By Guy Page
Say goodbye to the swag. The next time you see me outside, I won’t be wearing a hat or sweatshirt sporting the logo of a current Major League Baseball team – including my beloved Boston Red Sox.
On Opening Day last Friday, Major League Baseball announced it will withdraw the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta, in protest of the state of Georgia’s electoral integrity law, which MLB calls “voter suppression.” The law requires voter ID for absentee balloting. the law also – contrary to claims by Pres. Biden and others – expressly permits water distribution by self-service for people waiting in line.
MLB however has no problems cutting a multi-million dollar deal with Tencent, which Sen. Marco Rubio calls “a company backed by the genocidal communist government of China.” That’s the same big tech company that dropped the NBA after one of its execs voiced support for freedom in Hong Kong.
So in solidarity with the oppressed, democracy-loving people of Hong Kong and Georgia, I will no longer be a walking advertisement for MLB. I have plenty of nonMLB baseball hats – the local Mountaineers, the Round Rock (Texas) Express, the Calgary Cannons and the Pawtucket Red Sox. A buddy of mine has a brother who lives in Australia who might be able to score me a lid from the Toowoomba Rangers.
I also will not subscribe to Mlb.com or any other $$ collection system for these enemies of freedom. Or attend any games until they reverse this decision. Not a penny for tyranny!
And I am not alone.
“Democrats and Progressives have spent years decrying corporate money influencing politics. Now they’re bullying corporations into doing their bidding and having them openly threaten municipalities if they don’t bend the knee to the corporations,” Video news host Ericka Redic of Burlington said. “Tell me again which party is a threat to Democracy?”
One social media observer noted that professional sports seem to be determined to harm their own brand. “It took all the professional sport leagues SOOOOOO long to build their franchises and so quick to wreck them,” Ed Gallo said.
The hypocrisy noted by Rubio wasn’t lost on an economist and former Vermont lawmaker. “What duplicity! Sadly, MLB is a willing participant in the destructive ‘cancel culture’ infecting this country,” Bob Bancroft of Westford said. “Yet, it warmly embraces China, an undemocratic regime and pervasive human rights violator. Professional sports should refrain from political partisanship.”
A current state senator disputes the MLB contention that the Georgia law is “voter suppression.”
“I think that Baseball ought to stick to baseball,” Sen. Russ Ingalls (R-Essex/Orleans) said. “And if they chose to not listen to that advice, then get the story right before you act.”
“I gave up on the NFL when the ‘Hands up don’t shoot lie’ started. Subsequent anti-American actions of each Pro League has caused me to boycott all of them. They are agenda-driven propaganda machines, from supporting domestic terrorism to supporting illegal elections,” Jim Sexton of Essex Junction said. “They have failed ethically, I hope they all fail financially.
An Island Pond woman sees parallels with the left’s discrimination against women in sports. “For me, the MLB decision to boycott Georgia, while having just made an agreement with the CCP to work in/with China is a parallel for many of the current liberal talking points,” Bekah Perry said. “For example, allowing men to compete in womens’ sports in the name of “equality”, thereby disempowering one of the groups that they claim to want to empower. It is also a signal of the liberal assumption that Americans are too stupid to look below the surface at the facts and the logic of a position.”
Play boycott!
Categories: Commentary, politics
Excellent article. It is just Common political sense to authorize voter ID for absentee voting. But it has been turned into a racial injustice by the woke mob. This identity body politik is straight out of Marx’ Communist Manifesto.
We need to put our money where our mouth is. If the right decides to do this we WILL make our point and demonstrate that we won’t tolerate mindless adherence to wokesterism. I for one will no longer purchase Dr Bronners soap products due to their enormous donation to BLM. I don’t purchase Ben & Jerry’s ice scream due to their continued support of leftist values I find offensive. And then there is China, which besides having significant human rights violations (not to mention decades of forced abortions) but is also likely the creator of the lab tweaked Covid virus. Whenever possible I avoid buying anything made in China. If I can buy it used that doesn’t count as the profits don’t go back to China.
Delta Airlines, based in Georgia also expressed their opposition to this common sense legislation.
Delta operates a service that requires it’s clients to provide a government issued ID to take advantage of. If voter ID constitutes race-based voter suppression, then an airline demanding an ID is race-based traveler suppression.
I never understood the claim by the race-hustlers that because there is a lower procurement rate of government-issued IDs by Persons of Color, that somehow constitutes racism. There is also a lower voluntary rate of COVID vaccination participation among POC, even though there is supposedly disproportionately higher susceptibility to COVID and we even have special BIPOC clinics in Vermont for those who “express as BIPOC” (on the honor system).
I have always thought it gravely insulting and the height of leftist white racism to promote the idea that Persons of Color are somehow too stupid, too lazy or that their financial priorities deter them from getting an ID. It looks like MLB is letting political correctness and irrational race obsession put them in the irrelevant category, just like the NFL.
Thanks for the commentary, Guy. It takes courage these days to stand up to the leftist authoritarian, race-baiting, America-hating propagandists…
Well said Rich
Cancel the cancellers! If we use the same techniques that they use, No Coke products, no MLB products, no Delta flights and no Home Depot purchases. Lets see how long it takes them to trim their feathers and tend to their business!
MLB’s protest of Georgia’s recently passed election law is right out of the playbook of the postmodern-Social Justice Movement. Briefly, French philosopher Michel Foucault was a driving force in today’s SJM. Foucault coined the phrase ‘power-knowledge’. It doesn’t matter that Georgia’s election law is reasonable in balancing for election integrity, a necessity for public election support. Foucault believed that ‘dominate discourses’ determine what is Truth; economic and sociopolitical power are the ultimate determiners of what is true and – this is the important part – it doesn’t have to correspond to actual reality. In large part, MLB’s actions are part of a “language game” that we are witnessing all around in today’s culture. The propagandist media, academia and much of corporate America is unwittingly behind this movement. Its endgame is power and control.
Tom — thank you
It takes zero will power to leave my love for the Boston Red Sox and MLB behind – I am repulsed!
Maybe it’s time to bring back “Scab Ball”!
jethro
‘Common Political Sense’ – this must be an oxymoron – like jumbo shrimp and wildlife management ….
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This is the president who said he was going to unify the country, and this is the president who is repeatedly patted on the back as avoiding America’s culture war issues?
If you still doubt that progressive politics dominates nearly every institution of American public life and culture, look no further than the Major League Baseball decision announced last Friday.
Many of baseball’s most prominent players did not universally support the call to move the game. What we are seeing is the fact that virtually every single dimension of our culture is now indeed taken over by those who have a very clear moral agenda, and the overlapping forms of social coercion bring together the government and big tech and big capitalism and just about everything else, big academia, big media, big Hollywood, big entertainment. You have Hollywood celebrities indicating that they’re not going to be making films and they’re not going to be performing in films in Georgia, just like they brought action against Georgia when the state government passed a law restricting abortion.
This sin’t much different from the NCAA bringing pressure against a state like South Dakota that was bringing legislation that would have restricted girls’ sports to girls, women’s sports to women, not to those who are biologically male.
Remember, we have seen in recent years organizations as previously stalwart as the Boy Scouts of America caved first on the entire LGB set of issues, but then on T. And now it’s not even the Boy Scouts of America. It’s just something like Scouting USA.
When the editors of The Wall Street Journal mentioned that there can now be no doubt “that progressive politics dominates nearly every institution of American public life and culture,” we need to pay attention. We all need to pay attention. We need to pay even more close attention to what is going on in our society and who’s driving the change. And make no mistake. If the President of the United States can now bring this kind of moral pressure from the left on something like Major League Baseball based upon his response to legislation in Georgia that he got factually wrong, then he can bring that same kind of pressure on just about any pressure point in our culture. You can count on the fact he expects to win. The editors of The Wall Street Journal talk about this situation as the Biden Baseball League, but we all really understand this isn’t about baseball. It’s just about what this particular controversy in baseball reveals about the entire society and its future.
h/t to Mohler
Shazzam — well put.
House full of die-hard Red Sox fans here and we no longer give shit one about the Red Sox, or any of the pro sports teams we used to follow. They lost us and our money when they started taking a knee and inserting insulting, fake crowd noise into games played in empty venues.
Fixin to start drinking Pepsi if Coca Cola leaves GA
Boycott: This is an echo of much of what’s been said, but I just want to focus it to be a more commonly used citizen action tactic. It seems to me that we are awash in intrusive laws to manage our lives. These Laws are a product of our participatory governing system activating Majority Rule. This frequently feels like majority tyranny when it’s imposed on a minority that has strong objections to the law. When the minority sees no principal involved and can just acquiesce, there is no problem. However if we are impassioned in our objection we will see themselves as oppressed…as “treaded upon”. Discontent and resentment can be expected. This was a central concern at our founding. Sports teams, Coke, Hollywood folks, Disney, the CCP take conscientious positions. (This list of “conscientious” folks and their actions need to be expanded and made available.) These positions impact our approval/endorsement/purchasing decision for what they hope to sell us. Boycotts are in the arena of cultural/economic mores. They are citizen action at the level prior to and more pervasive than governmental law making. Would these tactics of immediate “spend voting” be more in keeping with our aspirations as a people governing ourselves? …and more effective?
It’s more than just avoiding Coke. There are many other brands that the Coca-Cola company produces- https://www.coca-colacompany.com/brands
We need to make it clear that we are tired of the lies, tired of the leftist cancel culture.
From Real Conservatives, 4.6.2021: Earlier today, Mitch McConnell blasted the “Outrage Industrial Complex” over the lemming-like response to Georgia’s voting integrity reforms.
“Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex,” McConnell added. “Americans do not need or want big business to amplify disinformation or react to every manufactured controversy with frantic left-wing signaling.”
Mitch McConnell is right on about the left pandering to racial virtue signaling.