Royce White is the Republican candidate for US Senate from Minnesota. His qualifications for the position aren’t the usual ones. He’s never held elective office, graduated from college, or served in the military. The Wikipedia article about him devotes the most space to his basketball career. He led his high school team to the state championship in 2009 and was named Minnesota’s Mr. Basketball that same season. He then accepted a scholarship from the University of Minnesota but left school before playing in a single game. The problem was brushes with the criminal law: some shoplifting and disorderly conduct at the Mall of America, a laptop theft in a dormitory that his lawyer negotiated down to trespassing. White transferred to Iowa State, where he played one season and was named to the All Big 12 first team. He entered the NBA draft and was selected in the first round by the Houston Rockets.
White only ever played in a few NBA games. The main culprit was unrelated to basketball skills—he has mental health challenges, preeminently acute anxiety, including an intense fear of flying, which is how NBA teams get from city to city. His career flamed out rapidly, unless you count some productive seasons playing for the Reno Bighorns and the Rio Grande Valley Vipers. He was in 2018 the NBL scoring champion as a member of the London Lightning—London, as in London, Ontario, Canada. He’s also fought in UFC mixed martial arts bouts and played in the 3-on-3 basketball league co-founded by the rapper Ice Cube.
Sometime around in here White started piping up on political questions. He’d shave his head and write messages on his bare scalp denigrating the World Bank and, on another occasion, declaring “Alex Jones was right.” (Alex Jones is the conspiracy theorist best known for arguing that the mass shooting of kindergartners at the Sandy Hook school was a staged operation set up by the government to defame supporters of gun rights.) On social media, some of his favorite targets have been homosexuals, Jews, and women who are “too mouthy.” Predictably, this kind of slop attracted the attention of Trump’s friend Steve Bannon. White has been a guest on Bannon’s podcast and, now that Bannon is in prison, has served as a guest host. His connection to the upper echelon of the MAGA brigade has raised his profile in Minnesota. A couple years ago, he ran for US House, but was defeated in the Republican primary by someone moderately less nutty than he. One upshot of that race: a watchdog group lodged a complaint alleging that White had misappropriated more than $150,000 in campaign funds for personal use, including $1200 at a strip club in Miami. The candidate did not exactly deny the charge. He says he paid back the money and that he liked the food at the strip club.
So that was 2022. This year, he won the Republican party’s endorsement for US Senate at their convention last spring. On Tuesday, he won the Republican primary by 10 points over his nearest rival. His campaign website is here. It’s an eyeful. I see that he emphasizes being a dad, and I understand he has four kids, though as far as I know he’s never married. That might be bad if he was a Democrat, especially considering that his name turns up in searches of family law records in at least two Minnesota counties—he’s been behind in court-ordered child support payments in both venues.
I understand that Republicans don’t like being called “weird,” but this is their endorsed candidate for US Senate. Delegates to their state party convention plucked him from the field and the choice was then ratified by GOP primary voters. They should be thankful if the normies planning to vote for Amy Klobuchar have settled upon calling them only “weird.”
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