MMA commentator and political podcast host Luke Thomas did not hold back his assessment of UFC CEO Dana White following White’s widely-discussed reaction to an incident near the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
On his show Luke Thomas Gets Political, Thomas offered his take on what White’s response revealed about the man himself.
He opened with a critique comment on White from his members: “Is there a better example of how Dana White has reached billion levels of being d*ad inside than seeing him describe how excited he was about being so close to a s**oting?” he said.
While Thomas acknowledged there could be a psychological explanation for White’s enthusiastic retelling, he made it clear he wasn’t endorsing it. “I saw the Dana White stuff and it was just like… I’m not co-signing Dana’s view, but like on some level because it was unusual, intense, however ultimately fine, that kind of maybe adrenaline going through his system could have affected the way in which you interpret the whole event. Okay, fine,” he explained.
However, Thomas quickly moved beyond that concession and shifted to a critique of White’s character and the environment surrounding him. Pointing to White’s involvement with Power Slap, Thomas argued it reflected something deeper.
“You can’t get to a place where you can hear doctor warnings about slap, you can hear these complaints about how unfair, how much athletes get paid are, how much this can damage their lives, blah blah blah. You can’t get to that place unless you’ve got a degree of your humanity that’s been eroded,” he said.
He then turned directly to White’s position of power and how it may shape his worldview. “I think Dana is, you know, I’m not a psychologist, but I would say I question to what extent that is a factor in how both Dana White finds himself in these situations of power, how he uses them and then how that informs his judgment about others. At this point, you know, you become so transcendently wealthy and powerful that human interactions almost take on an inevitable transactionalism and like what that does to you,” he said.
Thomas went further, speculating on what it might take to provoke a genuine emotional response from someone at that level of wealth and influence.
“If you’ve lived such an extraordinary extr eme life, maybe the only kind of thing that can get you, I’m not talking s*xually aroused, but like aroused, you know, in the general sense, although maybe maybe the other one too, is some kind of an extr eme event. I’m spitballing here. I’m not a psychologist. I don’t really know,” he added.
He also tied White’s reaction back to concerns about safety, particularly in light of discussions around a potential UFC event at the White House. “And then Dana being like this was awesome. It’s like, are you focused on safety?” he questioned.
Thomas closed by reflecting on wealth, power, and humanity. “Trying to look around at very rich and powerful people and then to see how many of them are still visibly in touch with their own humanity. Once you begin to inventory that, the list is not so long,” he concluded.
