Sean Strickland, the two-time and current UFC middleweight champion, says he has been banned from the Freedom 250 card on the White House lawn on 14 June, Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. Asked why, he said he had made fun of Israel and Jeffrey Epstein, and that he was the only male American champion kept off the guest list. He claimed he had earned the snub by saying the US President is owned by Benjamin Netanyahu.

When Trump turned MMA into MAGA’s national sport, he planted his flag in one seamy but prominent corner of American culture that would still have him. The trouble is that the cage is stocked with unpredictable fighters who answer to nobody, and the cluster of grievances around the Epstein files, Israel and the strikes on Iran has begun prising some of them loose. An event built to advertise his ownership of the sport is instead exposing how little of it he commands.

Strickland, like other fighters, spent years as a reliable Trump man before souring on him in the last several months. After the UFC fighter beat Khamzat Chimaev to reclaim his belt last month, he declared that his broken nose made him look like an Aipac lobbyist — a line that Paramount+ bleeped out. Earlier this month, Strickland also wrote that he would vote for a Democrat over an Aipac-backed Republican.

He is not alone. Bryce Mitchell, the prominent Arkansas bantamweight and proud flat-earther, quit the MAGA movement months ago, declared Trump the Antichrist over his handling of the Epstein files, and this week came out in support of Strickland. What might sound like a couple of men mouthing off could be the cutting edge of a wider revolt. Pew found in April 2026 that 57% of Republicans under 50 now hold an unfavourable view of Israel, up seven points in a year, and barely a third of them trust Netanyahu. Meanwhile, a majority of young Republicans tell pollsters they want a 2028 candidate who would cut weapons going to Israel.

Fighters are simply the quickest to say all of this on a hot mic — and directly to the UFC’s audience of these young, mostly Republican men — because their trade selects for men who bristle at being handled. The cage grew out of carnival sideshows and ungoverned regional circuits rather than any league office, and the men who fill it tend to trust their own eyes over any account handed down from above. Fighters are independent contractors who lease themselves to a single dominant buyer, not salaried employees with a union and a pension, and train in insular gyms run by eccentric coaches who have never rewarded conformist thinking. Understandably, they carry the reflexive suspicion of official stories that I described years ago when conspiracy culture took over the cage.

Trump has become the establishment many of those men will instinctively needle. The UFC’s Freedom 250 card is being held at the nation’s executive mansion, with champions performing like circus animals for the President on his birthday. A sport whose entire self-image rests on distrust of authority was always going to produce a counter-culture the moment it was folded into an unofficial arm of the state. Strickland, banned or merely uninvited, is merely the loudest sign of it, and he will surely not be the last.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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