UFC President Dana White Hits Media for Attacking Him During Coronavirus Lockdowns

UFC president Dana White has no regrets about keeping his business operational during the coronavirus lockdowns, angering large segments of the establishment media.

Speaking with Tucker Carlson on Monday, White called the pandemic “the scariest thing in the history of my life” and how he had to make a decision to keep his business going throughout the lockdowns. His biggest detractors were in the establishment media, which he described as being run by people who “do nothing” and “never built anything.”

“Nobody depends on them for a paycheck. But all they do is sit back and criticize [that] I’m going to kill people, and I care more about money than I do human life. I heard it all. And The New York Times, as you can imagine, was blasting me daily,” he said.

“These guys had nothing to worry about. They were writing horror stories every day, and they were all working,” he added.

After its newly-created headquarters in Las Vegas, Nevada, had to be locked down under the new orders, White brokered a deal with Yas Island near Abu Dhabi to conduct matches.

“It was really the only true bubble that existed in sports, because they brought people in the workers in the hotel, the workers in the restaurant, all the people that were as island were tested before they went there,” he said.

“And they were there for weeks being tested regularly before we even got there,” he added. “Then the people that we were bringing over, we tested, flew over on our own private plane that only we were on, got to the island. We were tested again and tested multiple times up until the event happened and then everybody would go home.”

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis later opened up his state and invited UFC to conduct matches there. White said this allowed American fighters to compete in the United States while foreign fighters could compete on Yas Island.

“[DeSantis] told us, ‘Come on in – we’ll host you here’,” he said of the offer. “So we were still able to run our business. Like nothing was even going on other than we didn’t have fans, we didn’t have a live gate because of them.”