Good news and bad news, everyone: the good news is that anti-vaccine kook RFK, Jr. did NOT choose NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers as his running mate in his doomed presidential campaign. The bad news: people are still listening to what Aaron Rodgers has to say. The worse news: what Aaron Rodgers is saying is getting dumber, and also possibly even more dangerous.
Okay, so I last talked about Aaron Rodgers in November of 2021, when I discovered that the American football player I had previously been told was a total genius was actually a complete walnut who believes in homeopathy, lied about being vaccinated for COVID, and thought deworming paste would cure the COVID he eventually caught because he didn’t bother to get vaccinated. From then on I vowed to never again look up to someone just because they can win both Celebrity Jeopardy and the Super Bowl.
In the two plus years since I last discussed him, Rodgers has not only doubled down on his weird COVID denial, and not only has he become emboldened enough to dip his toes into various other conspiracies, but we’re learning more about horrific beliefs he has held for more than a decade. For instance, in September of last year a fellow quarterback revealed that Rodgers had randomly asked him if he “believed in 9/11” and encouraged him to “read up on that,” implying it…didn’t happen?
CNN reported last month that Rodgers told a CNN reporter in 2013 that the 20 children and four adults murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary were part of a governmental “inside job.” He just volunteered that, to a journalist, at a Kentucky Derby after-party. Another person told CNN that Rodgers told him just “several years ago” that “Sandy Hook never happened…All those children never existed. They were all actors.”
Rodgers now publicly claims that he DOES think “the events (took) place,” so it appears that even he realizes how morally bankrupt that position is. Or he doesn’t want to join Alex Jones in paying the very real grieving parents a billion dollars. Whichever.
So he won’t cop to that one, but he did go on some shit head’s loser podcast and tell all 12 of his listeners that he believes in EVERYTHING ELSE.
The loser’s podcast is behind a paywall, but Sean Keeley of Awful Announcing took one for the team, shelling out $14.99 to listen to all THREE HOURS of this garbage to let the world know what Rodgers really believes, and boy is it dumb. Basically, if you ask the question, “Which conspiracy theory does Aaron Rodgers believe in?” the answer is “Yes.”
Anti-vaxx? Yes.
Mexicans joining the US Army get citizenship which they will then use to vote to destroy America? Yes.
Germ theory isn’t real? Yes.
JFK was assassinated by the CIA? Yes.
Dumb shit about archaeology that I couldn’t even bring myself to look into right now? Yes.
Something “going on in Antarctica?” Sure, why not.
And according to this clip from the show posted to Xitter, Aaron Rodgers believes that AIDS was created by the US government in the 1980s.
Now, THAT is a classic, vintage conspiracy theory. In fact, that particular myth can be traced all the way back to the early ‘80s, when the KGB created a plan to damage the US by promoting in the Western media the baseless idea that AIDS is “the result of yet another Pentagon experiment with a new type of biological weapon.”
I know, I know, it’s so 2016 to blame everything on Russian disinformation, isn’t it? Calm down, libtards, Russia isn’t hiding under your bed! Yeah, I saw you guys in the comments on my video about Havana Syndrome, I get it.
Except that we have the declassified documentation proving it: Operation Denver was a massive effort on the part of the Soviet Union to stoke anti-Americanism around the world by planting the story that the Pentagon sent CDC researchers to Africa to find novel viruses that they could tweak and then release upon their enemies, and that the result was the creation of AIDS at Fort Detrick. This is so well documented that we know exactly how they began (by planting an “anonymous letter” from a scientist in a KGB-run Indian newspaper on July 17th of 1983. In the following years, they spread this disinformation around the globe, planting articles and receiving credulous coverage even in non-communist countries. By 1992, 15% of Americans thought their own government had created AIDS.
So now I want you to sit back and just imagine Vladmir Putin, today, hearing the news that one of America’s greatest professional athletes of all time has publicly signed on to 40-year old anti-American Soviet propaganda. It must be similar to how I felt the other day, seeing wildflowers starting to poke up from the soil where I haphazardly threw some seeds last year. Only, like, more evil I guess.
It’s funny, because as I mentioned, Rodgers was a very popular guess for who was going to be RFK, Jr.’s running mate, and he has his very own AIDS conspiracy theory: that “poppers,” and not HIV, caused the disease. Poppers, if you don’t know, are drugs used recreationally in part because they can act as muscle relaxants, making them popular before anal sex. At the start of the AIDS epidemic, there was a lot of misinformation and conspiracy mongering. In another fun callback to my Havana Syndrome video, at least one researcher was even insistent that AIDS was actually a mass psychogenic illness, or mass hysteria.
But the most common conspiracy theory was the one RFK, Jr. is rehashing–the homophobic suggestion that AIDS was punishment for the evil “gay lifestyle,” despite the fact that scientists had already conclusively proven that HIV causes AIDS by 1984. And since one of the researchers who helped develop treatments and implement public health policy for the AIDS crisis was Anthony Fauci, well, that’s why this other 40-year old conspiracy theory is making a comeback.
With some luck, after November we won’t hear from RFK, Jr. again, but it appears that Aaron Rodgers is still able to throw football good, so I’m sure we’ll get at least another season’s worth of stupidity out of him. I wonder which conspiracy is next for him? Lizard people? Flat earth? Hollow earth? Let me know in the comments what you think.
