In a recent episode of his aptly named podcast, “Please Call Me Crazy,” GOP Senate candidate Royce White went on a chauvinistic rant demeaning women who live in the suburbs, and labeling Republican politicians who seek these women’s votes as “losers” who have a “cucked mentality.”
He doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo that Donald Trump and his campaign are trying — however haplessly — to soften their image with women voters. Or maybe White is outright defying it.
The Minnesota Republican, who’s currently looking to unseat Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, is known for launching bigoted attacks via social media and his podcasts. In July 2023, for example, White told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon that women these days are “too mouthy.”
That remark came up again during a podcast episode released on Thursday, when White doubled down on his “mouthy” remark, claimed Republicans who try to win over suburban women voters are “delusional," said these Republicans would be better off caucusing with Democrats, and accused these Republicans of “living in a cucked mentality.” (The term "cuck," in right-wing parlance, is another word for a man perceived as weak — particularly in their interactions with women). It’s worth noting, here, that just last week Trump publicly tried to woo suburban women during a speech that focused on crime. Awkward.
Let’s talk about the paths to victory. It ain’t coming through suburban women — that’s out. Any one of you Republicans out there who thinks suburban women are gonna be the path to victory … I don’t know what to say about you. Just go caucus with the Democrats. We don’t have time to play around with you people. You’re living in a — you’re living in a delusion. You’re living in a cucked mentality.
White said his “too mouthy” comments from last year pale in comparison to the things women are allowed to say about men these days. And then he truly went off the deep end with a chauvinistic rant claiming suburban women can “come along” with the hypermasculine MAGA movement only if they disabuse themselves of what he calls their “strange” psychology. Like many of White’s rants, this one descended into nonsensical schlock invoking geopolitics.
Now, if suburban women want to come along because they go to the grocery store and their bread is up 300% — good. But there’s this strange sort of psychology of suburban women where they’ve justified why they should pay more because some little Black kid — some little African kid, uhh, you know, on the Ivory Coast, or let’s say in the Congo or wherever — needs mosquito nets. We’re gonna give money — extra money — so the social programs can extend to a global community, that includes NGOs, where we get mosquito nets to the poor kids in Africa but we’re not gonna stop doing deals with China and all these other big tech companies that steal the natural resources of the Congolese by sending those same African children down into the cobalt mines to pull the cobalt with their bare hands.
No need to strain yourself trying to make sense of all of that. These are the ramblings of a man who seems to borrow his putrid takes from the darkest and most conspiracy theory-ridden bowels of the internet. And this contrived image of a suburban woman who purportedly tends to overspend on goods simply because they benefit children in Africa is a product of that delusion. But White wasn’t finished.
He continued:
If you think we can convince suburban women that that worldview is so contradictory [that it’s] a non-starter — if you think that, you’re a loser. You’re a loser. And that was my point about [White’s defeated Minnesota primary opponent] Joe Fraser — he’s a loser. He’s got a loser mentality.
Perhaps, now, it’s starting to make sense why I suspected White’s candidacy might prove disastrous for Minnesota Republicans. He’s never won a general election himself, yet he seems oddly confident the way to do so — in a state with a popular incumbent senator, no less — is to publicly demean suburban women, whose aversion to the GOP’s anti-abortion extremism and its Trumpian character more broadly already seems to be causing trouble for the party’s election hopes.