WASHINGTON — The N.B.A. superstar LeBron James and a group of other prominent black athletes and entertainers are starting a new group aimed at protecting African-Americans’ voting rights, seizing on the widespread fury against racial injustice that has fueled worldwide protests to amplify their voices in this fall’s presidential election.
“Because of everything that’s going on, people are finally starting to listen to us — we feel like we’re finally getting a foot in the door,” Mr. James said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “How long is up to us. We don’t know. But we feel like we’re getting some ears and some attention, and this is the time for us to finally make a difference.”
The organization, called More Than a Vote, will partly be aimed at inspiring African-Americans to register and to cast a ballot in November. But as the name of the group suggests, Mr. James and other current and former basketball stars — including Trae Young, Skylar Diggins-Smith and Jalen Rose — will go well beyond traditional celebrity get-out-the-vote efforts.
Mr. James, 35, said he would use his high-profile platform on social media to combat voter suppression and would be vocal about drawing attention to any attempts to restrict the franchise of racial minorities.
“Yes, we want you to go out and vote, but we’re also going to give you the tutorial,” Mr. James said. “We’re going to give you the background of how to vote and what they’re trying to do, the other side, to stop you from voting.”
He made no mention of President Trump, whom he has sharply criticized in the past, but he repurposed Mr. Trump’s slogan to hail America’s beauty, explaining, “We want to be beautiful once again.”
The new organization represents Mr. James’s most significant foray yet into electoral politics.
He has long said that he believes his greatest legacy will come from his off-the-court achievements. He has poured millions into his native Ohio, helping to underwrite college tuition for low-income students to attend the University of Akron and even opening his own school in the city for children in third through eighth grade.
He has also delved into entertainment, starting a media production company with his close friend Maverick Carter that has produced an HBO series, “The Shop,” in which the two men conduct casual interviews in a barber shop. Mr. James has also underwritten a series of documentaries.
Until now, though, his political involvement has mostly been limited to speaking out on social media and appearing at a single rally late in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
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The death last month of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, however, helped convince Mr. James that he needed “to get out and do a little bit more.”
Invoking the names of an earlier generation of athletes who called for social justice , Mr. James, a forward for the Los Angeles Lakers, said he wanted to be a model for future generations.
“I’m inspired by the likes of Muhammad Ali, I’m inspired by the Bill Russells and the Kareem Abdul-Jabbars, the Oscar Robertsons — those guys who stood when the times were even way worse than they are today,” Mr. James said. “Hopefully, someday down the line, people will recognize me not only for the way I approached the game of basketball, but the way I approached life as an African-American man.”
In some respects, Mr. James’s activism reflects a return to an earlier generation of athletes who used their fame to speak out about racial equality and the Vietnam War with little regard to whom it might offend.
And because today’s players have come of age in an era of social media, they want to engage in advocacy in their own voice.
“This group of athletes wants to feel empowered in every single way,” Mr. Carter said.
Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state, said that “trusted voices” like Mr. James’s could help break through the din at a moment of rising skepticism toward the news media and both political parties.
“What we’re seeing in Michigan is there’s a heightened need to inform citizens how to vote in this coronavirus era,” said Ms. Benson, a Democrat who is helping advise the group. “We’ve got to go beyond registering people to vote and talking about the importance of voting to actively combating voter suppression.”
The group, which will be organized as a 501©(4) nonprofit organization and therefore not engage in specific advocacy for a candidate, is still coming together, but Mr. James said he had found only willing ears in his recruiting conversations.
“I’m sick of seeing unarmed black men killed by the police,” said Ms. Diggins-Smith, a guard for the Phoenix Mercury, adding that she wanted “to put some action behind my frustrations, behind my anger, behind the helplessness that I’ve been feeling.”
For Mr. James and the other organizers, part of their motivation is to combat apathy among black voters. Older African-Americans are historically reliable voters, but in 2016 there was a drop-off with younger black voters, particularly men.
“We’re not letting that happen again,” said Mr. Rose, who called Mr. Floyd’s death perhaps the most galvanizing killing since the lynching of Emmett Till.
Mr. Young, a 21-year-old breakout star with the Atlanta Hawks, said he was hoping to be a “role model for my generation.”
“If people my age see that I’m going out and I’m voting and I’m talking,” he said, “maybe the next 21-year-old will.”
On Monday, Mr. James convened a call that included Mr. Rose, the Detroit-raised former N.B.A. star; Ms. Diggins-Smith; Draymond Green, a forward for the Golden State Warriors and another Michigan native; Udonis Haslem, a longtime Miami Heat forward who is from Florida; and the N.F.L. running back Alvin Kamara, who is from Georgia. Mr. James has also gotten a commitment from the comedian Kevin Hart, a Philadelphia native, and is speaking to a number of musicians.
Mr. James and Mr. Carter are putting up the initial funding.
The organization will team up with voting rights organizations, including When We All Vote and Fair Fight, and is being advised by Adam Mendelsohn, a former political strategist who has worked with Mr. James for nearly a decade, and Addisu Demissie, who ran Senator Cory Booker’s 2020 presidential campaign.
It is Mr. James, though, who has the loudest megaphone. His social media following is unequaled among American athletes: He has over 136 million followers between his Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts (just over 137 million people voted in the 2016 presidential election).
Now, he said, it’s time for his admirers to do their part.
“There’s a lot of people that want change in the black community,” Mr. James said, but he added, “if you actually don’t put in the work or if you don’t have the mind-set, there’s never going to be change.”
As for his own plans this fall, he said he had not yet talked to Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, but he did not rule out appearing on the campaign trail.
“We’ll see if we can help a candidate here and there,” Mr. James said.
A believer in a conspiracy theory the FBI classifies as a possible domestic terrorist threat is in a prime position to soon be elected to Congress, after coming in first in a Republican primary in Georgia on Tuesday.
QAnon conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has frequently posted messages about the bizarre pro-Trump conspiracy theory on social media, handily leads the primary field of Republicans in Georgia’s heavily Republican 14th District. Greene, who beat her closest opponent by more than 20 percentage points, will head to an August runoff after receiving 41 percent of the vote.
Greene is an outspoken supporter of QAnon, a conspiracy theory based on a series of anonymous messages posted online by a mystery figure named “Q.” QAnon believers think that Donald Trump is engaged in a shadowy war against a cabal of global elites, including the Democratic Party, and will soon arrest or even execute top Democrats in an event they know as “The Storm.”
Despite such ludicrous claims, Greene has praised QAnon. In a video posted online, she called the anonymous “Q” a “patriot” and said that their predictions had been accurate.
“Many of the things that he has given clues about and talked on 4Chan and other forums have really proven to be true,” Greene said.
Greene’s QAnon beliefs haven’t stopped her from winning the backing of at least one high-powered Republican. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio endorsed her bid, calling her “exactly the kind of fighter needed in Washington to stand with me against the radical left.” Greene has also been boosted by $44,000 in spending and $78,000 in earmarked contributions from the House Freedom Fund, a PAC tied to Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, according to campaign-finance watchdog Open Secrets.
Because of her performance in the first round of the primary, Greene is heavily favored to win the nomination. Should she get more than 50 percent of the vote in the primary’s runoff, she would have an excellent shot of winning the general election for her House seat, which is now held by retiring Rep. Tom Graves, also a Republican. Her district in northwest Georgia is rated “R+27” by the Cook Political Report, meaning that the Democratic candidate faces a Herculean task to take the seat.
Greene did not respond for comment. Nor did the National Republican Congressional Committee, which supports GOP House candidates.
But her emergence as the party’s likely nominee will inevitably put the committee in a bind: forced to choose between supporting the will of their primary voters and being tagged with a candidate whose beliefs are on the deep fringe.
In a detail reminiscent of the Pizzagate conspiracy that inspired a shooting at a Washington, D.C. pizzeria, many QAnon fans are convinced that leading Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are somehow engaged in sexual or cannibalistic torture of children. QAnon believers have been charged with two murders, a terrorist incident, and two child abduction plots related to their beliefs, among other crimes. The FBI considers QAnon a potential source of domestic terrorism.
Greene has also posted about QAnon on social media, tweeting QAnon catchphrases “Trust the plan” and “#GreatAwakening” and praising a QAnon clue as an “awesome post” in 2018.
While Greene seems poised to make history as the first Q believer in Congress, others have come close. Dozens of candidates this cycle have posted about the theory online. And in Oregon, the Republican Senate nominee, Jo Rae Perkins, is an open QAnon believer who thanked “Q” when she won the nomination to run in November against Sen. Jeff Merkley (D). After Perkins’ campaign tried to claim their candidate didn’t believe in the conspiracy theory, Perkins insisted she was a QAnon believer, saying she was “literally physically in tears” by the attempt to distance her from QAnon. Perkins, who is running in a heavily Democratic state, stands little chance of winning in the general election.
Greene’s wild worldviews don’t stop at QAnon. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, she rose to prominence on the right after recording a series of videos in which she confronted various liberals reviled by Trump supporters. In one popular video, Greene visited the congressional office of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and repeated an unproven claim that Omar illegally married her own brother. She may soon be able to just walk down the halls to confront Omar rather than tote a videocamera with her to the Capitol.
In another video, Greene pursued Parkland shooting survivor and gun-control advocate David Hogg in the street outside in Washington, saying in her video that Hogg is a “coward” with “George Soros funding.”
Greene earned headlines and social-media attention last week with a campaign ad in which she wielded an AR-15 rifle and warned left-wing antifascist “antifa” demonstrators to “stay the hell out of northwest Georgia.”
“You won’t burn our churches, loot our businesses, or destroy our homes,” Greene said in the ad.
Facebook pulled the ad, citing the site’s rules against promoting firearm use against a particular group of people. For conservatives, Greene’s ad became the latest proof that social-media companies are biased against her and earned her an appearance on early-morning Fox News show Fox & Friends First , where she accused Facebook of “defending terrorists.”
Greene has also promoted conspiracy theories about the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, proposing in social-media posts that the shooting was staged or somehow covered up by the FBI to promote gun control.
“Is that why the country music festival was targeted, because those would be the people that we would relate to?” Greene said in one video, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution . “Are they trying to terrorize our mindset and change our minds on the Second Amendment? Is that what’s going on here?”
Her devotion to gun rights is, perhaps, her most notable policy position. Among the laws Greene has railed against are those that include the prohibition of guns in schools.
