MN Senate Basketball Man Candidate: That Was No 'Strip Club,' It Was Gold Rush All-Nude Cabaret Total Landscaping
MN Senate Basketball Man Candidate: That Was No 'Strip Club,' It Was Gold Rush All-Nude Cabaret Total Landscaping
Also, that wasn't a limousine, it was a *car service* you fools.
Last week, reports surfaced that Royce White, a former sportsball player and full-time conspiracy theorist whom the Minnesota GOP has just endorsed for US Senate, had spent well over $32,000 in campaign funds on stuff that didn’t appear to be campaign related, like a visit to a strip club, hotels, travel, and the odd limousine service — most of it outside Minnesota, and all of it after he lost his 2022 primary bid for a congressional seat there. Some of that spending sure looked to campaign finance experts like potential violations of campaign laws!
But Royce White is a MAGA hero and advocate of what he calls “Smash-Mouth Populism,” so you won’t see him backing down or apologizing, because he did nothing wrong, and in fact if you criticize him, you are probably a white liberal racist who can’t stand seeing a Black man who thinks for himself, even if those thoughts are things like “Women have become too mouthy,” a bit of wisdom he shared on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast in 2022.
Not surprisingly, White took to Twitter yesterday to explain away those campaign expenditures, which are perfectly legitimate, OK? On Twitter, White lamented,
“It's been disturbing to witness all the ‘hang the Black man’ from these bloodthirsty Democrats, who can't stomach the idea of Blacks voting for America First. What you're looking at here is a receipt for ‘point to point’ car service. Not joy ride limousines. More Coming!”
The tweet was accompanied by a receipt for $1,697.54 from “Showtime Transportation” in Tampa, dated August 22, 2022 — well after he lost the August 8 GOP primary. Showtime describes itself as “Tampa's premier chauffeured transportation provider” and touts its luxurious rides, from executive sedans to limousines and Mercedes Sprinter “limo coaches” for your wedding party.
White explained Sunday that the expenditure was not for “joy ride limousines,” but rather a “‘point-to-point’ car service,” which is totally different.
See? Car service, not limousine, and a seven-hour trip from Tampa to Atlanta at that! White suffers from anxiety and does not fly, and while he was in the NBA, he battled the league to demand it recognize mental health issues like that. But accommodating anxiety doesn’t necessarily require using a service that costs nearly $1700, does it? And you’ll note that in disputing terminology, White never actually says what the campaign purpose of that August 22 trip might be.
White followed that with a broadside at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune for reporting on the questionable spending, although the story was initially broken by The Daily Beast. But the Star-Tribune is local, so it makes a better enemy. This is some excellent political not-digging-a-deeper hole, to be sure:
“There will be no opportunity for the StarTrib to retract. Communist Newspaper, the war is on! I love the smell of yellow journalism in the morning, it makes me so motivated I sometimes think something may be wrong with me. Then I remember, it's the media with a history of lying.”
As many replies noted, I Sometimes Think Something May Be Wrong With Me would be a great title for a campaign biography.
And as the Daily Beast story noted, White’s visits to both Tampa and Atlanta just happened to coincide with the playoffs and championship games for Ice Cube’s “Big 3” 3-on-3 basketball league, in which White plays. As campaign funding boffins say, transportation and hotels for sportsball are not allowable uses for campaign funds.
But the real joyride in White’s tweetstorm was nested down in the replies to the tweet about the not-a-limo ride, where he explained that no, he never spent any campaign funds at a strip club, you monsters! It was only an “accounting error,” you see! After a Minnesota voter pointed out that White ran in Minnesota, not Florida, and sarcastically asked, “was this car ride to the strip club?” White offered this very cogent response:
“Wake up... You think federal races are run locally? Check the PAC money, which I don't take, comes from everywhere else. You're not serious... If this is your logic on modern America politics. The "strip club", was an accounting error and when that's cleared. I'm going to have a blast crushing the opposition.”
You see? He was campaigning in Florida and Georgia nearly two weeks after he lost, because that’s where the PAC money is, and he’s so honest that he doesn’t take PAC money.
Furthermore, the “strip club” expense was no such thing! Just an accounting error, and we look forward to White’s explanation of that one — especially considering the FEC disclosure form that specified he spent more than $1,200 at the all-nude Miami strip club “Gold Rush Cabaret” — at 5:00 AM, no less.
White sorta-kinda explained to the Daily Mail tabloid that “he couldn't recall the strip club night but believed his team had 'used the wrong card' and were in the process of reimbursing the campaign.” Well sure, that’s 100 percent plausible! Maybe!
White also got into a beef with former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who replied to White’s tweet about the Star Tribune by urging White to sue the newspaper for defamation, because wouldn’t discovery be fun?
Olbermann also drew White’s ire — but not an explanation of the campaign purposes of his Florida trip — by asking whether the car service was “the campaign trip to the strip club, or the campaign trip to the basketball tournament, you corrupt motherfucker?”
White angrily retwote that with some furious whataboutism and the mandatory “debate me, you coward.”
“Shut your mouth Keith… Your head is so far up the Clinton’s ass, everything you say screams Epstein. We can debate anytime and anyplace. A basketball tournament is corruption? How about Benghazi? You Democrat shills never cease to amaze me. We are leaving the plantation.”
White followed that up with even more incoherent ranting:
“So Trump was a racist for saying ‘Son’s of Bitches’ but Keith is a freedom fight for ‘motherfucker’. How about this, come say it in person you little posh, mealy-mouth, cosmopolitan, Uniparty dweeb. Smash-Mouth Populism is here, we don’t mind one bit calling out puppets like you.”
Huh. Would that be a rootless cosmopolitan? And if Olbermann’s a puppet, who could White possibly be implying is the puppetmaster? Haha, don’t bother — who else is a puppetmaster out there but the Jews? White has often slammed “the Jewish elite” and insisted the comment wasn’t antisemitic, because he only meant the elite Jews who secretly run everything, not the ordinary rank-and-file Jews who aren’t part of the globalist plot, you see?
Oh, also too, the day before the campaign expenditure story broke, White explained his frequently awful comments to New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (reiterating he only meant the elite elite Jews) and bristling when she questioned his close association with Alex Jones, whose Infowars conspiracy show White has guest hosted a few times. And more beyond that!\
“Why is it that white liberal women in this country are so hellbent on telling Black men in America what we should and shouldn’t think?” he said. At other times he spoke with a sort of pitying condescension about my naïveté. “You may not know as a writer, but I guarantee you that your higher-ups, they know exactly how dangerous I am intellectually,” he said. “They know exactly how dangerous I am politically.” He continued, invoking Malcolm X, “Any time a Black man steps up who is competent on the issues philosophically, politically, spiritually, socially, economically, they start to plan how they’re going to kill him.”
So Royce White wins forever, just as soon as the strip club accounting error is cleared up, all you bigots who hate a strong Black man for spouting insane, antisemitic, misogynist, homophobic conspiracy stuff will get what’s coming to you. (Why yes, Mr. White also hates “identity politics” even as he calls his critics racists for saying things that have nothing to do with race.)
Democratic incumbent Sen. Amy Klobuchar has so far not commented on White’s endorsement by the Minnesota GOP, as far as we can tell, and why would she when he’s doing such a fine job of self destruction? The Minnesota primary will be held on August 13.
[Star-Tribune (one free read a month) / Daily Beast / Whole Lot O’ Twitter / NYT / Daily Mail / Hat tip to Alert Wonkette Operative "Raccoon of Vengeance"]
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Gotta point out that Reagan's 1965 "Where's The Rest Of Me?" and a 2024 "Sometimes I Think Something May Be With Me" would encapsulate the entire history of modern Conservatism in just two political biography titles.
"I sometimes think something may be wrong with me."
Well, better late than never.