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.

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On Sunday night, UFC star Josh Hokit secured a high-profile victory over Derrick Lewis at the UFC Freedom 250 event held on the White House’s South Lawn to celebrate the United States’ 250th anniversary and President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. However, following the victory, he went viral for all the wrong reasons.

During his post-match interview in the ring, Hokit took the opportunity to share a baseless conspiracy theory about former First Lady Michelle Obama.

‘Michelle Obama is a Man’

After his win over Lewis at the high-profile event on the White House lawn, Hokit addressed the crowd in attendance, where he pedaled a right-wing conspiracy theory that Michelle Obama is secretly a transgender woman.

“Michelle Obama is a man,” Hokit yelled into the microphone. “Am I right, America?”

Josh Hokit says “Michelle Obama is a man” after defeating Derrick Lewis on the White House lawn at UFC Freedom 250. pic.twitter.com/qBq4hl4TEx

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) June 15, 2026

Hokit then walked out of the ring to the cheers from the crowd.

Where Does This Conspiracy Come From?

Obviously, there is no basis to this claim, but the conspiracy theory has persisted for more than a decade and has been peddled by the usual suspects like Alex Jones and Jason Whitlock, despite consistent fact-checks.

Snopes has provided a very thorough history of the consistently debunked conspiracy theory, as well as an explanation as to why it persists. The theory dates back to at least 2008, but it picked up steam in 2014 when the late comedian Joan Rivers was filmed on the streets of New York City claiming that Michelle was transgender and Barack Obama was gay.

Since then, the theory has been amplified and spread, with one Republican state representative in Kentucky even sharing the theory on his Facebook account.

“These claims will likely not go away,” Newly Paul, an associate professor of print/digital media at the University of North Texas, told Snopes via email. “They seem rooted in spite, sexism, and racism, which fact-checks cannot cure.”

Different aspects of the conspiracy theory have been continually debunked on Snopes, PolitiFact, USA Today, Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Reuters, but it still persists. And thanks to the UFC and Hokit, it was amplified at a massive sporting event watched by millions of people.

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