“Michelle Obama Is a Man” - This Is How America Celebrates Its 250th Birthday - And the Attempt to Censor Us Too

After winning on the South Lawn of the White House, heavyweight fighter Josh Hokit shouted a debunked smear about Michelle Obama into the microphone, broadcast live on Paramount+. This is what the celebration of the nation’s anniversary looks like!

At the Freedom 250 cage tournament on the South Lawn of the White House, fighter Josh Hokit made sure the evening did not pass without scandal. Barely had he won when he shouted into the microphone that Michelle Obama is a man, in an exchange filled with profanity. Hokit had knocked out Derrick Lewis in the third round of their heavyweight bout and remained undefeated. Already in the week before, his divisive appearances had dominated headlines, and that was precisely the point. Whoever provokes the loudest receives the greatest attention, and in that way malice rewards itself.

What he shouted was a long debunked smear against a former First Lady who was not present to defend herself. It is the lowest thing a man with a microphone can do, delivered at the most distinguished address in the country. Dressing it up as a victory cry does not make it greater, but smaller. Paramount+ carried the whole thing live across its network. A major broadcaster lent its transmission to obscenity, did not cut away, but carried it into living rooms, and that is a disgrace that weighs on the broadcaster just as much as on the fighter.

What was being celebrated that evening was the nation’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday, Freedom 250. A republic founded on grand words marked its quarter millennium with a heavyweight fighter shouting a cruel lie across the people’s lawn. What an embarrassment. The headlines went to the one who said the ugliest thing, and so the ugliest thing became the harvest of the evening. The freedom stamped onto the banner turned out to be the freedom to smear someone who was not there. That is how public speech decays, until a slur passes for a toast and no one seems to hear the difference anymore.

There was an aftermath that says more about the state of things than the evening itself. When we posted a clip of that appearance on Facebook, not filmed by us but taken from what had been publicly broadcast on screens at the same moment, Facebook immediately blocked it. It said it was obligated to protect everyone’s intellectual property and that the post contained forty one seconds belonging to the UFC. For journalistic reasons and in order to uphold journalistic diligence, we use exclusively 13 seconds of the material that we report on in this article.

It is a strange thought that an event taking place at the people’s house and openly shown to millions becomes someone’s property the moment another person picks it up to reflect on it. What was meant to belong to everyone as spectacle belongs, once questioned, to a single owner. The major broadcast was allowed to spread it, the small piece examining it is not, and so the freedom they called Freedom 250 ends at the threshold of the person who merely wanted to look at it a second time.

Mark Zuckerberg speaks with Alex Pereira after his second round T.K.O. loss to Ciryl Gane at UFC Freedom 250 - Mark Zuckerberg enjoyed the evening from the front row, because whoever donates generously enough to the House of Trump is always a welcome guest there, even at the edge of a cage.

The house built for speech hosted slander that evening, and with each passing time it becomes more pathetic. A nation that lets its birthday speak in this voice should ask itself what it is becoming. It called the evening freedom and spent it on a lie about a woman who was not there.

To be continued .....