Perry Knotts/ AP
On Wednesday, CNN’s Pamela Brown and Jake Tapper reported that New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers—who is (or at least was) reportedly being considered as independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential running mate—had told at least two people that the 2012 mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, never happened. One of those two people was Brown herself, who recounted how Rodgers approached her at a Kentucky Derby after-party in 2013 to complain about the media’s coverage of the shooting:
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. Brown found the encounter disturbing.
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.”
Rodgers responded on Thursday in a manner that, viewed within a narrow context, could be considered to be a denial: “As I’m on the record saying in the past, what happened in Sandy Hook was an absolute tragedy,” he wrote on X, the emaciated husk of a social-media platform formerly known as Twitter. “I am not and have never been of the opinion that the events did not take place. Again, I hope that we learn from this and other tragedies to identify the signs that will allow us to prevent unnecessary loss of life.”
It feels strange to parse the statements of a Super Bowl-winning quarterback as if they are from a candidate for a constitutional office, but under the circumstances, apparently, we must. So I’ll just note the obvious: Rodgers did not deny the substance of the story, which reported that he said these things in 2013. Given that Alex Jones was recently handed a $1.5 billion judgment for his years-long campaign to defame grieving Sandy Hook parents—spreading false conspiracies that bear a strong resemblance to what Rodgers is reported to have said—it’s not surprising that a guy who maybe wants to be vice president, and definitely does not want to be bankrupt, is not repeating them now.
It’s also not surprising that Rodgers ended up in this mess in the first place. He seemingly relishes making statements that, he thinks, leave him just enough wiggle room to scramble out of trouble if necessary. Most famously, before the start of the 2021 NFL season, he was asked at a press conference if he’d been vaccinated. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ve been immunized.” He later clarified that he had not received a Covid vaccine and instead had engaged in an “immunization process through a holistic doctor.”
And in an interview on ESPN’s Pat McAfee Show this January, Rodgers discussed rumors about a client list for the notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that was soon to be released in court. “That’s supposed to be coming out soon,” he said. “There’s a lot of people, including Jimmy Kimmel, who are really hoping that doesn’t come out.”
Kimmel, whom no one has ever claimed was connected with Epstein—and we called everyone—wasn’t happy and threatened legal action. Rodgers eventually claimed that he wasn’t trying to link Kimmel to a secret pedophilia cabal. All he was doing was making a point about how Kimmel had once made fun of him for “even thinking that there’s a list out there.” (Just to be clear: Kimmel did make fun of him. But it was for saying that the government was using UFOs to cover up Epstein news. The newly unsealed Epstein documents did not, in the end, include a “client list.”)
This is just kind of who Aaron Rodgers is: An incurious person’s idea of a curious person. And it seems to be a terminal condition. On Thursday, while Rodgers was attempting to vaguely clean up his Sandy Hook comments, Awful Announcing’s Sean Keeley reported on an interview Rodgers did on a podcast called Look Into It, which is hosted by a martial artist named Eddie Bravo.
“I just like to question things,” Rodgers told Bravo at one point. (One of those questions: “Did we have Avatar-style Home Trees here?”) He appears to have discussed the predictable roster of items you’d expect someone who’s really into conspiracies to discuss—Allan Dulles, the Rockefellers, MK Ultra, antibiotics. But the one I’m haunted by is the theory about the mud flood.
“I’m fascinated in the Tartarian empire, just like I’m fascinated with what happened with the Greeks and the Egyptians and America and what’s going on in Antarctica and what happened there,” Rodgers explained. “There’s a lot of really interesting things that pique my interest—but the buildings especially.”
You may reasonably have stumbled on the phrase: “What’s going on in Antarctica and what happened there.” But it’s worth getting into the stuff about the buildings. Rodgers is discussing a niche and extremely weird conspiracy about architecture. Here’s how it goes: Once there was a global civilization called the Tartarian Empire that built all of the world’s really cool, old buildings. (They were not constrained by geography.) Then a great flood of mud came along, wiping out the Tartarian Empire but leaving the buildings intact. So when you see buildings on one continent that look a lot like buildings on another continent, that’s probably why—because the Tartarians built them. And when a cool building or set of buildings are torn down, it’s because modern-day nations are trying to erase the Tartarian heritage.
Basically, any famous structure is ripe to be considered Tartarian. The pyramids of Egypt, for instance, or the “White City” at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—but also the old Penn Station in New York, and the Iowa state capitol in Des Moines. You can only imagine what went through Rodgers’ mind when he first visited the Meadowlands.
It’s weird to be having this whole conversation about the starting quarterback for the New York Jets. I wish we weren’t! But Rodgers is being floated for the vice presidency, not because of the things he does on the field but because of the things he says off of it. As long as Rodgers is around, flitting vaguely around RFK Jr.’s run for the White House, it’s at least worth asking who he thinks really built it.
