Conservatives Lambast Washington Post for Dubbing Colin Kaepernick ‘Most Relevant Figure’ at Super Bowl

(AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

The Washington Post is getting shredded by conservative and pro-MAGA pundits on X after the paper dubbed Colin Kaepernick  the “most relevant figure” at the Super Bowl on Sunday, despite not having played in nine years.

But that is how WaPo sports reporter Adam Kilgore described the quarterback-turned-social justice commentator in his Saturday story titled “What Do We Make of Colin Kaepernick?”

His article started off by saying:

The most relevant figure to Super Bowl LX is absent from it. The game will be played in his former home stadium, in the place where his protest made him a national lightning rod and a global symbol. The social issues swirling around America’s largest sporting spectacle carry distinct echoes of what prompted his actions and what led to his exile. And yet he remains outside the conversation and invisible within the confines of the NFL.

Of course, Kaepernick drew the love of many progressives — and the ire of President Donald Trump and many conservatives — when he kneeled during the National Anthem. Kaepernick said he was doing it to protest police brutality against Black Americans and other injustices.

Kilgore’s story was immediately skewered by many pro-Trump and right-leaning X users right after, including Outkick founder Clay Travis. He said it was “perfection” because it showed why the paper laid off hundreds of employees and axed its sports section last week — “because they lost money and no one read it.”

National Review writer Charles C.W. Cooke also said the story was a sign WaPo was internally broken.

“They cannot fix themselves. They will not fix themselves,” he posted. “They are incorrigible, monomaniacal weirdos.”

Conservative pundit Ryan Girdusky scoffed at the article’s claim, saying “literally no one” watching the Super Bowl would be thinking about Kaepernick.

Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer asked why conservatives would subscribe to WaPo if that was the kind of sports content they were putting out. “If the sports page is this bad, imagine how bad the news pages are,” he said.

And FCC Chair Brendan Carr didn’t seem thrilled with it, either:

Conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller was amused the “most relevant” claim in Kilgore’s opening “made it past likely multiple editors.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) was also thrown off by the article. He asked if anyone who is not “an activist for a corporate media outlet” believed Kaepernick mattered this weekend.

And The Spectator editor-at-large Benjamin Domenech mocked the story, saying Washington Post just had to get one last Kaepernick article out before shuttering its sports department.

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