His mother was a white girl who’d been abandoned by her black baby daddy before the infant’s birth. She gave the child up for adoption, and he found a home with a white couple who’d lost two sons because of heart defects. By all accounts they were loving parents. Yet six years ago, during a pre-game performance of the national anthem, their adopted son, who’d become a NFL quarterback, introduced the toxic business of “taking a knee” as a protest against the purported oppression of black people by white Americans. With that one action, Colin Kaepernick unleashed a whirlwind of mischief that inflicted very real and substantial damage upon his country’s precious, hard-won social cohesion, thereby ensuring that he would go down in history not as an athlete but as an activist with a thoroughly destructive legacy.