Colin Kaepernick Takes Shot At U.S. National Anthem 10 Years Later

Colin Kaepernick first kneeled for the U.S. national anthem 10 years ago, when he was playing quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers.

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The then-veteran NFL quarterback kneeled for the national anthem in protest of police brutality and racial inequality in the United States of America. Kaepernick kneeled with his teammate, Eric Reid, in protest of what was happening in the United States. The 2016 season ended up being Kaepernick’s final one in the National Football League.

This fall, Kaepernick is releasing a new memoir. Ahead of the release of the memoir, Kaepernick has been making the media rounds.

The former NFL quarterback took a clear shot at the “Star Spangled Banner” during a recent media appearance.

During the Wednesday, September 16, episode of The Adam Friedland Show, host Adam Friedland asked the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, now 38, if he was even a fan of the song in the first place.

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“No,” said Kaepernick, who just released his memoir, The Perilous Fight.

“You just think as a song it’s whack?” Friedland asked.

“It’s a bad song,” the former NFL player said.

Kaepernick stands by his protest to this day

Kaepernick has said that other players expressed interest in kneeling, too.

“Yeah,” Kaepernick said. “I had players that came back and were like, ‘I talked to my agent about it, or I talked to my family about it.’ I remember one … playing this back is a little bit of a mind-blowing conversation. I had one player that came back and was like, ‘My owner told me that I can’t protest.’ And that was an unfathomable sentence to me.”

Kaepernick says that he wasn’t explicitly pressured to stop kneeling, though.

“They wouldn’t explicitly frame it that way, but it would be like, ‘Well, have you thought about doing something else?’ ” he said. “It was always a passive-aggressive [way of] trying to redirect, which is interesting.”

“The part that stands out to me and the NFL told on themselves in this situation is that I wasn’t protesting the NFL,” the civil rights activist added. “At no point in time was I like, ‘the NFL, you are the ones doing this,’ but their reaction was, ‘We have to make this stop, we’re going to take an oppositional position.’ ”

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This story was originally published September 20, 2026 at 8:44 AM.