Are you still working with them?

I'm one of them.

Yes.

So Project for Responsive Democracy is a 501c4 political advocacy nonprofit that I helped to start in 2024 in order to fiscally sponsor this ballot initiative attempt to divest Pittsburgh from countries engaged in practices like genocide and to support other forms of innovation and practices of direct democracy in Pennsylvania and beyond.

So my research at Arizona State for the past five years or so has been focused on ballot initiatives and specifically how movements and advocacy organizations and labor unions can strategically use direct democracy can use ballot initiatives to advance their causes in places and times where you can't pass, for example, a given policy through the existing legislature for one reason or another.

So that was sort of my research, excuse me, that was my research area.

I've never done any organizing in electoral politics myself.

ask how you like formulated your demand, basically kind of what went into determining what your actual ask was of the city of Pittsburgh.

Yeah, for sure.

So UFC as a company has worked pretty openly since 2016 to connect itself to the MAGA movement.

Like in that moment when Trump was first running for president, when you had a bunch of sports controversies coming out of the Black Lives Matter movement with like, you know, Colin Kaepernick taking a knee in the NFL, you had people in the NBA, you know, the NBA was making signals to the Black Lives Matter movement.

And UFC and Dana, why the president Dana White really went out of their way to market themselves as like the anti-woke sport.

Like if you're, if you're a man specifically, who's like sick of the NFL and sick of all this woke stuff, you can come over here and watch people beat each other up in a way that's like not woke, you know, they like really went out of their way to do that.

Dana White endorsed, um, uh trump in 2016 and he went on to actually introduce trump at the uh 2024 rnc so they've like really merged these worlds joe rogan obviously who's like you know avatar of the sort of cultural uh manosphere right um you know got his his start in that world um as a ufc announcer obviously he was a you know a comedian before that and he was like a martial artist he did taekwondo or some but he was one of the initial UFC announcers of this sort of rebrand.

And that's how he kind of got his start in that world.

So, you know, kind of what is it that we can kind of do or look out to or look toward to push back against?