It's Healthcare, Stupid
A massive backlash to the private insurance industry is under way. Why do MMA fighters have better talking points than our politicians?
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Generalities tend to fail in this atomized, choose-your-own-strawman media environment, but I feel comfortable identifying at least one thread in the post-second-Trump-election-victory discourse that has broken through to the semi-mainstream consciousness: “Why don’t we have a lib Joe Rogan?”
There are hundreds of Google results for variations on the theme, and Ryan Broderick even put together a list of candidates for such a hypothetical office back in November. This has seemed, thus far, like the main takeaway from a second Trump presidency — delivered in part by young men, especially white and Latino ones, deserting the Democrats in droves: How do we compete with all the content pushing angry young men to the right?
Its fitting, in a country in which our leaders have mostly decided that better things aren’t possible, that “politics” has mostly become a version of media criticism (click that link to see a sitting politician telling “the media” what to focus on). But as always, we’re asking the wrong questions. At least, the people who work in politics are.
To belabor the obvious, the Democrats fairly easily could’ve had a Joe Rogan. It was Joe Rogan. He publicly endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020, and then the party moved heaven and Earth to ensure Sanders wasn’t the candidate (again). But there’s no point relitigating the past at this point; best to try to ensure something that stupid doesn’t happen again.
Focusing on the current moment, there’s been some very obvious writing on the wall lately and no one in the political class, or even the pundit and politics-adjacent classes, seem to be talking about it. It’s starting to make me feel like I’m going crazy.
To wit: Here is UFC heavyweight champion Jon Jones on Instagram this month:
In case you don’t want to read all that, the gist of it is that Jones took a break from his usual posting output to rail against medical debt, our “greedy” healthcare system and corporate profiteering. “Time to hold these healthcare bullies accountable,” the post concludes. “Power to the people.”
Jones was stumping for Power to the Patients, a non-profit “dedicated to creating a more affordable and accessible healthcare system through price transparency.” The same organization, in existence since 2021, has enlisted everyone from Fat Joe to Shepard Fairey as spokespeople, and maybe it says something about me that I hadn’t heard of them until Jon Jones posted about it. Anyway, this particular organization and their PR practices are a little beside the point.
If Jones’ post doesn’t sound revolutionary on the face of it, it helps to consider the source. To say that something like this coming from a UFC guy in 2025 was refreshing is an understatement. As a long-time MMA fan, watching fighters shift from fiercely apolitical to openly toadying up to an out-of-shape New York musical theater enthusiast like Trump has been one of the most depressing developments ever — even to those of us who always thought we came in with low expectations. Just this morning I watched an Instagram reel of Rampage Jackson and Rashad Evans arguing vocifersouly for Flat Earth Theory on a podcast. Story for another time, perhaps, but suffice to say, this Jones, railing against healthcare bullies, is the same guy who was posting pictures of himself buddying up to Pete Hegseth at Donald Trump’s inauguration just a few weeks earlier.
And yet here he was, saying something… smart? Accurate? Not divisive? Easy to agree with?
True, it wasn’t exactly a call for a general strike or even universal healthcare, and it’s tempting to dismiss it as an anomaly, or typical hypocrisy, coming from a guy with a lengthy “controversies” section on his Wikipedia page, in which “domestic violence” is just one of the subheadings. But I would argue these “worst person you know just made a great point” situations are exactly when we should be paying closest attention. Finding common ground is a starting point, not something to avoid.
Meanwhile, the same week Jones was posting this on Instagram, fellow fighter and ex-middleweight champion Sean Strickland was showing up to the press conference for his fight with Dricus DuPlessis wearing a DENY, DEFEND, DEPOSE t-shirt. Deny, Defend, and Depose, is, of course, the slogan Luigi Mangione wrote on the shells of the bullets he (allegedly) used to kill United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The UFC promptly censored the shirt on its Embedded broadcast, but it’s still there for all to see on Getty Images, and on the numerous YouTube videos from the presser.
Delay, Deny, Defend was the original coinage, by Jay M. Feinman in the title of his 2010 book about getting private insurers to pay their rightful claims, but the idea was pretty clear. There aren’t many ways to interpret the shirt other than as another critique of healthcare profiteering and corporate greed. (I still haven’t found video of Strickland actually being asked about the shirt, which says something either about the hand-picked media outlets still allowed to attend UFC pressers, or about Australia, where the fight took place, for whom Mangione, his slogans, and the murder of healthcare CEOs might seem a can of worms better left unopened).
As with Jon Jones, Sean Strickland is not normally a person whose views I would champion. Where Jones always at least presented the facade of an affable politician in public (his hypocrisy in this being one of the main things he was criticized for), Strickland became something of a minor media darling by basically not being housetrained. That he was always good for an outrageous quote helped his brand, since, unlike Jones, his actual fighting style tends to be non-flashy and even sort of plodding. Anyway, finding problematic things Strickland has said is easier than finding non-problematic ones, and these days media folks mostly seem to do their best winding him up to say something crazy that they can use in a headline.
Strickland wore this shirt in between answering a fan’s question about “his least favorite race” (shoutout to Ben Fowlkes for bringing that one to my attention) and saying his opponent “fights like a retard on a shortbus.” You get it. He’s an avowed caveman (yet one who often seems just a hair’s breadth away from demonstrating genuine growth and understanding, but again, story for another time).
When even this guy is saying, essentially, that private healthcare sucks and corporate greed is the enemy, doesn’t it make the point that much more relevant?
True, as Naomi Klein points out in Doppelganger, fascism has always had a way of being a sort of funhouse mirror perversion of socialism and humanism. Care about your fellow man! Fight back against bullies! shouts the original. (As long as your fellow man looks like you and the bullies don’t, echoes the evil twin’s rejoinder). As someone important famously said, “Antisemitism is the socialism of fools.”
Insert whatever prejudice-based ism in there for antisemitism and it’s still basically true. And, sure, there could be a little of that going on here. But that doesn’t delegitimize “our healthcare system fucking sucks and we need to fix it” as a point. In fact, it only makes it that much more important for anyone who isn’t a piece of shit to keep saying it. Otherwise you’re letting people who think the rapist with racist tattoos is a cool guy and the guy who thinks “The China Man” is the “worst race” control the conversation.
I’m not here to point out all the ways in which guys who get punched in the face for a living are problematic. We get it, and I don’t need to hold Sean Strickland to the same standards of discourse as a sociology professor (or even, you know, like a UPS driver or something). But what they demonstrate is that these people — exactly the kinds of people who might be/probably are listening to Joe Rogan — are not unreachable. Especially if the message is “private insurance is bad and corporate greed is the enemy.”
Jones and Strickland’s is the exact demographic Democrats have spent the last few months (and really, years) handwringing about losing, sending a pretty clear message about at least one thing that matters to them. In country full of mostly low-information voters whose politics are hopeless convoluted at best, it’s hard to overstate how big a deal that is.
And so maybe trying to figure out the ideal messenger; the kindler, gentler, more lib-friendly Joe Rogan, is the wrong question. Maybe the right one is “how do we say something his fans actually give a shit about?”
I haven’t seen much of that. I’ve seen talking points about inflation, about DOGE, about Project 2025 (no one who doesn’t follow politics knows what that is! can’t you give it a more evocative, nefarious-sounding name???), about Elon Musk being a Nazi (which he is!), and about (*puts cocked pistol into mouth*) “trying to mend fences with Silicon Valley” (everyone hates the tech industry!). But virtually no one in a position of power or running for it is acknowledging the massive, nearly-unanimous outpouring of anti-private insurance sentiment among basically all levels of the populous minus the quarter-zip-and-vest class.
Sometimes I think public intellectuals spent so much of the War on Terror identifying the hypocrisy of the W Bush era (at a time when that still felt revolutionary) that now it’s all they know how to do. And in a country where everyone is becoming even more a mess of contradictions, the act has become increasingly pointless. Maybe we don’t always need to do oppo research on each other, and sometimes we can just “yes and.” As BluSky commentator Brendel once so wisely put it, “Our politics seem confusing in America but if you just imagine us as a nation of chiropractors it becomes really clear.”
Which is to say, I doubt people like Jon Jones or Sean Strickland could articulate exactly what we need to do to fix a broken healthcare system. But that’s the job of politics: to give people a vocabulary for change that’s been just on the tip of their tongues. The first step is acknowledging their grievances (and if Donald Trump’s political career proves anything at all, it’s how far one can get on acknowledging grievances alone).
And if you’re not doing even that, someone else is going to, and they’re probably going to use it for evil.
Trying to create a libby Rogan sounds like a job for the ad people that say things like "We want to create a viral video to sell our product.". That's not how anything works.
This is not really that related but it's been on my mind lately.
As a Canadian, watching the Trump administration lean on us for no reason other than his intrinsic whim-based shittiness reminds me of those long histories of whatever empire where you get emperors who build things and ones who realize they can just get short-term gains by fucking over their neighbouring vassal states. Maybe we should marvel at the restraint of the post-WW2 era (at least among the Western world states).