Actor Mel Gibson, ever the conduit for bizarre controversies surrounding his career, was put down for the count on social media after a video from a UFC fight showed him saluting former President Donald Trump.
Neither Gibson nor Trump served in the military.
A video, posted to TikTok, showed the former President arriving at the fight to some cheers and applause.
In the background, you can see someone lift their hand in a clear salute to Trump.
That person was confirmed to be Mel Gibson.
You can see the footage here:
@omar #DonaldTrump at #UFC264 #UFC @ufc
Snopes.com, a website dedicated to finding the truth out about urban legends, internet myths and memes, confirmed it was Gibson.
Gibson's history of making homophobic, misogynistic and anti-semitic comments put him ideologically in line with Trump.
In 2010, Gibson was taped calling his ex Oksana Grigorieva, using the n-word multiple times and threatening her with sexual violence.
Gibson also infamously went on an anti-semitic tirade against a police officer who arrested him for driving under the influence, saying "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."
He also called Winona Ryder an "oven dodger," an awful term meant to describe a Jewish person who avoided being killed in a death camp under the Nazis.
Gibson's father, Hutton, moved the family from New York to Australia in 1968 when Mel was 12 and cited keeping his older son from being drafted as a reason at the time. Hutton Gibson was a well-known antisemitic, White supremacist Catholic traditionalist who called the Holocaust "mostly fiction."
Trump's father Fred Sr. was connected with pro-Hitler, pro-Nazi organization Amerikadeutscher Bund in New York before the United States entered WWII. On May 31, 1927, Fred Trump was arrested by police while participating in a Ku Klux Klan march in Queens.
For many, these apples didn't fall far from their family trees.
Gibson has not stated whether or not the salute was intentionally, unironically directed toward Trump, but the video evidence is fairly damning for him.
It seems there is little Mel Gibson can do to outrun his unpleasant reputation at this stage in his career.
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