Every fighter has heard the advice. Don’t read the comments. Mute, block, keep scrolling, go hit pads. It works fine when the worst thing under your training video is some guy with an egg avatar calling you washed. Belal Muhammad spent roughly 26 minutes on X in the early hours of Nov. 8 (GMT) explaining why that advice falls apart once the people doing the hating have TV contracts and campaign offices. He’s right, and the fan who told him to ignore it is living in 2011.
How the thread started
At 00:52 GMT, Muhammad quote-posted a fan account, @TruthfulUfcFan, which had written that something happening in MMA lately had left them “utterly disgusted.” The posts I’m working from don’t say what that something was, so I’m not going to guess. What Muhammad did lay out was a theory of how online ugliness changed shape.
People used to hide behind fake accounts to say the garbage they were too ashamed to say with their real names attached. “Now the masks are off,” he wrote. He said folks are so desperate to go viral that they don’t care whether the attention is good or bad, and that “Respect, decency, and basic humanity are being sacrificed for clicks and views.” Then came the line that landed hardest for me: “the saddest thing is People are starting to think this is normal.”
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That’s a guy noticing the temperature of the room went up and asking why everybody stopped sweating.
The reply that made the case
About 26 minutes after the first post, at 01:18 GMT, a user replied with the classic counter. Paraphrasing: it’s easy to not care what others say, so why give it any attention or time?
Muhammad’s answer is the best thing he posted all night. He agreed it used to be easy to ignore and keep moving. Then he named who’s talking now: “It’s politicians, news anchors, and people with huge platforms openly spreading hate.” He said it’s wild how easily people can be manipulated and lied to until they hate an entire group. And he said it gets a lot harder to scroll past when the target is your religion, your people, or your friends, and they’re being attacked and dehumanized.
He closed it out with this: “At some point, ignoring it starts to feel like accepting it.”
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The scroll-past crowd treats all online hate as the same background noise. It’s a bad read. A troll with 11 followers is a mosquito. A politician or a news anchor with millions of eyeballs is a PA system. The fan’s advice works for the first and does nothing about the second, because the second doesn’t need your attention to spread. It already has everybody’s.
And look at the word Muhammad picked. Dehumanized. Nobody is asking him to clap back at people who think his wrestling-heavy style is boring. He’s talking about whole groups of people getting treated like they aren’t people. You can shrug off a bad take on your cardio. You can’t really shrug off that.
Fight fans should get this better than anybody
I love a great villain. I love press conference chaos, the table flips, the stare-down that almost turns into a scrap before the cameras are even set. Fight promotion runs on people saying outrageous things, and it’s a blast.
But the fight villain has a contract and an end date. He talks trash about your chin, your coach, your record, and then the cage door shuts and somebody settles it. That bit has a referee. What Muhammad is describing has no bell, no judges, and no rematch clause. Going after an opponent’s takedown defense is promotion. Going after his entire faith is something else, and a sport that lives on viral clips should be the first to recognize when the clips stop being about fighting.
The clicks-and-views line hits close to home for this business, too. Plenty of people in combat sports have figured out the algorithm doesn’t care whether you’re loved or loathed, only whether you’re watched. Muhammad basically called that out while standing inside the same attention economy. Takes some nerve.
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The governor joke is why it works
Here’s my favorite part. At 00:56 GMT, four minutes after his first post, a user named @Leroided replied, “Wow Belal. This is really profound and philosophical.” Hard to tell how much sarcasm was baked into that, but Muhammad’s response was perfect: “I’m running for governorr.” Extra r and everything.
That’s the tell that he isn’t climbing onto a soapbox and refusing to come down. He made a serious point, got poked, laughed at himself, and then came back 22 minutes later with his sharpest argument of the night. Preachy people can’t do that. Confident people can.
I can’t stand fighters who duck, and you can duck a conversation the same way you duck a contender. The easy move for any athlete with a brand to protect is to post a training clip, say nothing, and let the timeline burn. Muhammad picked the harder option at 1 a.m. on a Saturday night (GMT). Keep scrolling is advice for people who can afford it. He just told you he can’t.
