Why Does (Almost) No One in MMA Care About Paddy Pimblett's Racist Rants?
UFC star and Dana White favorite Paddy Pimblett brought his racist rants to the big stage Thursday, and precious few seem to care
UFC star and Dana White favorite Paddy Pimblett brought his racist rants to the big stage Thursday, and precious few seem to care
This was going to be a story about how one of the UFC’s most celebrated new stars, Englishman Paddy Pimblett, is once again getting the red-carpet treatment from the promotion and MMA beat media despite his being a loud and proud White supremacist. Pimblett’s hate-speech has appeared to have gotten him repeatedly banned from social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram but even coverage of that from the media has done backbends to avoid bringing up his xenophobia.
“I’m also banned on Twitter,” Pimblett told media assembled for his fight this week. “Just calling people stupid, fat idiots and stuff. You know what I mean? They give me grief and I’ve said something back.”
He’s called people more than stupid and fat, of course. Pimblett has also decried immigrants supposedly ruining his native England, people not speaking English, and celebrated terrorism. If you’re an MMA fan and didn’t know any of that you might be forgiven since Pimblett’s racism has not only gone unsanctioned by his promoter, the UFC, but all but ignored by the press.
Just this past week UFC President Dana White laughed along during a podcast conversation with Pimblett as the fighter called Jewish media member Ariel Helwani a “rodent.” MMA websites outlets ignored the anti-Semitic undertones of the insult and continued to interview Pimblett this week without bringing that up or all his past racist comments.
Then Pimblett exploded at the UFC pre-event press conference Thursday, repeatedly hurling the racist slur of “mongrel” at fellow fighter Ilia Topuria, who hails from Georgia - a nation that Pimblett has often insulted, en masse, in the past. According to Pimblett’s rant, Topuria has impure blood because he’s an immigrant and doesn’t speak enough English for the Englishman.
This was going to be a story about how all of this and more has been ignored by all MMA beat media - a group I’ve been a part of for a decade and a half. Then the phenomenal Trent Reinsmith did what he so often does - his job as a good journalist.
Reinsmith and his outlet Bloody Elbow published a simple but essential piece of news reporting Friday. It picked up on the most note-worthy thing about Pimblett - his shouting of a racial slur at a colleague at a press event - and put it into the appropriate context of his consistently, publicly, and angrily expressed White supremacist views over the years, and topped it off with an informative headline.
The piece, “UFC’s Paddy Pimblett calls Ilia Topuria a ‘mongrel,’ adding to his history of racist and xenophobic comments,” is the rare piece of fight reporting that actually served its readers.
“Are you talking English? English? Speak English for the people, lad, not German or Spanish like you’re from, you mongrel,” the piece quotes Pimblett accurately as saying.
“You pretend to be Georgian, but you’re not. You were born in Germany and you live in Spain. You were born in Germany and you live in Spain. You’re a little mongrel. That’s what you are. You’re a little mongrel.”
That’s the new stuff, but the story responsibly then places it all in context - the slur as well as Pimblett’s history of hate speech.
The term ‘mongrel,’ which was originally used to describe a dog of mixed or indeterminable breed, is also a racial slur applied to people who are considered to be or who identify as mixed-race. As William Saletan wrote in Slate in 2014, “Many people use /mongrel/ as an insult because they think it’s better to be purebred than to have mixed ancestry.”
It is also worth noting that this is not the first time Pimblett has used this type of language.
In 2018, Pimblett told now UFC fighter Muhammad Mokaev, a Russian immigrant who represented England in freestyle wrestling competitions, that he was a “fraud” and not “from here.”
The following year, Pimblett blamed the United Kingdom’s economic problems on immigrants who “don’t even speak English.”
Sadly, there’s even more in Pimblett’s recent history of spouting Nazi talking points. Thankfully, Reinsmith’s piece covers the rest of them. Click here to read the rest of the important report, and make sure to give him a follow on Twitter if that’s your type of thing.
I highly recommend it, since most outlets, are still simply reporting on this latest racist tirade from Pimblett as merely a bit of trash talk.
