Nike canceled a Betsy Ross flag shoe in 2019 because Colin Kaepernick called it offensive.
Six years later, the brand is trading at $33 a share – down 80 percent from its peak.
Lawrence Jones looked into the camera Friday morning and told Nike exactly what they did to deserve it.
Go Woke Go Broke: Nike Stock Has Lost 80 Percent Since the Kaepernick Deal
Nike's Thursday earnings call was ugly.
Sales fell 4 percent last quarter to $11.2 billion.
China – Nike's third-largest market, the region executives had been counting on for recovery – dropped 26 percent year-over-year.
The stock closed Friday at $33.21.
That is an 80 percent collapse from $169 per share in December 2021 – back when Nike executives were still congratulating themselves on their cultural courage and the Kaepernick checks were clearing.
Fox Business Network reporter Grady Trimble walked Fox & Friends through the wreckage, laying out a company in full financial retreat.
Brian Kilmeade named it: the "woke stunts" critics have blamed for a decade of self-inflicted damage.
Nike signed Colin Kaepernick – the quarterback who knelt through the national anthem – as the face of the brand and killed a Fourth of July shoe because he said it offended him.
Then came Dylan Mulvaney.
A company that makes those choices has decided half of America is its enemy.
Host Lawrence Jones closed the segment with advice Nike could act on by Monday morning.
"Maybe they should just start loving America again," Jones said.
Ted Cruz Led the Nike Boycott in 2019 and Said This Stock Crash Was Coming
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said the same thing when Nike's stock began its most recent slide – and he reminded everyone he had already stopped buying to prove the point.
"For my whole life, I wore nearly 100% Nike for athletic wear," Cruz wrote on X.
That changed in 2019.
Kaepernick irritated Cruz, he said, but Cruz kept buying.
Then Nike pulled the Betsy Ross flag shoe – a Fourth of July design featuring the 13-colony flag that flew during the American Revolution – after Kaepernick told company executives it offended him.
Cruz walked.
"When they cancelled the Betsy Ross shoe it showed that their marketing plan was America-hate," he wrote.
He bought brand new shoes, shorts, and t-shirts from a different brand that same week.
His conclusion: "Turns out I wasn't the only one."
Millions of Americans made the same quiet calculation without ever posting about it – they did not burn their Nikes for the cameras, they just stopped walking into the store.
The Caitlin Clark Nike Shoe Is Selling Out While the Rest of the Brand Burns
Michael Jordan figured this out in 1990.
Asked why he wouldn't endorse a Senate candidate in his home state of North Carolina, Jordan kept it short: "Republicans buy sneakers, too."
Nike built the most valuable athletic brand in history on that exact logic – then handed the keys to Colin Kaepernick and forgot everything Jordan taught them.
There is exactly one product line moving in Nike's disaster quarter.
Caitlin Clark's signature sneaker – the Caitlin 1, released October 1 for $140 – is moving faster than anything else in the company's catalog, Trimble reported on-air.
Clark is everything Nike spent a decade running from: an athlete who never knelt for photographers and never needed a woke campaign to fill an arena.
She just plays basketball better than any other woman and customers are rewarding her for it.
CEO Elliott Hill acknowledged on the earnings call that customers had grown tired of shelves full of repackaged classics with nothing new to reach for.
He promised to launch more than a dozen new footwear styles.
Analysts have identified a second self-inflicted wound: Nike walked away from Foot Locker and hundreds of other retail partners to chase a direct-to-consumer strategy that never delivered.
Now the company that cut off its retail partners to look visionary is going back to those same partners and asking for shelf space.
The brand that lectured America about its values is begging Foot Locker for a shelf.
Nike picked Kaepernick over the flag and Dylan Mulvaney over the customers who made them rich, and they did it on purpose.
The millions of customers Nike insulted did not hold press conferences about it – they bought Adidas, pulled swooshes off equipment lists, and lined up for Caitlin Clark instead.
Lawrence Jones read it back to the company.
Nike knows exactly what happened, and at $33 a share they are running out of time to pretend otherwise.
Sources:
- Grady Trimble, Fox & Friends, Fox Business Network, October 2, 2026.
- Ted Cruz, X (formerly Twitter), 2026.
- Emily Zanotti, "Nike Pulls American Flag Sneaker After Complaint From Colin Kaepernick," The Daily Wire, July 2, 2019.
- "Caitlin Clark Unveils New Signature Nike Sneaker," KCRG, June 18, 2026.
- Michael Jordan, The Last Dance, ESPN, 2020.