NBC Sucks Up to Kaepernick on Book Tour, Who Touts Defunding Police, Hopes to Play Again

NBC’s 3rd Hour of Today gushed Wednesday over Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL player-turned-living martyr on the left who’s out with a memoir about his supposedly exhausting life and is still stuck on Woke 1, pushing the defunding of police and false claims about police encounters, such as the 2014 death of Ferguson, Missouri’s Michael Brown.

In one of the teases, co-host Craig Melvin boasted Kaepernick would be “here in the studio sharing his story in a whole new way” as it’s been “ten years after his silent protest sparked a national debate.” Later, co-host Al Roker said Kaepernick engaged in “a peaceful protest in response to racial injustice.”

They started with why Kaepernick opened his memoir with a story about being picked on growing up, but that quickly moved to the kneeling and liberal activism.

“So, now that you have had this time, you know, and this distance, take us back to — to what led to the knee. You were sitting at a preseason game. What was happening that had this bubbling up for you,” asked Roker.

Kaepernick said it was thanks to “a lifetime of experience...doing more reading, more research,” but specifically Malcolm X’s autobiography because that “ was a huge turning point for me that opened a lot of doors to knowledge and discovery.”

Showing his actual ignorance, he listed a number of deadly police encounters as though they were the same, open-and-shut cases of police murdering black people. He ludicrously asserted his kneeling was a way of helping to take “action” so that black people “can make it home safely” (and not ostensibly have police shoot them willy-nilly):

[I]n the midst of that, we’re also seeing Mike Brown in Ferguson, we’re seeing Eric Garner, we’ve seen Tamir Rice, and more specifically, leading into 2016 we see the police killings of Mario Woods, Alton Sterling, Philando Castillo and you — I had a sense of, well, I have to do something. I now understand the issue. I have the background in the historical context of it. What action am I going to take to try to change this, to make sure that we can make it home safely?

It grew even dumber when Dreyer asked Kaepernick if he’s “seen change” in the decade post-kneeling.

Without stating it explicitly, Kaepernick went full defund the police by saying “there has [sic] been changes made, but not at the level that needs to be made” as it’s only happened “at local levels, at state levels” with “deploying social workers as opposed to police, and those are steps in the right direction.”

“[B]ut the scale and magnitude of change that needs to happen largely hasn’t. We’re in a place today where police killings are higher than they were in 2016. Police budgets have continued to grown — grow, so we need to actually distribute resources that benefit people, and serve their needs, and create safer communities,” he added.

“Police budgets have continued to...grow.” There it is!

Melvin closed with a question about whether Kaepernick still wants to return to the NFL since “it’s been ten years” and “you don’t even watch football anymore.”

Kaepernick offered one last grand delusion:

Well, I don’t watch football because I’m not going to support the organization that’s blackballing me, but as far as stepping back on the field, I continue to train and prepare. Wake up every day at 4:30, get all my training in, and then go about my day, but stepping back on the field, I would love to step back out there, and that’s something that I think I could do today. 

To see the relevant NBC transcript from September 16, click here.