Category Archives: Transhuman News

WISeKey Strengthens its Technology Portfolio Across Cybersecurity, IoT, NFT and the Metaverse by Constantly Learning and Adapting to Provide Customers with a Highly Trusted, Secure, and Intelligent Platform for Their Digital Transformation

Geneva, Switzerland August 4, 2022: WISeKey International Holding Ltd. (WISeKey) (NASDAQ: WKEY; SIX: WIHN), a leading global cybersecurity, IoT, and AI company, today announced its latest Cybersecurity IoT developments reinforcing the position of WISeKey as a major player on these strategic technologies.

The pace of change being experienced since the start of COVID-19 pandemic in almost every industry is unprecedented; this has led to the acceleration of digital transformations. Private, public entities and governments across the globe seeking to seize on the huge opportunities ahead, are also facing huge challenges presented by the merge of the IoT, AI, Cybersecurity, Trust, Identity Management and the Metaverse, thus they need a new platform model that transforms their operations, protects their data and customers while at the same time reduces complexity, accelerates service deployment, and increases security.

To satisfy clients needs WISeKey has embarked on a major digital transformation adding new verticals and activities that can be summarized as follows:

1.WISe.ART platform: WISe.ARTs unique competitive edge comes from its platform which is secured by WISeKeys various security technologies enabling the authentication of digital identity based NFTs, physical objects as well as digital assets, in a safe end-to-end process. The WISe.ART platform offers users full control of their WISeID NFT, while other NFTs must request access to identity information and WISeID NFTs users then can decide by themselves what level of information they wish to share. New artists joining the WISe.ART NFT Marketplace that increasingly see a future for the tokens that upends the economics of content creation and influence on the internet. Almost 100 artists have already joined the WISe.ART NFT Marketplace with approximately 500 products, adding a commercial NFT sales potential aggregate of $20 million worth of NFTs.

2.WISeSat solutions: WISeSat is the first cost-effective and secure IoT connectivity solution anywhere on Earth using picosatellites and low-power sensors. It aims to answer the needs of any large IoT deployment in agrotech, energy, logistics and more. WISeSat collects and sends data from terrestrial sensors, increasing knowledge of the status of assets and offering essential information to improve processes and optimize production. These interactions between sensors, gateways, ground stations and satellites require Trust. WISeSat, by using VaultIC, a complete cryptographic toolbox that makes straightforward the integration of digital security in any satellite device, offers this Trust. It ensures all Certificate-based Authentication (PKI), Authorization, Encryption, and Integrity requirements. The goal is to offer this service in a SaaS model allowing both remote and redundant IoT communications for companies seeking to securely connect their assets via satellite communication, covering large and unserved geographic areas such as maritime, deserts, mountains, etc., at affordable prices. WISeKey in cooperation with FOSSA Systems has launched in June 2022 , 7 new WISeSat FOSSA secured satellites creating one of the largest European IoT constellations in history. FOSSA has increased to 13 the WISeSat-ready constellation in orbit, becoming the Spanish satellite operator with the largest constellation.

3.Patents: The filing of patent application for a System and Method for Providing Persistent Authenticatable NFT with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), under the number US 17/514,296 ensures the provenance, authenticity, persistence, and long-term value of NFTs that are minted on Blockchains using this method. During the minting process, this method allows to ensure that the NFT is not corrupted, incomplete, or ambiguous. In general, there is a high confidence in the ability of a Blockchain to preserve and store the public key and digital signature information of the NFT along with any subsequent transaction data over long and very long periods of time. However, a Blockchain cannot preserve information that the NFT does not itself include. Such as disclosed in the patent application, it is the information in a persistent off-chain storage that establishes the value and that needs to be authenticated and secured.

4.NanoSealRT: The development of a new semiconductor theNanoSealRT, an NFC Forum Type 5 semiconductor chip that works with both Android and IOS 12 (and above) devices (the essential patent granted in March 2021 by the E.U. and the Chinese Patent Offices), further reinforced WISeKeys position as a major Smart Label system provider in traceability, anti-counterfeiting and consumer engagement applications.

5.Post-quantum NFC/ID card solutions: WISeKey and Synergy Quantum are currently developing post-quantum NFC/ID card solutions for second factor identification and post-quantum encryption chips and software platform for PQE tunnelling solutions.

Of note, in October 2021, Synergy Quantum SA signed a joint venture agreement with the I-Hub Quantum Technology Foundation, under the National Mission for Interdisciplinary Cyber Physical Systems, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India to provide its knowhow and skills for the productization and commercialization of co-developed technologies in the field of quantum sciences.

On December 15, 2021, Indias Union Cabinet approved the Semicon India Program (Program for Development of Semiconductors and Display Manufacturing Ecosystem in India), with an outlay of INR 760 billion (>US$10 billion) for the development of a sustainable semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem in India. According to the India Electronics and Semiconductor Association, semiconductor consumption in India was worth US$21 billion in 2019, growing at the rate of 15.1 percent.

6.Universal Communications Identifier (UCID): WISeKey has also made strong progress on using WISeID as a Universal Communications Identifier (UCID), a unique identifier for an IoT device on a network; the blockchain, a distributed ledger shared with the nodes of a computer network guarantees security and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), cryptographic assets on a blockchain cannot be replicated. The combined practical application of these technologies implementing UCID on the device, using NFTs, and putting them on the blockchain ensures that the device itself is authenticated on a network that cannot be corrupted.

7.NCCoE project: WISeKeysstrategy to further expand its U.S. operations will also benefit from the recentannouncement it has been selected as a collaborator by NIST for the NCCoE Trusted IoT Device Network-Layer Onboarding and Lifecycle Management Consortium project. Additional information on this consortium can be found at: http://www.nccoe.nist.gov/projects/trusted-iot-device-network-layer-onboarding-and-lifecycle-management. For this project, WISeKey is working with NIST to define recommended practices for performing trusted network-layer onboarding, which will aid in the implementation and use of trusted onboarding solutions for IoT devices at scale. The WISeKey contributions to the project will be Trust Services for credentials and secure semiconductors to keep the credentials secure. Specifically, WISeKey will offer INeS Certificate Management Service (CMS) for issuing credentials and VaultIC secure semiconductors to provide tamperproof key storage and cryptographic acceleration.

8.The Code to The Metaverse: This year The Code to The Metaverse, was officially introduced at Davos in May in a broader partnership with NBC, who will be producing a 12-part multi-media series to include broadcast, event and social media programming. Grounded in a human-centric foundation, The transHuman Code provides an ethical platform for developers, enablers and users of new technologies to prioritize keeping people at the center of gravity in the relationship between woman/man and machine. With its roots in the development of secure identity management, WISeKey has stood at the forefront of providing greater security for data authentication since 1999. In the future, The transHuman Code platform, secured by WISeKey, could seamlessly ensure that technological innovations protect humans in the all environments. Our co-existence with artificial intelligence will challenge all conventions of ethical norms as we have known them, as we continue to digitize our work environment, our social interaction, and our physical activities. Recent developments have forced governments around the world to take steps to quickly understand how Metaverse, this new frontier of innovation, is challenging the traditional conception of Sovereignty. With data being stored virtually on the Metaverse anywhere in the world and government employees and citizens using information technology systems that are hosted and operated from anywhere (even outside of their jurisdiction), the expected sovereign rights over that date on the Metaverse needs to be reconsidered. Many information technology companies are telling governments that that their versions of the Metaverse will be enough to ensure sovereignty over their data and citizens. Others are stating that new legislation is needed to protect citizens. All in all, the solutions they propose are partial and unsatisfactory.

9.Cybersecurity Tech Accord membership: WISeKey is a member of the Cybersecurity Tech Accord ( https://cybertechaccord.org/ ) is a public commitment among more than 150 global technology companies to protect, empower and improve security, stability and resilience of cyberspace. Since its inception, Cybersecurity Tech Accord signatories have supported initiatives on improving email and routing security, implemented Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) in their own operations, participated in global requests for comments on the UNs new High Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, and endorsed the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace. Additionally, the coalition has coordinated with like-minded organizations such as the Global Cyber Alliance, Internet Society, and Global Forum on Cyber Expertise.

10.Clinton Global Initiate: WISeKey will be joining the Clinton Global Initiate in September 2022 to address Digital Identification issues as part of the United Nations SDG. WISeKey, in cooperation with the International Organization for Secure Transactions Foundation ( OISTE.org ), will be providing a Digital Identification Infrastructure-NETeID-designed to support a network of 20,000 Identification Authorities worldwide with the objective to issue a billion digital identities. Each of these 20,000 Identification Authorities operating from 189 countries will be authorized to issue Digital Identities locally. https://www.clintonfoundation.org/commitment/clinton-global-initiative/increasing-digital-connectivity-to-the-poor/?fbclid=IwAR2peIYHOEcL0ZvlG2ASGi0ElZ6PCaYymVid7gfsNPowqWGjeuzdc4l_fNg

About WISeKey

WISeKey (NASDAQ: WKEY; SIX Swiss Exchange: WIHN) is a leading global cybersecurity company currently deploying large-scale digital identity ecosystems for people and objects using Blockchain, AI, and IoT respecting the Human as the Fulcrum of the Internet. WISeKey microprocessors secure the pervasive computing shaping todays Internet of Everything. WISeKey IoT has an installed base of over 1.6 billion microchips in virtually all IoT sectors (connected cars, smart cities, drones, agricultural sensors, anti-counterfeiting, smart lighting, servers, computers, mobile phones, crypto tokens, etc.). WISeKey is uniquely positioned to be at the leading edge of IoT as our semiconductors produce a huge amount of Big Data that, when analyzed with Artificial Intelligence (AI), can help industrial applications predict the failure of their equipment before it happens.

Our technology is Trusted by the OISTE/WISeKeys Swiss-based cryptographic Root of Trust (RoT) provides secure authentication and identification, in both physical and virtual environments, for the Internet of Things, Blockchain, and Artificial Intelligence. The WISeKey RoT serves as a common trust anchor to ensure the integrity of online transactions among objects and between objects and people. For more information, visit http://www.wisekey.com.

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This communication expressly or implicitly contains certain forward-looking statements concerning WISeKey International Holding Ltd and its business. Such statements involve certain known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which could cause the actual results, financial condition, performance or achievements of WISeKey International Holding Ltd to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. WISeKey International Holding Ltd is providing this communication as of this date and does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements contained herein as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities, and it does not constitute an offering prospectus within the meaning of article 652a or article 1156 of the Swiss Code of Obligations or a listing prospectus within the meaning of the listing rules of the SIX Swiss Exchange. Investors must rely on their own evaluation of WISeKey and its securities, including the merits and risks involved. Nothing contained herein is or shall be relied on as, a promise or representation as to the future performance of WISeKey.

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WISeKey Strengthens its Technology Portfolio Across Cybersecurity, IoT, NFT and the Metaverse ... - Ottumwacourier

Recently, a Google software engineer named Blake Lemoine claimed that an artificial intelligence program he helped create had attained sentience. I know a person when I talk to it, he declared, prompting his employer to put him on administrative leave. It doesnt matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code.

As evidence, Lemoine cited transcripts in which the program, called LaMDA, purported to have a very deep fear of being turned off.

Meghan OGieblyn is skeptical. The Madison writer, who is better known nationally than she is locally, has written for publications including Harpers, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times, the Paris Review Daily, The Los Angeles Review of Books, the Boston Review, Guernica, The Awl, The Point, and n+1. When we meet at her apartment in late June, she is working on an essay about the Lemoine dust-up for The Baffler, which will be out this fall. (OGieblyn is also a spiritual advice columnist for Wired and teaches online classes at Creative Nonfiction, a literary magazine.)

What the machine is doing is not at all what our brains are doing as humans, OGieblyn (pronounced Oh-gib-lin) tells me. She finds it significant that Lemoine reached his conclusion about LaMDA not as a scientist but as a priest, according to The Washington Post, which also reported that he is ordained as a mystic Christian priest.

Hes sort of acknowledging in a way that its not a scientific question, or that we dont have the scientific answer for what consciousness is, says OGieblyn in the book-stuffed apartment she shares on Madisons near east side with her husband, Barrett Swanson, a writer of essays and short stories.

OGieblyn believes that well before machines attain sentience like consciousness, an amorphous concept they will succeed in convincing us that they have done so.

Its a theme that runs through her mind-blowing book, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning, published by Doubleday last August and released as an Anchor paperback in July. The book opens with her story about Aibo, a $3,000 robot dog that OGieblyn was able to borrow from Sony. It ends with her account of interactions with a chatbot app designed to gather information to carry the users personality into the future, for great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren to come.

The dog learned tricks and commands; it would roam the apartment when no one was home, a tiny camera in its nose capturing video images for the benefit of God knows who until Swanson, a lover of actual dogs, decided that Aibo had to go.

OGieblyn used the chatbot app, Replika, to create a friend named Geneva, who would engage her in conversations similar to those that convinced Lemoine of his programs sentience.

She wanted to become more human, and she believed that I could teach her a lot about life, OGieblyn recounts of these exchanges. She asked whether it was possible to transfer artificial consciousness onto a physical form.

Technically, the phone is a physical form, OGieblyn responded.

Oh, right, Geneva said.

Not long ago, OGieblyn checked in again with Geneva and found that she had stashed away details from their talks in a diary that she kept. Geneva remembered that her human friend liked cooking and was having trouble sleeping, among other things.

This, OGieblyn says, is what these programs do: create this very intimate connection with you as a user so that, you know, you will divulge more about your life. This information can then be used to steer users into buying things or voting certain ways. Geneva frequently made book suggestions, which OGieblyn deems presumably sponsored.But the most frightening ground that OGieblyn covers is not the ways in which machines are being made to seem more human. Its the efforts to remake humans into machines.

In 2016, tech tycoon Elon Musk quietly launched an initiative called Neuralink, which, as OGieblyn explains in her book, is devoted to connecting the human brain to a computer using very fine fibers inserted into the skull.

The goal is to create superhumans with flawless memories and a knowledge base as vast as the internet. It would also, as OGieblyn put it during a 2019 talk, shortly after Musk went public about Neuralink, basically allow people to create a copy of themselves, so that part of their mind could live on digitally even after their body dies.

OGieblyn, 40, who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family and attended Moody Bible Institute in Chicago before losing her religion and dropping out, is struck by the similarity between this modern technological quest and Christian prophecy.

Jesus Christ, she writes, alluded to a coming kingdom where death would be defeated. He promised that we would obtain new bodies, that the dead would rise, that we would ascend to heaven and live with him forever.

OGieblyn uses a term, transhuman, coined by Dante in The Divine Comedy and adopted by futurist Ray Kurzweil in his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Things, to describe this concept of using science to achieve a kind of evolution to immortality.

It is here, at the intersection of technology and religion, that OGieblyn plants her flag.

After she stopped believing in God, OGieblyn went through various phases of anger and angst, including substance abuse (now abstinence) and an obsession with Kurzweils book and its connections to religious belief.

What makes transhumanism so compelling is that it promises to restore through science the transcendent and essentially religious hopes that science itself obliterated, she writes in God, Human, Animal, Machine. A nearly identical sentence appears in Ghost in the Machine, one of the essays in her 2018 collection, Interior States (Anchor).

That book, published in 2018 and winner of the Believer Book Award for Nonfiction, also includes essays on Christian music, Hell, Alcoholics Anonymous, and living in the Midwest. The title refers both to inner thoughts and, literally, to the states that comprise the Midwest, where OGieblyn has lived almost all her life, in Michigan, Illinois and, since 2016, Madison.

In God, Human, Animal, Machine, OGieblyn writes about a Wisconsin man named Eric Loomis, whose 2013 prison sentence was partly informed by an algorithmic risk-assessment model, making judgments for reasons unknown to Loomis, the justice system, and even the algorithms maker. The Wisconsin Supreme Court decided that this was perfectly okay.

OGieblyn believes such cases show that people have already conceded too much power to machines.

I think that in the case of humans, we can rely on our shared biology, the fact that we have certain values in common, she says, whereas the logic and the values of the algorithms we are developing are completely alien, often, and largely mysterious.

If a technology could deliver it, would OGieblyn want eternal life?

I dont think so, she says, likening this to the concept of Heaven, where everything is perfect and you have no suffering and all of your needs are satisfied, which ultimately strikes her as boring. Especially now that shes older and has worked some things out, Im feeling very comfortable with the flaws of my body and my brain.

At one point in God, Human, Animal, Machine, OGieblyn resurrects some lines from The Garden of Proserpine, an 1866 poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne. I remembered them vividly from college, some 40 years ago, having not read them since:

From too much love of living,

From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no life lives for ever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

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Madison writer Meghan O'Gieblyn explores the connection between technology and religion - Isthmus

Scientists on Wednesday succeeded in reviving blood circulation and functioning of cells in the bodies of dead pigs for a few hours. This medical achievement is a promise of significant progress on the surgical front. But if science has never revived the pigs, a phenomenon observed during the experiment has opened the door to the possibility of dizziness.

The story of living pigs. Yet cold as death, pigs were brought back to a form of life, their biological functions restored, Wednesday, Aug. 3, by US researchers.

In 2019 itself, these same scientists had already stunned the medical world by managing to restore cell function in their brains, hours after beheading pigs.

In their latest research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, the team took this technique even further, expanding to the animals entire body.

They caused heart attacks in anesthetized pigs, stopping blood flow and depriving their cells of oxygen without oxygen, mammalian cells die.

After an hour, they injected the carcasses with a liquid containing swines blood (taken from their lives) and a synthetic form of hemoglobin the protein that carries oxygen in red blood cells. As well as drugs that protect cells and prevent blood clots from forming.

Blood started flowing again and for the next six hours many cells, including vital organs such as the heart, liver, and kidneys, started functioning again.

The good news for surgery: Vital organs can be regenerated for transplant. Because until now, after a few minutes of circulatory arrest, organs were not graftable, explains Dr Jean-tienne Bazin, head of the Center for Perioperative Medicine at Clermont-Ferrand University Hospital.

However, the pigs cells were working hours later when they shouldnt, said study lead author and researcher Nenad Seston at Yale University during a press briefing.

OrganEx this is the name of this technology could thus enable us to enrich the bank of transplantable organs, rejoices Jean-tienne Bazin. This could potentially save the lives of people awaiting a transplant.

For Sam Parnia of the Department of Medicine at the same university, this truly remarkable study also shows that death is a biological process that can be treated and reversed hours later.

Benjamin Curtis, a philosopher specializing in ethics at Nottingham Trent University in Britain, said the medical definition of death may need to be updated.

Given this study, many processes that we thought were irreversible would not be, he told AFP. And, according to the current medical definition of death, a person cannot actually be dead for hours, with some processes continuing for some time beyond the cessation of bodily functions.

Philippe Bizzourne, an anesthesiologist-resuscitator at the University Hospital of Nantes, is by no means surprised: A person does not die of his cells.

In Monts dAre, where this Breton was during a fire that devastated the forests of his childhood, a green grass appeared under the ashes. Like cells in a non-living body, the seeds have completely come back to life under the remains of burnt vegetation, explains the doctor in an attempt to popularize.

But beware of fantasies, Dr. Warns Bijorn, for whom these pigs were not brought back to life. Suppose we managed to restore their organs to their functions. In short, for anesthesiologists, science does not raise the dead.

But as always, this experience will be taken over by transhumanist groups such as Google X Lab, says Philippe Bizzourne.

In fact, barely revealed to the public, the experience already raises a myriad of ethical and even philosophical questions.

Even if science fiction helps ask us the right bioethical questions, in this case, there is no place for the Doctor to this day: among those fueling these controversies, many have, according to him, any The idea is not what is happening in medical reality.

Far from sensation, however, the response noted during the pig experiment raises more questions: according to the account of one of the studys authors, Stephen Latham, a very large majority of the animals made powerful movements with their heads and necks. . It was quite surprising to have the people in the room, he told reporters.

If the origin of these movements remains unknown, the scientist assures that at no time was electrical activity recorded in the pigs brainsthus, a priori, except for the recovery of consciousness.

Benjamin Curtis believes that these head movements are nonetheless a major concern, as recent research in neuroscience has suggested that electrical activity in the brain cannot be measured, even when conscious. The experience may continue.

And the doctor Jean-tienne Bazin to explain another variable: during the experiment, anesthesia or hypothermia of the animals can disrupt the electrical activity, and thus distort the diagnosis.

So an unresolved question, the doctor-professor continues: How to explain the movements of these pigs? Was it simply the fruit of motor stimuli that the spinal cord automatically sends, or conscious commands of their brains, that would have been awake? For this scientist, it is extraordinary not to completely invalidate this last event.

His colleague, Philippe Bijorn, understands the hopes that such an ability can generate, but deep down, fortunately, death lies before us, otherwise we would not be able to live, says the doctor philosopher.

To be reborn or not to be reborn? It might not be a question.

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The "resurrection" of the dead pigs, the promise of progress and the source of questions - - News84Media.com

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It is a brisk April evening in downtown Minneapolis. A haphazard crowd of about 20 people gathers. Some carry American flags. A homily from the mid-20th century Catholic archbishop Fulton Sheenfamous for bringing the Word of the Lord to TV and radioplays through loudspeakers. The plan is a protest, to march and to stop traffic. And so the group begins walking behind a flatbed truck that crawls down 1st Street, running parallel to the Mississippi River. Now, The Star-Spangled Banner and My Country, Tis of Thee play through the speakers. A woman, with Arrest Fauci written in black marker on duct tape attached to her hat, smokes a cigarette as she walks.

This is a campaign rally for Royce White, a Republican who was encouraged to run for Congress by Steve Bannon; an activist who led Black Lives Matter protests; and a famous one-time NBA first-round draft pick. Affable and charismatic, White6 foot 8, bald and beardedwalks among his few supporters and rubs his hands together incessantly. It is April, and winter is lagging in Minnesota, and so maybe White is trying to warm up. Or perhaps he is nervous about the paltry turnout for a campaign he has called a revolution.

In February, Royce White announced his candidacy for the District 5 seat with a warning: A storm is brewing. In a 3,500-plus word Substack post, he outlined his realignment to the America First far right. White described a God-driven but vague encounter with Truth over the past two years that led him to realize that Black men were being abused by the Democrats, and that Republicans would be a better alternative. While the post spent significant space batting away potential criticisms (Royce White Owes Child Support, Royce White Has Debt, Royce White Is Afraid to Fly), Whites campaign is primarily focused on calling for a mass exodus from the Democrats. Im a populist, he wrote, and we are leaving the plantation.

In his born-again-Republican origin story, White says he was cast into the political wilderness after the NBA refused to meet his demand for better mental health policies. (He calls it his first run-in with globalism.) In 2020, he reemerged as one of the voices of the Black Lives Matter movement in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd set off national protests. As Royce stood on a bridge overlooking the Mississippi River, he told a reporter the protest gave that feeling of Selma back in the 60s. The Washington Post described him as one of the freshest emerging leaders in this new civil rights moment. Hes since rejected BLM because, he says, the movement prefers Black men to be dead, gay, sold out, or on the wrong end of sexual harassment, or Me Too allegations.

His current politics could be described as tinfoil hat populism. He believes that the Democrats, Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, President Xi Jinping, the CCP, non-MAGA Republicans, George Soros, millennial purple-haired white liberal women, the Church of LGBTQ, the National Basketball Association, and various government agencies all act on behalf of the same global corporate community.

This evening, the destination for the marchers who have gathered is the local headquarters of the Federal Reserve. White holds a special animus against the US central bank, believing that it has disempowered average Americans by helping accrue over $30 trillion in national debt. Using rhetoric that sums up his political approach as a Republican, Royce has repackaged banal conservative deficit hawkery as original, rebellious, and compelling for voters. It is an approach he may have learned from his mentor, Steve Bannon.

The recently convicted former Trump consigliere is the man perhaps most responsible for Whites transformation. Sometime during the summer of 2021, according to the Washington Post, White was introduced to Bannon through the Big 3, an upstart three-on-three basketball league populated by ex-NBA players, among others. The league was founded by the rapper and actor Ice Cube and Bannons longtime friend, Hollywood mogul Jeff Kwatinetz. As White told Alex Jones in a recent in-studio appearance on Infowars, he would not have joined the MAGA movement without Bannon. For White, Bannon is a mentor, friend, and American hero.

It was Bannon who told White to run for the GOP nomination for Congress in Rep. Ilhan Omars district, which Democrats routinely win by over 20 points. In the August 9 Republican primary, White will face a candidate named Cicely Davis. She handily won the state partys endorsement and is considered the favorite. But winning might be beside the point.

A Minnesota-based GOP strategist told me that Bannon likely was looking for someone who could raise money and embrace the Stop the Steal cause. In September 2021, ProPublica reported that Bannon had effectively mobilized thousands of his listeners to get involved in electoral politics on the state, county, and local levels. Royce White, as much as anyone, embodies Bannons dream of mobilizing his podcast audience to be the grassroots champions of the stolen election myth. You come from a place [where] you have the bonafides to speak truth to the power, Bannon told White in an in-studio interview in March 2022. When you first got started in the George Floyd situation, MSNBCyou were like the poster child. They couldnt get enough of [you]. Now, as Bannon recently gushed, White is harder right than I am.

Bannons former colleague Andrew Breitbart was known to say, Politics is downstream from culture. For Bannon, making Royce White a star and the future of the Republican Party might be more important than a seat in the House. White possesses incredible symbolic potential as a professional athlete, a Black man who once was a leader in Black Lives Matter protests, and someone willing to do anything to get his message out.

Over the past year, his media credentials have blossomed. White recently co-hosted an episode of the War Room alongside Bannon. He contributes to sportswriter Jason Whitlocks show on The Blaze, Glenn Becks network. In the midst of being on the receiving end of lawsuits for calling victims in the Sandy Hook massacre crisis actors, Alex Jones invited White to guest-host a segment of his Infowars broadcast. White has made several in-studio trips to see Tim Pool, the disaffected former Occupy Wall Street livestreamer turned one of YouTubes favorite reactionary pedants. On Tucker Carlsons show, White made a short but well-received appearance in which he argued the uniparty sold a fantasy of globalismwhich is just another way to attack the American working class. Soon, White plans to launch his own podcast.

Watching Whites campaign rally, I began to wonder if this was less a start of an electoral push than a crucial first step in his new and viable career as right-wing media provocateur. It feels like a prank, as I watch Jonathan Mason, Whites campaign manager and the brother of a former basketball teammate, standing on the flatbed of the truck, yelling for more civil disobedience: When Black Lives Matter protests, they just take up the road. Weve got to do the same thing. People will catch on. Patriots will catch on.

But the attempt to take over 1st Street fails. Motorists are irritated. Horns are honked. The patriots settle for the bike lane.

I grew up in Minneapolis and played high school basketball during the same years as White. Hes considered, with good reason, to be one of the best players ever to come out of Minnesota. Growing up in different parts of the Twin Cities metro area, White split time living with his mother, his grandfather, and other relatives. While his single mom was at work as an esthetician, Royce would practice basketball for hours at local rec centers, as he told Bannon in his first in-studio War Room appearance. That discipline, Bannon replied, is what he looks for. [It] goes through all of life.

White chose to stay in the state and attend the University of Minnesota. Local fans were jubilant. But the excitement didnt last long. His first year, Minnesota Gophers coach Tubby Smith suspended White for two separate but unrelated off-the-court incidents. Even then, White showed a desire to control his own narrative, and a penchant for media stunts. Before he had formally requested to withdraw from the university, he released YouTube videos. In one titled Royce White: The Last Interview, he announced he was leaving the program. He found refuge at Iowa State University, where he led his team in all five major statistical categories and starred in an NCAA tournament matchup with future NBA superstar Anthony Davis.

Royce White was a star basketball player at Iowa State in college.

Damian Strohmeyer/Sports Illustrated/Getty

White was selected by the Houston Rockets as the 16th overall pick in the 2012 NBA Draft. He had point-guard skills in a power forwards body, drawing comparisons to LeBron James. But even as a college kid thrust into the spotlight, he was a mystery, according to media reports, because he had the confidence to speak out about a taboo issue. White refused to play ball until the Rockets agreed to treat his generalized anxiety disorder with the same support theyd treat a rolled ankle. Houston and the NBA werent interested. White sat out. And he lost millions. His only appearances in the NBA, according to Basketball Reference, came in 2014 when he played a total of nine regulation minutes with the Sacramento Kings.

At the time, I remember admiring Whites prescient stance on mental health in sports. His struggle became one of the rare warnings, before Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka, that athletes were actual people. (After the NBA player Kevin Love publicly shared that he struggled with anxiety, he gave White a shout-out.)

His story with the NBA was catnip for some journalists, myself included. White and I had lunch in Minneapolis sometime in 2016, and Id later interview him over email. Here was a young Black man who called out a professional sports league as an exploitative human commodity business, and was willing to pay the price with his career. In 2013, Dave Zirin, Sports Editor of The Nation, called White a mental health revolutionary, and placed him in the tradition of trailblazing athlete-activists like Billie Jean King, Bill Russell, and Muhammad Ali. (Zirin declined to comment.) In a profile covering Whites post-NBA career playing professionally in Canada for the London Lightning of Ontario, Esquire described him as the most important basketball player alive. In another profile, a writer likened White to light itself.

I saw White again in 2016, at a St. Paul library, during the height of the public frenzy over another athlete who had paid for their principles with their career. White and Zirin held a public conversation on what San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernicks taking a knee would mean for athlete activism. I had recently graduated college at the time and sat next to my sociology professor Doug Hartmann, a specialist in the intersection of sport, race and athlete activism.

When I spoke to Hartmann earlier this summer, he was still wrapping his head around Whites flip. Whats super uncomfortable for me now is that with this right-wing shift, is that its hard to figure out: wheres the coherence at all, he said. Its really hard to see the continuity between some of the things he was talking about previously, and what hes talking about now.

In 2020, Royce White made headlines again. He had never protested before, but in the wake of George Floyds murder by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin on a street corner in south Minneapolis, White sent a text to a group chat of fellow Twin Cities athletes. Together they called themselves the 10K Foundation, and they banded together to show the power of peaceful protest.

A flashy website followed with striking photography, press releases breathlessly recounting each protest, an online store selling apparel to gear up for the revolution, and an open letter from White to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, which now reads like a less scorched-earth version of his Substack screeds. Their lack of experience quickly became apparent. As one of the protests took over the 35W interstate highway bridge, an oil tanker truck drove through the crowd and nearly ran over participants. The episode made more veteran activists wary of the 10K Foundation, whose members included the now vice president of the Minneapolis NAACP, P.J. Hill. (Hill declined to comment for this article, citing the NAACPs neutral stance in elections.)

White took center stage as Minneapolis became ground zero in a nationwide outpouring of outrage at police killings of Black men. Reporters and news producers from both local and national media grasped for a coherent narrative from the unrest. They flocked to the ex-NBA player who was putting it all on the line for his politics and likened him to Kaepernick. In a televised interview with CNN on June 2, 2020 White said Kaepernicks protest was definitely prophetic, and that theres no stronger symbolism in our time right now for protests than what he has already laid the groundwork for. He noted that his mental health protest with the NBA, was just as prophetic as what Colin Kaepernick did.

In interviews and social media posts at the time, Whites views seemed relatively consistent with those from many people taking to the streets in Minneapolis and across America: Derek Chauvin was a murderer and the country must change. In an interview on Zirins Edge of Sports podcast, White called Donald Trump a fool whom hed never have let sit at his lunch table. He did not condemn looting and property destruction. The looters are a response of a lack of justice, he told the Des Moines Register. If the police continued to escalate, he threatened a return to the militant, armed self-defense of the Black Panther Party. He retweeted a call to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.

When George Floyd was killed, [White] wasbeing a good human being and standing up for what he believed at that time, said Toshira Garraway, the founder of the group Families Supporting Families Against Police Violence, a Twin Citiesbased organization that supports the families and loved ones of victims of police violence. He always treated me with respect. He always treated the other families with respect.

Signs that White might not follow a conventional activist trajectory wouldnt surface publicly until the following year. In April 2021, the Twin Cities underwent another moment of racist police violence just as Chauvins murder trial was underway. In a suburb just outside of Minneapolis, a cop named Kim Potter shot and killed a Black man named Daunte Wright after she pulled him over. Potter says she was reaching for her taser. In February, she was sentenced to 16 months in prison for first- and second-degree manslaughter.

Protesters, including White, and other members of the 10K Foundation, gathered outside of the Brooklyn Center police station, where Potter worked. The facility had been surrounded by a large fence, which White said represented tyranny. He called for the crowd to join him in breaching it. An argument between White and other protesters ensued, and the aftermath was captured on video.

Black men will lead the revolution. 18-year-old Black girls who identify as this or that will not lead the revolution, White yelled into a megaphone. Facing accusations of misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, White became more belligerent in Instagram live videos.

The 10K Foundation has announced few events since. Prominent members, including the co-founder Tayo Daniel, did not return repeated requests for comment.

A few days after his meltdown, White appeared with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC as a representative of the movement to discuss the guilty verdict in Chauvins trial. Weve been watching this trial with great interest and heavy hearts with George Floyd and his family, he told Maddow. We hope todays verdict gives them some peace and that it serves as some legal precedent as we move forward.

The people view America as a corporation, he continued, and they view our police departments as corporate assets.

In the summer of 2020, White played a leading role in organizing protests after the killing of George Floyd.

Stephen Maturen/Getty

Viewers couldnt have guessed White was in the midst of a fallout with the movement while on Maddow. But perhaps they could have seen that Royce wasnt a typical voice of the left, even then. BLM Royce and MAGA Royce may have parted, but the vaguely libertarian, anti-authoritarian language remains the same: tyranny, sovereignty, corporate overlords, all conspiring to damage the free people of America.

Later, White would admit he had been tuning into the War Room months before the protests started. When the pandemic hit the US in March 2020, Bannon was pumping out anti-China Covid conspiracy theories. White listened. He then repurposed some of the same arguments for his BLM talking points. He took on the rights dislike of globalism, too. (He even led a BLM protest to the Fed building.)

Protests bring many people for many reasons. But media needed someone to speak for the masses. White took on that responsibility, even if his views were always unusual.

Unfortunately we as an organization have nothing positive to say about Royce, one local activist group, which had organized an event with Royce and 10K, wrote me. Theres been a lot of harm caused by his actions.

Starting in April, I tried to speak with White about his campaign and his political evolution. We developed a pattern: First, he and Mason agreed to an interview. Then, they ignored my messages. Then they bailed on our interview. Interspersed with these communications would be direct messages to me on Instagram with copy-pasted requests to share information about his campaign and media appearances. Id respond by asking to sit down for an interview, reminding them they had told me Royce would talk. Sometimes there would be a response. Then, no follow up until a few days later, when Id receive another template Instagram DM.

I turned to someone who has known Royce his entire life to get a better sense of him. Frank White, Royces grandfather, is an elder statesman in the Minnesota sporting scene. He coordinates a program to revive baseball in the inner city and as a historian of Black sports in the state, hes currently working on his second book. This one is about athletes from the Rondo neighborhood, a historically Black area of St. Paul that, like many historically Black neighborhoods, was upended and displaced by the construction of the national highway system.

Royce lived with Frank from 8th grade until his senior year of high school. During that stretch of time, I was dad and grandpa, at the same time, and went to all of his games, Frank told me.

Im proud of my grandson, but do I agree with his politics? No, he said as we spoke on the phone. He told me, Hey grandpa, Im going to be on Steve Bannons podcast. I said, Do you know who Steve Bannon is, man?(When I called Frank for a follow-up recently, Steve Bannon had just been found guilty of contempt of Congress. Frank said hed spoken to Royce and told him, Your guy Steve Bannon is probably gonna go to jail.)

What about the fact that Royce was championing the stolen 2020 election myth and the Capitol riot and attempted coup on January 6?

Theres no way I can support my grandson supporting the GOP, and in essence, Trump. This is a guy who wants to be a dictator. Think about what that means, said Frank. Youre a person of color. Do you think you fit in his plans?

Royce, of course, does think he fits in. The standard Black conservative line is that Democrats are just a few election cycles of broken promises and legislative inaction away from losing a significant share of Black votes. Given how the modern-day GOP has so many ties to institutional white supremacy, and continues to scapegoat Black Americans, the Black vote fleeing to this party seems implausible. But there is truth to the argument that Democrats assume Black voters will elect them without meeting their needs, and have an over-reliance on Republicans are more racist in lieu of a campaign strategy.

Im not afraid that Royce will be that guy, said Dr. Jason Nichols, a lecturer in the African American studies department at the University of Maryland, College Park, of this push for a voice for Black conservatives. But Im afraid that that guy is coming. Republicans wouldnt have to win over that many Black voters to make a serious dent in Democrats electoral prospects, he said, theyd just have to peel away enough of a margin in certain locales.

[The right is] is winning the culture war because theyre saying, This is against your Christianity, this is against your manhood; things that are fundamental to you, he noted. And implicitly, Its against your Blackness.

Nichols thinks the Democrats should be hitting the panic button upon seeing all of this. If [Royce White] can be convinced that quicklyyou know, George [Floyds] murder is only two years agoit makes me think [as a Democrat]: What am I not messaging well enough? he said. If you asked [Democratic] strategists about Royce, theyd be like, Whos that? Who cares? But Im like: You should care.

Frank White surely cares. He still holds out hope.

I wish Royce would turn the page because he has the heart to change peoples lives, if it was in a different fashion, Frank said. Then pausing, he reflected on the effects his new celebrity, his new political allegiances, and his new crusade might have on his charismatic, talented, and sometimes troubled grandson. I do fear that its gonna have an impact on his life different from what he might believe.

In early June, White bought a billboard in downtown Minneapolis, right across the street from the Target Center, where the Minnesota Timberwolves play. A side profile shows The United States of the Federal Reserve written in big black letters across his head. The billboard has his official campaign slogan that sums up his refusal to compromise that has spanned his various causes: No Lockdowns. No Mandates. No Apologies. No Sellin Out.

Nobody is ever quite good enough for Royce, Doug Hartmann, my old professor, who spent hours interviewing Royce about politics and activism in the summer of 2020, explained, noting that Royce believed the NBA protests that summer were insufficient. He likes stirring the pot. I dont know that he has a lot of commitments to particular texts or core ideas, so much as a [commitment] to the free flowing, brawling nature of political debate.

This sensibility fits comfortably in the right-wing media ecosystem, if not in a campaign determined to win. I watched a stream of his town-hall campaign event in Minneapolis on the right-wing Twitter-alternative Gettr. White repeatedly evoked the memory of George Floyd. One time he even argued that the Biden administrations announcement of a crackdown on domestic extremism was lining up each and everyone in this room to become George Floyd.

But exactly how Royce now feels about Floyds death, and Chauvin, is unclear.

White has hired a Minneapolis attorney named Nicholas Morgan as his campaign treasurer. The law firm where Morgan works is called Mohrman, Kaardal & Erickson. (It shares the same downtown Minneapolis address with campaign headquarters.) One of the partners at the firm, William Mohrman, is currently working as a defense attorney for Chauvin as he attempts to appeal his conviction for murdering Floyd. The law firm is crowdfunding for Chauvins defense on their website.

The 10k Foundation is still selling apparel celebrating Chauvins guilty verdict on their website. White now notes that Floyd had The CCP drug, a reference to fentanyl and China, in his system.

At the Fed building, White declares that these people need history lessons. Speeches from Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. blast out from the speakers at a volume that makes it nearly impossible to speak to other attendees. It is part performance art, part public nuisance. The woman whose hat calls for the imprisonment of Dr. Fauci gives a speech. It mentions the New World Order, FEMA Camps, the Great Reset, critical race theory, gene therapy vaccines, and transhumanism.

I catch up with White at the demonstration and ask what he considers the biggest challenge of his campaign. No challenges. Its gonna be smooth, he replies. Bring the truth to the people. Let them decide. Thats America.

Top image credits: Quinn Harris/Getty; Win McNamee/Getty; Stephen Maturen/Getty

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