Major League Baseball has announced it is moving its All-Star Game out of the state of Georgia. The move is in reaction to the 2021 election reform law. This makes MLB the latest private entity to embrace the cancel culture.
On the heels of public announcements by Atlanta based companies, Coca Cola and Delta Airlines, MLB is taking their toys and going off to play elsewhere.
So what?
Rarely do such boycotts achieve the desired results. People who don’t follow baseball do not really care. Moving the All Star Game out of Georgia only hurts the stadium employees and small businesses operating out of Atlanta, which is a majority-Democrat area.
Indeed, the statements and actions of these companies just illustrate how some companies are quite literally falling all over themselves to prove how “woke” they are in an attempt to ride the “cancel culture” wave.
The left-leaning executives of these companies likely know very little about the Georgia election law as they follow the liberal narrative and merely parrot President Biden calling the new law a return to the Jim Crow era.
Let’s get something straight, Georgia’s new election law has absolutely nothing to go with Jim Crow and it doesn’t seek to disenfranchise anyone. There are certainly some tweaks that could be made to the law to accommodate those with medical conditions that it difficult for them to get to the polls, but the law in no way mirrors anything Jim Crow.
Prior to 1965, it was virtually impossible for African Americans to vote in the South, and even poor Caucasians had a difficult time voting.
First, there were the literacy tests that almost required a person be an English major to pass. Then, there was a poll tax that poor prospective voters could not afford. Many people would never even get the chance to take the literacy test or pay the poll tax because the Ku Klux Klan guarded the entrances to the polling places to intimidate voters.
The Georgia election law does not bring any of that back.
The narrative that has been echoed by many, that the law bans individuals and groups from out of state from donating to political campaigns, is just simply not true. In the next election, all of the out-of-town donors can still donate to their candidates of choice; they just can’t vote for them unless they live in Georgia and have the ID to prove it.
There is no mountain of proof that the 2020 election in Georgia was rife with fraud. However, when some people are receiving two and three mail-in ballots and are not subject to the ID rule, then the possibility of fraud exists.
The move by MLB and others does nothing but show how out of touch these companies are with reality. They decry that having to prove identification is somehow racist while never acknowledging that ID is required to purchase their own products and services.
One of the biggest profit centers for a sporting events are alcohol sales. Alcohol sales and advertisements raise a large portion of the money used to pay major-league players’ large salaries. Every alcoholic drink sold requires photo identification at purchase.
Coca-Cola has just rolled out a new hard seltzer that requires identification to purchase. Oh, and let’s not even mention how far one would get trying to board a Delta Airlines flight without an a photo ID.
It is likely that MLB thinks stirring up a little controversy ahead of their big game will give the game publicity. Perhaps they should have sought some advice from the NFL before plunging the fingers in the woke wall socket.
MLB’s move will not have the desired outcome but rather will result in a loss of viewership at levels they have not seen since the 1994-1995 strike.
