BUZZ
Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta agrees
A Boston College historian recently complained that a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House is related to the “impulse” that led to lynching black people in the 19th century.
Heather Richardson joined Jim Acosta’s YouTube show to discuss the mixed martial arts event held on Sunday, June 14, dubbed UFC Freedom 250.
Richardson, a frequent Trump critic, cited her self-proclaimed expertise on Abraham Lincoln.
She said during the Gilded Age there was no “open display of denigration of American symbols and American values” like there supposedly is now.
She then praised people like JD Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie for saying they were “offering a way forward for the United States.”
Richardson then said Trump “is deliberately tear that apart and he is doing so on the same cultural argument of course that people used to back the first Gilded age that is these cultural wars that turn white Americans against marginalized people of color.”
“Right,” Acosta agreed.
The historian then concluded:
I mean it’s not really a stretch to say that the same impulse that created the UFC fight on the White House lawn is the impulse that really pushed lynching in the late 19th century against black Americans overwhelmingly but also against Italian-Americans in Louisiana for example or Mexican-Americans in the American West or indigenous Americans in the American that idea somehow a really fake idea by the way that America is a white nation and anybody who challenges that needs to be purged from the body politic.
However, many people did think it was a “stretch” to compare a fighting match to the racist lynching of people.
“I don’t understand how Heather Cox Richardson comparing a (bombastic, dumb, Trump-aggrandizing) UFC fight at the White House to **lynching**, or anything in the same moral universe as lynching, is remotely intelligent or useful historical analysis,” liberal journalist Jesse Singal wrote on X.
“The extent to which successful hyperpartisan media types are locked in echo chambers in which they are constantly congratulated for saying ridiculous things… it’s not great,” Singal said. “Even setting aside the shoddiness of the analysis all it does it reinforce RW populist sentiments.”
Heather Cox Richardson is not an historian—she’s an IQ test, and anyone that takes her seriously is telling on themselves. https://t.co/Bv9nDylY6d
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) June 17, 2026
RealClearInvestigations journalist Mark Hemingway commented: “Heather Cox Richardson is not an historian—she’s an IQ test, and anyone that takes her seriously is telling on themselves.”
Some political takes are bad. Some are lazy. Some are so ridiculous you almost have to read them twice just to make sure you heard them correctly.
This one may be in a category all by itself.
Heather Cox Richardson actually said, “it’s not really a stretch to say that the same… pic.twitter.com/RrQMeUveb9
— Donnie Cope (@dcopechatter) June 16, 2026
