Aaron Rodgers has gotten used to getting pummeled on the field and in the media, but over the past 48 hours, he has been hit in a way that would shake even a quarterback with 19 seasons in the NFL.
It was supposed to be a relaxing week for the New York Jet. According to his friend, the bro-y sports broadcaster Pat McAfee, Rodgers was at an ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica, taking mind-exploding psychedelics with a former teammate, when, on Tuesday, the Barstool Sports personality PFT Commander tweeted that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was considering Rodgers as his running mate. (The breaking news, from an account named after the stoolie’s late dog, is a reminder of just how weird the sports-media ecosystem is.) The New York Times soon followed up the scoop: People close to Kennedy said he was thinking about putting his friend Rodgers, a fellow vaccine skeptic, on his long-shot ticket for president.
Thinking about one’s place in the world on psychedelics is an overwhelming prospect as it is, so the news breaking while Rodgers was on a drug trip abroad must have been something — especially if he did not know it was going to happen. McAfee tweeted that he was not “100% sure he knew that news was gonna be happening.”
It did not get easier from there for Rodgers. Hours after the news of his potential vice-presidential nod, the QB experienced his first exposé. CNN reported on Wednesday that Rodgers was into the conspiracy world far beyond his questioning of the COVID vaccine, his thoughts on Jeffrey Epstein, and his opinions on 9/11: Rodgers has outed himself as a Sandy Hook conspiracist, believing that the 2012 school shooter in Connecticut who killed 20 children and six adults was actually a government inside job. He even brought up the matter unprompted to strangers. CNN reporter Pamela Brown wrote that in 2013, at a party after the Kentucky Derby, he began telling her out of nowhere that the media was ignoring the real story of Sandy Hook — a well-known conspiracy among members of the far right who posit that the attack was part of a plot to restrict Second Amendment rights.
“Brown recalls Rodgers asking her if she thought it was off that there were men in black in the woods by the school, falsely claiming those men were actually government operatives,” the report states. It also includes an account from an anonymous source who claims Rodgers told them years ago that “Sandy Hook never happened … All those children never existed. They were all actors.” In a tweet on Thursday, Rodgers issued a thin denial of the claims. “I am not and have never been of the opinion that the events did not take place,” Rodgers said. However, he did not actually refute the conspiracist narrative he was accused of sharing at the post-derby party. Rodgers admitted that the school shooting was real, but did not deny the idea that it was a government-backed plot.
It was a rough entry into politics, but Rodgers is used to getting slammed as soon as he enters an arena: Last September, he was hit just three-and-a-half minutes into his debut with the Jets, rupturing his Achilles tendon and knocking him out for the whole season. Perhaps the opposition dump could dissuade him from becoming a second option for a spoiler candidate. But then again, a bad press cycle has never dissuaded him in the past.
