The hype around Colin Kaepernick is overblown on both sides. The Right has turned him into some kind of historic villain, and the Left has turned him into a martyr who "sacrificed everything." Both of these characterizations are ridiculous, but the latter is most ridiculous. Kaepernick did not sacrifice everything. In fact, he sacrificed nothing. On the contrary, his political crusade has profited him tremendously. And that's simply not how sacrifice works.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Alright, so I want to say a few things about this Colin Kaepernick situation.
As you know, I'm sure Colin Kaepernick is the new face of Nike, and their Believe in Something, Even If It Means Sacrificing Everything campaign.
Very inspiring stuff.
Wait, that is the tagline, right?
Yeah, Believe in Something. Yeah, that's the tagline.
The new commercial was unveiled I believe it officially debuts today, as a matter of fact.
But there was a sneak peek.
A sneak peek of the commercial came out yesterday.
And so the commercial is Kaepernick narrating over images of various athletes doing...
Doing legitimately courageous things.
Like, there's one, there's an athlete who's overcame a brain tumor, another who became a wrestler, even though he doesn't have legs.
And then the camera cuts back to Colin Kaepernick, and Kaepernick is actually smothering a bald eagle with a burning American flag.
And so that was a little bit provocative, but not surprising.
No, actually, Kaepernick, he just says a bunch of Generically inspiring cliches about following your dreams and so forth.
And then the last line of the commercial is, so don't ask if your dreams are crazy.
Ask if they're crazy enough.
Which is one of those lines that, I mean, I guess it sounds inspiring.
It doesn't mean anything. Ask if your dreams are crazy enough.
Like, that's supposed to be your driving, the philosophy that drives your life?
It's like, no, that dream's not crazy enough.
No, I need crazier dreams.
Yeah. Is that what you would tell your kids?
Your kid says to you, you know, I want to be a doctor.
No, it's not crazy enough. You need to come back here with crazier dreams, okay?
I want really crazy dreams.
Okay, I want to fly to Mars.
There you go. That should be your goal, flying to Mars.
No, that's a crazy dream. Go chase it.
Anyway, it's all pretty innocuous.
The commercial is innocuous.
And in fact, I find Kaepernick himself to be, in general, a pretty innocuous character.
I am not naturally filled with the kind of blind rage about Colin Kaepernick that a lot of other conservatives seem to be filled with.
I never have been.
I haven't been able to generate...
The anger, especially the sustained anger that so many conservatives have about Colin Kaepernick.
Three years later, they're still so angry at this guy.
I couldn't...
I mean, listen.
And that tells you something, because if I'm not able to stay angry about Colin Kaepernick, I don't know how anyone else can.
Because usually, staying angry, it's one of the skills that I have.
I do think it's kind of amazing that we're still talking about this three years later.
And it seems to be this part of this trend that I pointed out before, where both sides of the political divide, they seem to kind of pick out stars.
The stars and the spokesmen for the other side.
So the right made stars out of David Hogg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Colin Kaepernick, and then the left made a president out of Donald Trump.
And they both accomplished that for the other side by being utterly, completely obsessed with these people.
Like, conservatives are obsessed with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I mean... Easily 90% of the coverage that I see and read about this woman comes from conservatives.
It's the same thing with David Hogg, and it's definitely the same thing with Colin Kaepernick.
I mean, conservatives are obsessed with these people.
They just can't get them out of their head.
And the same thing on the other end happened, and it's happened with other things with leftists, but obviously the biggest example is Donald Trump.
Donald Trump came on the scene and liberals just obsessed with a guy, liberal media obsessed with him, and he became president.
Which I think is an interesting phenomenon and maybe not a good strategy.
Maybe a better strategy, like if you're on the right and there's somebody on the left who you think is really stupid, ridiculous, shallow, inconsequential, irrelevant, all of these things, maybe the best thing is to treat them that way and to ignore them.
And then you'll stop hearing about them.
Maybe that would be the best strategy.
Certainly with Colin Kaepernick, if conservatives had just ignored, for the most part, his protest of the national anthem, if they had just...
I mean, maybe not completely ignore it, but when it first had happened, When it first happened, if they had said, well, I disagree with that.
It's silly. It's stupid.
It's disrespectful. Make your point and then move on.
And if the guy decides he wants to sit for the rest of the season, whatever.
If he wants to do that, it's just one guy.
And for so long with the National Anthem protests, it was Colin Kaepernick, it was a few other guys, it was just a few guys doing it.
It only became this huge, enormous thing, and even then it was only that for a few weeks where you had a lot of players doing it.
But that only happened after Donald Trump decided to purposely resurrect the issue, which had basically died.
And then heading into the 2017 season, he decided to bring it back up again, and that's when it turned into this big thing.
And even then, it only lasted. It only was like that for a couple of weeks.
If we had not done that, and we had just treated the protest as the silly, childish thing that it was...
Then it would have died away in a few weeks, and here we'd be three years later.
Nobody would be talking about Colin Kaepernick.
No one would even remember him.
And everyone would be better off, I think.
As for the boycott of Nike, which is going on right now, to me, the...
I'm not a big fan of our boycott culture and this Nike boycott seems to kind of perfectly encapsulate The shallow, virtue-signaling character of our boycott culture.
And that isn't... Now, don't get me wrong.
There are plenty of really legitimate good reasons to boycott Nike.
Let's start with the fact...
Let's start with the...
Here's the reason why I have always boycotted them or have mostly boycotted them.
I don't have... Like, if I wanted to burn my Nike merchandise, which I wouldn't do anyway because that's completely stupid and wasteful, And if you don't want to have your Nike merchandise anymore, then what you could do is give it to a person who's poor and needs some clothing, rather than burning your $100 shoes, maybe give them to someone.
I mean, you could go to pretty much any city and find a homeless person on the street who doesn't have shoes, maybe give him the shoes.
Just a thought. Anyway, I don't really have any Nike merchandise to burn.
And the reason for that, I'll admit, it's because that stuff, it's ridiculously expensive.
Like, I'm not going to pay a premium to have a little check mark on my shoes.
I'm just not going to pay that.
Right? I could go, I mean, there's really, unless you're an athlete, there's no reason to spend more than $30 or $40 on a pair of sneakers.
If you're going and spending $120 on sneakers because they have a check mark on them, I think that's pretty ridiculous.
So I was boycotting them for that reason.
It's more of a kind of practical utilitarian reason.
Another good reason to boycott them is that they've used sweatshops.
They have manufactured this ridiculously overpriced merchandise on the backs of child slaves.
It's a pretty good reason not to purchase from them.
And that problem has not completely gone away.
There's a report recently, last year, that the company's workers in some countries still are dealing with The denial of wages, sweltering heat, well over 90 degrees in the factories, unsafe conditions, physical abuse, and other problems as well.
So that's a very sound basis for a boycott.
Anytime a company is doing something that actually hurts people, they deserve to be boycotted, right?
Yet, knowing I'm sorry, I don't buy.
I made this point a few days ago, and some people said, well, I didn't know that Nike had a history of sweatshops.
Come on. It's been common knowledge for decades.
You really didn't know that?
I find that hard to believe.
I think most of us understood that it had that history.
We also understand that Nike sells its merchandise.
You know, has an unjustifiably high price for its merchandise.
Yet knowing all that, the current boycotters, if they really are boycotters, that is, people who have been consistent customers of Nike and now no longer will be, that's what a boycott is.
If you're boycotting Nike, but you're like me and you never really bought Nike anyway, well, that's not a boycott.
You're just continuing along with what you were already doing, right?
But if they really are boycotters, And that means that the boycotters gave their support to Nike in spite of the sweatshop problem, in spite of the fact that the stuff is ridiculously high priced, still gave their support to Nike, and now have only exploded in fury and sworn off the company because they saw a marketing poster they didn't like.
That would seem to raise a question about whether the boycott is really...
A campaign for seeking justice or if it's just another virtue signaling kind of mob to join, just another thing to do, another outrage to be a part of, which I think with so many boycotts, that's really what it's all about.
I don't think it's necessary or wise to boycott every company that fails to perfectly represent our political and ideological views.
I don't think we need to do that.
I think we should boycott companies who do harmful things and evil things.
Companies like that should be boycotted.
You could make a solid argument that Nike falls into that category, but you could have made that argument for the last, like, 30 years, and if you never made that argument before and now you're suddenly making it, I think it's a fair question to ask why.
What changed? All that said, I'll tell you what does annoy me about the Nike campaign And in general, the reception that Kaepernick has gotten on the left.
So I've already told you what annoys me about how the right has approached Kaepernick.
So let me go over to the left now.
What annoys me the most is the cheapening of heroism.
This attempt to make Kaepernick into some kind of heroic figure, some kind of martyr.
I mean, it's ridiculous because he isn't that.
We're told, now Nike's telling us, he sacrificed everything, right?
Sacrificed everything, which is quite a statement.
And if you're telling me he sacrificed everything, then we know he didn't sacrifice everything, so that's at least hyperbole.
But if you're telling me that, then I should be able to look at at least one thing that he did sacrifice.
He didn't sacrifice everything.
Did he at least sacrifice something?
I don't think he did. Let's look at this for a moment.
He was a quarterback who had been on the decline in his career.
Although the last season he played in the league, there was a little bit of an uptick in his production.
But generally speaking, Kaepernick, there was about half of one season where Kaepernick was getting all this hype as he was the next big thing in the NFL, this transformational quarterback.
And all of that died off very quickly.
And he hit his peak and plummeted.
That was his trajectory.
He was at his peak, went to the Super Bowl, he lost, and it plummeted from there.
Now, he was at best a second-string quarterback talent.
Once he left San Francisco, after choosing to opt out of his contract, by the way, So he chose to opt out of his contract after the whole protest thing.
Then he opted out of his contract.
He decided to be a free agent.
And then he didn't end up on any other teams.
Now, if this protest had not happened, he probably would have ended up on some team, probably on the bench somewhere, or potentially vying for a starting job in like Buffalo or Cleveland or something like that.
And he would have maybe gotten three or four years out of his career that way in mediocrity.
You know, either maybe three, four, five years of riding the bench or of kind of being on the quarterback carousel in one of these markets like Buffalo or Cleveland.
And then he would have retired and he would have been basically, basically forgotten.
Instead, so that was the trajectory that he sacrificed.
Instead, though, he does this protest.
And now it's true that almost certainly part of the reason why he couldn't find another job in the NFL was because of the protest.
He was not a top 10 quarterback talent, but he was at least a top 30 or 35 talent, which means that all things being equal, he would have found a job somewhere on a roster somewhere.
But all things were not equal because teams are just not willing to take on the distraction, the attention, the hysteria for the sake of a second-string quarterback.
I mean, if you're going to, as an athlete, if you're going to bring all of that hysteria to a team, you better have enough talent to compensate.
You've got to have a lot of talent.
You have to be an absolute star to compensate for that.
And he's just not that.
He didn't have enough talent to compensate for the distraction that he would bring.
So, Teams passed on him, logically.
Which is, it's not the first example of that happening.
The same thing happened to Tim Tebow.
Tim Tebow, who never, I mean, although there were people who were offended by Tim Tebow for some ridiculous reason, there was never any reason to be offended by the guy.
Yeah, Tim Tebow liked to kneel also, but he didn't kneel during the anthem.
Kneel on the sideline or celebrating a touchdown or something like that.
Tim Tebow's big sin was that he was a devout Christian and he was known for his Christian faith.
But the bigger problem for teams with Tim Tebow is just that he became this This star who kind of transcended the sport itself, and people loved him for reasons that had very little to do with football, so he just had a ton of attention on him,
yet he didn't have the talent to necessarily be a starting quarterback in the NFL consistently, so teams said to themselves, well, we're going to bring this guy in, put him on the bench, and then we're going to have all this attention on this one guy who's sitting on the bench, and it's just a distraction.
So teams said, We don't want that.
So that's why Tebow had trouble finding other jobs in the NFL. There are plenty of examples.
Dez Bryant was one of the best wide receivers in the game.
He's on the decline right now after leaving the Cowboys.
He still hasn't found a job on another team.
Now, he's very different from Tim Tebow, but he's a divisive kind of diva-like character.
And there's a lot of just distraction.
It's just a distraction.
And teams are not willing. They don't want to have that distraction on their roster, especially for a guy who can't compensate for the distraction by being an all-star talent.
So that's what happened at Kaepernick.
And in fact, there were reports that there were at least one team that was looking at Kaepernick as being possibly a second-string quarterback.
He turned down that offer.
He also turned down offers to play for the CFL, the Canadian Football League.
So this is not someone who's desperate to go and play football somewhere.
Comparing again to Tim Tebow, who he tried desperately to get on an NFL roster and stay on one.
He couldn't. And so then he goes and he plays baseball.
I mean, this is a guy who just wants to play a sport.
He just wants to play ball. This is really what he wants to do.
And so he'll take any opportunity he can get.
Kaepernick has not done that.
It seems like Kaepernick is just not a ball player.
He's not interested in playing ball.
He's more interested in being this savior figure that he has turned himself into.
So he chose to sacrifice three or four years of bench warming or possibly starting for some mid-market team.
And in exchange...
He has international fame, accolades from the media, a lucrative sponsorship deal, and other things.
And that's a heck of a nice trade, I would say.
I mean, I would take that trade, wouldn't you?
And that's why this isn't martyrdom.
This isn't heroism.
Kaepernick is neither a hero nor some sort of great historic villain.
He's just a guy who expressed his opinion, and he was punished for it, but he was also massively rewarded for it.
And the reward, I think, way outweighs the punishment.
And so that's all.
But that's not sacrifice, and that's not heroism.
That's a lot of different things.
I think, among other things, it's also a calculation on his part.
Where he had to choose, do I really want to try to stay in the league and play football, or do I want to go in and do this?
And have this be my brand and build on that brand as the socially conscious warrior for racial equality kind of thing.
And he chose that path.
And it's paid off for him pretty well.
It seems like our culture...
You know, in our culture, we are just desperate for heroes.
We're desperate for people to look up to.
And so we select guys like Colin Kaepernick.
And on the other end, as part of this overall seeking of identity, we're also desperate for easy villains that we can hate.
And so we also select guys like Colin Kaepernick.
I think that's where this comes from. That's why, even though Colin Kaepernick is just some quarterback who was on his way into relative NFL obscurity, yet he kneels for the anthem a couple times, and he becomes this massive figure that we're talking about for three years.
And why is that? It's just because he became this really easy, unchallenging kind of mascot.
For both sides. So on one side, they were able to take him and turn him into some kind of hero.
On the other side, they could turn him into a villain.
And it's easy. It's unchallenging.
And on both ends, it's just ridiculous.
Because he's neither of those things.
He's a guy with an opinion who made a decision and a calculation.
