The Company They Keep

Josh Hokit is a known quatity. So is the president who put him on a stage.

He has done this before.

Following a fight in 2025, heavyweight MMA fighter Josh Hokit said the identical disgusting remarks about Michelle Obama that he said last night on the White House lawn. After a UFC bout in January 2026, he said the same thing about Brittney Griner. [I’m not repeating the remarks here.]

Patterns of behavior reveal character. Hokit has revealed his, in public, on microphones, for years.

He was not originally on the card for UFC Freedom 250. He was added at the president’s personal request, who wanted to see Derrick Lewis fight. That addition put a man with a well-documented pattern of racist and misogynistic remarks about Black women on the largest stage of his career, inside an arena built on the South Lawn of the White House.

The president, too, has a pattern.

Donald Trump spent years promoting the lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. On the first day of his second term in office, he sought to end recognition of transgender and nonbinary people under federal law. In February 2026, he posted a video to Truth Social depicting the Obamas as apes. He deleted it. Nonetheless, the pattern accumulates.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken just before the event found that only 16% of Americans felt it was appropriate to hold UFC fights at the White House. Forty-six percent said it was not. Even among Republicans, support reached only 31%.

The whole event was grossly wrong and out of touch.

The people sitting ringside at the event included the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the FBI Director, the Defense Secretary, the Speaker of the House, and an assortment of tech billionaires and celebrities.

Joe Rogan held the microphone. When Hokit finished, Rogan said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Josh Hokit,” and the broadcast moved on.

Nobody corrected Hokit.

Dana White, President of the UFC, eventually texted TIME magazine that he was “completely against saying nasty and false things about people’s families.” Robert Griffin III called it a disgrace, and noted that it takes a particular smallness to use your biggest moment to attack a woman by questioning her womanhood, especially given the history of deploying that specific weapon against Black women. Jemele Hill, Don Lemon, and others said what needed to be said.

I did not watch the event, but having perfect context is not the problem here. I don’t care about Josh Hokit, but I do care about our character, and the questions we each need to answer:

What conversations do you permit around you? What do you feel an obligation to address? What does your silence say to everyone watching?

I know my answer. In the presence of racism, of misogyny, of transphobia, of the particular cruelty of using a person’s identity as a punchline, I do not stay quiet. Not because I am looking for a fight. Because silence, in those moments, is its own position.

The people at that event won’t spend a moment looking at their own silence. They just don’t care about the company they keep.

But we do. Because our character matters to us.

And that’s worth fighting for.