Liberals all across the country are beginning to rally to force the National Football League to sign activist Colin Kaepernick to a new NFL contract. Though, at least one sports writer, has called that campaign a “shakedown,” and compares Kaepernick to fraudsters Al Sharpton and Tawana Brawley.

After spending the whole of the 2016 season protesting the national anthem, Colin Kaepernick walked away from the 49ers and became a free agent. Yet, since announcing his availability to the league, not a single NFL team has signed him to a contract.

Liberal activists decided to focus on race, as the primary cause for Kaepernick’s continuing unemployment. To that end, many Kaepernick supporters have tried to start a movement with the goal of forcing the NFL to hire the player.

Filmmaker Spike Lee, for instance, announced support of a rally to be held in front of NFL headquarters in New York City to force the league to give Kap a new job.

Despite that Lee doesn’t seem to be aware that his favored quarterback’s name is spelled with two e’s and not just one, Lee pushed out a Tweet announcing a rally date of August 23:

https://twitter.com/SpikeLee/status/894905182353592321

However, at least for one sportswriter, the whole campaign looks like an Al Sharpton-styled shakedown.

In an appearance on Fox News, Fox Sports 1 host Jason Whitlock called the campaign an “invasion of progressive ideology and the progressive movement into the National Football League and sports.”

He continued to disparage the effort saying, “This, to me, is starting to smell like a shakedown of the NFL and the NFL ownership. Colin Kaepernick, the false narrative, that he’s out of the league because all the owners are racist and he’s being blackballed. Listen, this is simply a case of a guy who’s not good enough — his talents aren’t good enough to justify all the attention and noise and controversy that comes along with him.”

This has a ring of truth to it, if Kaepernick were the standout quarterback that his supporters think he is, he’d be working right now whether he hates the U.S. or not. While Kaepernick isn’t the worst quarterback in the NFL, his skills just aren’t good enough to allow his profile to rise above the trouble he’d bring to whatever team unfortunate enough to hire him.

To drive the Sharpton shakedown point home, Whitlock concluded by saying, “This is like the Tawana Brawley of football, this false narrative that we have going here.”

You may recall that in 1987, the 15-year-old African American Brawley claimed six white men raped her. It was later discovered that she lied about the incident. Though, not before a then-rotund Al Sharpton used Brawley’s case to burnish his community activist credentials, by stirring up near riotous protests. It was all a hoax, but Sharpton cashed in on the incident and used it to help bolster his national prominence.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com