By Rich Lowry
Syndicated Columnist
Ten years later, Kaepernick remains unpersuasive
A decade later, Colin Kaepernick is as tiresome as ever. To mark the 10-year anniversary of his kneeling during the National Anthem, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback is out with a new memoir, “The Perilous Fight.” (Get it?)
In an interview with NBC News in advance of the book’s release, which he clearly imagines as part of a vindication tour, he proved himself as committed to woke racial politics as ever.
He told NBC that his protests were about fighting “police killing black folks” and “systemic oppression.” He added that he was thinking — not very modestly — about the Montgomery bus boycotts, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King while he took a knee.
It’s certainly true that Kaepernick sacrificed his career to his protests, although he was a marginal player by the end. In his prime, Kaepernick was a top-notch athlete and electric performer. No one can take his exemplary 2012 and 2013 seasons away from him. In one playoff game in 2012, he passed for 263 yards and ran for 181, a single-game record for rushing by an NFL quarterback.
He couldn’t maintain this level of performance, though. In 2015, he lost his starting job to journeyman Blaine Gabbert. He won it back for a time in 2016, although he got benched during one game after throwing for all of 4 yards. The 49ers went 1-10 when he started, and by one metric, he ranked 23rd out of 30 qualifying quarterbacks. So he was hardly the GOAT, instead once-very-good, now-mediocre. Then there was the issue that his style of play didn’t necessarily fit in most offensive schemes.
Layer on top of this the circus he’d bring to town with his kneeling and it’s understandable that teams didn’t find him an alluring proposition in 2017 when he was a free agent. There were myriad options available as backup quarterbacks who weren’t notorious for disrespecting the national anthem immediately prior to games.
TITLE: None of this would have mattered if Kaepernick had maintained his 2012 level of play; in that hypothetical, teams would have signed him even if he started to do the black power salute during huddles.
Kaepernick has now worked himself into a position where he’s compared NFL players to enslaved people (in an absurd Netflix documentary), and he’s bitter that he isn’t numbered among them as a 38-year-old who hasn’t played in 10 years.
Then there’s the substance of his advocacy. The high-water mark for Kaepernick’s anti-police worldview came in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, when the NFL basically apologized for not listening to his supposed wisdom and the police were put on their back foot in many cities around the country.
The result was an increase in violent crime that, of course, disproportionately victimized black people. The country has now recovered from this idiocy — based on the lie that the police indiscriminately kill black people — and the country is much safer for the people who Kaepernick purports to care most about. If we ever go anywhere near his preferred policy of abolishing the police and prisons, we’d instantly create the worst crime wave in the country’s history.
Kaepernick is sometimes compared to Muhammad Ali. The legendary boxer sacrificed part of his career by claiming conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War. Ali was hated for a time, but his true greatness as a boxer, his incandescent charisma and his outsized place in the culture allowed him to transcend that political controversy and become a beloved American figure.
That is not going to happen to Colin Kaepernick, whose claim to fame is kneeling on the sidelines during some NFL games. He’s very dismissive of the enduring change wrought in the NFL by his protests and the tumult after 2020. The league has painted the words “End Racism” in end zones. Kaepernick rightly considers these pointless messages performative, but so was his scorn for the anthem of his own country a decade ago.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.
(c) 2026 by King Features Synd., Inc.