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Vice President Vance on Wednesday called the reaction to the offensive comment made about former first lady Michelle Obama at the “Freedom 250 UFC” event on the White House’s South Lawn “totally disproportionate.”
The vice president talked about UFC fighter Josh Hokit in a nearly three-hour-long interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Hokit had told a crowd at the White House during the fight last month, “Michelle Obama is a man, am I right America?”
Host Joe Rogan moved on to the topic after asking what was more shocking, Hokit’s remark or his armbar fighting techniques, prompting Vance to laugh and say, “Definitely the armbar part.” Rogan then pushed back on the remark about Obama, saying it was not “the best thing to say at the White House.”
“Fair, but the reaction to it to me was still totally disproportionate,” Vance replied. “Dude, people say stuff all the time. OK, I live –– I work in a business where, obviously, people make life and death decisions all the time. And I’m always a little bit caught off guard by the culture that just overreacts, when clearly the thing that Josh is trying to get is the overreaction in the first place, right?”
Vance said people can say the comment was “offensive … and you get on with the rest of your life,” but people, instead, “kind of lose their minds.” He compared Hokit’s remark with the racist tropes said by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at the start of a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden in October 2024, where Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating pile of garbage.”
“I’m like, ‘He told a joke,’ and the person’s response is, ‘Well, it’s not a very funny joke,'” Vance continued. “And my response to that is, ‘You know, what happens when somebody tells me a joke that’s not funny? I don’t laugh, and then I move on with my life.’ This whole industry around outrage, especially getting outraged around humor, I think is actually really hurting the country.”
Vance laughed after Rogan said he told Hinchcliffe that making a “racial joke” was “going to get you stabbed.”
Rogan previously slammed Hokit’s remark last month. He said then and with Vance that Hokit has his own character, his own “shtick” as a “pro-wrestling bad guy” who should not have been invited to fight if they wanted to avoid any controversy.
Hokit, in response to the backlash, previously said he was giving the former first lady a “compliment” and refused to backtrack.
“It’s more like she knows how to deal with adversity, she knows how to work hard like a man when the times get tough,” he told podcaster and UFC journalist Ariel Helwani. “It was a perfect opportunity to show the world how great this country is with freedom of speech.”
Trump ally and UFC boss Dana White also condemned the comments, telling Time magazine that he was “completely against saying nasty and false things about people’s families.”
Hokit’s comments were an apparent reference to a baseless conspiracy theory that has taken hold on the political right in recent years about the former first lady, remarks that were widely panned by critics and even some supporters of the president.
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