Colin Kaepernick went on ABC's "The View" and accused NFL owners of blackballing him for political reasons, pointing to their donations to President Trump as proof of where they stand.
The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback sat across from co-host Ana Navarro on Monday and laid out his case plainly: no team signed him after he opted out of his contract, and he believes the reason had nothing to do with football. Kaepernick called it a matter of politics and power, owners punishing a player who knelt during the national anthem, then writing checks to the very administration that made his protest a culture-war flashpoint.
Navarro walked him through the timeline. Roughly six months after Kaepernick began kneeling, he left the 49ers. No other franchise picked him up. He sued the league for collusion, alleging owners coordinated to keep him out. The NFL denied it. The whole thing ended in a confidential settlement, the terms of which have never been disclosed.
When Navarro asked what he believed was the real reason no team gave him a shot, Kaepernick didn't hedge. He told the panel he never protested the NFL itself, and that the league's reaction to his protest revealed its politics.
"I think it was political. I also think it was power. I think the reality is one, I think it's important context, I didn't protest the NFL, so their response to the protest is very informative in relation to where they stand politically. We've seen them donate millions of dollars to Trump in this administration."
That framing does a lot of work. Kaepernick wants the audience to connect two dots: owners gave money to Trump, and owners froze him out. The implication is that the kneeling protest offended their partisan loyalties, not their football judgment.
But Kaepernick offered no documents, no specific donor names, and no dollar figures beyond "millions." The claim rests entirely on his read of the situation. The NFL has denied collusion, and the confidential settlement resolved the legal dispute without any public finding of wrongdoing.
Kaepernick also floated a theory about player leverage. The NFL, he said, is "approximately 70% black," and that racial makeup gives players enormous power over the league's direction. His hypothetical was blunt: if players refused to take the field for a single weekend, the league would have no product to sell.
"If players unify around that, because if players spent one weekend and said, we're not going out there until you address this, there's no game."
No current or former player echoed that call during the segment. No union representative weighed in. It was Kaepernick alone, years removed from an NFL roster, sketching out a work stoppage that has never materialized.
Kaepernick frames the backlash against his kneeling as purely partisan, a product of conservative owners and a Republican president. But the opposition to anthem protests crossed ideological lines in ways that complicate his narrative.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, no one's idea of a right-wing figure, told Katie Couric in a 2016 interview that Kaepernick's protest was "dumb and disrespectful." She went further, calling it "arrogant," though she acknowledged his First Amendment right to kneel and said she would not support any law preventing it. Ginsburg compared the gesture to flag burning: personally offensive, legally protected.
Couric, for her part, didn't let the full exchange reach the public. She later admitted in her memoir that she deliberately cut some of Ginsburg's more pointed remarks from the final interview. Ginsburg had said kneeling players showed "contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life." Couric said she "wanted to protect" Ginsburg, believing that progressive racial justice was a "blind spot" for the justice.
A journalist decided the public couldn't handle a liberal icon's honest opinion, so she buried it. That episode says as much about the media ecosystem around the kneeling debate as anything Kaepernick said on "The View."
Kaepernick's collusion grievance against the NFL was filed under the league's collective bargaining agreement. It alleged that owners conspired to deny him employment. The NFL denied the charge. The case never went to a public hearing or produced a ruling. It ended with a confidential agreement, the terms of which neither side has disclosed.
That means Kaepernick's claim that he was politically blackballed remains exactly what it was when he filed the lawsuit: an allegation. A serious one, and one that resonated with millions of Americans. But an allegation that was never tested in open proceedings and never confirmed by any neutral fact-finder.
On Monday, he added a new layer, tying the owners' political donations to their personnel decisions. It is a claim built on inference. NFL owners donate to candidates across both parties, and many gave to Trump. Whether those donations explain why 32 front offices passed on a quarterback with a 28, 30 career record as a starter is a question Kaepernick answered for himself long ago. He has not produced evidence that would answer it for anyone else.
Navarro did not press him on the gap between assertion and proof. She did not ask which owners he was referring to, how much they gave, or whether any owner had communicated a political reason for not signing him. The segment moved on.
"The View" gave Kaepernick a platform to restate a case he has been making for years. The audience was sympathetic. The questions were soft. The host framed his departure from the 49ers as something he was "forced" into, a characterization Kaepernick did not correct or confirm during the exchange.
None of that makes his underlying complaint false. Owners may well have factored politics into their decisions. The NFL's handling of the kneeling controversy was clumsy at best, and the confidential settlement suggests the league saw enough legal risk to pen a check rather than fight in public.
But Kaepernick's argument on Monday asked viewers to accept a chain of reasoning, owners donate to Trump, owners didn't sign me, therefore the donations explain the decision, without any link in that chain verified by an independent source, a document, or a named witness.
When a public figure makes serious accusations about coordinated political discrimination, the press owes the audience follow-up questions, not a sympathetic nod. Kaepernick got the nod.
Accountability is supposed to run in every direction. If NFL owners acted in concert to punish a player for his politics, that is a scandal worth exposing with evidence. If a former quarterback is leveraging old grievances on daytime television without new proof, the audience deserves to know that too.
