Hey Royce: Let's Not Pretend to Be Righteous

Hey Royce.

Let's not pretend to be righteous.

You have wrapped this week in the language of fairness. You told a reporter you have deep respect for women's basketball. You mentioned that your younger sister played Division One. You mentioned that Nancy Lieberman coached you in the BIG3. You said you would do whatever the coach needs, whatever the girls need you to do.

Then you said your wig is in the mail.

You do not get both of those sentences. One of them is the tell, and we both know which.

Here is the thing I want on the record before anything else, because most of the coverage has skated past it.

Before Friday afternoon, there was not a single man trying to get into the WNBA. Not one. Enes Kanter Freedom declared, you followed him inside of a few hours, and that was the entire invasion — two former first-round picks who are never going to play a minute, in the same news cycle, in the middle of a primary campaign one of them is losing badly.

So when you say you are exposing a threat to women's sports: you are the threat. You are the whole threat. It did not exist on Thursday. You are not the alarm here. You are the supply.

And you built it in the one week you needed a headline. Read your own paperwork left to right.

Now about the righteousness.

You have made a second career out of telling this country who is corrupt, who is compromised, who is lying. Fine. Let's go through your file the way you go through everybody else's.

October 2009. You took about a hundred dollars of clothing out of the Mall of America and shoved the security officer who stopped you. You pleaded guilty to theft and to disorderly conduct. You never played a game for the University of Minnesota. You left for Iowa State.

2012. Houston takes you sixteenth overall. You never suit up for them. You will not fly, and when they send you down to the D-League you refuse to report and get suspended. Three NBA games, all of them in Sacramento. That is the career.

I want to be careful right here, because I am not going to be cheap about the flying. That was a real anxiety disorder, you were one of the first men in professional sports willing to say so with his name attached, and it cost you a fortune. That took something most people do not have. I would defend it against anybody who mocked it, including people on my side of this letter.

What I am saying is narrower. A man who would not board his own team's plane is now telling reporters he will do whatever the girls need him to do. Pick one standard for what a person owes a locker room, and try it on yourself first.

June 5th, 2020. You are a featured speaker at U.S. Bank Stadium, in front of thousands of people, calling for Bob Kroll to resign. You led several of the marches that summer. Six years later your campaign site carries endorsements from Steve Bannon, Kari Lake, Mike Lindell, Alex Jones and Jason Whitlock.

People are allowed to change their minds. I have changed mine about big things. But not usually that far, not usually that fast, and never for free. At some point somebody is going to ask you which of those two men was the act.

Except you did not only change your mind, which would at least be honest. You went back and edited the record. Your own website now says you were never a part of the Black Lives Matter organization. Technically that can probably be defended — an organization is a specific thing and a street is not one. But you were at the front of those marches, and every person who watched you do it knew exactly what they were. Changing your position is a man reconsidering. Quietly rewriting where you were standing is something else.

And before you tell your people this is a left-wing hit piece: the New York Post calls you a far-right populist who has embraced conspiracy theories ranging from the origins of the coronavirus, to the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, to satanic influences in the federal government. The New York Post. Not a paper that goes hunting for reasons to be hard on a Republican.

Somewhere in there you started talking about Jewish elites. You have called Israel the lynchpin of the New World Order. The Republican Jewish Coalition — a Republican organization, inside your own party — says that is antisemitism. Your answer is that you only meant the elites, not ordinary Jews, who you say are being exploited by them. Every man who has ever said that sentence has meant it exactly the way you mean it.

In 2023 you sat down on Steve Bannon's podcast and said this, and I am quoting it whole so nobody can tell me it was trimmed: "Look, let's just be frank. Women have become too mouthy." The Harris campaign put the clip in front of the country the following year.

Hold onto that one. We are coming back to it.

And then there is February.

In February, Hennepin County District Judge Kristen Marttila found you liable for physically abusing your ex-wife and your teenage son. She ordered no contact with her for fifty years and no contact with him for two. She ordered you to stay a quarter mile away from both of them, to submit to a mental health screening, and to give up your firearms.

It was the third order for protection your ex-wife has obtained against you. You had already pleaded guilty to violating an earlier one.

The judge wrote that she is plainly in fear of you, and that her testimony was entirely credible. The child advocate the court assigned to the case wrote that your son is scared for his physical safety around his father.

You deny all of it. You filed an appeal on April sixteenth and it is pending, and I am printing that because it is true and because you are owed it.

The chairman of your own state Republican Party has asked you to suspend this campaign. Twice.

Count them up. The New York Post. The Republican Jewish Coalition. The chairman of your own state party. Not one of those is a Democrat, and not one of them had to be talked into it.

So let me set Friday down next to the rest of it.

In 2023, women were too mouthy. This week you are one.

You spent this week demanding a place in a women's locker room. A judge in your own county ordered you to stay a quarter mile from your own child.

Spotlight Dispatch, generated August 8, 2026. An illustration, not a real room. One locker standing open, one towel folded on the bench, and nobody in it. This is the room he spent the week demanding to be let into.

That is the letter. That is the entire letter.

You should know who is writing, because it is the only thing that makes this worth opening. This paper takes no one's check — no paywall, no email captured, no data sold, no investors, no PAC, no federal money. Influence is not for sale here. I am not a Minnesota voter. I am not working for Michele Tafoya, or Adam Schwarze, or Peggy Flanagan, or Angie Craig, and I do not have a dollar or a preference riding on Tuesday. I would print this identical letter with the party flipped, and I do — four days ago I printed one about a Democrat under indictment, and three days ago one about a Republican running for the Senate in North Carolina. Nobody bought a word of this. My name and my number are at the top of this page. Yours is on a ballot.

One last thing, and it is not for you.

There are transgender people who watched this week and understood that a man used the fact of their existence as a three-day bit to move a number in a Senate primary. They did not do this. Sophie Cunningham did not do this either — she said what she believes and she is eating the noise for it in every road building in the league, which is a different thing from what you did no matter how much you would like to stand next to her. The WNBA left this door unlocked and I have written its commissioner about that separately. But you are the one who walked through it with a camera crew, and you did it on a Friday, three days out.

You are going to lose on Tuesday. You were going to lose on Tuesday before any of this started, and that is not why I wrote.

I wrote because you spent a week telling this country that women need protecting, and there is a file in Hennepin County with your name on it about the two people you were actually supposed to protect.

Let's not pretend to be righteous, Royce.

— Michael

The Official Internet Press Secretary

Spotlight Dispatch · August 8, 2026

michael@spotlightdispatch.com