Colin Kaepernick made his name by disrespecting the American flag.
Now he has a book to sell and a microphone in front of him again.
And what he just said about “The Star-Spangled Banner” is going to make a lot of veterans furious.
Kaepernick Tells A Podcast Host The Anthem Is “Wack”
Ex-NFL player Colin Kaepernick argued that, from a purely musical standpoint, the United States’ national anthem is a “bad song.”
As part of his press tour to promote his upcoming memoir, Kaepernick appeared on a recent episode of The Adam Friedland Show.
The comments came roughly 24 minutes into the conversation, when host Adam Friedland put the question to him directly.
Friedland asked Kaepernick, “Do you think ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is a good song?”
Kaepernick quickly responded with a “no.”
But Friedland wasn’t done pressing him on it.
“You just think, as a song, it’s wack?” Friedland asked.
The two men then moved on to the question of what should replace it.
Friedland suggested the song “March Madness” by Atlanta rapper Future as a potential new national anthem.
Kaepernick’s response? “Great choice.”
Friedland pressed further, calling it “a good pull” for the idea of swapping out the anthem entirely, and Kaepernick answered, “Not mad at that.”
So there it is, straight from the man himself: the song that plays before every American sporting event, the one that has sent men and women to their deaths defending the flag it honors, isn’t good enough for Colin Kaepernick.
The Same Malcontent Who Started It All
Kaepernick made headlines in 2016 when he refused to stand for the national anthem, later explaining that he remained kneeling as an act of protest, which sparked nationwide discourse.
Kneeling for the anthem was never a peaceful protest worth celebrating.
It was, and remains, an insult to the flag and to the men and women in uniform who died defending it.
Kaepernick didn’t just disagree with a policy or write an op-ed about it.
He turned a shared national ritual, one meant to unite fans of every background before kickoff, into a personal grievance session broadcast to millions.
And an entire trend of anthem protests followed in his wake, spreading across locker rooms and stadiums for years.
He has not played in the NFL since 2017, and he’s insisted that the league intentionally blackballed him for his political stances.
Whether or not that’s true is a separate argument.
But it’s worth noting that the man now trashing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as musically inferior has spent a decade positioning himself as a martyr for a cause that most Americans never asked him to champion on their behalf.
What This Book Tour Really Reveals
None of this is happening in a vacuum.
Kaepernick is out promoting a memoir, and controversy sells books.
Trashing the national anthem on a popular podcast is a guaranteed way to generate headlines, and Kaepernick knows it better than almost anyone in modern sports history.
He built an entire post-football career out of positioning himself against the country’s most basic patriotic rituals, and there’s little reason to think this latest round of commentary is anything other than a continuation of that same playbook.
But there’s a difference between kneeling silently during a song and going on a comedy podcast to mock it as “wack” while brainstorming replacement anthems with the host.
One was at least framed, however unconvincingly, as a statement about something bigger than the song itself.
The other is just an aging former quarterback taking potshots at a piece of American heritage for laughs and attention while he has a book to sell.
Families of fallen service members don’t get the luxury of treating the anthem as a punchline.
They hear that song at funerals.
They hear it at homecomings for the ones who made it back and at memorials for the ones who didn’t.
And for millions of Americans who have stood with a hand over their heart at Friday night football games in small towns across this country, “The Star-Spangled Banner” was never about whether the melody was catchy enough for a former NFL quarterback’s taste.
It was about what the song represents, not whether it could top the charts next to a rap single.
Kaepernick’s entire public identity since 2016 has been built on the premise that his personal grievances deserve a bigger stage than the game he was paid to play.
This latest interview is just the newest chapter in that same story, dressed up as a casual conversation about music taste.
Nobody forced him to answer Friedland’s question the way he did.
Instead, Kaepernick leaned into his anti-American protest, riffing with his host about swapping out a two-century-old piece of American history for a contemporary rap song, treating the whole exchange as an easy laugh.
That tells people everything they need to know about where his priorities actually sit heading into this next media cycle.
Expect more of the same as the book tour rolls on.
Source: Mediaite, “Colin Kaepernick Says He Thinks the National Anthem Is a ‘Bad Song'”