Aaron Rodgers' Sandy Hook Conspiracy-Making Is Not Surprising, Even If It's Disgusting

Shortly after news broke that independent presidential candidate and anti-vax darling Robert F. Kennedy had quarterback Aaron Rodgers on his shortlist of vice presidential candidates, CNN published a story revealing that Rodgers shared conspiracy theories about the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting with others as early as 2013.

In that piece, CNN shares two different accountings of Rodgers’ opinions on the massacre. The first, from a meeting with Rodgers at a 2013 Kentucky Derby afterparty, suggests that Rodgers believed that the shooting was conducted by the government — the reasoning for which is unclear.

The second comes from an anonymous source to CNN, who claims Rodgers believed that the tragedy never happened, even saying “those children never existed.” This story allegedly comes from several years ago.

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Those who have followed Rodgers’ relationship with conspiracy would find this unsurprising, but this is the first time such a disgusting conspiracy from Rodgers was made public on a broad platform like this.

Later, Rodgers posted on Twitter that he believed the events at Sandy Hook took place and that he regards it as a tragedy.

While this does refute the second characterization of his beliefs, it does not refute the first, much more common version of the conspiracy. He also never denied making the statements, regardless of whether he believed them.

This is important, as Rodgers has a history of making statements with the intent to communicate a more socially acceptable vision while couching reality behind easy-to-misinterpret words. The most obvious example comes from his “immunization” controversy in 2021.

Large portions of this piece come from my podcast appearance on the QAA Pod, where I discussed Aaron Rodgers’ relationship to conspiracy and how it related to the Jimmy Kimmel controversy. With their permission, segments from that show are reproduced in print here. I highly encourage you to listen to it.

When Green Bay Packers media asked Aaron Rodgers if he was vaccinated, he responded with “Yea, I’ve been immunized.”

Not only did he say yes to the question, but he also said he wouldn’t judge people who were unvaccinated — which clearly positions himself as someone who is. On top of that, headlines — still up to this very day — went out telling the world that he was vaccinated.

He wasn’t. This was a lie. No matter how much he wants to get around it by what he thinks was a clever play on words, he intended to mislead people, saw that they were misled and was satisfied with the result.

He also clearly got the Packers organization to buy into this lie and keep up the illusion; while he was otherwise following the protocols for an unvaccinated player throughout the facility, he still met with media, in person, without a mask — in violation of the policy. No unvaccinated player on the Packers, other than him, met with the media in person, much less without a mask.

We found out about his real vaccination status on November 3rd, when Rodgers was ruled out for a Week 9 matchup against the Kansas City Chiefs. Given the timeline — vaccinated players could have been available for the game while unvaccinated players would be out for at least ten days — the only way this could be dispositively true is if he was unvaccinated.

His explanation for his decision to mislead the media hit some pretty common talking points.

Rodgers complained about the “woke mob” and “cancel culture,” two concepts that are virtually meaningless and have definitions that can change from moment to moment in order to suit a larger narrative. His complaints about being silenced are the least convincing complaints one could muster.

He's perhaps been the least silenced athlete in modern football. Aside from the fact that he has his own platform that will be boosted by the sports media apparatus — his tweets are news — he can call a press conference whenever he wants.

He had a weekly television spot on ESPN and will likely continue to have one next season. He was on the Joe Rogan Experience, meaning he’s not only been on one of the most popular sports podcasts in the United States, but he’s also been a guest on the single most popular podcast in history.

Like most “canceled” figures, Rodgers’ cancellation status does not denote any silencing; it instead is an essence he wears — a way to signify his cultural values. It’s the same as being a “free thinker,” a pair of words that in the dictionary means someone capable of independent thought but in reality signals a certain set of beliefs and practices.

It’s easier to think of cancellation as a jersey he wears or a team he plays for than any significant loss of cultural power.

He went on to claim that he didn’t lie during the presser where he lied and complained about the witch hunt culture against unvaccinated football players. He said his “plan” was to answer any follow-up questions about what it means to be “immunized” truthfully.

It is notable that he makes fun of the fringe end of conspiracy theory here, and that’s worth putting a pin in, but he runs through the gamut of arguments that he would have used — familiar in the vaccine debate — instead of sitting with how obvious it was that he was misleading people.

In doing so, he turned this from an issue of lying to an issue of the decision to vaccinate. These are not unrelated, of course; he values having all the information available to him to make a decision, but he did not allow others to have that information when deciding whether or not to be in a room with him.

By reframing the debate, he moved away from the question of dishonesty and into a well-worn, contentious topic that perpetuates itself. Of course, he lied while doing this, too.

For example, he said that the NFL’s medical professionals told him that it was impossible for a vaccinated person to get COVID or spread COVID. If that were true, that would be a misleading statement from NFL medical officials. But NFL medical officials confirmed that Rodgers never contacted them at all, and they never spoke to Rodgers or ever held that stance, much less communicated it to anyone.

On The Pat McAfee Show, he shared opinions that unvaccinated players were actually safer — opinions contradicted by data on NFL infection rates. He later shared, on the Look Into It podcast with Eddie Bravo, a more insidious belief: that the COVID-19 vaccine is experimental gene therapy that “changes your DNA.”

Also worth pointing out, Rodgers invokes Martin Luther King Jr. when asked if he was violating league protocols (he was).

This is astounding. But this kind of martyrdom is not new among conspiracy theorists or those resistant to vaccination protocols.

He’s no Martin Luther King Jr. The NFL did not jail him in Alabama; they merely fined him about $14,000. At the time, he was making $50 million a year. That is less than one percent of his on-paper, football-only income. It is less than one-tenth of one percent of that income. It is one-fourth of one-tenth of one percent of that income.

Incidentally, “… and rules that make no sense” is an incredible addendum to the King quote — as if King also objected to city ordinances that disallowed parking on the even side of the street during the summer.

Rodgers’ willingness to mislead or misinform the media extends beyond the vaccine debate.

While the Packers and Rodgers were figuring out their future, Rodgers and Pat McAfee mischaracterized a report about Rodgers’ meeting with the New York Jets.

Diana Russini reported that he had a “wish list” of players he wanted the Jets to sign — a list of players that the Jets eventually did sign most of. Those players were not in high demand in the free agency market, and it’s pretty reasonable to conclude that the Jets would not have signed them otherwise. They even traded away better players to make room for the players Rodgers wanted.

But despite this obvious evidence, he denied the report and was mad at the reporting, mischaracterizing it and criticizing the nature of reporting for not giving him a voice. Of course, each reporter on the story contacted him for comment, and he told them to lose his number. He willingly gave up his opportunity to put the report in context and then complained about a lack of context!

When he mischaracterized the report, he said he didn’t hand a literal pen-and-paper list of players to the Jets and hold them hostage — but that’s not what the reporting said. All it said was that he wanted certain players on the roster. He invented a grievance around a report that didn’t even make him look bad and used it as an example of how the media was out to get him.

He did the same thing with another report — his usage of secret hand signals, common among quarterbacks, confused the new crop of rookie receivers Rodgers was working with, in part because he wouldn’t teach them during training camp. They would have to learn “on the fly,” even though some of them were last used several years ago.

There was ample sourcing for the story, and the sources were named: all players who worked with Rodgers in Green Bay — Jordan Love, Randall Cobb, Robert Tonyan, Sammy Watkins, Romeo Doubs, Equanimeous St. Brown, Jace Amaro, Kylin Hill, Shaun Beyer and more.

Because the signals story did cast him in a negative light, he felt obligated to respond. He said it was “by far the dumbest nothingburger article that I have read in the entire season.”

He added, “Ninety-five percent of that article is absolute, complete horseshit. The other five percent is exaggerated nothingness.”

He didn’t detail what parts of the article were in the wrong and what was merely “exaggerated,” though he did offer one additional point: that the signals used in the game are often used in practice. None of that denies any of the reporting.

McAfee went off on anonymous sourcing (no anonymous sources were used in the piece), and their performance on McAfee’s show let Rodgers relitigate his gripe against the media.

If that was all, then these moments would just be odd footnotes in Rodgers’ career.

The Kentucky Derby story was from 2013, which is also the year he and Seneca Wallace were on the Packers roster together. Seven years after that, Wallace shared a story about Rodgers “asking questions” about chemtrails.

This is a long-standing conspiracy that posits that the government is spraying the populace with cancer-causing chemicals in order to keep the population docile — often through “mind control”-type chemicals. It also has the bonus of “enriching” the pharmaceutical industry through “higher” cancer rates.

In addition to believing the chemtrails conspiracy, Rodgers would also share conspiracies about aliens. Brett Hundley, who was his backup quarterback from 2015 to 2018, and Joe Callahan, a backup in 2016, both shared stories about how Rodgers would “unabashedly” believe in the existence of aliens through the presence of UFOs and would “frequently” engage in long discussions about who built the Pyramids of Giza. Put a pin in that UFO thing, by the way.

Rodgers also seemingly initiated discussions about who killed President John F. Kennedy. This was later substantiated by his appearance on the Look Into It podcast with Eddie Bravo, where he argues that the last “real president” was Kennedy. Rodgers outright argues that the Lee Harvey Oswald “story” is bullshit, calling it the “magic bullet theory,” a well-known name for the aspect of the conspiracy that focuses on the trajectory of the bullet that killed Kennedy.

There is seemingly no conspiracy theory he won’t touch. Oh sorry, not a conspiracy. As he said on the Look Into It podcast, “And again, these are not conspiracy. These are all proven things, although conspiracy is a term which gets slighted. Conspiracy theories have been right about a lot of things in the last couple of years, if you go back and look at it.”

He repeated that point on the Pat McAfee Show pretty recently, too.

UFOs and conspiracies about the Pyramids are somewhat out there but, as far as conspiracies go, fairly mainstream. Before any of this Sandy Hook stuff came to light, it went deeper. On The Breneman Show (now called Next Up with Adam Breneman), a former Packers backup quarterback shared more about Rodgers’ conspiracies.

Kizer not only mentioned 9/11 Trutherism, but also things like the moon landing, reptile people and inner earth. Notably, Kizer mentioned Agartha by name, suggesting a very deep familiarity with this conspiracy.

Some people are familiar with Inner Earth theory — that the Earth is hollow and the inside is inhabited in some way. People very familiar with it may call it Agartha, which is the purported name of the kingdom of the Inner Earth.

There are a number of competing theories for how this operates, but many of them postulate that the earth’s crust is only several hundred miles thick and that passageways — primarily at the poles, but possibly also the Pyramids — bridge the gap between the outer earth and inner earth.

The occupants of Agartha vary by theorist. There is a Nazi version of the myth that argues that the Third Reich never died and only moved into the Earth, a conspiracy that dovetails well with the well-known associations between Nazis and the occult, but there are a number of other theories about inhabitants of Agartha.

Sometimes they are an ancient race of beings native to Earth (Old Ones, but not the Lovecraft Old Ones) or they are aliens who moved there — the same aliens that may have constructed the Pyramids and Stonehenge and perhaps even Angkor Wat.

At other times, “lost” civilizations described in Greek myth, like Atlantis, Hyperborea and Amazon, were absconded to the interior of the Earth. Instead of the Earth’s core, we have a small sun in the middle of the Earth, one that provides eternal light to the citizens of Agartha.

It should be noted that the addition of Nazis to the myth isn’t just an accident of history; there has long been a racist subtext to Inner Earth and ancient alien theories that essentially take it as a given that non-white cultures could not develop civilization. Given the “pale white” appearance of such an “advanced” culture like the Hyperboreans, there’s a lot of overlap.

Regardless, no model of gravity allows for a theory like Inner Earth. Proponents often lie about support from famous mathematicians like Richard Euler, who proposed a physics-related thought experiment about a hollow planet but never proposed this theory as anything close to realistic.

That aside, other concepts in physics make this impossible — even a passing understanding of electromagnetism would render this sort of thing unworkable. The explanation for volcanoes is flimsy — they explain that lava is “sandwiched between” layers of surface rock on either side of the lava, but there is no explanation for why lava would remain liquid in that inner layer, why volcanoes erupt or how they can interact with well-known and well-proven theories of plate tectonics.

Rodgers is also a strong proponent of holistic medicine. The wellness scene often rejects peer-reviewed science in favor of “traditional” medicine, which contains its own host of conspiracies that Rodgers often parrots, including the discussions surrounding corruption in the for-profit healthcare industry.

Those conspiracies often have a grounding—that profit motives warp incentives in bodily health — but they often fall short of identifying structural issues. The bigger issue is the association of that scene with a broader sect of conspiracy that often reproduces the Alex Jones-style fearmongering and fascist return to traditional values that have ballooned in the QAnon movement, which benefited from the wellness entrepreneurial project.

Rodgers has stopped well short of espousing the more radical wellness-related conspiracy theories. But his engagement with conspiracy and engagement with wellness is worth digging into.

None of the above statements, technically, tell us that Rodgers believes in these theories. But they keep coming up for a reason. And there is a reason Kizer sounded pretty convinced by the end of it. The fact that Rodgers believes in UFOs backs this up as well.

Rodgers has indicated multiple times that he “believes in UFOs,” an important statement to parse because technically, everyone believes in UFOs — they are simply unidentified flying objects. But the statement “believes in UFOs” typically means believing that a great many of these unidentified objects are aliens.