Aaron Rodgers Has Lost His Fucking Mind
I'm an Aaron Rodgers fan and I'm here to debunk his claims.
I didn’t like football growing up.
My dad was a huge football fan. He played the sport his entire life, but despite his enthusiasm for the game, it just never appealed to me. Too many rules. Games moved too slowly for me.
Plus, I’m from Southern California and when I was a kid, both Los Angeles football teams moved away, so I didn’t have a home team to root for even if I had wanted to.
Fast forward to 2008 when I was a senior in college. I had just gotten a part-time job as a production assistant for a morning sports radio show. Suddenly, I had to actually care about NFL football as part of my job. Ugh, fine.
That same year, a young quarterback named Aaron Rodgers was named as the starter for the Green Bay Packers. I noticed he threw the ball a lot and he threw it well. I thought, “Hey, when this guy throws the ball, it’s really exciting to watch.” Suddenly, I didn’t mind football so much. I actually kind of liked it.
As fate would have it, my next job would be producing a football documentary about a high school quarterback. I learned a ton about football and the quarterback position specifically.
As a result, my passion for football grew exponentially, as did my fandom of Aaron Rodgers. I decided I would be a Green Bay Packers fan officially. Rodgers had earned my loyalty. It was settled.
Over the years, I’ve been charmed by his off-the-field persona. He just seemed like my kind of guy. For a long time, his Instagram profile pic was an illustration of him as Obi Wan Kenobi from Star Wars. He was secretly an extra in an episode of Game of Thrones. He once played himself in an episode of The Office and to this day, I still occasionally say “Oof, flag on the play” when something disturbs me. And, of course, he had a well-publicized two-week stint as the host of Jeopardy this past summer.
I proudly wear my number 12 jersey every game day, believing somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain that by doing so, I am actively helping the Packers win their games.
A few years ago, I even dressed as Aaron Rodgers for Halloween, sporting a fake mustache and aviators as a small nod to the viral photo of him as a Denim Daddy.
Whenever a conversation turned “Tom Brady is the GOAT” I was always quick to chime in about how Aaron Rodgers has done more with less, and that Tom Brady (noted cheater) had all the luxury (the cheating) at his disposal (cheating).
I was all in on Aaron Rodgers. So much so that lately, I’ve begun trying to picture a world in which Aaron Rodgers no longer plays for the Packers. After all, he’s 37, plus the rumor mill is constantly buzzing that he’s just itching to get out of Green Bay. I wondered: am I really a Green Bay Packers fan, or am I an Aaron Rodgers fan?
That’s how much influence this man has on my enjoyment of this sport. He’s my hero. But I hoped I still had a few years left before I was forced to answer the question for real.
But suddenly, this week, I was forced to confront it in the most horrifying way imaginable.
“Immunized” not vaccinated
This week, it was revealed that Aaron Rodgers tested positive for COVID-19 and that he was also unvaccinated. Reporters were quick to dig up remarks he made months earlier in which he was asked if he had been vaccinated. Instead, he replied, “I’ve been immunized.”
The remark was not scrutinized at the time. It’s possible Rodgers meant vaccinated, but maybe had just bought a new thesaurus and was trying out some synonyms just for fun.
This week, however, he revealed that his plan had always been to tell the media that he was “immunized” and not “vaccinated” – a deliberate word choice intended to muddy the waters. In his mind, this was a mere technicality.
He now claims, “It wasn’t some sort of ruse or lie. It was the truth.”
Except that it wasn’t. This was a lie by omission.
It was a savvy PR move by someone who – up until this point – had been a media-savvy guy. He knew that if word ever got out about what he meant by “immunized,” he could take the position that this was simply an argument over semantics and he could lay out the case for his decision at that point.
And if that had been where the controversy ended, I think Rodgers could have gradually found his way back into our hearts over time, after the initial backlash. After all, as the face of State Farm, the reigning NFL MVP, and the host of Jeopardy, Rodgers has accumulated A LOT of public goodwill over his career.
I think eventually, the uproar would have died down and Rodgers would have returned to the field, led the Packers to another NFC Championship game, waxed poetic about how romantic the game of football is, filmed another million commercials with Jake from State Farm, and Packers fans would have said, “Awww, we can’t stay mad at you, Aaron! 😍”
But the controversy didn’t end there.
“My cancel culture casket”
48 hours after his COVID news broke, he went on the Pat McAfee show and put on a masterclass in How to Lose All Public Goodwill in One Hour.
He opened with seemingly prepared statements: “I realize I’m in the crosshairs of the woke mob right now. So, before the final nail gets put in my cancel culture casket, I’d like to set the record straight on some of the blatant lies that are out there about me now."
He then pulled out the classic allusion to reproductive rights that often gets bastardized by anti-vaxxers these days: “I believe strongly in bodily autonomy and the ability to make choices for your own body and not to have to acquiesce to some woke culture or crazed group of individuals who say you have to do something.”
He revealed that he was far more interested in homeopathy, holistic remedies, and alternative medicine for his own health decisions.
“I’m not some sort of anti-vax flat-earther. I’m somebody who’s a critical thinker. You guys know me – I march to the beat of my own drum,” he said, like a manic pixie dream girl.
This critical thinker then rattled off all the anti-vax hits in rapid-fire succession:
This is a witch hunt.
I am being shamed and canceled.
The vaccine might make you sterile! We don’t know!
Masks don’t reduce COVID transmission.
If the vaccines are so great, then how come vaccinated people are still getting COVID?
Obviously, I must have gotten COVID from a vaccinated person.
The media is pushing pro-vaccine propaganda onto the masses.
The vaccine manufacturers have been reckless in rushing vaccines to market.
Actually, The Left is making the vaccines political.
Ivermectin.
Hydroxychloroquine.
I am exactly as oppressed as Martin Luther King, Jr.
Joe Rogan is my doctor.
Everything he said absolutely shocked me to the point that I thought maybe he was doing a bit. Maybe this was a new character he was trying out, Absolutely Fucking Insane Guy, because there’s no way a person I had admired could be this detached from reality. But this was no performance art. This is who he is.
It is not the responsibility of Green Bay Packers fans to answer for the sins of Aaron Rodgers. And I won’t. Life is choices and he made his.
I will, however, hold him accountable for each of his irresponsible claims. Let’s debunk some of Aaron Rodgers’ bullshit.
“I’m a critical thinker”
Rodgers claimed to have done his own research and spoke with “a lot of different people in the medical field” to get the “most information” before making a decision.
He later remarked that he had, on his own, “paid for and done research” to support his claims. Rodgers’ remarkable lack of self-awareness is on full display here in a way that’s even more sinister than you might think.
A 16-year NFL career has made Rodgers a very powerful man. And sometimes, when you’re a powerful man, you become so accustomed to having special access to things normal people don’t, that you come to expect special access in all situations as a matter of course.
Surely there’s a better conclusion to the vaccine research that works out differently for him, right? Why should his elite status not make him privy to that information as well?
This line of thinking is, of course, not limited to celebrities like Rodgers. In fact, this is often the precursor to conspiratorial thinking in general. Being privy to special information makes people feel smart and important. It’s incredibly appealing to feel as though only your little group is right and everyone else is wrong. Why do you think Qanon is so popular?
But Rodgers is a textbook case in confirmation bias, or the tendency to search for, interpret, and favor information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs. Rodgers came to a conclusion in his mind – he doesn’t trust the vaccines – and he sought out (and apparently paid for) “research” that confirmed this belief.
He didn’t give any weight to the fact that the medical opinions he was aligning with were actually outliers and nowhere near the consensus of the medical community. It didn’t matter to him. Because he’s a “critical thinker.”
I consider myself to be a critical thinker too, ya know. So if I put on my critical thinking hat and read the research and find that I agree with the CDC that the benefits of taking the vaccine far outweigh the risks of contracting COVID – a disease with unpredictable outcomes – does that make me a sheep? That’s what I can never quite understand about this logic.
Believe me, I have a healthy distrust and skepticism of authority at all levels. But what if the overwhelming consensus by the medical and scientific community – in addition to the demonstrable carnage being wreaked by COVID we can see with our own eyes – presents me with enough evidence to reach my own conclusion, and that conclusion just happens to align with the government’s conclusion?
Apparently, to the anti-vax crowd, you’re only a “critical thinker” if all your research has led you to a conclusion that aligns with theirs. That’s not critical thinking, babes. That’s contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake.
“My body, my choice”
The thing is, there are a lot of ways this entire situation could have NOT been a complete and utter trainwreck for Aaron Rodgers if he only had enough self-awareness and introspection to be honest with himself and the public.
“I realize I’m in the crosshairs of the woke mob right now” could have just as easily been something different, like: “You know what? I haven’t gotten the vaccine because I’m afraid of what it might do to my body. I’m a professional athlete and I know there’s an extremely slim and remote chance of long-term side effects from the vaccine, but even that remote possibility scares me and I’m just not ready to get the vaccine. I hope you can respect my choice.” But that’s not what happened, of course.
In the McAfee interview, Rodgers claims to be allergic to one of the ingredients in the vaccines. Whether or not that’s true is not up to me to speculate, but if that’s the case, that alone could have been a sufficient enough argument for his decision, at least from a public interest standpoint. He could have just left it at that.
But the damage isn’t in him saying that he’s unable to be vaccinated for practical medical reasons. Instead, the damage occurs when he spends the remainder of his 45 minutes on the show spreading debunked COVID claims to an audience of millions and attacking the legitimacy and usefulness of the vaccines to all the people who aren’t Aaron Rodgers.
He could have just said, “I’m allergic,” instead of “I’m allergic and also WHAT IF THE VACCINE MAKES YOU STERILE?? Ever think about that?! Who’s to say?!”
Aside from the vaccines, he also called the NFL’s daily protocols for unvaccinated players “Draconian” and “not based in science” and created “a shame-based environment to try to get as many guys vaccinated as possible so that the league looks better.”
Honey, they are asking you to wear a mask at work so you don’t breathe your full, undiluted viral load all over the many people you interact with. You’re not Hester Prynne and a mask isn’t your scarlet letter.
“I’ve consulted with a now good friend of mine, Joe Rogan”
Rodgers dropped this bomb on us and it was a DOOZY: ”I’ve consulted with a now good friend of mine, Joe Rogan [...] and I’ve been doing a lot of the stuff he recommended in his podcasts and on the phone to me and I’m gonna have the best immunity possible.”
He described his Joe Rogan-approved course of treatment, which included:
Monoclonal antibodies
Ivermectin
Vitamin D
Zinc
HCQ (Hydroxychloroquine)
UH, ONE OF THOSE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHERS, AARON.
The monoclonal antibodies are the thing that’s working there, my guy.
This is like saying, “I cured my heart failure with my own combination of treatments: I took vitamins, drank green tea, ate raw ginger, rubbed some Icy Hot on my chest, and underwent open-heart surgery to repair the damage done to my heart.” WHICH ONE IS THE ACTIVE INGREDIENT IN THIS KITCHEN-SINK APPROACH? WHO’S TO SAY?
Speaking of monoclonal antibodies, according to the FDA, “Monoclonal antibodies are laboratory-made proteins that mimic the immune system's ability to fight off harmful pathogens such as viruses.” LMAO THIS IS JUST LIKE A VACCINE FOR AFTER YOU GET THE VIRUS.
Laboratory-made proteins?? Hmmm, this isn’t exactly the all-natural homeopathic alternative medicine you were popping off about in this same interview, sir. Yeah, everyone’s a crunchy granola organic hippie until the shit hits the fan and then it’s “INJECT THAT SYNTHETIC LAB-GROWN SHIT DIRECTLY INTO MY VEINS MOTHERFUCKER.”
There are no atheists in foxholes and there are no homeopathic hippies in COVID wards.
“The Left!”
This really seemed like the part where Rodgers went off-script and I was fucking aghast when he said the following: “When Trump, in 2020, was championing these vaccines that were coming so quick, what did The Left say? And I’m talking about every member of The Left. ‘Don’t trust the vaccine; don’t get the vaccine; you’re gonna die from the vaccine.’ And then what happens? Biden wins and everything flips. Shouldn’t that initially give you a little bit of pause and go, ‘Hold on a second… isn’t this shit about health?’”
Honest to God, where does this argument come from? Most people “on The Left” were praying for these vaccines from the beginning, having recognized that vaccinations have been the miracle of the modern era for eradicating pandemics since polio.
If Trump had done nothing but fast-track these vaccines, that could have been his legacy. Instead, he shit all over that possibility by undermining all other public health advice to mitigate the raging pandemic in the meantime – but that’s not the issue here.
Every rational person understood that this was not Trump’s vaccine. We had no misconceptions that Trump was the one tinkering in the lab himself trying to mix the right mRNA recipe for us. We all recognized and understood that there existed actual competent scientific mechanisms working to develop the vaccines and that Trump’s contribution to the effort would be to eliminate all of the bureaucratic red tape that would have stood in the way of their FDA approval.
I don’t know anyone on “The Left” who expressed the sentiments Rodgers is complaining about here. Name the vaccine Trumpade and put his face on the bandage, I truly don’t give a fuck. I’ll still take it.
“Vaccinated people still get COVID”
Finally, Rodgers went on to say, “If the vaccine is so great, then how come people are still getting COVID and spreading COVID and, unfortunately, dying from COVID?”
Great question. For which there are answers. All you had to do was ask competent experts your questions. Like the experts at Johns Hopkins, to name one example. That’s all. Did you do that, Aaron? Did you actually go out looking for answers to this question?
When anti-vaxxers go on radio or TV with an agenda to promote, they often claim they’re “just asking questions!” but the reality is: they don’t expect those questions to be answered. They’ve already decided that the question is rhetorical. No answer could be satisfactory to them. So the question then becomes the answer.
This tactic is intentionally provocative. The absence of an answer to Rodgers’ question on the fucking Pat McAfee show doesn’t mean that answers to these questions simply don’t exist. It just means that Pat McAfee didn’t have them. WHY WOULD HE? IT’S A SPORTS SHOW.
Aaron, if you’re reading this, let me tell you a little story about why the vaccine is SO GREAT. This one comes from my own life. This past summer, I had dinner with a friend and her family at their home. Five people were present at this dinner. Every one of us was vaccinated.
Her mother is immunocompromised and had been feeling a little under the weather that day. We thought nothing of it and proceeded to hang out indoors in close quarters, maskless, for an entire evening. The next day, she learned she had been feeling under the weather because she had COVID.
The news sent everyone into panic mode. Everyone else present at that dinner got tested that week. And not a single one of us tested positive.
The vaccines had worked as promised. Had this been one year prior, before the vaccines, the outcome almost certainly would have been different, as those were perfect conditions for COVID transmission to occur.
As for my friend’s immunocompromised mom, her bout with COVID had roughly the same severity as a common cold. She was fine a couple of days later. Was the vaccine worth it if only for a drastic reduction of the severity of her infection? You bet your fucking ass it was.
So yeah, Aaron – the vaccine is actually so great. It saved my ass. It’s saved a lot of asses. And it’s wildly irresponsible to dismiss that just because they’re not absolutely perfect 100% of the time.
Here’s an analogy that might make sense to you, Mr. Rodgers: Remember your first game of the season this year? The one where Green Bay lost 38 to 3 against New Orleans? The one where you only threw for 133 yards, ZERO touchdowns, 2 interceptions, and ended up with a 36.8 passer rating?
It was an abysmal performance that reminded us that, actually, YOU don’t work perfectly 100% of the time either.
But then you went on to win the next 7 games straight. As of this writing, the Packers record this season stands 7 wins, 1 loss with Aaron Rodgers as QB.
Think of the vaccine like your own record. Usually pretty fucking unstoppable. But sometimes a lackluster performance slips through the cracks.
And just for fun: a comparison to MLK
Sigh. Alright. Here we go.
Rodgers said, “The great MLK said you have a moral obligation to object to unjust rules and rules that make no sense.”
Jesus Christ.
I mean... Jesus. Christ.
If there’s one thing I wish people would learn how to do when constructing arguments is to ask themselves the following question: “Is this a 1:1 comparison?” Because things don’t exist in a vacuum where all conditions are equal. You need to contextualize things. Does there exist an order of magnitude in the difference between the two things you’re comparing?
Still, the “white celebrity compares his plight to that of Martin Luther King” was the last square I needed to complete my “I’m Being Cancelled!” bingo card.
What comes next
I don’t know how my opinion for Aaron Rodgers can ever recover from this. It’s not “cancel culture” if your behavior has caused me, personally, as an individual, to lose respect for you. I don’t support people blindly. I hold them accountable. You’re not above the law (of me).
Maybe one day we’ll get some huge, sincere mea culpa from him? Maybe one day he’ll have some kind of come-to-Jesus moment where he expresses his regret over praising the healing power of Joe Rogan?
I don’t know.
They say “don’t meet your heroes” and Aaron Rodgers proved this week why that’s true.
Maybe I’ll look for another NFL team to root for.
Not the Patriots.
Aaron Rodgers Has Lost His Fucking Mind
I can’t love this enough