Patriotism rings registers. That’s an undisputable fact. It’s why car dealerships fly oversized American flags. Associating your brand with patriotism, American greatness, and love of country is almost always a smart PR move.
And in the sporting world, patriotism sells tickets. Our two biggest international sporting events — the Olympics and the World Cup — are explicitly built on jingoism.
It’s your country against my country — and I say, my country’s better!
Even fictional sporting events are (often) dripping in palpable patriotism. The first Rocky movie was about Apollo Creed, the American heavyweight boxing champion, needing an all-American opponent for America’s bicentennial. (And in the fourth Rocky movie, Mr. Balboa traveled to the Soviet Union, slayed the evil Rooskie, and singlehandedly won the Cold War.)
It wasn’t coincidental that the pro wrestling boom of the 1980s kicked into high gear when “American Made” Hulk Hogan, waiving the star-spangled banner, beat that nasty, no-good Iranian bully, the Iron Sheik. Go ‘Murica!
It beckons an intriguing question — and a timely one too, with UFC Freedom 250 airing Sunday night from the White House lawn: What was the most patriotic prizefight in American history?
We can eliminate the July 4, 1923, title fight between Jack Dempsey and Tommy Gibbons in Shelby, Mont. On paper, the fight had it all: a popular champion in his prime, the July 4th holiday, and a town that had discovered oil one year earlier and was thinking big: Shelby officials hoped the event would cement their city as a vibrant hub for tourism and built a 40,000-seat stadium.
Unfortunately, the fight was an economic disaster. Ticket prices were too high. The event failed to draw. Four local banks went bankrupt. Over 100 years later, the town still hasn’t recovered: According to the 2020 census, Shelby’s current population is 3,169.
(And oh, by the way, Jack Dempsey won by unanimous decision in a very boring fight. There were no knockdowns.)
For my money, the most patriotic prizefight in American history was Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling II on June 22, 1938. With apologies to Ali vs. Frazier I, this was the most historically significant heavyweight fight in U.S. history.
Joe Louis held the title. Known as “The Brown Bomber,” Louis had dynamite in both hands. He was also a black man — and the first black champion to win the heavyweight championship since the great-but-controversial Jack Johnson, who had triggered race riots with his gleeful thrashing of white fighters (and, of course, for his just-as-gleeful dalliances with white women). Louis was, arguably, the first black sports champion to be universally embraced by white America.
And Max Schmeling, from Germany, was the only man to ever beat him.
By all accounts, Schmeling wasn’t a Nazi or a racist. But for very obvious reasons, Adolf Hitler was eager to showcase him as the pinnacle of Aryan genetic superiority. Like it or not, Schmeling became a German national hero — the “master race” personified.
Louis heard the rhetoric. He knew the stakes.
And he trained like a man possessed.
Hitler was so confident Schmeling would pummel Louis yet again, he had the fight broadcast live to German troops.
Spoiler Alert: Hitler cut the footage after Schmeling was knocked down twice in the first round.
Before the fight, Louis was eerily focused. At one point, he turned to a friend and admitted, “I’m scared.” When his friend asked him why, Louis said, “I’m scared I’m gonna kill him.”
And he nearly did: It’s unclear which of the three knockdowns in the first round did the most damage, but after the fight, Schmeling was hospitalized at Polyclinic Hospital for ten days. Multiple vertebrae in his back were shattered.
When the fight was over, so was Schmeling’s propaganda value to the Nazis. He spent most of World War II as a paratrooper with the Luftwaffe, until his leg was mangled by mortar fire in the Battle of Crete.Yet Schmeling’s story had a surprising post-war postscript: Because he was one of the few Germans whose image wasn’t tainted by the Nazis, the Coca-Cola company hired him to help popularize the soda in Europe. Schmeling soon became a company executive — and exceedingly wealthy.
Meanwhile, Joe Louis went broke. He owed the U.S. government a fortune in back taxes, was nearly decapitated by Rocky Marciano in an ill-advised comeback attempt, and became a pro wrestler to pay the bills. When he died in 1981, Louis’ family couldn’t even afford his funeral.
So Schmeling paid for it himself, serving as one of Louis’ pallbearers.
“Looking back, I’m almost happy I lost that fight,” Schmeling said in 1975. “Just imagine if I would have come back to Germany with a victory. I had nothing to do with the Nazis, but they would have given me a medal. After the war, I might have been considered a war criminal.”
Max Schmeling died in 2005 at the age of 99. He was a millionaire many times over.
Sometimes, winning in the ring is the easy part.
Will Sunday night's UFC fight card reach the heights of Louis vs. Schmeling II? I strongly doubt it.
But it’ll be memorable. Historic. A fight card we’ll be talking about for generations!
And even if it rains, hey, it probably won’t be as bad as Dempsey vs. Gibbons.
Oddly enough, a new fight is currently brewing across America. It’s not in a ring and it’s not in a cage.
This one is about… data centers.
PRediction: The data center battle will be a major boon for Democrats — at least until the GOP figures out what the heck it stands for.
After all, we know what the Democrats stand for: Data centers are tools of the oligarchs! They use too much energy, devour too much water, and are designed to steal our jobs — so the rich get even richer!
As NBC News noted, quite a few MAGA-adjacent podcasters agree with them:
Steve Bannon, a former Trump White House adviser and prominent MAGA media personality, has ramped up his focus on the issue in recent weeks, describing the fight for the right’s future as between “broligarchs” in the tech industry and the populist movement he champions.
“They have to be confronted,” Bannon said in an interview of AI companies. “They’re totally out of control.”
He called for more guardrails to be put in place for AI in the U.S., saying “it takes more regulation to open a nail salon on Capitol Hill” than exists to constrain AI.
“You have no idea where these things are going to end up,” Bannon added. “No idea. Maybe the most dangerous thing we’re dealing with right now.”
For Democrats, there’s an easy-to-follow narrative that makes sense to the liberal mind: The rich oligarchs are in tech; tech is driving AI; these data centers make everything run — so, if we get rid of the data centers, we can depower the rich oligarchs.
The Republican narrative is far more muddled. Economic conservatives want the free market to continue to drive AI innovation, but this message clearly isn’t resonating with the masses. According to Gallup, 63% of Republicans oppose the construction of local data centers. Just 34% support it.
It’s pretty crazy: On a national level, a slim majority, 53% of Americans, wouldn’t want a nuclear power plant built in their city — yet a whopping 71% oppose data centers.
Which means, we’re more scared of AI than nuclear mishaps!
These poll numbers are gonna be a siren’s call for Democratic strategists. It fires up grasroots activists, plays into their raging hatred for the “evil oligarchs,” and, best of all, the GOP can’t oppose them without losing nearly two-thirds of its base.
Which is why, tactically, the Dems will do what they’ve done before…
PRojection: Look for Democrats to increasingly tie environmental fearmongering to the AI and/or data center debate.
It’s old school watermelon politics: green on the outside, red on the inside. The green concerns are the Dems’ cover story — but what lurks beneath the surface is the actual endgame.
And that’s asserting government control over all aspects of the AI industry… including the wealth it generates.
To save Mother Earth, the Dems must destroy data centers! (Or own them. Either way is cool.)
The Dems did this with oil. They did it with carbon emissions. They invented “Inconvenient Truths” that tell an inevitable tale of dystopian despair — unless we wise up, give the Democrats more power, and save our children from this pending apocalypse.
It’ll be the exact same playbook: cherrypicked facts and outlandish predictions.
Justifying their opposition via environmental factors does two things. It rallies their left-wing base — while also building the legal justification for (more) government interference. The government has a legitimate role in protecting the environment, after all.
And because the GOP is unwilling or unable to defend data centers as a glorious free market success story, the Dems can do so with minimal pushback.
By 2028, data centers will be branded as environmental boogeymen — energy-sucking, drought-causing monsters that drain our nation dry. Get ready to hear a drumbeat of shocking facts, like Amazon’s data centers consuming 2.5 billion gallons of water in 2025. (Which is true.)
That’s a mindboggling number. Until you realize…
PRaise: To those who put these “shocking facts” in context.
Ars Technica’s June 12 article, “When It Comes to Total Water Use, AI Data Centers Are a Drop in the Bucket,” had a few mindboggling facts of its own. Sure, Amazon’s 2.5 billion gallons of water sounds like a lot, but did you know:
- We use 531 billion gallons of water a year on U.S. golf courses.
- California’s almond orchards consume 1.3 trillion gallons of water a year.
- U.S. lawns use 3.3 trillion gallons of water a year.
When you factor in AI’s potential benefits, its water usage is a bargain!
(And besides, is it really possible to “waste” water? Whenever you use it, it evaporates and returns to the atmosphere! We’re literally drinking the exact same water that dinosaurs did.)
PRedator: I’ve now been in Virginia for two weeks. And I gotta tell you, I really miss my Florida friends. Mostly my buddies from the neighborhood pub.
One of them is Larry, who retired in his early 50s from Verizon, where he helped manage the company’s… wait for it… data centers!
About a month before I left the Free State of Florida, the Reddit-reading, Bernie Sanders-supporting, pro-socialist bartender overheard Larry and I discussing data centers. This bartender (who’s actually a very nice kid) told Larry that data centers are an environmental disaster: They use too much power. They consume too much water. They pollute the city. They destroy lives.
Data centers are evil! No more data centers!
Larry tried to explain that he spent his entire career at data centers. Making sure they ran safely and efficiently was his life’s work. He delved into great detail, describing how the water is heated, cooled, and recycled within a closed system — and that these environmental scare tactics just aren’t true.
The bartender didn’t believe him. Even though he was speaking directly to an honest-to-God data center expert!
That’s the power of propaganda.
Make no mistake: The anti-data center side is currently winning. Their PR campaign is fully underway. And it’s growing by the minute.
Those of us who support innovation, technology, and the free market have a real fight on our hands.
Speaking of which, enjoy tonight’s UFC fight card. It’ll be one for the history books.
Let’s hope it’s remembered more like Louis vs. Schmeling II than Dempsey vs. Gibbons.
