I do not stand with Kyrie Irving.
I do not endorse the NBA star’s parroting of antisemitic conspiracy theories, including his promotion of fake Adolf Hitler quotes.
And I do not endorse his repeated citations of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who borrows from white nationalist propaganda with his claims of a new world order led by Black people, Jews, Muslims and women.
By the time this goes live, there’s no telling which right-wing figure Irving will have quoted — or misquoted — next. But to be safe: I don’t endorse whoever that is, either.
To fill you in, the Brooklyn Nets have suspended Irving for at least five games for promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories — first by tweeting out a link to a film that denies millions of Jews were killed in the Holocaust and falsely (yet favorably) attributes quotes to Hitler about Black people. Irving also suggested Jones was right about a looming new world order — another lie steeped in fundamentalist Christian antisemitism, anti-Blackness and misogyny.
Irving has apologized after having refused to do so, and he has been vaunted among a vocal minority of Black people who, disinformation be damned, claim his cause is steeped in pro-Black intellectualism.
I’ll pass.
I insist that, if Irving were as enlightened and self-aware as he claims to be, he’d be less concerned about parroting right-wing talking points he was fed on the internet and more concerned about how — and why — those talking points made their way to him.
That, and not Irving’s yearslong descent into conspiratorial rabbit holes, is the sign of a truly deep thinker.
But Irving, who has careened from flat Earth claims to Covid denialism and now Holocaust denial, has been dangerously self-assured in his rightness. So instead of a truly introspective Kyrie Irving, we’ve gotten ... a cloistered man performing intellectualism while clearly unprepared to defend his beliefs.
But rather than harp on a man I’m pretty uninterested in trying to convince, I think there’s an example to be made here. Because Irving’s behavior is most likely familiar to anyone who has seen friends or family consumed by insidious lies spread online.
How did Irving find this video? By his own admission, by typing a Hebrew translation of his name into Amazon. Yes, Kyrie Irving’s career is on the line because of his vocal support for what is, in essence, a Jeff Bezos-approved movie rec.
To be clear, Bezos, Jones and fake Hitler aren’t part of the pro-Black revolution. But it’s easy to see how relying on Amazon’s algorithms for enlightenment might have led Irving to the sordid conclusion that the film is steeped in pro-Blackness.
Last year, the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue released a report outlining how Amazon searches can steer users toward racist and other extremist material.
From the report:
“At the core of this issue is the failure to consider what a system designed to upsell customers on tote bags or fitness equipment or gardening tools (and which has proven to be one of the most successful systems in the world for doing so) would do when unleashed on products espousing conspiracy theories, disinformation or extreme views. The entirely foreseeable outcome is that Amazon’s platform is, in effect, inadvertently but actively promoting these ideas to their customers.”
Foreseeable, indeed.
A USA Today write-up on the report put its findings succinctly.
“People browsing a book about one conspiracy on Amazon are likely to get suggestions for more books on that topic as well as books about other conspiracy theories about everything from QAnon to the COVID-19 vaccine,” the report found.
That’s essentially the Kyrie Conspiracy Cocktail.
The Nets, Jewish activists and even some of Irving’s defenders have pointed to Amazon as a culprit for funneling this hate speech to him in the first place. They’re not necessarily wrong, although implying he couldn’t differentiate fact from fiction does no favors to his claims of being an independent thinker.
But I think all of that is beside the point. The issue, to me, doesn’t so much seem to be a lack of knowledge, which is curable. It seems to be an excess of hubris — the undeserved arrogance of a man hopelessly convinced he possesses brilliance he can use to lord over peons beneath him.
I’m very cautious of Black people who embrace Irving’s type of self-righteousness and supposedly infallible leadership, particularly when it’s so clearly obvious they are out of their depth.
I’m not sure there’s an antidote for that.