Dana White denounces Josh Hokit’s ‘nasty’ Michelle Obama slur

Dana White had a message for Josh Hokit after UFC Freedom 250.

After knocking out Derrick Lewis in the fourth fight of the evening on the White House South Lawn on Sunday night, Hokit seized his post-fight interview with Joe Rogan to credit President Trump for “having the balls” to stage the event, deliver a crude remark about the mother of Alex Pereira, and land on “Michele Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”

Josh Hokit just called Michelle Obama a man in front of Donald Trump at the White House pic.twitter.com/NiOqsxp2Fm

— Happy Punch (@HappyPunch) June 15, 2026

Rogan, who responded to Hokit’s transphobic remarks about Brittney Griner at UFC 324 in January by laughing and framing Griner as merely “catching strays,” declined to challenge any of it.

White did.

“I understand that the Obamas are public figures, but I’m completely against saying nasty and false things about people’s families,” White told TIME’s Sean Gregory in a text message. “Everyone knows my position on free speech, but I hate that kind of nonsense.”

It’s a more substantive response than what White offered after the Griner remarks, when “I didn’t love it” was the full extent of his public position that stopped well short of doing anything about it. Hokit went on to beat Curtis Blaydes at UFC 327 in Miami in April, and that performance was compelling enough that White overrode his own misgivings and added Hokit to the White House card as a last-minute opponent for Lewis, after Trump personally asked why Lewis had been left off the lineup.

That sequence of decisions put Hokit on the South Lawn with a microphone, and he used it the same way he has used every microphone the UFC has handed him.

What Hokit did on Sunday night was not the unhinged improvisation of a fighter drunk on adrenaline. Instead, it was a calculated, premeditated act of bigotry executed on the most symbolically resonant piece of real estate in the country, before a national television audience, with the implicit blessing of everyone who put him there. There is no free speech principle capacious enough to launder what it actually was: a man using the White House lawn as a stage to traffic in transphobic slurs against a Black woman, to the delight of a crowd that had been primed for exactly this kind of performance.

White knew exactly who he was booking. He booked him anyway, at the explicit request of the President of the United States, for an event that was billed as a celebration all Americans could enjoy. Hokit made sure that wasn’t true.