Kyrie Irving's antisemitic roots: Do they go back further?

This very interesting and in-depth profile by New York Magazine has me wondering about that and more. Let's start here:

In early 2017, Irving’s teammates Channing Frye and Richard Jefferson created Road Trippin’, a podcast they’d record while flying on the team plane. Irving regularly joined in, providing the wider world with an unfiltered window into his free-associative mind. He riffed on the possibility of a faked moon landing and noted that JFK’s murder took place just days after he tried to “end the bank cartel.”

I'm not saying that IS antisemitic, but it's a short hop from there to "they" control all the banks.

NOTE: Contra nutters on Reddit, where I posted the story link, I totally reject all forms of JFK conspiracy theory, which is why I added the "JFK Assassination" tag. Whether they will eventually focus on possible early roots of Kyrie's "lizard people" thinking, I don't know.

Especially when you then go to:

In one podcast episode, Jefferson and Frye began debating the Illuminati. Another host, the sideline reporter Allie Clifton, tried to change the subject, but Irving stopped her. “It’s okay, this feeling you’re getting in your stomach,” he said.

Well, there you go. And "there" is where Allie Clifton seemed to see Irving going.

But, the weirdness goes beyond possibly deeper antisemitism than I first knew, or other issues like the flat-Earthism.

Like "Anthony Browder." He's one of those "Black Egypt" types. One who believes Egyptian genius is behind much of the modern world.

Then there's Frances Cress Wilding, going quasi-Freudian with her ideas on a sport's ball size and color vs. White vs Black skill levels. Alert Larry Bird and Tiger Woods.

I already thought Dallas trading for him was idiotic. This just adds to that. 

Then we get to the Black Hebrews film fallout.

“Was I surprised that he tweeted out a random antisemitic documentary? Yeah, a little bit. Then again, if you know the YouTube or Instagram algorithm, what kinds of things get fed to a conspiracy-minded guy like him …,” said one team front-office figure, who happens to be Jewish. “I feel like the antisemitism thing is such a footnote to the whole Kyrie story, another example of him spouting off on things he doesn’t know about. He thinks he’s discovered something nobody else knows.” 

Before returning to the Nets, Irving offered an apology during a televised SNY interview. When he had claimed he couldn’t be antisemitic because “I know where I come from,” he said, he wasn’t referring to a lost tribe of Israel. He said he meant suburban New Jersey.

OK, now we're into an allegedly deep thinker telling a lie and a laughable one.

From there, the piece looks at the history of Jewish-Black tensions, Jewish friends of Kyrie's childhood and more.

Then it moves to his narcissism as a player:

At his first press conference as a Dallas Maverick, Irving seemed to characterize his time in Brooklyn as a success. “I left them in fourth place. I did what I was supposed to do,” he said. (The team went 5-9 in games that Durant missed.) “I was incredibly selfless in my approach to leading.”

More reasons the Mavs shouldn't have made the trade, at least not at the price they did.

And finishes with a cold assessment of his psyche:

There’s another way to look at Irving too. He’s often treated as a Neptunian, but many of his qualities are, at heart, pretty familiar for a 30-year-old American who spent much of the pandemic staring at a screen: a borderline solipsistic obsession with his identity, a vague distrust of the country’s political Establishment, a radicalization on matters of social justice. ... Off the court, at least, Irving is far from unknowable. In his own way, he can even be considered — and here’s a word no one has ever used to describe him — ordinary.

I agree. And, for Kyrie, that last cut — being called "ordinary" — is surely the coldest of all.