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I had never heard of Josh Hokit until the other week. But the little I quickly learned about the immigrant-bashing, trans-hating Ultimate Fighting Championship fighter was enough to guess, correctly, that Hokit was the man behind the UFC Freedom 250’s most despicable moment on Sunday.
“Michelle Obama is a man,” Hokit belted out. “Am I right, America?”
The slur, which came during a post-fight interview with Joe Rogan, was met with a mix of cheers and boo’s. Others, like Rogan, seemed taken aback, appearing to wonder: Even for a corruption-soaked night already teeming with vulgarity, did this Hokit guy go too far?
UFC president and CEO Dana White seems to think so. “I’m completely against saying nasty and false things about people’s families,” he has since told Time. But what had White been expecting? Here was a man made notorious through “nasty and false” insults. As Kyle Green, a sociologist who writes on the intersection of sports and politics, told me in advance of Sunday’s spectacle:
There’s also Josh Hokit, who’s going to fight on the [White House card]. People who know him from his days as a college wrestler say he’s just playing a character in the UFC. But when he gets in front of the mic now, he wears an American flag bandana, and he says that he wants to kick Mexicans out of the country, or he’ll say that he wants to beat up transgender people, that Brittney Griner is a man. He’ll say the most offensive things, leaning into the MAGA fan base. Again, I don’t know if he believes it or not. But it doesn’t really matter, right? Because that’s the thing that sells.
It’s the kind of behavior long excused as “smack talk,” fighting words intended to antagonize one’s opponent. But over the past decade, the UFC’s bear-hug embrace of more distinctly hateful rhetoric follows the contours of the broader permission President Trump gave to such language. It also, as Green told me, speaks to the increasing pressures some fighters have to play characters they think will appeal to their fanbases:
Trump has enabled it, and that’s how I think about it outside of the UFC. We see people, whether it’s online or on the street, much more willing to say racist and sexist things. I don’t think he caused it, but I think he’s enabled it. What fighters have to do now, [taunting and smack-talking], is, in part, because the UFC labour model is a really grotesque one, in that fighters are technically independent contractors with very few protections and rights. It’s very different from boxing, where they have the Muhammad Ali Act.
Which isn’t to say that Hokit may not believe the cruelty that animated his slur on Sunday night. Nor is it to solely blame the UFC’s terrible labor rights for incentivizing it. Because to even contemplate Hokit’s motivations is to extend this man unearned, far-too-generous consideration. Hurling a vulgar insult against a Black former first lady during a White House event, ostensibly to honor America’s 250th birthday, is a choice—and Hokit enjoyed making it. Let reminders of it attach itself to every oligarch, Republican, Trump family member, and corporation that went along with this cage fight.
