While UFC Freedom 250 played out on the White House lawns Sunday night, with President Donald Trump and UFC chief Dana White staging an entrance from the Oval Office, a very different kind of event was getting underway 200 miles north. In New York City, Jane Fonda and a roster of Hollywood and media figures launched "Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment," a show featuring drag queens, group breathing exercises, and singalongs aimed at countering the president's marquee fight night.
The contrast could hardly have been sharper. One event drew a massive live audience to watch professional fighters compete on the grounds of the executive mansion. The other assembled a familiar cast of entertainment-industry voices to talk about fascism and free speech, while offering no concrete policy alternative and, in at least one case, no evidence for its central claim.
Trump and White walked out of the Oval Office together to kick off UFC Freedom 250, Breitbart reported. The setting, the South Lawn of the White House, gave the event a scale and visual punch that no arena could match. Whatever one thinks of mixing combat sports with presidential pageantry, the crowd showed up, the cameras rolled, and the spectacle landed.
Almost simultaneously, Fonda's concert began in New York City. The listed speakers and performers included Bette Midler, Joy Reid, Julia Roberts, Patti Smith, and Rufus Wainwright. Midler brought her daughter. Roberts brought what Breitbart characterized as "her anger", and a promise.
Roberts told the audience:
"If we keep inhaling and exhaling, we will prevail."
Breitbart noted that Roberts offered no evidence to support her theory. It is worth pausing on that line. The actress's proposed resistance strategy, breathing, is the kind of statement that sounds like parody but was apparently delivered in earnest. No policy prescription. No legislative agenda. No legal challenge. Just respiration as political action.
The concert operated under the banner of the Committee for the First Amendment, an organization with roots in 1947 Hollywood. Jane Fonda's father, actor Henry Fonda, formed the original committee that year when Hollywood figures were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The elder Fonda's group was a response to real congressional subpoenas and real professional consequences for people in the film industry.
Jane Fonda revived the committee last October, framing it as a response to what she described as a perceived rise in authoritarian practices and attacks on free speech. The word "perceived" matters. The original committee answered a specific government action, compelled testimony before Congress. The revived version appears to answer a feeling, not a statute or a subpoena.
That distinction tells you a great deal about the gap between the 1947 version and the 2025 reboot.
The New York City show included drag queen performers, group deep-breathing exercises, and audience singalongs. These were not side attractions. They were, by all available descriptions, featured elements of the evening's programming.
Set aside the politics for a moment and consider the optics from a pure counterprogramming standpoint. The White House event featured professional athletes competing at the highest level of mixed martial arts. The New York event featured celebrities leading breathing exercises. One event projected strength and spectacle. The other projected anxiety and self-care.
If the goal was to offer an alternative vision that would appeal to persuadable Americans, the kind of voters who decide elections, it is difficult to see how singalongs and deep breathing accomplish that. If the goal was to reassure a like-minded audience that they are on the right side of history, the event may have succeeded on its own terms. But preaching to the choir is not a strategy. It is a comfort ritual.
The six named participants, Fonda, Midler, Reid, Roberts, Smith, and Wainwright, represent a cross-section of the entertainment and media establishment. Fonda has been a fixture of left-wing activism for more than half a century. Midler has spent years directing political commentary at the president on social media. Reid is a cable news host whose network has struggled with ratings. Roberts is one of Hollywood's biggest names. Smith is a punk-era icon. Wainwright is a singer-songwriter with a devoted following.
None of them hold elected office. None of them run government agencies. None of them will face voters in a primary or a general election. They are, in the most literal sense, performers, people whose professional skill is commanding attention on a stage.
That is not a disqualification from political speech. Everyone has the right to speak. But the event's own title, "A Concert for the First Amendment", invites a question: Who, exactly, is silencing these people? They had a stage, a microphone, an audience, and media coverage. The First Amendment appears to be functioning precisely as designed.
Breitbart described the concert as "the left's counterprogramming effort" against UFC Freedom 250. The framing is fair. The timing was deliberate. The event was designed to compete for attention with the White House spectacle.
But effective counterprogramming requires an audience beyond your own base. It requires a message that lands with people who are not already convinced. Julia Roberts telling a New York City crowd to keep breathing is not a message that travels to swing-state diners and union halls. It is a message that travels to Instagram stories and late-night monologues, environments where the left already dominates.
Social media critics noticed. Breitbart noted there was no shortage of commentary online about the event, though specific posts were not detailed. The general thrust was predictable: one side mocked the concert as out of touch, the other praised it as courageous resistance.
The Sunday night split screen revealed something that polling and punditry often obscure. The cultural divide in America is not just about policy. It is about energy. UFC Freedom 250 projected confidence, physicality, and mass appeal. "Rise Up, Sing Out" projected grievance, nostalgia, and exclusivity.
The original Committee for the First Amendment, the one Henry Fonda helped create in 1947, responded to a government body wielding subpoena power against private citizens. That was a concrete threat. The revived version responds to a president whom its members simply oppose, a president who, whatever his critics say, won a national election and governs with a mandate from voters.
Breathing exercises and drag performances are legal, protected, and harmless. They are also not a political program. They are not a policy agenda. They are not a path back to power for a party that has lost ground with working-class voters of every background.
When your best counterpunch to a White House fight night is a celebrity singalong, the problem is not the First Amendment. The problem is that you have nothing to say that the country wants to hear.
