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Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy [ [link removed] ].
If you don’t follow the NBA, here is the short version of what happened last week: a 24-year-old basketball player got cut from the Chicago Bulls—and by the next morning, Riley Gaines had compared him to Jesus Christ.
The longer version is sadder, messier, and considerably more revealing about how the modern right-wing media machine operates. But let’s start with the basketball, because you need the basketball to understand why the rest of this is so absurd.
Jaden Ivey was the fifth overall pick in the 2022 NBA Draft [ [link removed] ]. For those keeping score at home, that means he was considered one of the five most promising young basketball players in the entire country. He went to the Detroit Pistons, showed flashes of real ability in his first two seasons, and then his body began filing formal complaints. He missed time with a broken fibula. He had knee surgery. He was traded to the Chicago Bulls at the February deadline as part of a low-stakes roster shuffle, and in a little over a month with Chicago he played exactly four games before his knee sidelined him again [ [link removed] ] for the rest of the season. Four games. He wasn’t anchoring a franchise. He was a project with an expiring contract and a medical file that reads like a grad school reading list: long, concerning, and full of things you wish you hadn’t seen.
So: injured player, no guaranteed future, not yet under contract for next year, sitting at home with nothing to do. And somewhere in that particular combination of factors, Jaden Ivey discovered Instagram Live.
What followed was … a lot.
Over the course of several days, Ivey conducted a series of livestreams that sometimes ran nearly an hour each, covering a range of topics that included: the sinfulness of Pride Month [ [link removed] ], the spiritual inadequacy of Stephen Curry [ [link removed] ], the spiritual inadequacy of LeBron James, the spiritual inadequacy of Michael Jordan, the false doctrine of Catholicism, the wickedness of 50 Cent’s music, abortion, and—in what I can only describe as a scheduling choice—the fact that his wife wasn’t texting him back.
He called out the NBA for celebrating Pride Night as a promotion of “unrighteousness.” He said Steph Curry—arguably the most openly Christian active player in the league, a man who writes Bible verses on his shoes and has a Bible study group—was “not surrendered” and probably not a real Christian. He said LeBron’s rings won’t matter on judgment day. He said the same about Jordan’s six. He called Catholicism a false religion. He did all of this on a platform connected to his real name, with his employer’s logo still on his profile.
The Bulls waived him the same day the Pride Night comments dropped.
And look—the Bulls are not exactly a model franchise. They haven’t been relevant since Michael Jordan was doing most of the work and Dennis Rodman was doing all of the chaos. But even the Chicago Bulls, an organization that has made some genuinely impressive front-office errors over the years, knew that a player racking up theological enemies from an Instagram Live during his paid rehabilitation was not a situation they needed to be in.
The official reason was “conduct detrimental to the team.”
Which brings us to the real story...
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