Royce White Announces Run for Senate With New Conspiracy Theory

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 must #InvestigateMaui… The presence of advanced weapons and technology, is reason enough for We The People to demand answers on behalf of our fellow citizens in Hawaii. Anybody who strikes down an investigation is hiding something. I’m running for US Senate in 2024. pic.twitter.com/4zIu2xLm0h
— Royce White 🇺🇸 (@Highway_30) August 17, 2023