Colin Kaepernick has become a patron saint of the left, a martyr who thinks he lost his NFL job over his liberal political stance rather than his lousy play.
His protests last year have turned into a national controversy, with dozens of other NFL players now taking up his mantle and kneeling during the national anthem.
But if Kaepernick has a secret…. and if he really wants to make a difference, he should start with a gesture much simpler and quieter than protesting at football games.
He should register to vote!
The Sacramento Bee reports that the out-of-work quarterback isn’t even registered.
For all his talk… for all his demands… for all his anger… for all the issues he hopes to change, he’s not willing to engage in our democracy in the most meaningful way possible.
He’s not willing to vote, and he didn’t somehow fall off the voter rolls.
Kaepernick, who has been eligible to vote since he turned 18 in 2005, has NEVER registered in his home state of California.
The Bee found in a search through voter records last year that he has also never registered in Nevada, where he was a student for 2006-2010.
That means he didn’t cast a ballot for the nation’s first African-American president in a critical swing state in 2008.
Kaepernick also didn’t vote to help reelect Obama in 2012 and didn’t vote to elect California’s first African-American senator last year.
And of course, that means he didn’t vote in the 2016 presidential election despite calling attention to the issues that are supposedly important to him throughout the campaign.
Last year, just six weeks before the election, Kaepernick even flat-out called Hillary Clinton “evil” and a “racist” and suggested that she wasn’t very different from Donald Trump.
“Both are proven liars and it almost seems like they’re trying to debate who’s less racist,” he said in September, according to The Associated Press. “And at this point, talking with one of my friends, it was, you have to pick the lesser of two evils, but in the end, it’s still evil.”
And despite the supposed importance of key issues, he said he only watched “a little bit” of the presidential debates.
Seems like when the cameras are on, Kaepernick is all about those issues.
When they’re off, he couldn’t care less.
The great irony here is that one of the big stories in the left-wing media before last year’s election was whether or not Trump and his supporters would “accept” the outcome of the election.
Of course they would (and did). That’s how democracy works.
But it turns out this liberal darling is the one who wasn’t and isn’t willing to accept the results of any election.
“I said from the beginning I was against oppression, I was against the system of oppression,” Kaepernick said last year, according to NBC Bay Area. “I’m not going to show support for that system. And to me, the oppressor isn’t going to allow you to vote your way out of your oppression.”
He even said it would be “hypocritical” of him to vote.
Someone needs to get Kaepernick a dictionary.
It’s not hypocritical to not vote… but it IS hypocritical to demand attention on a political hot-button issue, and then refuse to engage on it in the most basic level possible in a functioning democracy.
— The Horn editorial team