The Bullied Bully

I Wish I Didn’t Google Him

You’ve heard it. It’s old news: Trump is turning 80, America is turning 250 and Team Trump is packing the South Lawn of the White House for a mixed martial arts event.

Almost unbelievably, combatants will weigh in under the Lincoln Memorial.

For the past decade, Mr. Lincoln has been turning in his grave so much that he might as well be dubbed the Rotisserie President.

As someone who cares so deeply about American history that I’ve happily volunteered to teach two sections of U.S. History every year for the last twenty-seven years, I cry foul. What a national disgrace!

Trump could have planned anything to celebrate. Anything! Of all things, he chose cage fights put on by his pal, UFC president, Dana White. What a steaming sack of shameless cockamamie bullshit.

That said, great sport.

I won’t use these pages to persuade you of the greatness of MMA. I’m not gonna yammer on about how it’s uniquely international and interdisciplinary. I won’t sell you on its purity. Or how it platforms women. Or how MMA weight classes create an inclusive competitive environment for athletes of all shapes and sizes.

I know MMA is not for everyone. For the same reason I will not seize this space to pen odes to Steely Dan (or will I?) or cilantro, I’m not gonna proselytize MMA here. To each their own. Never will I ever watch golf or the Eurovision Song Contest. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Truth be told, the real reason I watch MMA is because I can. For free. Whenever and wherever I want to. The UFC posts fights on YouTube. No commercials. None of the silly pre-fight drama. I press play, then two warriors come to the center of the ring. Ten seconds or twenty-five minutes later, one of them will have their arm raised in victory. It’s great!

I’m no MMA superfan, but these days, it’s the only sport I watch. I enjoy basketball, baseball, and soccer (as I insist on calling it). But those sports demand appointment viewing and/or subscribing to some expensive service that I don’t care enough to pay for. Plus, all those sports last hours. I don’t have hours. I don’t have patience for commercials. I don’t care about sports storylines.

So I don’t know the behind-the-scenes dramas, or the rivalries, or who clowned whose mama. I don’t know who the fighters are, and I’m not especially interested in finding out. I assume they’re all monomaniacal lunatics. Finely tuned chaos merchants. The less I know, the better; familiarity would only complicate things.

There is a big fight card this Sunday. The main event is a long-awaited middleweight championship bout between these two trained killers:

Oh, dear reader. I made an oopsie. Last weekend, evidently with too much time on my hands, I googled the fighters. I learned things I wish I didn’t know and I can’t unlearn any of it.

Turns out that Sean Strickland is a steaming pile of trash. Here’s a snippet from his Wikipedia page:

In January 2022, Strickland responded to a question on Twitter, writing: “If I had a gay son I would think I failed as a man.”

Strickland has made a number of controversial comments about women and women’s rights, one of which was calling the decision to grant women the right to vote an error.

He said “Sure, have women’s MMA, have it be a thing. I don’t like to watch it. I don’t think most people like to watch it. If the female MMA was to separate from the male MMA no-one’s going to watch that shit”.

Strickland reiterated these views in February 2026, stating that “no one gives a fuck about women’s sports”, before adding: “There’s nothing wrong with women. They do great things. They cook, they clean.” He asserted that “too much” empowerment of women has “ruined society”.

Strickland was a harsh critic of the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, calling its headliner, Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, a “fucking faggot” and “a gay foreigner who doesn’t speak fucking English”.

I cross-referenced his Wiki page. I slid down the Sean Strickland rabbit hole. Shockingly, it only gets worse. This guy flat out sucks.

If that makes you want to root for Chimaev, careful what you wish for. Chimaev is a close friend and vehement supporter of the Head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov. If you don’t know about Kadyrov, allow me to cut to the chase: he’s a murderous gangster of epic proportions. I honestly think he’d appreciate my description.

The internet took my interest in Sean Strickland seriously and my algorithm changed accordingly. Next thing I know, Google nudged me towards a video of (the also problematic) Theo Von interviewing Strickland. Why bother watching? I’ll tell you why: I am not always of sound mind. I can be a slave to the algorithm. You’re better than me. Whatever.

The interview excerpt shook me to my core. If you’ve read this far, you must watch it.

Sparing no detail, Strickland describes the horrors of his childhood. His relentlessly violent, addicted, neo-Nazi father. Failures of the school system. Poverty. Suicidal ideation. The pain and shame and trauma of it all. Both men are overwhelmed by grief.

If those who deride and summarily dismiss the so-called manosphere could only see these two “toxic” men working—haltingly, imperfectly, but earnestly—to exorcise parcels of poison.

In a matter of an hour, in my wee little mind, Sean Strickland went from athlete to villain to victim…to fully human.

Now I sit with the problem: Sean Strickland is a bullied bully. What does my heart want for him? What does my empathy ask of me now?

Love,

DL

P.S. This is the third in a trilogy about empathy. Last week, I inquired about the limits of empathy. The week before, I danced at the intersection of empathy and boundaries. All are part of the same messy, unfinished argument.

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