Bryce Mitchell has built a reputation inside the UFC for being unpredictable on the microphone, but his latest statement moves well past typical bravado. Mitchell recently stated that he has received a vision from God warning that American troops are being lured into a trap in the Middle East, and he is urging service members to walk away before it is too late.
Mitchell’s message shared on social media lays out a scenario in which the military is not simply deployed into danger but deliberately placed there by forces working against it from within. He frames the coming conflict as a repeat of September 11, describing it as an inside job orchestrated to look like something else entirely.
He said in a video, “I had a vision from the Lord from a couple of years ago… when there’s a vision, in my opinion, you can tell that it’s real and it’s from God. Here is my vision that I believe is going to happen very very soon.”
In his telling, every soldier sent overseas faces an ambush, and the strike could come at any moment. His solution is blunt: troops should refuse to go, and he presents conscientious objection as the one guaranteed path to staying alive.
He said, “Every single military member overseas or in the Middle East was totally wiped out. There were three aircraft carriers in my dream and at least two of them were totally sunk. [They were] ambushed by Russia, China, and Iran combined, their firepower… All of our ground troops were instantly vaporized.”
Mitchell also argues that the campaign lacks any moral grounding, insisting that the people of the Middle East do not deserve to be targeted by what he calls a corrupt American government, and he predicts that opposition to this effort is building toward something capable of toppling the United States itself.
Mitchell noted, “Our own leadership in the dream had conspired against our troops. So our government is literally setting up our military to be slaughtered. If you go to Iran to [ ] them, we cannot help you. The American citizens here in this country that love you and make sure you’re safe, we can’t help if you’re over there… You’re walking into an ambush.”
“They are using you as pawns, they’re gonna get you [ ], and then they’re gonna use that to escalate the war more… Donald Trump is an outside force trying to destroy the country by the way he leads.”
He closes by saying he trusts the vision because it came from God, and that conviction is enough for him regardless of who finds it credible.
The reaction underneath his post split in predictable directions. Some followers treated the warning as confirmation of fears they already held, thanking him and invoking scripture about dreams and prophecy in the end times.
Others pushed back hard, with one commenter telling him flatly that what he experienced was not a vision and that he needed to seek help.
This is not an isolated outburst. Mitchell has spent recent months weaving together a narrative about the country heading toward collapse, and the military claim fits neatly alongside another theory he floated about the Bureau of Land Management’s wild horse roundups.
In that instance, Mitchell argued the horse removals happening across Western rangeland have nothing to do with ecosystem management and everything to do with denying ordinary Americans a way to get around once the government pulls the plug on modern infrastructure.
“I believe that Trump is actually [ ] all of the horses because they’re going to be a viable source of transportation for our rebel army once they cut our power and our fuel,” Mitchell said. He went further, tying the roundups to the food supply as well. “Yes, they’re also going to grind these horses up and put them in hamburger meat and sell them back to us, you know, for pennies on the dollar and it’s going to hurt the American farmers, I get that too. But the real reason they’re [ ] these horses is so we can’t use them for transportation. They’re about to shut our grid down. God bless y’all and get ready. Thank you.”
The roundups themselves are documented and ongoing, even if the official justification looks nothing like what Mitchell describes. Coverage from an NPR affiliate followed a recent operation in Colorado’s Piceance-East Douglas Herd Management Area, where a helicopter pushed small bands of mustangs across the sagebrush toward a capture pen, part of an effort to remove roughly 1,000 horses in a single gathering.
The Bureau of Land Management oversees both the horses and the rangeland they occupy across ten Western states, and it currently holds close to 60,000 animals in off-range facilities at an annual taxpayer cost of about $100 million. Around 85,000 mustangs remain on public land, a fraction of the cattle population grazing the same ground.
Opinions on the roundups vary widely among the people who witness them. Horse advocate Robyn Smith has documented the toll the process takes on herd bonds. “That’s a family. That’s a family out there,” she said. “It’s a family broken.” Rio Blanco County Commissioner Callie Scritchfield, a former rancher, sees the tradeoff differently, recalling a horse she found trapped in a mud hole “trying to get the last drop of water, but he’s bogged down. He don’t have the strength to get out. It’s not pretty.” Inside holding facilities, she said, the animals are consistently fed and watered. Range specialist Troy Osborn, formerly with the U.S. Forest Service, points to the strain multiple grazing species place on the same land. “We want to see the ground healthy. We want to see it productive,” he said. “We want to see it used by all animals, by all species.”
Roughly 8,000 horses found new homes through adoption or sale last year, though reporting has raised concerns about where some of those animals end up. Mustangs sold for as little as $25 have reportedly surfaced later at livestock auctions associated with buyers who export horses to Canada, where slaughter plants can pay up to $750 per animal. The agency has denied sending horses to slaughter and says it takes reports of violations seriously, but critics maintain that third party buyers are exploiting gaps in oversight.
