06 November 2021 | Most Valuable Moron

So much for the image of a book-loving, erudite jock.

There's a reason why we don't pay much attention to what athletes and their fans think about anything beyond sports: they're mostly stupid people with very little to say. They're generally incurious and hostile to anything resembling knowledge but are quick to give the impression that they're experts in every subject under the sun.

Now enter Aaron Rodgers.

Arguably one of the NFL's most valuable players, he has come out in full-throated anti-vaccination mode, claiming that he did tons of research on his own and even sent the NFL a "500-page report" about what he "discovered" regarding masks, vaccines, and what's scientific and what's not. This is after he was demonstrably lying about his vaccination status for months on end, a lie that was certainly backed up by the Packers themselves, who knew the truth and covered it up. There's no real way around their culpability.

But what gets us is that this man has access to an entire medical staff that his employer also has on the payroll. Why do top athletes like Rodgers or Kyrie Irving have to resort to doing their own "research" when they can easily talk to any number of medical professionals who work for the same organizations as they do? Rodgers and others can literally pick up the phone and speak to highly trained and knowledgable medical professionals any time they want to, unlike all of us, but we're supposed to believe that the were somehow forced to do their own medical sleuthing because they had no other recourse? This notion is totally bogus and insulting to their own fans. In Rodgers' particular case, he was also blatantly lying to his supporters' faces about it from the get go. What credibility does he have?

Sports fans' knowledge about vaccines and science is about as dismal as one might expect, but that doesn't excuse someone like Aaron Rodgers from lying to them about it, even if they generally buy into all this easily debunked bullshit he claims to have discovered. Adding insult to injury, Rodgers is not only doubling down, but he's deeply arrogant about it. And maybe with good reason, because it's not as if he's going to pay any real price. The Packers organization won't either. (Remember, did the Houston Astros slink off into obscurity and exile due to their cheating scandal? They just played in the World Series!) This is the way it goes down in professional sports, and sports fans aren't going to do much about it, either.

Oh, and since Rodgers has taken to complaining about "cancel culture," well, a person named Colin Kaepernick has some actual experience with that. Try doing some research on that, imbecile.