June 15, 2022 • 21 mins
Royce White was best known for a brief and rocky stint in the NBA until 2020, when he re-emerged as a leader in protests against police brutality after George Floyd's murder. Now, he's running for Congress in his home state of Minnesota aligned with the far right wing of the Republican Party. Journalist David Gardner tells us how Royce White fell in with MAGA ideologues like Steve Bannon.
The Washington Post, How a former NBA player and activist became a far-right media darling
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Before we begin, a reminder to please rate and review
our show that helps new listeners discover us and grow
the program. On this episode of Sports Illustrated Weekly, Royce
White was a good college basketball player who was perhaps
best known for a short and bumpy stint in the
NBA until when he led several protests in Minnesota against
(00:24):
police brutality following the murder of George Floyd. At the time,
White was praised as an up and coming civil rights activist.
So how did that version of White, a black man,
end up falling in with maga ideologues like Steve Bannon?
And why is he running for Congress in Minnesota as
a right wing populist. Journalist David Gardner joins us to
(00:45):
explain how White became a favorite of the far right.
It's Wednesday, June fifteen. I'm your host, John Gonzalez from
Sports Illustrated and I Heart Radio. This is Sports Illustrated Weekly.
My name is Royce White, on a fifth generation Minnesota
and a product of the Twin Cities. But first and foremost,
(01:08):
I'm an American. I'm running for Congress because our leaders
have sold us out. David Gardner, Welcome to Sports Illustrated Weekly.
Great to be here, Thanks for having me, John. Yes,
so you wrote a must read piece about Royce White
in the Washington Post. Heavily reported, and David White is
sort of this fringe figure in pro sports. He wasn't
(01:30):
in the NBA for very long. He's tried his hand
at m n A for a minute, and yet he's
gotten quite a bit of media attention during his career
for reasons that we'll get into. But first tell us
a little bit about who Royce White is and why
you decided to write about his nascent political career. Yeah. Well,
if you're a college basketball fan like I am, then
you probably remember Royce had an absolutely spectacular season at
(01:51):
Iowa State. He lost to a great Kentucky team, but
they had a decent n c A tournament run. It
was a team loaded with transfers. He actually led the
n c A all five major statistical categories that season.
It was just an exceptional dominant player. Actually played sort
of ahead of his time. He's more of a small
ball oriented offense guy, and I think in today's NBA
(02:13):
he might have thrived more than he did ten years ago.
When he was drafted, he was a first round pick
and then, as I'm sure we're gonna get into, he
had some pretty notable battles with the NBA over their
mental health policy that sort of derailed his career. Yeah,
a lot of the conversation around him back then was
about his unwillingness to fly. He's a reluctant flyer. I
guess we might call him euphemistically. Tell us a little
(02:34):
bit about that, because he says that that's not why
he didn't make it in the NBA, and that it's
a convenient narrative for the NBA to say, oh, this
is why, and it really he says, wasn't about that. Yeah,
so pardon the terrible pun, but I'll just say that,
you know, he said that this narrative took off because
of the NBA, right, But what he says is that
he was always able to manage his anxiety. It was
(02:56):
triggered by flying, but he was able to manage it.
And I talked to Iowa state coaches who confirmed that
they actually had an assistant coach that he was very
close with who would sit with him during takeoff at
the times when his anxiety was most likely to trigger,
and throughout the flight keep him in conversation, keep him healthy,
keep him talking. And then he also flew when he
played for the Professional Basketball League in Canada too. They
(03:16):
didn't do a lot of flying, but he did it
when he was able to, when he needed to, And
so I am sympathetic to him in the sense that
I think that he was more willing to fly than
people give him credit for. At the same time, he
was trying to unfold a larger battle with the NBA
about their overall mental health policy, and in that way,
he was really well ahead of his time. Yeah, the
battle with the NBA and Royce White continues, at least
(03:39):
in one direction. He calls the n B a a
quote neoliberal, globalist, Marxist, radical materialist establishment, which is just
an incredible mouthful, and it's just one of the many
organizations and entities that he has a problem with. This
is a big grievance for him. Yeah, he considers the
NBA and many other large global corporation is to be
(04:00):
part of what he considers to be the corporate ocracy,
which is the merger of the government and large corporations
at a scale at which ultimately, I think the end result,
as he understands it is to strip everybody of their
individual American citizenship and to replace them with a global citizenship.
Of course, this is this kind of language is a
conspiracy theory that goes back as far as geopolitics goes back.
(04:24):
Sometimes there's lizard people behind it. Sometimes, unfortunately it's ethnic
minorities that are labeled as escapegoats in this situation. But
that's his understanding of his grievance against the NBA, which
particularly manifested it against David Stern, who he said that
he outlived because of prayer, even though David Stern is
about fifty years older than him. Yeah, you could also
take that into account. But so Royce White, I mean, look,
(04:46):
a lot of people have complicated, convoluted political beliefs. Certainly
athletes do as well, but he was not exactly an
athlete of renown, right, So normally, under usual circumstances, you
would expect him to be sort of relegated to a
innge figure that we only tangentially pay attention to, if
we pay attention to him at all. And yet he's
really had this resurgence in terms of people focusing on
(05:08):
what Royce White has to say. When did he first
pop back up? On the radar off the court. Yeah,
I think for most people, if they weren't paying attention
to his m m A career. And I think he's
only been in one fight. You'll have to fact check
me on that, but he does not have a stellar
mm A record, I think for most people and for
me certainly. He came back on to the scene after
the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Royce's from Minneapolis,
(05:30):
and he played his first season of college basketball, although
he never saw the court for the Minneapolis Gophers, and
he was out on the streets leading protests, and at
that time he was actually sounding in some ways very
similar to a lot of the liberal protesters. He was
talking about the police being outside the circle of trust
and wanting them to be back in the circle of trust.
(05:50):
But he has since sort of recast what he was protesting,
and he now says he was protesting like the Federal
Reserve and these other things that he takes issue you with. Yeah,
around the time of the George Floyd protests, he's out
in the streets, he's protesting with Black Lives Matter. He's
on MSNBC talking about policing issues. As you mentioned, sounded
(06:11):
at least to me, incredibly socially progressive, and yet, as
you mentioned, these days, something entirely different from his political position.
He's taken a very hard right turn. He's trumpeting a
lot of the sentiment you could hear from the MAGA
movement and the far right. How did he get involved
with and start espousing far right political views? So that
was my starting point with this story. I looked at
(06:33):
a guy who I read about actually in the Washington
Post two years prior to my feature, who was being
featured as an emerging civil rights activist, who was out
here on the streets, like you said, protesting the murder
of George Floyd. And then a couple of years go by,
and then I see him announce his campaign on Twitter,
and in his campaign he's criticizing Elan Umar and he's
(06:53):
saying some pretty outlandish things I would say. And so
then I look him up and it looks like he's
friends with Steve Bann. Now he's appearing on Alex jones
Is Info Wars program, which is a conspiracy theory show.
And I was just very surprised at how this happened.
So that's why I wanted to get in touch with
him and see how do you reconcile those two things?
How do you go from being a protester against police
(07:16):
brutality to being a far right congressional candidate. And the
answer in that sense is that he sort of went
down a YouTube rabbit hole that started with watching some
Steve Bannon videos, listening to Steve Bannon's war Room Pandemic podcast,
and then eventually becoming friends with Steve Bannon through the
Big Three, which was a sort of unlikely and unexpected
(07:36):
basketball connection that I did not anticipate finding when I
started the reporting. Royce White, who's the beginning of the
season in the Big Three league, really the reason why're
having him on. I think he's one of the most
original thinkers in this country now. But populism, nationalism, economic issues,
et cetera. Well, First, first, Eve, I want to say
to you, like I said you off air, I've been
following a war Room since the pandemic first broke out
(07:59):
of the ulan Um. I really appreciate the information you
were putting out at that time and work you continue
to do. Yeah, you mentioned some of the very strange
bedfellows that he finds himself interacting with, like Alex Jones,
who was d platform from Twitter and YouTube for all
sorts of conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation. Most notably, he was
sued and has gone bankrupt or filed for bankruptcy because
(08:21):
he had said that the Sandy Hook shootings were done
by crisis actors. And now he's also Royce White hanging
out with Steve Bannon, who was a major figure of
the far right of former and current advisor to former
President Trump. I'm really aggressive anti immigration nationalist with serious
racist undertones or even overtly racist views. He's also under
(08:43):
indictment for refusing to cooperate with the January six Committee.
White calls him a friend, David and a mentor and
the quote American hero. This seems to me to be
a very strange alliance. Yeah, he refers to him as
an American hero, and our conversations many times, not just
the one time that's er in the piece, but he
regularly referred to Bannon as an American hero. We didn't
(09:04):
have a chance to get into the piece. It was
already lengthdy as it was. But he also discussed that
he thought that Steve Bannon's current indictment, which you referenced
he's facing misdemeanor charges for refusing to cooperate with the
January six Commission. Is a product of a kangaroo court,
he said, and he does not respect the January six Commission.
Of course. Bannon also evaded felonies previously because of a
(09:26):
build the Wall campaign that he participated in. Two of
his co conspirators have since pleaded guilty to those felony
charges of money laundering, wire fraud, those sorts of things.
Bannon only got away with it because Donald Trump, his friend,
gave him a pardon, and so it is a really
really strange friendship. But I think if you look into
(09:46):
a little bit more closely, you start to understand. Mainly,
Bannon still enjoys an enormous platform. He's been d platform
by Twitter because he called for the beheading of Dr
Anthony Faucci, but he still has an enormously successful podcast,
radio show, television show that live streams, and Royce has
been able to develop an audience in the far right.
You don't see it on Twitter. He used to have
(10:07):
about five thousand followers on Twitter and now he's got
about a hundred thousand. But on these platforms like Getter
and Truth He's growing an enormous presence there. So White
gets access to Bannon's platform, he gets to put himself
out there. What does Bannon c in Royce White? Because
from Afar you see a guy, a black man who
(10:27):
was protesting on behalf of Black Lives Matter, who was
in the streets again protesting against George Floyd's murder. What
does Bannon see White as? Is he a good messenger
for their brand of politics? I mean, what is Bannon
getting out of this? Yeah? Well, I think it's important
to note here that you know, some people when I
talked to them about Royce, people who know him well,
(10:48):
some people were worried that he was just sort of
playing the part. And I think a lot of people
on the left have this conspiracy or this thought that
a lot of people on the right are disingenuous with
their beliefs, but they're just trying to get famous because
of them, or you can get a lot of reach
tweets or likes on your Twitter accounts. Royce actually, when
we talked, his views are in alignment with Steve Bannon,
and in fact, Bannon multiple times during our conversations said
(11:10):
that Royce White was to the right of him, and
I don't think that there are very many people in
the United States who are to the right of Steve Bannon.
Now Steve Bannon, if you're a cynic also gets something
out of Royce White, which is that he adds a
bit of diversity to his movement, which has previously been
associated primarily with white nationalism. And so he adds a
(11:32):
guy and he says it in the piece, he said,
here's a guy, here's a black guy who's talking about
real issues. And later on he says, the people on
his right criticize him for incorporating people who are black,
who are Jewish, who are Hispanic into his movement, but
he sees that as the future of America. He doesn't
think that he can enact the kind of change that
he wants to be able to enact without being able
(11:54):
to bring minorities into the bold from the people around
Royce White, because I'm with you from afar, the cynical
part of me goes, Okay, this is just a transactional
relationship between White and these fringe far right figures so
he can gain some sort of popularity or notoriety. What
it was, friends and teammates and former coaches who know
(12:15):
him best have to say about the attorney's taken. Yeah.
I spoke with countless people who have played with him
at all levels of basketball, people who have coached him
at all levels of basketball, and everybody sort of has
their theory because Royce doesn't maintain relationships with a lot
of people in that world anymore, and so these are
just people who are from afar observing what's happened with Royce.
(12:38):
Some people said that, you know, he's always been a
sort of conspiratorial guy, and so it's not too surprising
to them that ultimately he ended up finding these far
right conspiracy theories and identifying with them. Some people thought
that perhaps he was just doing it for a platform.
I had one NBA coach tell me that he was
just going to chase a check wherever he could find it.
I didn't put that in the piece because I didn't
(12:59):
think it was a necessarily fair way to describe what's
happening with Royce. And I thought his politics were genuine
in the way that he was talking about them with me.
And then other people are just really concerned about him.
I mean, I tried to emphasize that in the piece
as much as I could, but there are friends and
people who considered themselves at one time to be close
friends with his family, members of his who are really
(13:21):
deeply concerned about the kind of people that he's associating with.
It's not just Steve Bannon, who is a dangerous and
deranged figure in American politics, but it's also like Alex
Jones you referenced. I mean, if a guy calls Sandy
Hook grieving families crisis actors, if he says that people
who are neo Nazis are actually Jewish actors, if he
(13:41):
says that there's stuff in the water that turns frogs gay,
I mean, these are people that you just don't associate
with if you want to take yourself seriously. Yeah. So,
I mean, I think when you call Royce Whites politics genuine,
it's also fair to call them extreme. He's circulating with
all these other people with these similarly extreme view who's
and he's running for Congress. He's running in a very
(14:03):
heavily democratic district where the congress person at present is
Ilhan Omar, And I think the wrinkle there isn't just
that he's running against Omar, who is a convenient person
to attack for the far right. But the interesting part
for me, what stood out was that the GOP doesn't
even want him to run in that district. Right. Yeah,
(14:24):
So the way that Minnesota congressional seats work is that
there's a delegate process, and so nobody is bound by
the delicate process, but it's particularly the way that normally
candidates are nominated for seats. So the delegates actually voted
seventy seven twenty four in favor of another Republican candidate
to face off against Ellean Omar. Her name is Cec Davis.
(14:44):
She's got a really interesting story herself. And Royce went
up in front of these delegates when this meeting happened,
and he said that he was not going to accept
it because he said that the Republican Party had to
describe itself as the Party of God, and he was
going to stand up as the face of the Party
of God. And as a result, he's decided that he's
going to primary miss Davis as she's running, and so
(15:07):
there's a pretty likely outcome in which he doesn't even
actually end up facing off against Alan Omar, unless he
decides later to run as an independent. If you can't
secure the Republican nomination. Yeah, the I believe the primary
is in August. What are his prospects for the primary?
He doesn't seem favorable for the primary. I mean you
have to consider that this district is plus twenty five Democratics.
(15:30):
So if he were out in the further out in
the suburbs, or are really in rural Minnesota, I think
that he would have a better chance at a nomination.
But he's in a really heavily democratic district, and even
the Republicans in this district are not what you would
consider the sort of far right maga Republicans. They're more
of the classic nineteen eighties Ronald Reagan Republicans, who are,
(15:52):
you know, just interested in tax cuts and family values
and things of that nature. I don't think that Royce's
messages about, for example, the federal or reserve will really
have a lot of resonance with people. And I think
that also he's going to face some attacks from the
right because although he says he wasn't protesting with Black
Lives Matter, that's how most people remember him in Minneapolis
(16:12):
right now, is leading these protests against police brutality. And
you have to remember Republicans took a very negative view
of those protests, they called people looters. Public opinion polls
showed that Republicans were not interested in these protests and
they had a negative view of them. And so he's
going to have some attacks not only from the left
but from the right. In this district, he faces a
really steep battle. Yeah, he's really trying to thread a
(16:34):
needle there. And the way that you buttoned up the piece,
I think said at all. You had a family member
who said, what if he says all this terrible stuff
and loses, or what if he says at all any winds? Right?
I mean, So he's just out here peddling a brand
of politics that I'm not sure who exactly it's for. Yeah,
I mean I think if you want to know who
it's for, it's for the people that he's appearing with
on their podcasts. You know, there is an audience out
(16:56):
there for people who want to hear this kind of
popular right wing rhetoric. He's going to have a platform
with Steve Bannon for as long as he wants it.
He was just on Tim Pool's show, which has become
an increasingly far right presence. He's got an open invitation
for Alex Jones as well, And of course he's appeared
on former sports reporter Jason Whitlock's podcast a number of
(17:17):
times too, and Jason himself has had a turn towards
right wing politics, and so I think that he enjoys
the platform. You know, I think that if things had
gone differently with the NBA, that he could have had
a different voice in this if he had been respected
for his battle against mental health, things could have gone
a different way. But ultimately that's not the way that
it went. And he's gone to a place where he
(17:38):
enjoys a platform, he enjoys being accepted, and he enjoys
being thought of as a thought leader. That's how Steve
Bannon describes him as a thought leader in the far
right populist movement. So you wrote this piece about White,
and I would call it a very unexpected life turn
for him, and it got a massive response, including from
(17:58):
White himself, who respond in his newsletter, and I'll just
describe his newsletter as a lot. He called you a
pencil powered keyboard warrior. I don't know what that means,
but good for you. I think you should have a
shirt made up. What did you make of his response? Uh?
You know, I thought it was interesting because I have
written pieces before about people who I didn't think we're
(18:20):
gonna like the ultimate product, and uh, I had very
many interviews with him where I was pushing back on him.
I don't know if he expected it to be a
flattering piece or not. I sent the piece to his
campaign manager. Royce never gave me his number, so I
didn't talk to him that way, but I sent it
to his campaign manager. His campaign manager said thank you.
I didn't hear from Royce at all. I sort of
(18:40):
half expected him to call or his campaign manager to
call and yell at me. People are always welcome to
call me after I report on them. I just have
not heard from him in that way. And then he
published this open letter, and you know, I didn't respond
to it on Twitter, and I'm not gonna respond to
it on Twitter either. Is because I think that he's
just trying to draw out the fight. And I think
that for many people on the far right, it actually
(19:02):
helps them to have what they call hit pieces run
against them in mainstream media outlets because they can say
then that they're, you know, not endorsed by the Jeff
Bezos Washington Post or the New York Times or whatever.
I read the piece. He asked for a correction, but
he didn't cite anything that he wanted to be corrected.
I stand by all of the reporting in it. I
did think that if you read his other substack posts,
(19:24):
it's very in line with that in the sense that
he goes off on many tangents and it's very lengthy.
And if I can be silly for a second, I'll
just say it took me about a month to write
my three thousand words story, and I think his response
was words and he wrote it the next day. And
I have enormous respect for that as a right to
be able to do that on deadline. Yeah, he really
(19:46):
cracked that out. I don't know that I would recommend
reading his newsletter, but I very much recommend reading your
piece about Royce White and the far right in the
Washington Post. David Gardner, thanks for this, Thanks John, thanks
for listening, and a reminder to please rate and review
(20:06):
our show. Be on the lookout for Friday's special bonus
Father's Day episode with Pat Forty. Sports Illustrated Weekly is
a production of Sports Illustrated and I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.
(20:28):
And for more of Sports Illustrated It's best stories and podcasts,
visit SI dot com. This episode of Sports Illustrated Weekly
was produced by Jessica Yourmoski and Isaac Lee, who was
also our sound engineer. Our senior producer is Dan Bloom.
Our executive producers are Scott Brody and me John Gonzalez.
Our theme song is by Nolan Schneider. If you've stuck
(20:51):
around this song, we leave you with this tease for
Friday's special episode. Yeah, all of a sudden, the little
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(21:11):
All Right, get it together.
Before we begin, a reminder to please rate and review
our show that helps new listeners discover us and grow
the program. On this episode of Sports Illustrated Weekly, Royce
White was a good college basketball player who was perhaps
best known for a short and bumpy stint in the
NBA until when he led several protests in Minnesota against
(00:24):
police brutality following the murder of George Floyd. At the time,
White was praised as an up and coming civil rights activist.
So how did that version of White, a black man,
end up falling in with maga ideologues like Steve Bannon?
And why is he running for Congress in Minnesota as
a right wing populist. Journalist David Gardner joins us to
(00:45):
explain how White became a favorite of the far right.
It's Wednesday, June fifteen. I'm your host, John Gonzalez from
Sports Illustrated and I Heart Radio. This is Sports Illustrated Weekly.
My name is Royce White, on a fifth generation Minnesota
and a product of the Twin Cities. But first and foremost,
(01:08):
I'm an American. I'm running for Congress because our leaders
have sold us out. David Gardner, Welcome to Sports Illustrated Weekly.
Great to be here, Thanks for having me, John. Yes,
so you wrote a must read piece about Royce White
in the Washington Post. Heavily reported, and David White is
sort of this fringe figure in pro sports. He wasn't
(01:30):
in the NBA for very long. He's tried his hand
at m n A for a minute, and yet he's
gotten quite a bit of media attention during his career
for reasons that we'll get into. But first tell us
a little bit about who Royce White is and why
you decided to write about his nascent political career. Yeah. Well,
if you're a college basketball fan like I am, then
you probably remember Royce had an absolutely spectacular season at
(01:51):
Iowa State. He lost to a great Kentucky team, but
they had a decent n c A tournament run. It
was a team loaded with transfers. He actually led the
n c A all five major statistical categories that season.
It was just an exceptional dominant player. Actually played sort
of ahead of his time. He's more of a small
ball oriented offense guy, and I think in today's NBA
(02:13):
he might have thrived more than he did ten years ago.
When he was drafted, he was a first round pick
and then, as I'm sure we're gonna get into, he
had some pretty notable battles with the NBA over their
mental health policy that sort of derailed his career. Yeah,
a lot of the conversation around him back then was
about his unwillingness to fly. He's a reluctant flyer. I
guess we might call him euphemistically. Tell us a little
(02:34):
bit about that, because he says that that's not why
he didn't make it in the NBA, and that it's
a convenient narrative for the NBA to say, oh, this
is why, and it really he says, wasn't about that. Yeah,
so pardon the terrible pun, but I'll just say that,
you know, he said that this narrative took off because
of the NBA, right, But what he says is that
he was always able to manage his anxiety. It was
(02:56):
triggered by flying, but he was able to manage it.
And I talked to Iowa state coaches who confirmed that
they actually had an assistant coach that he was very
close with who would sit with him during takeoff at
the times when his anxiety was most likely to trigger,
and throughout the flight keep him in conversation, keep him healthy,
keep him talking. And then he also flew when he
played for the Professional Basketball League in Canada too. They
(03:16):
didn't do a lot of flying, but he did it
when he was able to, when he needed to, And
so I am sympathetic to him in the sense that
I think that he was more willing to fly than
people give him credit for. At the same time, he
was trying to unfold a larger battle with the NBA
about their overall mental health policy, and in that way,
he was really well ahead of his time. Yeah, the
battle with the NBA and Royce White continues, at least
(03:39):
in one direction. He calls the n B a a
quote neoliberal, globalist, Marxist, radical materialist establishment, which is just
an incredible mouthful, and it's just one of the many
organizations and entities that he has a problem with. This
is a big grievance for him. Yeah, he considers the
NBA and many other large global corporation is to be
(04:00):
part of what he considers to be the corporate ocracy,
which is the merger of the government and large corporations
at a scale at which ultimately, I think the end result,
as he understands it is to strip everybody of their
individual American citizenship and to replace them with a global citizenship.
Of course, this is this kind of language is a
conspiracy theory that goes back as far as geopolitics goes back.
(04:24):
Sometimes there's lizard people behind it. Sometimes, unfortunately it's ethnic
minorities that are labeled as escapegoats in this situation. But
that's his understanding of his grievance against the NBA, which
particularly manifested it against David Stern, who he said that
he outlived because of prayer, even though David Stern is
about fifty years older than him. Yeah, you could also
take that into account. But so Royce White, I mean, look,
(04:46):
a lot of people have complicated, convoluted political beliefs. Certainly
athletes do as well, but he was not exactly an
athlete of renown, right, So normally, under usual circumstances, you
would expect him to be sort of relegated to a
innge figure that we only tangentially pay attention to, if
we pay attention to him at all. And yet he's
really had this resurgence in terms of people focusing on
(05:08):
what Royce White has to say. When did he first
pop back up? On the radar off the court. Yeah,
I think for most people, if they weren't paying attention
to his m m A career. And I think he's
only been in one fight. You'll have to fact check
me on that, but he does not have a stellar
mm A record, I think for most people and for
me certainly. He came back on to the scene after
the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Royce's from Minneapolis,
(05:30):
and he played his first season of college basketball, although
he never saw the court for the Minneapolis Gophers, and
he was out on the streets leading protests, and at
that time he was actually sounding in some ways very
similar to a lot of the liberal protesters. He was
talking about the police being outside the circle of trust
and wanting them to be back in the circle of trust.
(05:50):
But he has since sort of recast what he was protesting,
and he now says he was protesting like the Federal
Reserve and these other things that he takes issue you with. Yeah,
around the time of the George Floyd protests, he's out
in the streets, he's protesting with Black Lives Matter. He's
on MSNBC talking about policing issues. As you mentioned, sounded
(06:11):
at least to me, incredibly socially progressive, and yet, as
you mentioned, these days, something entirely different from his political position.
He's taken a very hard right turn. He's trumpeting a
lot of the sentiment you could hear from the MAGA
movement and the far right. How did he get involved
with and start espousing far right political views? So that
was my starting point with this story. I looked at
(06:33):
a guy who I read about actually in the Washington
Post two years prior to my feature, who was being
featured as an emerging civil rights activist, who was out
here on the streets, like you said, protesting the murder
of George Floyd. And then a couple of years go by,
and then I see him announce his campaign on Twitter,
and in his campaign he's criticizing Elan Umar and he's
(06:53):
saying some pretty outlandish things I would say. And so
then I look him up and it looks like he's
friends with Steve Bann. Now he's appearing on Alex jones
Is Info Wars program, which is a conspiracy theory show.
And I was just very surprised at how this happened.
So that's why I wanted to get in touch with
him and see how do you reconcile those two things?
How do you go from being a protester against police
(07:16):
brutality to being a far right congressional candidate. And the
answer in that sense is that he sort of went
down a YouTube rabbit hole that started with watching some
Steve Bannon videos, listening to Steve Bannon's war Room Pandemic podcast,
and then eventually becoming friends with Steve Bannon through the
Big Three, which was a sort of unlikely and unexpected
(07:36):
basketball connection that I did not anticipate finding when I
started the reporting. Royce White, who's the beginning of the
season in the Big Three league, really the reason why're
having him on. I think he's one of the most
original thinkers in this country now. But populism, nationalism, economic issues,
et cetera. Well, First, first, Eve, I want to say
to you, like I said you off air, I've been
following a war Room since the pandemic first broke out
(07:59):
of the ulan Um. I really appreciate the information you
were putting out at that time and work you continue
to do. Yeah, you mentioned some of the very strange
bedfellows that he finds himself interacting with, like Alex Jones,
who was d platform from Twitter and YouTube for all
sorts of conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation. Most notably, he was
sued and has gone bankrupt or filed for bankruptcy because
(08:21):
he had said that the Sandy Hook shootings were done
by crisis actors. And now he's also Royce White hanging
out with Steve Bannon, who was a major figure of
the far right of former and current advisor to former
President Trump. I'm really aggressive anti immigration nationalist with serious
racist undertones or even overtly racist views. He's also under
(08:43):
indictment for refusing to cooperate with the January six Committee.
White calls him a friend, David and a mentor and
the quote American hero. This seems to me to be
a very strange alliance. Yeah, he refers to him as
an American hero, and our conversations many times, not just
the one time that's er in the piece, but he
regularly referred to Bannon as an American hero. We didn't
(09:04):
have a chance to get into the piece. It was
already lengthdy as it was. But he also discussed that
he thought that Steve Bannon's current indictment, which you referenced
he's facing misdemeanor charges for refusing to cooperate with the
January six Commission. Is a product of a kangaroo court,
he said, and he does not respect the January six Commission.
Of course. Bannon also evaded felonies previously because of a
(09:26):
build the Wall campaign that he participated in. Two of
his co conspirators have since pleaded guilty to those felony
charges of money laundering, wire fraud, those sorts of things.
Bannon only got away with it because Donald Trump, his friend,
gave him a pardon, and so it is a really
really strange friendship. But I think if you look into
(09:46):
a little bit more closely, you start to understand. Mainly,
Bannon still enjoys an enormous platform. He's been d platform
by Twitter because he called for the beheading of Dr
Anthony Faucci, but he still has an enormously successful podcast,
radio show, television show that live streams, and Royce has
been able to develop an audience in the far right.
You don't see it on Twitter. He used to have
(10:07):
about five thousand followers on Twitter and now he's got
about a hundred thousand. But on these platforms like Getter
and Truth He's growing an enormous presence there. So White
gets access to Bannon's platform, he gets to put himself
out there. What does Bannon c in Royce White? Because
from Afar you see a guy, a black man who
(10:27):
was protesting on behalf of Black Lives Matter, who was
in the streets again protesting against George Floyd's murder. What
does Bannon see White as? Is he a good messenger
for their brand of politics? I mean, what is Bannon
getting out of this? Yeah? Well, I think it's important
to note here that you know, some people when I
talked to them about Royce, people who know him well,
(10:48):
some people were worried that he was just sort of
playing the part. And I think a lot of people
on the left have this conspiracy or this thought that
a lot of people on the right are disingenuous with
their beliefs, but they're just trying to get famous because
of them, or you can get a lot of reach
tweets or likes on your Twitter accounts. Royce actually, when
we talked, his views are in alignment with Steve Bannon,
and in fact, Bannon multiple times during our conversations said
(11:10):
that Royce White was to the right of him, and
I don't think that there are very many people in
the United States who are to the right of Steve Bannon.
Now Steve Bannon, if you're a cynic also gets something
out of Royce White, which is that he adds a
bit of diversity to his movement, which has previously been
associated primarily with white nationalism. And so he adds a
(11:32):
guy and he says it in the piece, he said,
here's a guy, here's a black guy who's talking about
real issues. And later on he says, the people on
his right criticize him for incorporating people who are black,
who are Jewish, who are Hispanic into his movement, but
he sees that as the future of America. He doesn't
think that he can enact the kind of change that
he wants to be able to enact without being able
(11:54):
to bring minorities into the bold from the people around
Royce White, because I'm with you from afar, the cynical
part of me goes, Okay, this is just a transactional
relationship between White and these fringe far right figures so
he can gain some sort of popularity or notoriety. What
it was, friends and teammates and former coaches who know
(12:15):
him best have to say about the attorney's taken. Yeah.
I spoke with countless people who have played with him
at all levels of basketball, people who have coached him
at all levels of basketball, and everybody sort of has
their theory because Royce doesn't maintain relationships with a lot
of people in that world anymore, and so these are
just people who are from afar observing what's happened with Royce.
(12:38):
Some people said that, you know, he's always been a
sort of conspiratorial guy, and so it's not too surprising
to them that ultimately he ended up finding these far
right conspiracy theories and identifying with them. Some people thought
that perhaps he was just doing it for a platform.
I had one NBA coach tell me that he was
just going to chase a check wherever he could find it.
I didn't put that in the piece because I didn't
(12:59):
think it was a necessarily fair way to describe what's
happening with Royce. And I thought his politics were genuine
in the way that he was talking about them with me.
And then other people are just really concerned about him.
I mean, I tried to emphasize that in the piece
as much as I could, but there are friends and
people who considered themselves at one time to be close
friends with his family, members of his who are really
(13:21):
deeply concerned about the kind of people that he's associating with.
It's not just Steve Bannon, who is a dangerous and
deranged figure in American politics, but it's also like Alex
Jones you referenced. I mean, if a guy calls Sandy
Hook grieving families crisis actors, if he says that people
who are neo Nazis are actually Jewish actors, if he
(13:41):
says that there's stuff in the water that turns frogs gay,
I mean, these are people that you just don't associate
with if you want to take yourself seriously. Yeah. So,
I mean, I think when you call Royce Whites politics genuine,
it's also fair to call them extreme. He's circulating with
all these other people with these similarly extreme view who's
and he's running for Congress. He's running in a very
(14:03):
heavily democratic district where the congress person at present is
Ilhan Omar, And I think the wrinkle there isn't just
that he's running against Omar, who is a convenient person
to attack for the far right. But the interesting part
for me, what stood out was that the GOP doesn't
even want him to run in that district. Right. Yeah,
(14:24):
So the way that Minnesota congressional seats work is that
there's a delegate process, and so nobody is bound by
the delicate process, but it's particularly the way that normally
candidates are nominated for seats. So the delegates actually voted
seventy seven twenty four in favor of another Republican candidate
to face off against Ellean Omar. Her name is Cec Davis.
(14:44):
She's got a really interesting story herself. And Royce went
up in front of these delegates when this meeting happened,
and he said that he was not going to accept
it because he said that the Republican Party had to
describe itself as the Party of God, and he was
going to stand up as the face of the Party
of God. And as a result, he's decided that he's
going to primary miss Davis as she's running, and so
(15:07):
there's a pretty likely outcome in which he doesn't even
actually end up facing off against Alan Omar, unless he
decides later to run as an independent. If you can't
secure the Republican nomination. Yeah, the I believe the primary
is in August. What are his prospects for the primary?
He doesn't seem favorable for the primary. I mean you
have to consider that this district is plus twenty five Democratics.
(15:30):
So if he were out in the further out in
the suburbs, or are really in rural Minnesota, I think
that he would have a better chance at a nomination.
But he's in a really heavily democratic district, and even
the Republicans in this district are not what you would
consider the sort of far right maga Republicans. They're more
of the classic nineteen eighties Ronald Reagan Republicans, who are,
(15:52):
you know, just interested in tax cuts and family values
and things of that nature. I don't think that Royce's
messages about, for example, the federal or reserve will really
have a lot of resonance with people. And I think
that also he's going to face some attacks from the
right because although he says he wasn't protesting with Black
Lives Matter, that's how most people remember him in Minneapolis
(16:12):
right now, is leading these protests against police brutality. And
you have to remember Republicans took a very negative view
of those protests, they called people looters. Public opinion polls
showed that Republicans were not interested in these protests and
they had a negative view of them. And so he's
going to have some attacks not only from the left
but from the right. In this district, he faces a
really steep battle. Yeah, he's really trying to thread a
(16:34):
needle there. And the way that you buttoned up the piece,
I think said at all. You had a family member
who said, what if he says all this terrible stuff
and loses, or what if he says at all any winds? Right?
I mean, So he's just out here peddling a brand
of politics that I'm not sure who exactly it's for. Yeah,
I mean I think if you want to know who
it's for, it's for the people that he's appearing with
on their podcasts. You know, there is an audience out
(16:56):
there for people who want to hear this kind of
popular right wing rhetoric. He's going to have a platform
with Steve Bannon for as long as he wants it.
He was just on Tim Pool's show, which has become
an increasingly far right presence. He's got an open invitation
for Alex Jones as well, And of course he's appeared
on former sports reporter Jason Whitlock's podcast a number of
(17:17):
times too, and Jason himself has had a turn towards
right wing politics, and so I think that he enjoys
the platform. You know, I think that if things had
gone differently with the NBA, that he could have had
a different voice in this if he had been respected
for his battle against mental health, things could have gone
a different way. But ultimately that's not the way that
it went. And he's gone to a place where he
(17:38):
enjoys a platform, he enjoys being accepted, and he enjoys
being thought of as a thought leader. That's how Steve
Bannon describes him as a thought leader in the far
right populist movement. So you wrote this piece about White,
and I would call it a very unexpected life turn
for him, and it got a massive response, including from
(17:58):
White himself, who respond in his newsletter, and I'll just
describe his newsletter as a lot. He called you a
pencil powered keyboard warrior. I don't know what that means,
but good for you. I think you should have a
shirt made up. What did you make of his response? Uh?
You know, I thought it was interesting because I have
written pieces before about people who I didn't think we're
(18:20):
gonna like the ultimate product, and uh, I had very
many interviews with him where I was pushing back on him.
I don't know if he expected it to be a
flattering piece or not. I sent the piece to his
campaign manager. Royce never gave me his number, so I
didn't talk to him that way, but I sent it
to his campaign manager. His campaign manager said thank you.
I didn't hear from Royce at all. I sort of
(18:40):
half expected him to call or his campaign manager to
call and yell at me. People are always welcome to
call me after I report on them. I just have
not heard from him in that way. And then he
published this open letter, and you know, I didn't respond
to it on Twitter, and I'm not gonna respond to
it on Twitter either. Is because I think that he's
just trying to draw out the fight. And I think
that for many people on the far right, it actually
(19:02):
helps them to have what they call hit pieces run
against them in mainstream media outlets because they can say
then that they're, you know, not endorsed by the Jeff
Bezos Washington Post or the New York Times or whatever.
I read the piece. He asked for a correction, but
he didn't cite anything that he wanted to be corrected.
I stand by all of the reporting in it. I
did think that if you read his other substack posts,
(19:24):
it's very in line with that in the sense that
he goes off on many tangents and it's very lengthy.
And if I can be silly for a second, I'll
just say it took me about a month to write
my three thousand words story, and I think his response
was words and he wrote it the next day. And
I have enormous respect for that as a right to
be able to do that on deadline. Yeah, he really
(19:46):
cracked that out. I don't know that I would recommend
reading his newsletter, but I very much recommend reading your
piece about Royce White and the far right in the
Washington Post. David Gardner, thanks for this, Thanks John, thanks
for listening, and a reminder to please rate and review
(20:06):
our show. Be on the lookout for Friday's special bonus
Father's Day episode with Pat Forty. Sports Illustrated Weekly is
a production of Sports Illustrated and I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.
(20:28):
And for more of Sports Illustrated It's best stories and podcasts,
visit SI dot com. This episode of Sports Illustrated Weekly
was produced by Jessica Yourmoski and Isaac Lee, who was
also our sound engineer. Our senior producer is Dan Bloom.
Our executive producers are Scott Brody and me John Gonzalez.
Our theme song is by Nolan Schneider. If you've stuck
(20:51):
around this song, we leave you with this tease for
Friday's special episode. Yeah, all of a sudden, the little
brown eyed girl who used to sit night. I'm gonna
cry reading this. I haven't read this in a long time.
(21:11):
All Right, get it together.
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