Editor’s note: Given recent policy developments in the federal government, the author of this article has been granted anonymity to protect their safety and ability to continue their education in the United States.
In 2013, the world was shocked when George St-Pierre, Ultimate Fighting Championship welterweight champion, narrowly won a match against rising contender Johny Hendricks. St-Pierre, often regarded as the greatest welterweight of all time, was on a decisive 11-fight win streak against other worthy contenders. In their matchup, the young upstart Hendricks outperformed the legendary veteran, bruising St-Pierre’s face in patches of black and blue — yet St-Pierre was declared the winner. Most everyone that night believed St-Pierre’s win streak should have been broken.
Most everyone, including Dana White, the chief executive officer of the UFC. One might think that, in a prize-money sport like mixed martial arts, an executive would sigh in relief that their biggest star retained the belt. Instead, White was furious and foulmouthed.
“I want what’s fair and that wasn’t fair,” White said. “I think the Nevada State Athletic Commission is atrocious. I think the governor needs to step in immediately before these guys destroy this sport like they did boxing.”
It’s a strangely principled type of anger, one which seemingly stems from a fundamental belief in meritocracy. It’s a type of anger that almost supersedes any obvious ulterior motives for profit. And it’s exactly White’s anger, which seemed honest, that has greatly endeared him to the public — especially during UFC’s soar in popularity.
If you are familiar with today’s world of combat sports, then you know that White is anything but a principled, honest figure. Nowadays, White has fully rebranded himself as a cutthroat businessman, one of President Donald Trump’s close friends and the head mogul of the (alleged) oligopoly that is the UFC. It should come as no surprise that White is a right-wing conservative and, in many ways, the very caricature of out-of-touch elitists.
Scummy dishonesty and slimy practices are par for the course for the mogul. Add to those two quirks a pop of domestic violence and a solid shade of worker exploitation, and what you see is a sketch that reveals — in its bold, exaggerated ugliness — all that is unfair and unequal in America. White reminds me of the archetypes that protest tunes have historically targeted. He’s the rich man who drove folk legend Woody Guthrie from his door in “I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore.” He’s the businessman drinking Bob Dylan’s wine in “All Along the Watchtower.” White is the person with his belly full, while everyone else’s is empty in “Down Rodeo.”
Given the thorough lineage of songs that target the very type of person White is, it’s surprising (and hilarious) that White has time and again expressed his adoration for the band Rage Against the Machine. Whether that’s moshing in Rage’s pits as early as 2012 or bringing the band up in podcast appearances, he is a die-hard fan. On Feb. 11, 2020, Dana White posted on Facebook: “BOOOOOOOM!!!! Rage Against The Machine is BACK,” expressing his excitement for Rage’s next concert. Soon after, he quoted the band’s famous refrain “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” on his Instagram story.
Were White more conscious of Rage’s lyrics, he would quickly learn that the very machine the band rages against is him. In fact, for Rage’s entire history, it has been him, and it will always be him. “Compromise, conformity / Assimilation, submission / Ignorance, hypocrisy / Brutality, the elite / All of which are American dreams,” screams frontman Zack de la Rocha at the end of “Know Your Enemy.” White, seemingly, does not know the enemy.
White’s love for Rage is one of the most glaring examples of this strange phenomenon of conservatives co-opting progressive art. Rage — with their music, performances and public comments — has made it quite clear that they stand in direct opposition to the exploitative practices that White engages in.
In an interview with Vice, guitarist Tom Morello talked about the purpose of their music.
“Then, as now, that music critiqued a capitalist/white supremacist power structure that was and is still in full effect. Currently more so than ever.”
But this strong stance hasn’t stopped people on the other side of the aisle from misconstruing the band’s message. In 2012, Republican politician Paul Ryan similarly shared his appreciation for Rage; at the height of the pandemic, a group of MAGA supporters presented a Blue Lives Matter flag as they yelled Rage’s most scathing lyrics about white supremacy in the police force. “Those who died are justified, for wearing a badge, they’re the chosen whites.”
This appropriation results in part from Rage being a heavy metal band. Like country is to folk, metal is considered far more conservative than its punk counterpart. The genre appeals the most to white men, who now feel alienated from the “progressive” state of the world. Rage’s aggressive, confrontational sound leads people from all sides to project their own anger onto the music, often without absorbing the message. “The message that people take from Rage is ‘you should be angry,’” content creator Polyphonic says. The mere aesthetic of the angry metal genre — the medium — simply overwhelms Rage’s message of progress and anti-capitalist revolution.
To further understand how aesthetics can hide ideology, we circle back to White and the night St-Pierre retained his welterweight belt. After St-Pierre won the fight, the champion said in his post-fight speech that he needed to take a break. He had defended his title 10 times over the course of five years, and he needed to take some time for himself. At the following press conference, White inadvertently dropped the veil about why he was so angry.
“Whatever the hell (St-Pierre) was saying (about taking a break), that’s not how it works,” White said. “You owe it to the fans, you owe it to the belt, you owe it to this company and you owe it to Johny Hendricks to give him that opportunity to fight again unless you’re going to retire.”
As is typical with executives, White’s anger with St-Pierre concerned his bottom line. Were St-Pierre to take a “break” with the belt, UFC would have no marketable star — no legitimate lineage for the welterweight crown. Unfortunately, that’s not the narrative people cared to remember. If we look at what journalists wrote at the time, the root of White’s anger is scarcely mentioned. MMA journalists often led with how White believed Hendricks won — Fox Sports headlined “As GSP-Hendricks scoring controversy swirls, White slams NSAC” and USA Today ran “Dana White furious, strongly believes Johny Hendricks beat Georges St-Pierre.” If any discussions were had about that night, they concerned White’s principled anger about St-Pierre’s decision, an image which has sufficiently covered up the business motives fueling that anger.
But therein lies the power of outrage. Anger is a strong emotion, and we often believe that no one gets red hot without reason. Author Edward Abbey once said, “Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.” If someone is blowing a fuse, we tend to associate it with passion. A study in social status and anger expression also found that, in Western cultures, anger is fueled by blockage of personal goals and desires fuels anger. But the aesthetics of anger can obfuscate the cause of that passion, preventing deeper analysis. In White’s case, anger hid his business-forward agenda from the public. And in the political realm, anger, a loud emotion, does an exceptional job at hiding quiet bigotry.
Beyond the direct use of anger, the conservative adoration for Rage shows how the anger of others can be weaponized, stripped of its original meaning and used to fuel entirely different agendas. For Rage, their messages of progression and revolution are buried when their music gets co-opted. When one listens to “Bulls on Parade,” that person may hear about how “they rally ‘round the family with a pocket full of shells” and get angry at something, but whether that individual connects “they” to the “war cannibal animal” of the United States is a different question.
This right-wing pattern of misinterpretation, decontextualization and then co-opting, deliberate or not, reveals something deeper about the aesthetics of anger. Namely, anger can function as its own medium. Painters use paint, filmmakers use cameras and conservatives use anger. By acting as a medium, anger is its own message — one that seeks to unite people emotionally before it does logically.
When speaking about Rage’s small but prominent right-wing fanbase, Morello said that the music could help educate them.
“One of the most important things about Rage is that we are able to seduce some people with the music, who are then exposed to a different political message.”
Morello embraces Rage’s appealing anger, hoping that, through their aesthetic, listeners will somehow come around to the message. Yet, amusing and hilarious as it is to see Trump supporters or white supremacists attach themselves to art that attacks them, the deeper implications of co-opting are scary. Unfortunately, I don’t think progressive anger has done any seducing here. Rage may have channeled anger in their work, but they never quite grasped how easy it was for their opponents to turn that very anger against them.
If anger is a political medium, conservatives have mastered it. They use both their own anger to rally people and co-opt anger from their opponents to fuel their backward agenda. Anger is at the core of why they continually miss or ignore the anti-establishment messages from art they consume. But that strong emotion is also why their movement appeals to so many people: It’s blindingly red.
“To expose and close the doors on those who try / To strangle and mangle the truth / ‘Cause the circle of hatred continues unless we react.”
The ability to harness and repurpose rage has been at the heart of conservative messaging for many years. But there was a time when conservatives didn’t have full ownership of anger.
Bob Dylan is ferocious on “Masters of War,” possessed by the spirit of unrest following the U.S.’ increasing involvement in the Cold War. “You hide in your mansion / While the young people’s blood / Flows out of their bodies / And is buried in the mud.” Dylan has a sharp pen, and he isn’t afraid to use it like a sword.
Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” is similarly enraged. The same spirit that made Dylan unrecognizable in “Masters of War” is burning Simone alive. Simone emphatically slaps down on her piano keys while the drums lend a sense of urgency, galloping from one verse to the next. In the most crucial line of the song, “Oh but this whole country is full of lies / You’re all gonna die and die like flies,” Simone restrains from letting all her anger out. Her tone is measured but her commentary is not.
Both songs are effective protest songs, communicating anger through simple aesthetics — a guitar and harmonica for Dylan and drums and piano for Simone. Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost access to leftist rage, or more worryingly, the right has learned to subdue it. The question then is: How do we take the power back?
