Aaron Rodgers vs. Jimmy Kimmel was no accident. ESPN is playing an ugly game

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I don’t know what Jimmy Kimmel does in his private life and neither do you, most likely, but that’s not really the point. Aaron Rodgers is one of the great quarterbacks who has played America’s most popular sport, really one of the best there ever was, but that’s not really the point, either.

No, the point is that Pat McAfee may be the highest-paid employee at ESPN, which remains the biggest sports broadcaster in America, and on Tuesday Rodgers went on his show and implied that late night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel might be one of the names on the list of disgraced financier and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs. Kimmel, who shares an employer with McAfee, then said the allegations had put his family in danger, and sort of threatened Rodgers with legal action. Oops!

The notable part here wasn’t that Aaron Rodgers spouted bog-standard, internet-brained conspiracy theories; that appears to be a large part of what he does now, as a lifestyle. He’s like millions of other Americans in this way, and Canadians while we’re at it. He’s lost in the internet fever swamps, wrestling with illusions and fantasies that seem real to him, all the while imagining that he’s Indiana Jones.

But everybody knows that, and McAfee perhaps most of all, because his show pays Rodgers to come on once a week to trash Anthony Fauci or claim he rehabs his torn Achilles tendon by listening to dolphins copulating or whatever. This particular segment didn’t start out talking about Jimmy Kimmel, or the Epstein list. It was a freewheeling discussion about bad officiating and the idea that the NFL is scripted — rigged, in other words. This idea had recently spread, in McAfee’s words, to “the whole internet.”

I guess, sure. It’s actually an old idea if you’ve ever sat in a bar where people talk about sports. The idea that big markets are favoured arises in every sport, and it even bubbles into some front offices in over-emotional moments. Rodgers added the latent semi-conspiracy that the official Super Bowl logo has included colours from participating teams the last two years, and this year has red and purple in it and Baltimore and San Francisco are the two best teams in football, so maybe this is all rigged? People talk about this on the internet now, apparently.

Side note: Humans as a species used to be bored all the time. Remember being bored? Like, sitting in your house waiting for someone to call you on a summer day with nothing to do? We used to have to learn how to be bored. Living this way is just exhausting.

So, Rodgers was talking about some stupid crap he saw on the internet. No problem. Everything was under control. And then McAfee co-host and former NFL linebacker A.J. Hawk, who has the unnerving air of a man who could comfortably watch a plane crash without blinking, interjected.

“Does this have something to do with the Epstein list that came out?” prodded Hawk.

And Rodgers sniggered, “That’s supposed to be coming out soon. There’s a lot of people, including Jimmy Kimmel, who are really hoping that doesn’t come out.”

So, a show on ESPN, owned by Disney, featured baseless allegations that another high-profile employee of Disney is a possible pedophile, or at least a friend of pedophiles, and the show itself started it. That is how you know McAfee and company know exactly what they are doing under the guise of, as McAfee said in his day-after bit of disingenuous damage control, “s–t talking.”

Kimmel has made fun of Rodgers’s forays in pseudo-science and conspiracy; Rodgers has latched onto the right-wing shibboleth about Epstein’s list proving that elites are corrupt. The American right is increasingly of the belief that its opponents are pedophiles, and that death threats are free speech.

And Hawk knew that if he brought it up, Rodgers would say something that would get the show noticed. This wasn’t an accident, except perhaps of history.

It’s another little signpost of decline. Imagine being one of the fine journalists ESPN has fired or laid off in the past few years as its cable revenues have started to erode. Imagine being an LGBTQ ESPN employee when Rodgers slams the medical establishment as “the alphabet mafia,” which he also did Tuesday. Yes, yes, ESPN is bleeding money and chased McAfee to compete with the bro attention economy, and the Barstools and Joe Rogans of the world. Yes, TSN rebroadcasts the show in Canada. A request for comment from TSN was not returned.

But the problem with that is that bro ethic is eventually going to say something sexist, or homophobic, or in this case potentially actionable. S–t talking on American TV in 2024 means eventually your brain-poisoned celebrity quarterback will accuse another celebrity of being a pedophile, and your bro host has to say: Hey, we were just messing around. In a week, Rodgers will probably claim that the mainstream media took him out of context because they’re afraid of the truth, and McAfee and Hawk will laugh and say sometimes free speech is controversial.

And if ESPN lets it keep happening on its airwaves — if they send lawyers to calm Kimmel and warn McAfee — then we’ll just know they are sliding further away from not just the standards of broadcast journalism, but of televised sports talk. And Rodgers will keep talking, and eventually he will return to this little fantasy. And if he does, well, I don’t personally have much of an opinion on Jimmy Kimmel, except for this one: he should sue.