Is Colin Kaepernick the most important American civil rights icon of his generation?

[Santander]

While he's far from perfect, I'm actually starting to think so.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Oh my god no.

The below post from two months ago has 25 recommendations.

Reminder that despite the revisionist lionizing of Kaepernick, he is and always will be an edgy, contrarian jackass.

BLM took his stated cause and adopted it for their own, as did his fellow kneelers.  His actual original goal has been forgotten in favor of a phony Kaepernick who was a vanguard for the current BLM cause.

This is why he was kneeling.  He thinks America is fundamentally an irredeemable, white supremacists nation.  He thinks this is a bad place.  That's why when he kneeled he explicitly said it was to show disrespect for the flag.

I'm sure this post will be twisted twelve ways to Sunday but for the record, I am not opposed to kneeling, in its current incarnation as an expression of grief and activism.  I just think that's not why Kaepernick was kneeling (no think about it really, it's his own words).

And the thing is, it's not like that was some grand principled stand either.  The world was mainly introduced to Kaepernick and his political views through that whole episode.  But we on the west coast had been familiar with him for years.  He's always been an edgy jackass who basically gets his political views from Facebook and goes out of his way to be contrarian and woke.  His "I'm kneeling to show disrespect for this white supremacists murder state" protest was just another episode of that.

Also, while I'm here, Kaepernick was a washed up player who was already on his way out of the NFL.  All the revisionist history about, oh the NFL sabotaged his career, it's a bunch of malarkey.  His career was already over.  Yes he has some stats you can cherrypick that look good on paper.  So do plenty of other QBs, like Tyrod Taylor, who are also confined to backup, journeyman, or tank captain roles.  If Kaepernick was able to play that role, he'd still be in the league.  Unfortunately he was a locker room problem, wanted starter money, and his girlfriend called the Ravens owner a "slave master" when they were about to offer him a deal, so that's why he's out of the league.

[Suburbia]

No, because he does not promote voting.

He says things like this and expect teams to want him.

The NFL doesn't want him.

He'd get mauled by a white linebacker or defensive player like Richie Igcognito.

https://twitter.com/Kaepernick7/status/1308908426349678592

Abolish the police and replace it with what?

[Tartarus Sauce]

I hope not, he's a bona fide moron.

[Beet]

By and large my problem with the abolish the police crowd is that they fail to see that crime and police are symbiotic and one will not go away without the other. At the end of the day they're both gangs of tough guys with guns. Some have state legitimacy and some don't, but gangsterism is the root cause of both.

A society with very low, nonviolent crime rates is a society where the police will wither away. Trying to get rid of the police while allowing crime to thrive will cause the police to grow back spontaneously (via public or private routes).

The entire basis of the criminal justice reform movement and why the politics of it shifted after the 1990s is due to crime rates going down. That was your foundation-- the basis of your voice.

The activists never understood this. Not from the beginning (2014-15). They wanted to criticize Bill Clinton for his politics of 1994 ignoring that the context was very different back then due to decades of high crime rates.

They wanted to reap the rewards of the Clintonian crime drop without protecting where their power was really coming from.

I tried to say this at the time and was blasted for it.

[Suburbia]

By and large my problem with the abolish the police crowd is that they fail to see that crime and police are symbiotic and one will not go away without the other. At the end of the day they're both gangs of tough guys with guns. Some have state legitimacy and some don't, but gangsterism is the root cause of both.

A society with very low, nonviolent crime rates is a society where the police will wither away. Trying to get rid of the police while allowing crime to thrive will cause the police to grow back spontaneously (via public or private routes).

The entire basis of the criminal justice reform movement and why the politics of it shifted after the 1990s is due to crime rates going down. That was your foundation-- the basis of your voice.

The activists never understood this. Not from the beginning (2014-15). They wanted to criticize Bill Clinton for his politics of 1994 ignoring that the context was very different back then due to decades of high crime rates.

They wanted to reap the rewards of the Clintonian crime drop without protecting where their power was really coming from.

I tried to say this at the time and was blasted for it.

The 1980s-1990s criminal justice era was mixed.

US crime dropped since 1998......but it has ticked up since 2015, due to the de-policing. If funds are to be cut from police, which they should, to fund these social programs like education, it better work.

If there is a crime wave you will see a Republican elected in the mold of Giuliani, but more lethal, and I don't think that the activists can deal with that.