Did Aaron Rodgers ever believe...

THURSDAY, MARCH 14, 2024

...the planet's least plausible claim? Did Aaron Rodgers ever believe the planet's least plausible claim?

In a new statement posted today, Rodgers has seemed to say that no, he never did. On the other side of the ledger, we direct you to a partially first-person report by Jake Tapper and Deborah Brown of CNN.

According to the CNN report, Rodgers once said he believed that least plausible claim. He believed that the murders at Sandy Hook were a hoax—or at least, so CNN says:

CNN knows of two people with whom Rodgers has enthusiastically shared these stories, including with Pamela Brown, one of the journalists writing this piece.

Brown was covering the Kentucky Derby for CNN in 2013 when she was introduced to Rodgers, then with the Green Bay Packers, at a post-Derby party. Hearing that she was a journalist with CNN, Rodgers immediately began attacking the news media for covering up important stories. Rodgers brought up the tragic killing of 20 children and 6 adults by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School, claiming it was actually a government inside job and the media was intentionally ignoring it.

When Brown questioned him on the evidence to show this very real shooting was staged, Rodgers began sharing various theories that have been disproven numerous times. 

[...]

Brown recalls Rodgers asking her if she thought it was off [sic] that there were men in black in the woods by the school, falsely claiming those men were actually government operatives. Brown found the encounter disturbing.

Rodgers, through one of his agents, declined to comment to CNN.

CNN has spoken to another person with a similar story. This person, to whom CNN has granted anonymity so as to avoid harassment, recalled that several years ago, Rodgers claimed, “Sandy Hook never happened…All those children never existed. They were all actors.”

When asked about the grieving parents, the source recalled Rodgers saying, “They’re all making it up. They’re all actors.”

For the record:

If the murdered children never existed, we don't know what it would mean to say that they were actors. 

That part of the story is a bit hard to parse. That said, that anonymous source also claims that Rodgers said the parents of the murdered children were just "crisis actors" too.

(For the record, also this: We'll guess that the word "off" in that passage may be an unnoticed typo. If "off" should really be the word "odd," the passage would seem to make more sense.)

At any rate, can this claim about Rodgers possibly be true? In an instant rebuttal, he has seemed to say that he never believed those things about the murders at Sandy Hook.

On the other hand, the Washington Post's Azi Paybarah did some sniffing around yesterday. He came up with this second alleged example of a somewhat peculiar belief:

PAZBARAH (3/13/24): According to one former teammate, Rodgers appeared to show skepticism about the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

“The first thing that comes out of Aaron Rodgers’s mouth was ‘Do you believe in 9/11?’” former Green Bay Packers teammate DeShone Kizer said in a 2022 podcast interview, of meeting the quarterback. After Kizer said he did, Rodgers replied, “You should read up on that.”

What does, or did, Rodgers believe about 9/11? We have no idea!

Meanwhile, did Rodgers ever believe the least plausible claim on the planet—the claim that Sandy Hook was a hoax?  We can't answer that question, but we can reliably tell you this: 

A whole lot of people do!

The idea that those killings were a hoax would seem to be the least plausible claim on the planet. That said, the so-called "democratization of media" has resulted in a giant anthropology lesson, a lesson which goes like this:

We humans believe the craziest things! Aaron Rodgers to the side, there's nothing so crazy—more precisely, so implausible—that a whole lot of us human beings won't rush into line to affirm it.

This is a very important discovery, one that runs all through our politics. It's a surprising tenet of newfound anthropology—anthropology all the way down. 

It's hard to believe that Rodgers believed it! That said, how well do we understand the shape of our human world?