Royce White’s specialty is basketball, not history, and it shows in his public comments.
White (profile here) is a non-serious candidate in Minnesota’s 2024 U.S. Senate election. He’s a throwaway candidate, i.e. a placeholder on the ballot for a hopeless race shunned by career politicians. He won’t defeat Sen. Amy Klobuchar (see polling data here).
Since nobody else takes White seriously, you shouldn’t either, and I’d caution against getting too upset about his views on America’s role in World War 2.
At first he said America was “the bad guy” and “the bad guys won in WWII.” Then, backpedaling, he said “there were no ‘good guys’ in that war.” He explained “if you look closely, you see the link between liberalism and communism in the allied forces,” seemingly referring to the fact the Allies included Russia.
In White’s feeble mind, the mere fact that America and Russia fought on the same side against Germany leads to “liberals are communists.” Let’s call this what it is: dumb and logically flawed. According to his thinking, if he’s ever bought anything made in China, that makes him a communist.
I’m not alleging that, by the way.
It’s true he didn’t say the German Nazis were the good guys. He wouldn’t be that far; he only said there were no good guys. This sounds like a good topic for a semanticist convention, but we’re not going to do that here, we’re only going to do the relativistic thing that’s been around since 1940: Hitler was a monster, the Nazis were a horrible regime, and the Allies (including us) fought the “great crusade” (in Eisenhower’s words) that ended their reign of conquest, terror, and mass murder.
The American G.I.s who fought that war believed they were good guys fighting against evil. Generations of American schoolchildren were taught that, too. Including, presumably, Royce White. Let’s just give him a failing grade in history class and move on. You and I have better things to do.
The only question worth considering is: Where does the GOP get such bad placeholder candidates, and why don’t they have better ones?