Colin Kaepernick took a knee in 2016 and half the country cheered him as a hero.
Ten years later, the numbers behind that moment are finally getting a second look.
Clay Travis just attached a death toll to that decade.
Clay Travis Tied the Anthem Protest to a Specific Nationwide Death Count
Travis laid it out in a post that has already pulled in millions of views.
His argument: the wave of anti-police activism that Kaepernick's kneel helped launch tracks with roughly 20,000 additional murders nationwide.
Ten thousand of those victims, by his accounting, were black.
Travis called what followed "Woke 1," the term AOC herself has used for the movement's first wave.
He is not just talking about a bad news cycle for the NFL.
He is talking about a decade of dead bodies in the neighborhoods the protest was supposedly fighting for.
Outkick and Sport & State both ran with the numbers Tuesday, framing it as the receipt liberal America never wanted issued.
The timing is not an accident.
The anniversary retrospectives from the sports media have mostly treated him as a martyr.
Travis is offering the other version of that anniversary story.
The FBI Numbers Behind the Death Toll Claim
Travis built his case on FBI crime data and the Washington Post's own police shooting database, not a single outside study.
The murder count tells the story on its own.
There were 17,413 murders nationwide in 2016, the year Kaepernick first knelt.
By 2020 through 2022, the height of the "Woke 1" era, that number climbed to roughly 22,000 murders a year.
The FBI's 2025 data shows black Americans made up 52 percent of murder victims and black men accounted for 55 percent of killers, even though black men are roughly 6 percent of the population.
Travis's math connects those trends directly to the anti-police climate the anthem protest helped kick off, even though no single peer-reviewed study ties the kneel itself to a specific body count.
Clay and Buck laid out the same 20,000 figure on their radio show, tying the Kaepernick era directly into the broader death toll from that first wave.
Travis is not the only one who has made this argument either.
Researchers tracking what they call the Ferguson Effect, the tendency for violent crime to spike once officers pull back after intense public scrutiny, have documented the same pattern in city after city for a decade, independent of Kaepernick specifically.
There is one more number Travis did not put in his post.
Murders fell to 14,085 in 2025, the lowest count since at least 1900, and several major cities logged double digit drops again through the first half of 2026.
What Happens When Cops Stop Doing Their Jobs
Here is the part nobody in the mainstream sports press wants to say out loud.
Kaepernick got a Nike deal, a Netflix documentary and a decade of praise from every major outlet in the country.
The people in the neighborhoods his protest claimed to speak for got a body count.
Ten thousand black Americans is not an abstraction, it is ten thousand funerals.
Police departments in blue cities spent the back half of the 2010s afraid to do proactive policing because the last officer who did it ended up on the national news.
Nobody forced police unions to pull back, but the political pressure from the Kaepernick era made backing off the safest career move an officer could make.
That is the trade the activist class made without ever asking the people who'd pay for it, and Travis just put a number on the bill.
Sources:
- Clay Travis, "Colin Kaepernick's NFL protest which started ten years ago helped lead to 20,000 more murders," X, Sept. 1, 2026.
- Sport & State Staff, "Clay Travis: Data Shows Colin Kaepernick's Protest Got It All Wrong, Cost Black Lives," Sport & State, Sept. 1, 2026.
- FBI Uniform Crime Report, 2025 murder and homicide data.
- Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, "20,000 Dead Thanks to Kaepernick, Woke 1.0, and BLM," The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show.
