In a perfect demonstration of why more education on LGBTQ+ identities is needed, UFC featherweight Bryce Mitchell has said that he has chosen homeschooling to prevent his son “turning gay.”
Arguably, this was the tamest part of an unhinged rant in which he shared bizarre takes on everything from vaccines to Edgar Allan Poe.
In an Instagram video where he sat on the couch holding his infant son, Mitchell set the tone for the rant by calling vaccines poison. “I want to encourage ya’ll not to vaccinate your children because I think it’s bad for their health,” he said. “It could potentially k*ll them. Give them some type of… make them autistic. Seriously, these vaccines are poisonous. Don’t vaccinate your kids.”
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Mitchell, who has previously come out as a flat Earther and mass shooter denier, went on to enlighten us with his thoughts on classical literature. “My son ain’t gonna be reading no Edgar Allan Poe,” he said. “He’s going to be reading the Bible. That’s just how it is and I’m just telling you, if you don’t teach your kid these things, it’s gonna be fed right to the devil and we’re not gonna let that happen here.”
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And finally, Mitchell explained why everyone who attended public school is apparently gay now. “We’re gonna have to homeschool all our kids or they’re going to end up turning gay and that’s the reason I’m gonna homeschool Tucker,” he said. “I don’t want him to be a communist, I don’t want him to worship Satan, and I don’t want him to be gay.”
Mitchell’s caption below the post included even more paranoid claims. Apparently, he heard (from a totally reliable source, we’re sure) that the Department of Homeland Security tried to take his son away for refusing to let doctors vaccinate him.
“We have to fite[sic] for our kids or evil will corrupt the next generation,” he wrote. “This country is so evil only God can save us.”
After all that, Mitchell concludes with the most wild claim yet—that there’s nothing hateful in his speech. “Remember i just got love in my heart so if sumone[sic] twists my words and makes me look like the bad guy, u will kno the real enemy,” he said.
While it would be easy to laugh this off as ravings of a delusional conspiracy theorist, Mitchell is unfortunately a public figure. He is ranked #12 in the featherweight division, which gives him a high degree of visibility in his sport. It also represents a vile trend of growing anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in the UFC, which has been mainly spearheaded by Sean Strickland. On Instagram, where Mitchell uploaded the rant, he has half a million followers.
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