fighting form and popularity). Much of this is due to the UFCs inability to generate new stars capable of capturing mainstream attention. Outside of McGregor, the only other truly mainstream figure in the UFC is color commentator Joe Rogan, who, much like the Paul brothers, owes his fame from his success on YouTube.

The UFC has proven to be unwilling of generating new stars that capture mainstream attention. Part of the problem is the over-saturation of UFC events, which has led to a noticeable decrease in the quality of the fights showcased under the UFC banner. Many UFC pay-per-views are no longer worth the price of admission, and search and web traffic for UFC fighters has dwindled relative to the Paul brothers. This is no longer the heyday of Brock Lesnar, Ronda Rousey, or McGregor.

Boxing, too, has suffered over the years. While the sport has generated talents such as Gennady Golovkin, Canelo Alvarez, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua, none carry the star power of their predecessors such as Floyd Mayweather or Manny Pacquiao did. And yet, even Mayweather could not ignore the allure (and easy pay-day) of celebrity boxing when he faced Jake Paul in an exhibition bout earlier this year.

As interest in boxing and MMA has waned, an appetite for entertainment based combat sports events reemerged. Triller understood this, which is why it signed Jake Paul to compete against Nate Robinson on the undercard of the Mike Tyson vs. Roy Jones Jr. exhibition matchand later had Paul headline their following event against MMA fighter Ben Askren. It is also why every MMA fighter (and some boxers, too) worth their salt is calling out the Paul brothers in the hope of earning the biggest pay day of their careers.

Case in point: Vitor Belfort. After beating up on the aged Holyfield, Belfort called out the elder Paul brother and announced that Triller was willing to offer a $25 million purse for the winner of a proposed fight between them on Thanksgiving. All of this occurred in an arena peppered with signs that read Trump Won and Trump 2024. It was only natural that Trump would be the one to close out the circus.

This is like a rally, Trump said while waving at the crowd and thanking them for their support. We love our country.

While Trumps involvement in the Triller carnival is a testament to the role that combat sports plays in the zeitgeist of modern American politics, it was by no means the worst part of the event. Indeed, the former president was overshadowed by the aged veterans who tainted their legacies on pay-per-view for our supposed entertainment. And though Ortizs faceplant KO loss does feel like karmic justice, we are all lucky that the Holyfield fight did not end in tragedy.

Triller may be responsible for the incompetent matchmaking but it is the collective failures of MMA and boxing that are to blame for our current nightmare.

Link:

How the hell did we get here? - Bloody Elbow