OpinionMichelle Goldberg

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By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

Royce White, a Black former pro basketball player who led protests in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd, made his first appearance on “The Alex Jones Show” about two years ago. As he spoke, it became clear that the deep suspicion of government authority that inspired him to march in the summer of 2020 had carried him into Jones’s paranoid orbit. “We all know when the time comes and authoritarianism is at its peak, the police and the troops who just take marching orders are going to be the ones forcibly vaccinating you and your kids,” he said. Jones, a purveyor of conspiracy theories about everything from 9/11 to the murder of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, was thrilled by their conversation. “You’re awesome, you’re dead-on, and we’re going to learn a lot from you,” he enthused.

In the 2010s, White was known for fighting to get the N.B.A. to accommodate his generalized anxiety disorder, a public stand that won him journalistic admiration even as his athletic career faltered. (The Nation’s Dave Zirin called him a “mental health revolutionary” and compared him to Billie Jean King and Muhammad Ali.) Then in 2020 he was hailed as a rising civil rights activist. “Royce White Towers Above the Minneapolis Protests, and Thousands Are Looking Up to Him,” said a Washington Post headline. “If Donald Trump continues to threaten us with the military, this will continue to escalate,” White said on CNN, adding that people were “tired of tyranny.”

Yet White, distrustful of established power, also chafed under the constraints of what seemed to him like liberal orthodoxy. He was drawn, he told Jones, to “people who the establishment and the corporatocracy tried to silence, whether it be you, whether it be Minister Louis Farrakhan, whether it be a guy now like Robert Malone” — a major........

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