Colin Kaepernick started kneeling for the national anthem a decade ago and told the country it was about police brutality.
Now, ten years later, he’s still talking about it, and he’s still not satisfied.
And what he just told a podcast about the real finish line he’s chasing will make plenty of Americans furious.
A Decade Later, He’s Still Not Satisfied
Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick lamented he is still not “at peace” with his protest, a decade after he started kneeling for the National Anthem, because police departments have not been defunded from coast-to-coast. That’s not a throwaway line. That’s the actual goal he’s been sitting on for ten years.
Kaepernick reflected on his protest during a recent interview on The Ringer’s Higher Learning podcast. The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback grabbed national headlines in 2016 when he started protesting police brutality and what he claimed was the nation’s racist oppression of Black citizens, two issues which he said made him disgusted by the American flag.
Disgusted by the flag. That’s his own framing, not ours, and it’s worth sitting with for a second before anyone calls him a hero.
Kaepernick told the podcast he feels good about what he did in hindsight, but not the result. Asked whether he was at peace with the decisions he made and the approach he took, he said, “Yes.” But when the question turned to whether he was at peace with how things actually turned out, he didn’t offer the same clean answer.
And the reason he gave is not “I wish there was more racial healing” or “I wish the country came together.” It’s that police departments still exist and still have budgets.
MAGA Pushback and the “Leave the Country” Line
Kaepernick said the NFL’s reaction to him has been similar to a lot of “MAGA folks” who have told him to leave the country if he hates it so much. “If you’re going to critique the NFL, if you’re going to say it’s racist, if you’re going to say you don’t trust the owners, well, why don’t you leave?” Kaepernick said. “I don’t think we should be in a space where we run from those fights. Otherwise, we just allow it to continue to exist as it is.”
He’s framing pushback from ordinary football fans as an attempt to silence him. It isn’t. It’s Americans who watched a multimillionaire athlete use a pregame ceremony honoring the flag as a personal grievance platform and decided they didn’t much care for it.
Kneeling for the anthem was never a small or private gesture. It happened on national television, in a stadium, during a moment set aside to honor the country and the men and women who died defending it. Turning that moment into a weekly political statement was a choice, and it was an insulting one to every service member who never got to come home.
Kaepernick is not a civil rights icon for making that choice. He’s a malcontent who took a unifying ritual and made it about himself, and a decade later he’s still doing victory laps over it while complaining the victory isn’t complete.
The Defund Push That Never Really Died
Here’s the part that should actually alarm people. Kaepernick isn’t nostalgic about 2016. He’s still actively rooting for police departments to lose funding nationwide, and he said so in plain language on a podcast in the year 2026.
The country already ran this experiment. Cities that slashed police budgets or gutted departments after 2020 saw officers leave in droves, response times climb, and crime rates spike in the very neighborhoods activists claimed to be protecting. Working-class and minority communities paid the price for a policy that sounded good in a hashtag and fell apart in practice.
Kaepernick isn’t asking for police reform, body cameras, or better training standards. He’s asking for police departments to have less money to do their jobs. That’s not a nuanced policy position. That’s the same “defund the police” agenda that Democrat-run cities tried, watched blow up in their faces, and in many cases have spent the last several years quietly walking back.
But Kaepernick apparently didn’t get the memo that the rest of the country moved on from this idea once the results came in.
What This Says About the Anthem Protest Ten Years Later
It’s worth remembering how this all started. Kaepernick didn’t kneel because he had a specific piece of legislation in mind. He knelt because he wanted police departments defunded, and a decade of failed experiments in cities that actually tried it hasn’t changed his mind one bit.
And that’s the tell. This was never really about a conversation or “raising awareness.” It was about a specific radical policy outcome that most Americans, including plenty who don’t consider themselves conservative, rejected once they saw what it actually looked like on the ground.
Kaepernick still frames critics as people trying to run him out of the country simply for disagreeing with him. But nobody is stopping him from speaking his mind. What Americans are doing is rejecting the substance of what he’s saying, which is a different thing entirely than trying to silence him.
The NFL never really settled the Kaepernick question. It just let the clock run out on his career and hoped the controversy would fade. It didn’t. He’s still talking about it, the same demand is still on the table, and he’s telling anyone who’ll listen that he won’t feel at peace until American police departments have their budgets gutted from coast to coast.
That’s not a call for justice. That’s a decade-old grudge dressed up as principle, and it deserves exactly the skepticism Americans have been giving it since the first time he took a knee.
Source: Mediaite, “Colin Kaepernick Vents He’s Not ‘At Peace’ With Fact Police Still Haven’t Been Defunded”