How Aaron Rodgers Beat the Regime

CULTURE

The man in the arena

By Titus Techera · September 14, 2026 · 10 min read

Every kid has a favorite athlete. If you loved speed, it was Rickey Henderson or Randy Moss. Agility? Barry Sanders. Attitude? Allen Iverson. Raw power? Bonds, of course. For me, that athlete was Aaron Rodgers, whom I watched as a weird kid coming of age in Bucharest and Berlin, fascinated by American culture despite my geographical alienation from it.

I loved seeing him win Super Bowl XLV after a desperate underdog 9–7 season. The following year, I admired his almost-perfect 15–1 season, then watched the Packers’ shocking defeat in the divisional playoffs. The highs and lows, the reversals—they all belonged to a world of earnest love of beauty that remains with me to this day.

Today, Rodgers kicked off his 22nd NFL season at 42 years old. He won, grinding out a tough win against the Falcons, throwing for 221 yards and a touchdown with no interceptions. He’s now on the Steelers, the team he beat in his sole Super Bowl victory. He will be joined, for the first time in many years, by his beloved old coach Mike McCarthy, with whom he’s shared a 20-year love/hate, buddy-comedy-style relationship since they joined the league in 2006.

Rodgers is already making preseason news for being preternaturally based in public interviews, this time condemning his starlet ex Shailene Woodley for wanting to bang another guy before their wedding and blasting the Trump admin for being too influenced by Israel. Handsome Rodgers was clearly marked for total control by the publicity women of the mainstream regime, being set up with various movie stars like Woodley and Olivia Munn, and fake PR phenomena such as Danica Patrick, but he was always a little too “weird,” AKA not a slave, to ever make these fake relationships work. He called politics a “total sham,” and he regrets ever bowing to the establishment during COVID.

In fact, he didn’t bow—he refused the vaccine, but he tried to do some cagey finagling around a “homeopathic vaccine” that would allow him the same rights as the holy Pfizer-vaccinated. That he was an open refusenik in the first place is admirable, and nobody can blame him for gametime audibles skirting ridiculous vaxx rules. We all did these sorts of things, especially if we had jobs to protect. But what’s incredible about Rodgers is that he had not just any job, but the best job in American sports, being a star NFL QB. And yet, he’s taken risks with it. Real risks. And for this, we know he is a man.

However he ends his amazing career, he’ll be remembered both for setting records and for setting the record straight. At the peak of his fame and success, he found himself alone against the hysteria and had to prove his character in a celebrity culture that has turned men into eunuchs. He escaped the machine of lies and has become something strange: an independent American. In a culture of “role models,” which is to say, mere acting, he has embraced the weirdness of American freedom.

Rodgers is now at the end of his career, still unvaccinated, having survived cancellation. Starting tomorrow against the Falcons, he’ll make one last attempt to summit the NFL peak, after all his records, after becoming MVP four times, to get that second Super Bowl win that proves the point. I see the gray in his beard—he’s just a bit ahead of me there—and the boyish twinkle in the eye, the dimpled smile, the California confidence. He can take the pain. We can feel that he should win, because we all want to believe in second chances.

Rodgers is a NorCal kid from the definitionally lower-middle-class town of Chico. His parents were Ed and Darla: Ed, a chiropractor and former O-lineman with Chico State; Darla, a part-time reporter for the Chico Enterprise-Record. You couldn’t write better dinergoths if you tried. Aaron grows up with good SATs but no prospects, goes to community college to play ball (Butte), then transfers to Cal and leads the Golden Bears for two years before giving up his senior year to be drafted in the first round in 2005. Millionaire at 21. Alex Smith went first that draft, to the 49ers, while Rodgers went 24th. Smith never quite worked out, as a QB or as an announcer. Whereas we all know, we can sense, that Rodgers has a future after football.

Rodgers waited years in the shadow of Brett Favre, the great Cajun, the indefatigable QB who started every game for the Packers from 1992 to 2007 and won and lost consecutive Super Bowls. Favre completely rejected Rodgers as the runt of the litter; he provided him zero mentorship and was cold throughout Rodgers’ time as second-string QB. Rodgers had to learn from a distance, which he did. In 2008, he came into his own in Mike McCarthy’s QB School, first by deconstructing and reconstructing his movement mechanics, then through intense study of defensive coverage and playcalling. He trained himself for control, turning talent into power, building, during losing seasons, future winning seasons—a brilliant rookie with the insatiable desire to make it to the playoffs, to get to real victories, to reap the honors of greatness. He played with vigor and pleasure. He also had a sense of humor—football is not really that serious—celebrating TDs with the Championship Belt move and the Shoryuken flying uppercut.

By 2010, Rodgers had achieved what the entire Millennial generation would fail at: being an actual white man. Leadership meant excellence plus popularity. We had a deal: he would hide the injuries, the pain, the fears, all the ways you end up paying for beauty, and we were lifted by his success. The excitement sold ads; Rodgers got his endorsements. We believed being a man still mattered—America was still the country rooted in rugged individualism. The man in the arena.

In the centennial Packers season, 2018, Rodgers came back from trailing the Bears 20–3 in the third quarter. He threw three TDs and won 24–23, then talked to Michele Tafoya after the whistle. It turned out he was stoned out of his mind, playing through a knee injury, unable to quite form sentences anymore, but still somehow in control.

Fast-forward a few years. COVID happened. 2020 was a banner year for Rodgers, garnering his third MVP and leading the Packers to a 13–3 season and his fifth NFC Championship. He lost to final-year Tom Brady’s Buccaneers in January 2021, who went on to win Super Bowl LV. Then, on August 26, 2021, during preseason, Rodgers answered a reporter’s question about his vaccination status: “Yes, I’ve been immunized.” By November, the Packers were again brilliant: 7–1. Then Rodgers got COVID, and scandal erupted over his non-vax status. Everyone involved on the NFL side knew he wasn’t vaccinated, but he was too big a star to attack at first. Even still, he had to be punished—there were investigations, the Packers were fined $300K, Rodgers and others were personally fined too, and all throughout raged a constant media hysteria.

Strangely, this is where Rodgers began to shine in an entirely new way. He went on Pat McAfee’s show and started talking about everything from woke mobs to the fake science, from his own research on the vaccine to the shameful health theater of the time. He praised Joe Rogan and his advice on beating COVID. He went on a MAHA-avant-la-lettre rant about health, fitness, diet, and learning what you’re putting into your body. He rejected the mRNA vaccines (because of an allergy); the J&J vaccine had been briefly pulled by the CDC in April, so he was worried about that, too. In the NFL’s first 17-game season, the Packers ended up 13–4, and Rodgers got his fourth MVP. But it was also another miserable playoff, ending as soon as it started in another heartbreaking Divisional loss.

It’s a different world now, and there’s a new Rodgers. He’s now talking to Tucker about the ayahuasca ceremonies that led him to his MVP titles, about his belief in aliens and UFOs, which we now call UAPs—apparently, the aliens, too, need rebranding—but maybe also about the demonic forces and the God that he doesn’t believe in, and antisemitism, which he’s on the fence about. Rodgers thinks the plants have helped heal him. He’s not going back to the church of his childhood. He’s going forward into some inscrutable future—he wants disclosure about futuristic tech; the government should be honest with us, like he’s honest about ayahuasca. The way he describes our politics and society is “wild.” It’s true, and so is he.

We’re basically nice people—we have athletes to look up to as men, or used to. But watching Rodgers throw, I would often think he was meant to lead men into battle, to launch the heavy bronze spear, and kill our enemies. Instead, we got giants in pink, advertising breast cancer in October; the kind of humiliation usually reserved for black actors, forced into drag. We were promised men and we got poster boys for Fauci, arm candy for Taylor Swift. What the hell happened? No wonder Rodgers goes on ESPN to call Fauci “an absolute fucking coward.”

Rodgers hates the people trying to control him. Nice people become fighting people when you threaten their agency. How did the golden boy Rodgers become one of us, a leader in the culture wars? Once one small thing falls off, the entire reliable celebrity identity—being well-adjusted but selling thrills—falls apart. The self is abolished, and in comes everything the internet can throw at you, every conspiracy theory, every fear, every memory from childhood that suggests you were meant to take another path. In the storm of the soul that replaced the midlife crisis for my generation, monsters and heroes are forged.

Why did Rodgers turn out this way? Is it something to do with his WWII-hero grandfather, whom he cannot forget, in whose wartime suffering he became patriotic? Is it a defensive patriotism, skeptical of the state, of all authority? Rodgers talks openly now of wanting to mentor younger men, starting with his teammates.

What did football fandom teach you? How did you prepare for this now, whatever it is that we’re facing? The losers ended up on betting apps, the winners ended up with sabermetrics; most of us were actually training for the new wilderness of Trump fandom, of Rogan fandom, RFK Jr.—all these friends of Aaron Rodgers, the surprisingly comfortable new cast of characters. We’re looking for new leaders without realizing it—ready to go through the wilderness of deinstitutionalization, the loss of all credibility, the acquisition of trust by pain suffered and enemies incurred. Maybe Rodgers learned to lead through his long career of injuries, defeats, betrayals. Maybe that’s how he ended up in front of Congress testifying about the tyranny of COVID.

Which brings me back to now—one last season of football, playing for the city, Pittsburgh, that represents the decline of industrial America more than any other, for his old blue-collar coach, who evinces the same. Rodgers got married, wants kids; he’s coming back from Fantasyland to claim an American life for himself, something private, away from celebrity, that we all want and most will never have. If Rodgers can win another Super Bowl, I confess I’ll have a bit more confidence and cheer. I know it’s irrational, but I take what I can get these days. I want to see him win because of how he talks about patriotism, his WWII grandfather, the hatred of our corruption and the MAGA hope. Football is America’s game or it’s nothing. We show ourselves in public or we hide. We do this or we don’t.