Rubio Compares UFC to the Moon Landing While Signing Deal to Use Cage Fighters as U.S. Diplomats
Rubio Compares UFC to the Moon Landing While Signing Deal to Use Cage Fighters as U.S. Diplomats
Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood at the State Department podium Thursday alongside UFC CEO Dana White and did something truly remarkable: he compared a cage fighting organization founded in 1993 to the Apollo program.
Rubio invoked President Kennedy’s famous Moon landing pledge to argue that America has always done the impossible, and that somehow, UFC is proof of that same national spirit.
“When President Kennedy announced that we were going to put a man on the Moon and return them safely to the earth, no one thought that was possible, and we did it,” Rubio said. “At some level, that’s what this whole company, what UFC has been.”
He didn’t stop there.
Rubio called UFC events one of the “very few things left in our society, and I would say, in the world, that convenes us all.” He also declared the UFC “truly is the United Nations of fighting,” claiming that watching people punch each other in an octagon is somehow educating Americans about world cultures.
The whole spectacle was a preview of the UFC event scheduled for the White House South Lawn this weekend, complete with a temporary arena called “the claw” and reports that the Pentagon has been tapping physically fit soldiers to fill the seats.
Under the agreement Rubio and White signed, the State Department plans to deploy MMA athletes, coaches, and executives as cultural ambassadors abroad, use mixed martial arts to teach English and leadership skills to foreign youth, and coordinate international UFC events to, in their words, “showcase American excellence.”
This is what American diplomacy looks like now. Not treaties. Not alliances. Chokehold clinics.
While real diplomatic relationships with longtime allies fray and America’s standing on the world stage continues to erode, the Secretary of State is busy signing partnership deals with a fighting league and comparing it to one of humanity’s greatest scientific achievements.
Apollo 11 put humans on the Moon. UFC put a cage in the Rose Garden. Not quite the same thing, Marco.
