They say timing in life is everything, so it seems in death as well, as it was sweet coincidence that Colin Kaepernick, the floundering NFL quarterback, found himself on the defensive while defending Fidel Castro in the days preceding the brutal dictator’s death. In a matter of a few minutes Kaepernick proved what an empty suit, or in his case what an empty uniform, the so-called civil rights crusader has turned into.

On a conference call with Miami sports reporters last week before this past Sunday’s game with the Miami Dolphins, Kaepernick came up against a buzzsaw of a reporter, much different than the fawning press he’s used to dealing with, who reduced him to fabricating facts and pathetic ramblings.

An unidentified reporter who has been described as “from a family of Cuban exiles,” asked some pointed questions about a T-shirt Kaepernick had worn at a press conference in August which showed the likeness of both Malcolm X and Fidel Castro shaking hands with the wording “Like minds think alike.” As one can imagine, someone “from a family of Cuban exiles” did not find Castro the least bit inspirational or as cute and cuddly as many on the left still do.

When asked why he wore a T-shirt promoting Castro, at first Kaepernick tried to shrug it off, saying the reason he wore the shirt had nothing to do with Castro but to show his support for Malcolm X and the shirt represented Malcom X’s willingness to be “open-minded” in meeting with all varieties of people.

Not letting him off the hook, the reporter accused Kaepernick of trying to change the subject. This caused Kaepernick to tell a whopper, one that is often used by Castro supporters, “One thing that Fidel Castro did do is they have the highest literacy rate because they invest more in their education system than they do in their prison system, which we do not do here, even though we’re fully capable of doing that.” A little fact checking for Kaepernick would have shown that Castro’s educational accomplishment, much like many of his so-called achievements, is nothing but a sham. The reality is that despite Castro’s claim that he inherited a country with only 178,000 students with a national literary rate of 25%, pre-Castro Cuba had over one million students in school, and Cuba had one of the highest literary rates in Latin America at 78%. As for Kaepernick’s claim that Cuba spends more on education than its prisons, it should be pointed out that in essence the entire island nation is a prison.

Later Kaepernick and the reporter got into it on how the Cuban government’s policies have led to the breakup of countless families, with Kaepernick arguing, “We do break up families here. That’s what mass incarceration is. That was the foundation of slavery, so our country has been based on that as well as the genocide of native Americans.”

After more back and forth on this topic the reporter finally figured out that arguing with stupidity was pointless, saying sarcastically, “Wow. That’s amazing!” to cut off any more of Kaepernick waxing philosophic. What is illuminating about Kaepernick’s comments is how they dovetail perfectly with the Black Lives Matters movement’s effusive praise of Castro after his death, saying that they had “overwhelming sense of loss” and thanking Castro for harboring cop killer Assata Shakur.

All this helps to demonstrate that when Kaepernick takes a knee each Sunday, which is something the NFL condones, he is a false crusader. He claims he is fighting for racial equality, but in realty he is just an ill-informed subversive fighting for his kind of tyranny.

It is interesting to contrast Kaepernick’s vision of Cuba with former pitching great Luis Tiant’s. Tiant had this to say about what Castro’s communism did to his native country: “They took away the freedom, the happiness, the dreams that one had as a boy, all you wanted to be and never could. I have to thank God, my wife, my family, that at least I was lucky enough to be able to get here.”

It should be noted that Tiant won 229 games in the majors. So far this year the ’49ers have yet to win a game Kaepernick has started.