Aaron Rodgers’ gushing praise for Putin was a mess

Thanks to injury — and apparently, arrogance — Aaron Rodgers has recently spent far more time podcasting than playing in football games. He’s been busy promoting conspiracy theories and other far-right rhetoric on seemingly any platform willing to have him.

That continued when the New York Jets quarterback sat for a friendly two-hour interview with ousted Fox News host Tucker Carlson. As NBC News noted, Rodgers pushed multiple conspiratorial claims during this chat, released on X.

But what garnered the most attention online was the NFL star’s gushing praise for Vladimir Putin. He called Carlson’s recent softball interview with the Russian president “awesome,” even though Putin himself said he thought the questions were too deferential.

“Putin came off as an interesting, thoughtful, smart individual,” Rodgers said.

“And if you’ve read ‘1984,’ the base game plan of government control is you have to have an enemy and you have to slander that enemy regardless if you know anything about them,” he added, seeming to suggest that U.S. officials have unfairly maligned the Kremlin.

Rodgers didn’t seem to grasp the perverse irony in using a book about government censorship to dismiss criticism of a pro-censorship regime. But he continued, going on to praise Putin over President Joe Biden:

Note how Rodgers papers over the “all the stuff” Putin has done to “the different people,” a list of misdeeds that includes an attack on the U.S. election system, bombing Ukraine into potential oblivion and suppressing free speech in his own country. And although Rodgers seems to think Putin owns a mastery of Russian history, actual historians and fact-checkers found his interview with Carlson to be chock-full of pro-Russian propaganda.

It’s fair to say Rodgers doesn’t belong on any list of diplomatic experts.

We can however, add him to the rather pitiful list of medium- to high-profile Putin apologists. He joins over-the-hill action star Steven Seagal, Pink Floyd rocker Roger Waters and filmmaker Oliver Stone. Even rapper Meek Mill appears to have gotten in on the act, expressing support for Carlson’s interview before it aired and recently sharing a video that falsely portrayed Putin as saying that Jesus was Black.

Many high-profile figures who had been friendly with Putin or the Kremlin prior to Russia’s war with Ukraine have had the presence of mind to distance themselves since the invasion.

Eerily, Aaron Rodgers and the like have only gotten more pronounced in their Putin worship.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com