Ten years after Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest ignited one of the biggest cultural battles in sports history, the former NFL quarterback says he still believes the league has blackballed him.
But according to BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock, that claim misses the bigger story.
“Ten years later, Colin Kaepernick just told the country he won,” Whitlock says.
“He sat with NBC News and said he no longer watches the NFL because the league is actively blackballing him and the men who knelt with him. He watches college football now. That is not a quarterback begging for a clipboard; that is a man who knows the institution already belongs to him,” he explains.
“A three-minute kneel during the national anthem has been stretched into game-long signs in every NFL stadium. ‘End racism,’ ‘stop hate,’” he continues, noting that it’s not going away any time soon.
“For the 2026 season, the seventh straight year of the stencil, the league will paint those slogans in the grass and on the helmets again. Marxist liturgy as field decoration. [Kaepernick] never needed another snap. He needed the building to preach after he left the huddle,” he says.
And the “diversity score cards” within the league — like the male cheerleaders who went viral not too long ago — still “sit in the front office as if they were defensive schemes.”
“The NFL did not stumble into this; it was discipled into it. [Kaepernick] watches college football and accuses the NFL of blackballing him,” Whitlock says.
“He can afford the sneer. He is one of America’s greatest Trojan horses. He never recaptured the quarterback job. He captured the institution,” he continues. “The NFL thought it was containing a protest. It was being converted by one.”
“What began as a sideline gesture now owns the grass, the hiring, and the moral vocabulary of Sunday. The loudest league in the country is still kneeling. The quietest quarterback already cashed the cultural check,” he adds.
And while Kaepernick is often treated as a “failed activist,” that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
“Ten years later, we are still talking about Colin Kaepernick. … That is a cultural victory that never required a comeback, a tryout, or another down. He sacrificed a fading quarterback career and got a league to carry his flag,” Whitlock says.
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