Former CNN anchor-turned-YouTuber Jim Acosta hosted historian Heather Cox Richardson as she suggested that the same ideas that energized the UFC White House event motivated the lynchings of the 19th century.She began by condemning the use of an honor guard at the Lincoln Memorial to present the fighters, suggesting, "I think Trump is deliberately perverting those things that Americans hold dear.""He forced them to stand on those steps in honor of the UFC fighters coming down," Richardson said."It was almost as if he was saying, 'I don't care what you hold sacred.
I'm going to use all of it for myself.'""What you are watching Trump do right now is deliberately tear that apart, and he is doing so on the same cultural argument, of course, that people used to back the first Gilded Age," she argued."That is these cultural wars that turn White Americans against marginalized people of color."DANA WHITE DENIES AMERICA 250 UFC FIGHT AT WHITE HOUSE WILL BE 'POLITICAL,' 'NOT AT ALL' ABOUT POLITICSThe UFC Freedom 250 fights take place on the South Lawn of the White House on June 15, 2026, in Washington, D.C. (Jacquelyn Martin - Pool/Getty Images)"Right," Acosta agreed."That's the bottom line there," Richardson continued.
"So, I mean, 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 against Black Americans overwhelmingly, but also against Italian-Americans in Louisiana, for example, or Mexican-Americans in the American West, or indigenous Americans in the American West.""That idea somehow — a really fake idea, by the way — that America is a White nation and anybody who challenges that needs to be purged from the body politic," she concluded.JIM ACOSTA RUTHLESSLY MOCKED FOR COMPARING REMOVAL OF TRUMP’S NAME FROM KENNEDY CENTER TO FALL OF BERLIN WALLJim Acosta was CNN’s White House correspondent during President Trump’s first administration and...