Colin Kaepernick invented the anti-American protest in 2016 and has not played since. The next year the protests exploded across the league. But now, Randy Moss is claiming that the league’s treatment of Kaepernick has somehow muted player speech.

Moss, who wore a tie at his Hall of Fame induction ceremony emblazoned with the names of blacks killed in altercations with police, recently spoke out about the National Football League’s treatment of the inventor of taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem.

The former New England Patriots wide receiver spoke to ESPN this week and insisted that the league has quashed the player’s political speech despite that protests grew exponentially after Kaepernick left the league, The Big Lead reported.

Moss told ESPN’s The Undefeated:

Athletes are scared right now. A lot of athletes, most guys, don’t want to talk about this. They’re terrified for their careers. They’re terrified about losing their occupation, which is how they feed their families. Black athletes know they’re being treated a certain type of way. Most guys can’t really voice their opinions. They’re worried about getting the same type of treatment that Colin Kaepernick got.

This is a bit hard to believe. Kaepernick was left unsigned starting in the 2017 season — the year after he invented his protests — but throughout that very season, player protests exploded across the league and among nearly every NFL team even with Kaepernick spending the whole of the 2017 NFL season on the sidelines.

Moss continued:

‘But we’ve got to put the attention on the right things. We’ve got to admit to the problem. Everybody. What if black police officers around the country were going up in these white neighborhoods with rich white kids and started killing them? What would people say about that? What would be the reaction to that? A lot of people just don’t want to really talk about what’s going on. A lot of people don’t want to talk about the pain people are feeling out there. There’s a bada– crisis in our country that’s happening every day. And then when you bring it up, when you just try to talk about the truth, you get all this flak.’

Moss’ premise is faulty. Take Chicago, for instance. The Chicago Police are more heavily patrolling the city’s black neighborhoods not out of spite, but because that is where all the crime is. There aren’t running gun battles happening on a daily basis in the white neighborhoods Moss was talking about. So, there is no reason for police to be there “killing rich white kids.” Like many, Moss is ignoring the cultural problem that seems to tell young black males that immediately resorting to violence is the right thing to do.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.