How Hate Found a Home in Jiu-Jitsu & MMA

**Speaker 1:** Hey everybody, this is Steve here. Hope you're doing well. I've got a bonus for you. Now, you may not be familiar with my other work, but over at BJJ Mental Models, we've been producing an audio documentary on the dark side of martial arts history, especially as it pertains to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And we just published an amazing episode in that audio doc featuring fellow Fighting Matters host Stefan Kesting. It's an awesome talk on mainstream extremism in the martial arts. And given the recent accusations against Andre Galvao and Atos, this conversation is incredibly relevant. I've decided to take down the paywall on this episode and give it away for free. So you can get it here at no cost without being a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber. So please do enjoy and let me know what you think. And if you want the rest of the series, you can check it out at BJJmentalmodels.com. **Speaker 2:** Welcome back to our series on political extremism in martial arts. My name is Ben Van Dorn. I'm a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt and owner of Deep Blue Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. **Speaker 3:** And I'm Eva Schubert, college instructor and creator of Villains and Virgins History podcast. **Speaker 2:** Over the last two episodes, we have had great conversations with Kareem Zidan about politics and sports. We've looked at both organizational power structures in sports and extremist groups that utilize Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and MMA as part of their recruiting and propaganda. You can conceptualize those two conversations as discussing outliers. You have billionaires in boardrooms shaking hands with powerful politicians and extremists in the corners of our society fighting to prove their worth to each other. Today we're going to talk about political extremism that exists in the mainstream. Athletes fighting in prime time, being cheered on by casual fans and supported by both Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and MMA organizations. There are a good number of athletes and coaches with sponsorships, big followings and financial incentives to keep pushing hateful rhetoric and conspiracy out into the community. There are also companies that continue to platform and promote these voices. To help us with this conversation today, we've called upon someone who not only has been in the game for a long time, but who has also had a platform in the community for years. He's a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt who has spent decades sharing his knowledge, building a platform, and who hasn't been shy about speaking out against the darker side of martial arts. He is the host of The Strenuous Life podcast, co-host of The Fighting Matters podcast, owner of grapplearts.com and author of the recently released book, Perseverance, Life and Death in the Subarctic. Stefan Kesting, welcome to the show. **Speaker 4:** Thank you so much for having me, guys. I'm really excited to be here. **Speaker 2:** Yeah, before we begin, I just want to say that I've been learning from you for a long time. I think before I even started Jiu-Jitsu, you were putting out a lot of really high quality content and I know you've been very influential to a lot of people in the martial arts space. You know, more recently you've put out a really great instructional on the Kimura that I recommend people go check out. So, it's just great to be able to sit down with you and and talk about the sport. You've been someone that I've been following for a long time. So thank you again for joining us. So we're going to talk about some specifics here, but I wanted to in this conversation kind of start by getting your long view about politics and martial arts. You've been in this space for a long time. So, how have you seen the nature of political extremism in martial arts change over the last like 20 or so years? **Speaker 4:** Sure. Well, I I think the sport has always veered a little bit towards the right. Historically, the UFC, when I started watching it, you know, we'd watch it at a strip club because that was the only place in Vancouver where I live that would air it, that would show it. We didn't have ways to stream it over the internet. This is in the early 90s. So, there was this general sort of right-wing, call it a trailer park, blue collar bias to people who watched the UFC, and to some extent to people who did the sport, but it was really never an issue. You know, I trained with cops, I trained with criminals. I never really worried about it too much. And this became more and more of an issue as we went along. And I don't know if it was just me getting more sensitive to the rampant conspiracism in the sport. You know, Joe Rogan never ran into a single conspiracy that he didn't fully embrace. Really? The moon is made of green cheese? Tell me more, oh honored guest. And this was kind of like a, ha ha, isn't that crazy kind of thing. But I think the dividing line really, it began to fracture more under the first era of Trump, but then when COVID came along in 2020, and the Biden-Trump transition was in in play there, that things really started going off the rails. And I've talked about this before, but you could watch, I'm focusing on Joe Rogan here because he kind of is a spokesperson for the community. You could watch Joe Rogan's opinion shift in real time. From being one of the first people to take COVID seriously and have, you know, actual epidemiologists and actual doctors talking about this, to going, wait a second, that means stand-up comedy is closed in California because we're taking measures. I'm moving to Texas. And then just swinging super hard the other way. And you could watch people whose career or identity was wrapped up in sort of the public performance aspect of it. Whether that was Tony Robbins not able to do his very lucrative large evangelical sessions, or Joe Rogan and his buddies not being able to do comedy for a couple of months, or Jiu-Jitsu instructors not being able to teach Jiu-Jitsu, the thing that paid their mortgage, pivot off in search of alternate explanations. Because you can't be a good person and keep your club open when there's this deadly virus going around. So, one way to resolve that moral dilemma is to say, well, you know, I was listening to this guy and he says that it's really no worse than the flu. So therefore, I'm not doing anything bad by keeping my club open in the middle of a pandemic or not modifying my behavior at all. And that really schismed the martial arts community pretty hard. I think that the effect was more visible in the United States than in Canada. Canada had somewhat better financial support for the small business owners that were closed. I'm not saying that they were the right measures or that they were sufficient, but there were more measures, whereas in the states, sounds like a lot of people were just expected to close and still somehow pay their mortgage. **Speaker 3:** I'm going to chime in there for a second and just reflect on the fact that I think this phenomenon, while it's acute in the martial arts space, was also society-wide, because the turn to the embrace of conspiracy theories was definitely not limited to MMA and Jiu-Jitsu people. I mean, I was listening to someone call in to talk to a psychologist yesterday, this woman who who loves her husband and says, how do I even communicate with this guy? Because he's convinced the banking system is going to collapse any day now, and we shouldn't be putting money into a retirement fund, and he wants to hide cash under the mattress. And like, how do I even have a conversation or try and partner with this person? And and this is a woman who loved her husband. She wasn't ready to get a divorce. But the fissuring in that marriage, the living in alternative realities is something that I think many of us can relate to even outside martial arts because we all know some family members or some friends who've kind of taken that that hard turn and are now living in a totally different reality where the things they're concerned about and the things that they think are the biggest threats look radically different from what the rest of us think. So, yes, it's definitely a thing in martial arts, but I think it's actually a lot wider than that as well. **Speaker 4:** I think we can explain a significant part of society's malaise with two principles. Principle number one, social media algorithms try to keep you on their platform for as long as possible, and the best way to do that is through outrage. That's well proven. So if they can present you with ridiculous stuff. Look at these blue-haired radicals that are insisting all boys become girls and all girls become boys and that it happens at school between 2:00 and 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon when they come home, they're a different gender and their genitalia has been mutilated. If I read that and I believed it, I too would be outraged. So it's this outrage farming and this attempt to maximize time on a platform so as to be able to serve people more advertising and thus maximize revenue. That's principle number one. And principle number two is that these social media platforms are owned by billionaires and that billionaires have a political agenda. Typically lower regulation, lower taxation for corporations. And that's why the Trump inauguration, there was just a lineup of social media people of everyone from Elon to Zuckerberg, you know, and all the people who are going to end up buying TikTok. You know, they they realize what a powerful tool this is to shape political opinion and to drive an agenda. I mean, look at the creation of Grokopedia by Elon Musk, right? It's busy citing stormfront.org as a source for its knowledge base. Stormfront.org is a violently, vehemently pro-Nazi white supremacist website that I was incidentally featured on because they took one look at me and there was a discussion of who's good at this self-defense stuff. This was years ago. And they took a look at me and they go, ah, shaved head, white dude, likes martial arts. Clearly, he's of he's a fellow traveler. Clearly, he's a fellow white supremacist. And so they were promoting me on stormfront.org. **Speaker 2:** Some context there is that it was years ago the case that, you know, white supremacists were just called like skinheads, you know, people who shaved their heads. That was sort of like the sort of niche subculture within that white supremacist community. Now, I think they've shifted identity-wise. You said a lot of things in there that I I kind of want to touch on. So, you know, you're kind of characterizing the early 90s about, you know, maybe there was always this sort of rightward tilt, but it wasn't an issue. And I I wasn't training martial arts in the 90s, but I was watching the UFC in the late 90s, early 2000s and I remember it primarily being as it was kind of going into the mainstream, getting sanctioned, there was, you know, commercials late at night for the pay-per-views that happened three or four times a year. And it's really just mainly about the violence. Like people didn't understand it. And I remember that was the major pushback is, are we going to accept this level of violence on our sport? And it really wasn't about anything else. You know, you know, politically John McCain was looking at the sanctioning of the sport. So there was a political element there, but it didn't follow the same sort of, I think, right-left cultural divide that we're seeing today. **Speaker 4:** There was actually a period of time when it was trying to be more inclusive. I believe it corresponds with the time that they were trying to get onto mainstream cable networks. And that they were presenting Rich Franklin as the face of the UFC,