Did History Channel fuel Aaron Rodgers' conspiracy brain?

Pajiba

"How did a beloved QB, Jeopardy! host and Celebrity Jeopardy! winner find himself not only the recipient of misinformation but a spreader of it?" asks Dustin Rowles of Rodgers' recent descent into vaccination and even election conspiracies. But as it turns out, Rodgers has been publicly into conspiracies involving aliens for many years. "I listened to an Aaron Rodgers podcast appearance from six years ago — in the time before Trump — and what sounded charming and harmless then now sounds like the beginning of Rodgers’ undoing," says Rowles. "He not only spoke of an alien encounter but of a megalithic alien structure that’s blocking the light from a star 1200 light-years away (it was dust), and he had some other thoughts about the government covering up UFO sightings, which in and of themselves weren’t that alarming. However, Rodgers — who unsurprisingly also confessed that he was a huge Malcolm Gladwell fan — only seemed to pick up bits and pieces of the information he relayed but confessed ignorance to the larger story. What’s that maxim about how a 'little knowledge is a dangerous thing'? That’s Aaron Rodgers in a nutshell. He only knows enough to be dangerous. On that same podcast, Rodgers also confessed that he was a 'huge fan' of the History Channel, which has evolved in the last 15 years into a hotbed of conspiracy theory. Rodgers took special notice of two shows on the History Channel that he loves: America Unearthed and Ancient Aliens. I don’t know much about those two series, specifically, except that on American Unearthed, 'if Dan Brown wrote about it, odds are good that (host) Scott Wolter believes it and investigates it.' Meanwhile, Ancient Aliens posits, as Salon has noted, that 'everything from death rays to macaroni and cheese was actually invented by extraterrestrial visitors thousands of years ago and given to humans.' The Awl (RIP) even suggested in an article titled, 'Ancient Aliens is everything that’s wrong with America,' that Ancient Aliens approach to its topics parallels the Republicans’ approach to science." As Rowles points out, "just because something calls itself The History Channel doesn’t mean it contains actual history."