Aaron Rodgers should stick to football
There was a time I considered Aaron Rodgers a tragedy, but it was largely football-related. After all, before Patrick Mahomes, Rodgers was the most talented quarterback of all time, but he has only won a single Super Bowl, just one. He has had seven one-possession losses in the playoffs.
But Rodgers is clearly a tragedy in a different way, a very specific way, a sad and dangerous way, and it continues to unfold. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Rodgers was being considered by Robert Kennedy Jr. as the vice-presidential candidate for his third-party presidential campaign. Kennedy, of course, has a long and terrible history of anti-vaccine activism, among other things. He’s a damaged, dangerous man.
Other VP candidates apparently include former pro wrestler and Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, former Congressional representative Tulsi Gabbard, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, and political gadfly Andrew Yang. The only people who had allegedly not turned Kennedy down were Ventura and Rodgers.
And CNN reported Wednesday that in 2013, and on another unspecified date, Rodgers expressed the conspiratorial view that the Sandy Hook school shooting was staged, and was a government plot. Rodgers was quoted as saying the children never existed, and were actors.
This was a very specific and insidious conspiracy theory pushed by Alex Jones who was ordered to pay the families $965 million (U.S.) over those lies. Every child killed at Sandy Hook was either six of seven years old. Some of their families were harassed for years. The grief extends to this day.
Rodgers is already a well-known kook. His outspoken anti-vaccine views are just a start; there may not be a conspiracy theory he won’t embrace. Rodgers recently went on a podcast and espoused views on a litany of conspiracies, from the gruesome lies of the Died Suddenly anti-vaccine movement — which blames deaths on vaccines that have been proven to be exceedingly safe — to the most elaborate weirdness of the Tartarian Empire theory, which posits that there was a worldwide civilization that created much of the world’s great architecture and whose existence was then covered up, for some reason. Sure.
Usually, Rodgers responds to criticism by playing the grievance card, Like many conspiracists, any criticism is a signal that you’re on the right path, and the world is out to get you. He also has a history of disingenuous wordplay. Asked if he was vaccinated in 2021, he said he was “immunized.” And after clearly implying Jimmy Kimmel was on the side of pedophiles and sex trafficking, he claimed he had never implied any such thing.
Then Thursday, Rodgers released a statement on X, about the Sandy Hook allegations. Read it carefully.
“As I’m on the record saying in the past, what happened in Sandy Hook was an absolute tragedy. I am not and have never been of the opinion that the events did not take place. Again, I hope that we learn from this and other tragedies to identify the signs that will allow us to prevent unnecessary loss of life. My thoughts and prayers continue to remain with the families affected along with the entire Sandy Hook community.”
If you scan it quickly, it sounds like a denial. The thing to ask yourself is, what events is Rodgers referring to? What was the tragedy? If you subscribe to Jones’ version of events — to the monstrous, retraumatizing lies that were told about families whose children had been murdered in their elementary school — then this statement doesn’t have to change a word.
If you believe Sandy Hook to have been a government operation and that the children were actors, and that the real version of events may have even led to people dying, then you could sit down and write that you never denied those events, and that tragedy. You might even be able to write it with a straight face.
This is life in the Joe Rogansphere and the conspiracy world. It’s where Kennedy lives, too: He is the product of deep life trauma, from the assassinations of his father and uncle onward, and the result is a man whose trust in institutions has been shattered into a constellation of mirror shards in which he sees a broken, funhouse version of the actual truth. He is trying to appeal to disaffected young men.
Rodgers may still fit that description. Incidentally, Rodgers says he first started questioning things when he learned about the assassination of JFK. History echoes.
Rodgers is supposed to be the starting quarterback for the New York Jets next season, of course, and any third-party bid is doomed to failure electorally, in the short term. He’s still rich, accomplished, a Hall of Famer in waiting, all that.
But I feel sorry for Aaron Rodgers. He split from his religious family at some point, though his father shared some of his views on COVID. He split from reality at some point, too. He comes across like someone who desperately wants to be considered smart and thinks he’s found a shortcut: If you see things that nobody else sees, you must be smart, right? He comes across like someone whose trust in institutions was shattered, and who needs a certain kind of approval.
Mostly, he comes across as a tragedy. And football doesn’t have very much to do with it at all.