Kaepernick Reverses on Voting, Praises Mayor Mamdani

Kaepernick told NBC News that Mamdani's approach could pull disengaged voters back in: "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.'"

He argued that people who say "this doesn't represent me, I'm not voting" stay home because they aren't seeing politicians govern that way.

The New York Post's Rich Lowry was blunt in the other direction, writing that "a decade later, Colin Kaepernick is as tiresome as ever" and that the memoir reads as a "vindication tour." Lowry credited Kaepernick's 2012 and 2013 seasons — including a playoff game in which he passed for 263 yards and ran for 181, a single-game rushing record for an NFL quarterback — but said the quarterback was a marginal player by 2016, when the 49ers went 1-10 in his starts.

Lowry also rejected the premise of the protest itself, calling the anti-police worldview a "lie that the police indiscriminately kill black people" and arguing the post-2020 backlash against policing drove up violent crime.