Irving first came to our attention in 2017, when he endorsed flateartherism in a podcast interview – “The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat,” insisted Irving before also claiming that there are aliens (it is unclear what sort of geometrical object these aliens call home) and some unspecified cosmic cover-up of everything for unclear reasons (he did emphasize, though, that flat eartherism “is not even a conspiracy theory”, so there). Said Irving: “If you really think about it from the landscape of the way we travel, the way we move, and the fact that … can you really think of us rotating around the sun and all planets aligned, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what’s going on with these planets?”. And yes, those are words in a sequence, but they are little else. As for the aliens, Irving’s main reason for concluding that they exist and interact with us is that he has seen it in movies and can’t see any reason for making such movies (“for what? For what?”) unless aliens exist; also, it is hard to believe that the people who ostensibly manage a conspiracy to hide the flatness of the Earth could possess the creative spark needed to imagine aliens out of whole cloth; Irving doesn’t.
Other NBA luminaries, like Wilson Chandler and Draymond Green, supported Irving’s claims but most did not, and after some blowback, Irving claimed to have been joking and that he was misunderstood but also, with regard to the shape of the Earth, that “I don’t know. I really don’t” and suggesting that people should “do [their] own research for what [they] want to believe in” because “Our educational system is flawed”. Irving himself is a good illustration of why doing your own research is not necessarily a good idea, in particular when dumb internet memes constitute the limits of your research capacity; it is, however, hard to deny, given Irving, that the educational system may suffer from some shortcomings. He has later avoided attempts to clarify his position on the shape of the Earth.
Of course, once you are open to flat Earth nonsense, reason-based constraints are no longer in play, and Irving has championed a number of other conspiracy theories as well. It is perhaps little surprise that he thinks John F. Kennedy was killed because he wanted to end the “banking cartel” or that he was a channel for an impressive amount of misinformation, including anti-vaccine misinformation, during the COVID-19 pandemic – Irving was among the leaders of a rather influential group of low-information and low-reasoning-level NBA players (including Michael Porter jr., Jonathan Isaac, Bradley Beal and Andrew Wiggins) promoting anti-vaccine and COVID-19 conspiracy theories. According to Irving, “secret societies are administering vaccines in a plot to connect Black people to a master computer for a plan of Satan” (yes, it’s dumb, and yes, it’s an idea that is popular with antivaxxers and major anti-vaccine organizations), and he would share rants by Alex Jones on how state actors representing the New World Order have been planning to oppress the public by intentionally releasing viruses.
Anti-semitism
The last couple of years, Irving has been an adherent of the Black Hebrew Israelite doctrine, according to which black people are the real Jews. Real Jewish people are, on the other hand, fake Jewish people, and followers of the nonsense are accordingly quick to engage in hardcore anti-semitism also beyond the anti-semitism inherent in the doctrine’s core delusion. Irving seems to have gotten his ideas from amateur conspiracy theorist Ronald Dalton Jr.’s film (and book) Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America, which embellishes the Black Hebrew Israelite doctrine with Holocaust denial and quotes attributed to Adolf Hitler, Henry Ford and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. It also claims that (real) Jewish people worship Satan, control the media, controlled the Atlantic slave trade, and currently control the media (Dalton claims to have received his info partially through divine revelation, by the way). When confronted with the misinformation promoted by the film, Irving refused to apologize: saying that deeming him antisemitic was “not justified” and that he intended to “learn from all walks of life and religions” is obviously not distancing oneself from the misinformation, and Irving also emphasized that “[h]istory is not supposed to be hidden from anybody” and that “I’m not going to stand down on anything I believe in. I’m only going to get stronger because I’m not alone. I have a whole army around me.” He added that he would be able to debunk any criticism leveled at him because of his propensity for “study[ing]”, and that he “know[s] the Oxford dictionary,” so there. To direct questions about whether he defended anti-semitism, Irving clarified that “I cannot be antisemitic if I know where I come from.” The incident resulted in a suspension from his NBA team and a termination of his contract with Nike. He eventually issued a notpology and did not denounce the misinformation he had been promoting.
Diagnosis: Not operating on at very sophisticated cognitive level, this one. There is, however, a chance that some people, operating at a similarly basic cognitive level, actually listen to him.
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