WATCH: American UFC star attacks Australian govt, press on live TV for jailing pregnant woman over FB post

Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter Sean Strickland took on Australia's mainstream media during a live press conference Wednesday, after reporters claimed to not know about the government's arrest of a young pregnant woman for a FB post opposing lockdowns.

Populist outside the ring

The 32-year-old California native has made a name for himself acting “out of the box."

At a press conference down under, where he is preparing for his championship fight on September 10th in the UFC, the world's largest MMA promotion, Strickland again excited his fan base, attacking the reporters who were there to cover him.

FB police

Strickland started his off-script remarks at the presser with criticism of the heavy-handed treatment of lockdown opponents by the Australian police. 

It must be talked about. You guys did throw a pregnant woman in jail over a FB post during Covid. That must be talked about. Shame on you guys. 

Strickland, wearing a “Cancel Me” t-shirt, then focused on the government policies that the police were enforcing.

Here's the thing Australia. I would like you guys so much better if you had a freedom of speech, so if you could go ahead and make a freedom of speech like the greatest country in the world, we would get along better. 

'I mean, how is that not standard with you guys? How do you not have a freedom of speech? You have a government that can say: “If you say something we don't like, we will throw you in prison,” how . . . do you rationalize that?'

In Donald Trump fashion, Strickland took on the mainstream media directly, turning the presser into an interview of the journalists as he prodded them to justify the police-state measures. 

How do you feel about that? 

When a reporter asked, “which woman was this”, Strickland blasted him for claiming to not know about the violation of the pregnant woman's rights even though the story had already made the rounds on alternative media.

It was all over the news, how do you not know about that?'

KGB tactics? Not in Australia …

A second reporter then made the mistake of assuming that Strickland must have confused Australia with a nation in which KGB tactics are used to harass opponents of government policy, as reported by Daily Mail.

A reporter then asked Strickland: 'Are you confusing us with Russia?'

Strickland replied: 'No, I'm saying there was a pregnant woman who was thrown in jail during Covid.  

Yes, in Australia

Search results for “Australia, Facebook Post, Arrest” in X, formerly Twitter, reveals a litany of posts about Zoe Buhler, the pregnant woman with whom the reporters claimed to not be familiar. 28 years-of-age at the time she was arrested in front of her small children, in September 2020, police charged her with promoting an anti-lockdown protest on Facebook.

The video of her arrest was shared more than 10 million times and, possibly as a result of the exposure, Victoria Police delayed her trial. Then, after two years of anxiety and mounting legal fees, the government dropped the case, though the extraordinary use of police to protect the government from criticism continues to draw attention from Strickland and others.

Championship fight to defend against communism

Winning 27 of his 32 MMA fights, Strickland ranks 5th in the UFC's middleweight division and is scheduled to fight the current champion in that weight class, Israel Adesanya, whom Strickland accuses of inappropriately touching his dog and “swearing allegiance to China.”

Adesanya, in fact, spent part of his kickboxing career in China after being born in Nigeria and before relocating to New Zealand.

Adesanya, for his part, has stood his ground, defending his ties the communist nation and promising to knock Strickland out, “in the name of China.”

Socialist Past

Strickland's opposition to communist China is particularly noteworthy considering his previous affiliation with socialists, which he attributes to a rough childhood and a racist grandfather to whom he turned when his relationship with his parents broke down.

I actually went through this weird neo-Nazi, white supremacist phase when I was younger, and I got kicked out of school for, like, hate crimes, all this crazy sh*t. I was just so angry, and I had a lot of f***ed up influences in my life, that it felt so good to . . . hate something. I would walk down the street with just a knife or like a rock hoping to kill somebody. . . . 

My grandfather was this big piece of sh*t. When you’re a kid, you don’t see that, you hero-worship him. My grandfather was, like, 6-foot-7 ... he just kind of filled your head with crazy sh*t. Because you’re in seventh grade, spouting off Nazi [ideology].

Strickland deeply regrets his racist past, which he turned away from in his early teens.

[T]here's no privilege for being like racist, so I resented [my grandfather for persuading me to be a neo-Nazi] a big majority of my life for you know filling my head with that . . .

I grew out of it when I started training . . . I was like 14, 15. But i mean you're talking like, I would walk through school with like a big permanent swastika swastika on my arm  . . . I had no idea what . . . it meant. I’m in elementary school, I’m in seventh grade, I don’t know what . . . that means. 

Then I started training and the moment I started training I was like . . . I don’t hate anybody. Everyone’s cool. Then a lot of people who helped me out in my life, they weren’t white. . . . So that was a weird thing to deal with, and you also feel ashamed. Now, you feel shame because your entire life you’ve been spouting off this rhetoric — again I’m being a kid — and the next thing you know people are helping you and they’re not even . . .  white. 

Strickland's rejection of National Socialism (Nazism) complements his rejection of communist China, as both forms of socialism are properly placed together on the left end of the political spectrum, as explained by the John Birch Society.

• In his early years, Benito Mussolini was a leading member of the Italian Socialist Party, which was composed of socialists and communists. His 1932 manifesto . . . presented a statist, totalitarian philosophy completely compatible with communism: “Everything in the State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State.”
• Since both communism and fascism are totalitarian by definition (total government control of everything) . . . they both belong on the left end of the spectrum, 
• The full name of Hitler’s Nazi Party . . . was National Socialist German Workers Party, and like Mussolini, Hitler adopted the corporate socialist political-economic model. . . .
• Hitler’s Nazi “stormtroopers,” the street-fighting SA Brownshirts, were composed largely of “Beefsteak Nazis”: “Red (communist) on the inside, brown (Nazi) on the outside.” Many of these notorious communist thugs switched back and forth (from Communist Party, to Nazi Party, and back to Communist), largely indifferent to the minor ideological differences, serving whoever was in power.

Please see our earlier article on Nazis and communists:

Fascist anti-fascists; Antifa exposed; Fake political spectrum puts National Socialists on the Right