Heather Cox Richardson, the Substack "historian" with 2.9 million subscribers and an estimated $5 to $12 million a year in newsletter revenue, went on leftist activist podcaster Jim Acosta's show and compared the UFC Freedom 250 event at the White House to lynching. Yes, you read that correctly. A mixed martial arts competition held on the White House lawn on Sunday is, according to this woman, spiritually linked to racial murder in the 1800s.
Because nothing says "I'm a serious academic" like comparing a sporting event attended by thousands of cheering fans to one of the darkest chapters in American history.
Richardson delivered this gem with a straight face, telling Acosta, "It's not really a stretch to say that the same impulse that created the UFC fight on the White House lawn...is the impulse that really pushed lynching in the late 19th century." Not really a stretch. She actually said that. A woman who writes a newsletter called "Letters From an American" apparently hasn't read many letters from actual Americans, because most of us watched UFC Freedom 250 and thought, "That was awesome," not, "This reminds me of racial terror."
This is the same kind of unhinged comparison we got from ABC's The View panelist Sunny Hostin, who has made a career out of finding racism in every American tradition that doesn't involve a PBS tote bag. The left has this incredible talent for taking something millions of people enjoy and turning it into a lecture about how we're all secretly terrible.
Let's be clear about what actually happened. President Trump hosted UFC Freedom 250 on the White House lawn. People loved it. Fighters like Josh Hokit competed. The crowd went wild. It was a celebration of American toughness, competition, and freedom — three things the left absolutely cannot stand.
And because people enjoyed it — because Trump scored another massive cultural win — the "experts" had to rush to their microphones and explain why fun is actually fascism. That's the playbook. We can't just have a good time in this country without some credentialed scold telling us it's morally equivalent to a hate crime.
As one commenter pointed out, Richardson "has the most popular political Substack in the world." She's raking in millions telling liberals exactly what they want to hear: that everything conservatives enjoy is rooted in white supremacy. That's not history. That's a business model.
The real tell here is that Richardson didn't go on a serious news program to make this claim. She went on Jim Acosta's podcast. The same Jim Acosta who got booted from CNN for being too insufferable even by their standards. These two deserve each other — a disgraced cable news activist and a Substack grifter cosplaying as a historian, sitting around agreeing that UFC fans are basically a lynch mob.
Here's what the left will never understand. Americans don't watch UFC because of some dark impulse lurking in our national DNA. We watch it because it's exciting, because the fighters are incredible athletes, and because it's a whole lot more entertaining than listening to Heather Cox Richardson drone on about how everything we like is secretly evil.
Keep it up, folks. Every time one of these "intellectuals" compares a backyard barbecue or a sporting event to a historic atrocity, another thousand voters decide they're done with the Democratic Party. Richardson can keep cashing those Substack checks. We'll keep enjoying our country.
As reported by Twitchy, the reaction online was about what you'd expect — a mixture of disbelief and mockery. Because that's all this deserves.