Colin Kaepernick once led an anti-American protest against the National Anthem.
Now a socialist New York City mayor has him singing a very different tune.
And what Kaepernick just revealed about the politician who changed his mind will leave a lot of people shaking their heads.
From “Hypocritical” to All In for a Socialist
Back in 2016, the same year Kaepernick made himself famous by kneeling during the national anthem, he told the press exactly where he stood on voting. “You know, I think it would be hypocritical of me to vote,” he said at the time. He went further: “I said from the beginning I was against oppression, I was against the system of oppression. I’m not going to show support for that system. And to me, the oppressor isn’t going to allow you to vote your way out of your oppression.”
That was then.
In his upcoming memoir, *The Perilous Fight*, Kaepernick now calls that 2016 decision “irresponsible.” He also says he eventually voted for Democrat presidential nominees Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020 and 2024. So the man who once declared voting an act of complicity with oppression quietly went ahead and voted Democrat twice before deciding the whole thing needed a public rebranding.
And the politician who apparently completed that transformation? New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
“When we talk about leaders that are moving the needle right now, I think we’re seeing real impact coming out of Mamdani,” Kaepernick told NBC.
He added: “It is very refreshing for a lot of people to see someone in a political role saying, ‘I am prioritizing the people’s needs. I’m going to hold people accountable to that, and we are just going to execute and deliver on this over and over again.'”
What Mamdani Actually Represents
Mamdani is not a run-of-the-mill liberal. He is a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the openly Marxist organization whose own platform calls for government seizure of major corporations, abolition of the US Senate, replacement of the Presidency and Supreme Court with bodies subordinate to Congress, and the elimination of ICE. The DSA’s stated goal is a classless society built on the wreckage of the capitalist system that built this country.
Mamdani’s municipal agenda fits the mold. His platform includes expanding government-run childcare, freezing rents in rent-stabilized apartments, and opening city-run grocery stores. Every one of those proposals moves New York City further away from a market economy and closer to the kind of centrally planned arrangement that has produced shortages, stagnation, and misery everywhere it has been tried at scale.
Government-run grocery stores. In New York City. In 2026.
This is what Kaepernick calls “moving the needle.”
But there is something worth noting here beyond the policy substance. Mamdani is also a Muslim politician whose rise has been celebrated by the same left-wing media apparatus that has spent years insisting America is irredeemably racist and its institutions are beyond saving. The DSA, which Mamdani belongs to, has advocated for open borders and the abolition of ICE, which would effectively end any meaningful enforcement of immigration law. These are not fringe positions within Mamdani’s political world. They are the agenda.
Kaepernick’s enthusiasm for all of it is not exactly surprising. But it is clarifying.
The Larger Pattern Worth Paying Attention To
Let’s be honest about what this story actually is. It is not really about Colin Kaepernick deciding to vote. He already voted twice. It is about the left finding a new political figure to rally around, and using celebrity endorsements to build momentum for a brand of socialism that would have been considered extreme even by Democrat standards a decade ago.
Mamdani’s rise is part of a broader push by the DSA and its allies to normalize Marxist policy proposals under friendlier branding. City-run grocery stores are not called socialism in the press releases. They are called “combating food insecurity.” Rent freezes are not called price controls that destroy housing supply. They are called “prioritizing the people’s needs.” The language is engineered to obscure what the policy actually does.
And Kaepernick, a man who built his public identity on rejecting American institutions as fundamentally corrupt, is now the enthusiastic face of a movement that wants to replace those institutions with government ones. The contradiction is worth sitting with for a moment.
He spent years insisting the system was so broken that participating in it even by casting a ballot was a form of moral surrender. But the moment a socialist mayor shows up promising to run the grocery stores and freeze the rent, suddenly voting is not only acceptable but something to promote actively to his followers.
What changed? Not the system. Kaepernick’s team just finally found a candidate who wants to replace it with something he likes better.
And that something is a platform the DSA would recognize as its own: government control of housing, government control of food distribution, government-run childcare, and a political identity rooted in the same Marxist framework that has produced economic ruin and authoritarian drift in every country that has tried it in earnest.
The historical record on socialist governance is not ambiguous. It is a catalog of shortages, stagnation, and the steady erosion of the individual freedoms that make prosperity possible in the first place. Kaepernick may find Mamdani “refreshing.” The residents of cities and countries that have lived under the policies Mamdani is implementing would likely use different words.
But the celebrity endorsement machine does not linger on that history. It moves from one inspiring figure to the next, and right now the inspiring figure is a 34-year-old democratic socialist running New York City’s government like an experiment in what happens when you let the DSA platform off the leash at the municipal level.
Worth watching. Not for the reasons Kaepernick thinks.
Sources: Breitbart, OutKick, NBC News, OAN