#3077: Jonathan Isaac

Celebrity athletes coming out as stupid and misinformed isn’t novel – we covered Kyrie Irving in our previous post – and most people won’t expect them to be any more trustworthy or worth listening to than a random TikTok video.

 

But we should emphasize ‘most people’, for celebrities like basketball star Jonathan Isaac do undeniably have some reach. Now, Isaac hasn’t, as far as we know, endorsed Irving’s flat earther nonsense, but during the early 2020s, he certainly established himself as a wingnut COVID denialist and antivaccine conspiracy theorist. While the NBA did their best to ensure that their players were vaccinated against COVID, Isaac assumed the mantle of some kind of unofficial leader for those that would not: Proudly unvaccinated, Isaac claimed to have read up on ‘antibody resistance’ – it is unclear what he was reading, but he mentioned studying Black history and watching Donald Trump’s press conferences – which led him to “distrust” Dr. Anthony Fauci, look out for people he believed might die from the vaccine, and put his faith in God. “At the end of the day, it’s people,” Isaac said about the scientists developing vaccines, “and you can’t always put your trust completely in people” – apparently apart from Trump and whatever conspiracy theorists Isaac follows on social media. Then, of course, he lamented how unvaccinated players were vilified and bullied just because they were willing to risk the life and well-being of everybody by choosing to stick with their own misinformation. Imagine that.

 

Isaac is otherwise generally famous for being a religious fundie and for being a wingnut. He refused to support Black Lives Matter, for instance, because although he supports Black lives, “I feel like Black lives are supported through the gospel, all lives are supported through the gospel.” In 2022, Isaac released his book on the topic, Why I Stand, which seems to be a book-length treatment of the kinds of insights encapsulated in the above quote, and we grudgingly admire anyone who’ve made it through even the first few pages. His stance on vaccines, politics and religion was apparently interesting enough to get him invited to Clay Clark & Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken America Tour.

 

Diagnosis: He’s famous, and he’s stupid. That means that silly nonsense will be spread, and it has. His contribution is probably soon forgotten, but Isaac will certainly have boosted this kind of nonsense, and its effects won’t go away anytime soon.