August 23, 2023

Royce White Announces Run for Senate With New Conspiracy Theory

The former NBA player turned MAGA ran unsuccessfully for Congress in a 2022 Republican primary.

Mother Jones illustration; Getty; Richard Rodriguez/Getty

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Royce White announced that he will be running for U.S. Senate in 2024, according to a video posted to his Twitter account. This came within days of a debut of a new conspiracy theory: That “advanced weapons” were related to the horrific fires in Hawaii.

In 2022, White, the former first-round NBA draft pick and George Floyd protest leader, ran for Congress as a protege of Steve Bannon in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District. He finished with 37 percent of the vote in the Republican primary.

That was a high number considering his central positions. As I explained in a profile last year:

[White’s] current politics could be described as tinfoil hat populism. He believes that the Democrats, Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, President Xi Jinping, the CCP, non-MAGA Republicans, George Soros, “millennial purple-haired white liberal women,” “the Church of LGBTQ,” the National Basketball Association, and various government agencies all act on behalf of the same “global corporate community.”

I wrote about White’s confusing and confounding journey last August. A top NBA prospect, White left the league after objections to the league’s lack of a mental health policy. It was a prescient protest that earned White a level of notoriety and media coverage that ranged from dismissive to fawning. But by 2021, he had flipped. 

In his born-again-Republican origin story, White says he was cast into the political wilderness after the NBA refused to meet his demand for better mental health policies. (He calls it his first run-in with globalism.) In 2020, he reemerged as one of the voices of the Black Lives Matter movement in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd set off national protests. As Royce stood on a bridge overlooking the Mississippi River, he told a reporter the protest gave “that feeling of Selma back in the ’60s.” The Washington Post described him as “one of the freshest emerging leaders in this new civil rights moment.” He’s since rejected BLM because, he says, the movement prefers Black men to be “dead, gay, sold out, or on the wrong end of sexual harassment, or Me Too allegations.”

White now plays for the Big 3 professional basketball league and has used his platform as of late to issue support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and to call for an investigation into whether “advanced weapons” caused the tragic wildfires in Maui. 

In 2024, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar is up for reelection, and Axios reported that half a dozen would-be Republican contenders have no plans to run. As of Tuesday evening, White had not yet filed a candidacy with the FEC. 

When reached for comment White told Mother Jones: “Take your White liberal racism back to yuppyville… Cuck.” When pressed whether that was confirmation that he was running for U.S. Senate in Minnesota in 2024, White replied, “Congratulations buddy… You’re the Please Call Me Crazy “Cuck of the Week.” (“Please Call Me Crazy” is the name of White’s podcast.)

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate