Editors’ note: Spectrum is currently working to schedule an interview with Senator Klobuchar.
Amidst a crowded opening day of the State Fair filled with torrential rain and the usual crowds, Royce White, a “donut guy,” persisted for his interview with The Minnesota Star Tribune and campaigned at his booth throughout the remainder of the day.
White, a former NBA player and Minnesota Mr. Basketball, is the GOP-endorsed candidate in the race against incumbent Sen. Amy Klobuchar. White’s endorsements include Rep. Matt Gaetz, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and Moms for America Minnesota. However, the Republican Jewish Coalition endorsed his primary opponent, Joe Fraser, in response to White being “an eager promoter of antisemitic conspiracy theories and an avid defender of egregious antisemites.”
Klobuchar, running to become the first-ever four-term senator from Minnesota, has received endorsements from the DFL, Women Winning, EMILY’s List, and former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.
White has some big plans for high schoolers. “You gotta do an audit of the media you’re consuming. You gotta do an audit of the things that you’re learning. You gotta put that stuff on trial. You gotta ask yourself, what you know, what the motivation is behind what you’re being taught? What, what interest does it serve?” White said.
White remarked in an exclusive interview with The Spectrum, “I’m going to try and penetrate the… mainstream divide of narrative, and the mainstream media… has tried to divide Americans into these cultural entities, which I’m not saying are unimportant or insignificant.”
Instead, White wants high schoolers to focus on “the way the money works, and the time of the money to these revenues, the foreign policy of the military industrial complex.”
One of White’s goals is to change the culture around “forever wars,” which he defined during his interview with the Star Tribune as the wars abroad since 2003. To “not take the special interest money of the people who pay for forever wars.”
White, as confirmed by campaign finance filings, has received no campaign money from Political Action Committees (PACs), with all of his money coming from small dollar donations. Klobuchar, in comparison, has received over one million dollars from PACs.
White has spent $157,000 of his 2022 House campaign money on personal expenses, according to a complaint filed by the Campaign Legal Center. The complaint specified that the $100,000 of the funds have been withdrawn without public knowledge of where the money goes. The money has, according to the complaint, has gone to strip clubs, resorts, jewlery, and many other non-campaign places.
White’s other strategy for spreading awareness is to “speak the truth” about the Forever Wars and the border crisis. “[The next generation] needs to understand… your teachers, your teachers, even at your high school, not all of them, but a lot of a lot of these teachers, were educated at universities where there is a there is a status quo of academic political thought that that status quo has covered for the military industrial complex, or, let’s say it’s warped the narrative about the military industrial complex to a degree where most kids [in high school] aren’t even really interested in the math,” White said.
White isn’t just speaking theoretically. He saw this in action when he led Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. “As soon as I marched young people to the Federal Reserve, everybody’s looking at me like, What is this? What am I looking at? What is this building? This is the most important building in the state of Minnesota. The most exclusive building in the state of Minnesota is the Minneapolis Federal Reserve. This is where monetary policy is set. This is where inflation is created. This is where the decision is made to print money to support Forever Wars,” he recalled.
This story was originally published on Spectrum on September 30, 2024.
