MLB flip-flop exposes out-of-touch corporate elite
Washington Examiner
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It could be easy to dismiss Major League Baseball’s decision to award the 2025 All-Star Game to Atlanta, Georgia, as run-of-the-mill sports news. But just two years ago, Commissioner Robert Manfred removed the same event from Atlanta because the state’s voting reforms allegedly didn’t align with MLB’s values.
But the successful pressure campaign exerted on MLB, and its repudiation now, should be a lesson for everyone about the co-option of corporate power by an ideological managerial class immune to the requirements of truth and democratic accountability.
A WELCOME TURN RIGHT IN ARGENTINA
In March 2021, the democratically elected Georgia legislature passed the Election Integrity Act that, among other things, banned ballot-harvesting, restricted the use of ballot drop boxes, mandated voter identification for absentee ballots, and expanded early in-person voting opportunities.
President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party responded to these commonsense voting reforms with hysterical fury. Biden called the law “Jim Crow 2.0,” adding that the legislation was designed to accomplish “two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion.”
Activists from the organized fraud group known as Black Lives Matter demanded that corporations with operations in Georgia abandon the state, and they targeted MLB in particular since the organization had scheduled the All-Star Game and the draft to take place in Atlanta.
After Georgia-based Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines cowered, caved, and condemned the law, MLB Commissioner Manfred did too, explaining that “the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport” was to pull the All-Star Game and draft from Georgia.
Emboldened by MLB’s disgraceful weakness, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms predicted that her city’s loss would be the first “of many dominoes to fall, until the unnecessary barriers put in place to restrict access to the ballot box are removed.”
Fortunately, however, Georgia’s elected leaders stood firm in the face of this contemptible and unjustified corporate pressure. “Georgians and all Americans should fully understand what the MLB’s knee-jerk decision means,” Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) said at the time. “Cancel culture and woke political activists are coming for every aspect of your life, sports included. If the Left doesn’t agree with you, facts and the truth do not matter.”
Kemp has since been proven right, first at the ballot box and then again in federal court. Instead of suppressing votes as Biden, BLM activists, and their corporate accomplices predicted, a record number of Georgians voted in the Nov. 22 elections, far outpacing turnout rates in other states in the region. That same ballot also saw Kemp cruise to reelection.
In federal court, the law has been preserved with only superficial changes to such matters as how many feet away from a polling place campaigns are allowed to distribute food, drinks, and other gifts.
“Georgia’s voting laws haven’t changed,” Kemp celebrated after MLB’s flip-flop, “but it’s good to see the MLB’s misguided understanding of them has. We look forward to welcoming the All-Star Game to Georgia.”
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The larger lesson in Georgia’s deserved win over MLB and BLM’s fraudsters is that corporations can’t be trusted any longer to act in the best interests of their shareholders or by responding to market realities. MLB did not benefit financially from moving the All-Star Game to Colorado, nor did fans boycott the sport because the All-Star Game was in Atlanta.
MLB’s decision to turn tail and run was made capriciously at the executive level. Cut off from the realities of average everyday life by wealth and credentials, corporate leaders are vulnerable to modish claptrap shouted by Leftist college graduates. Big business has largely lost public trust — and deservedly so.