The president of the United States used his bully pulpit on Thursday to preach that Major League Baseball should move its premier mid-season event out of Atlanta. Yes, you heard that right. Joe Biden once again bowed to the extreme demands of whatever committee of leftists is guiding his enfeebled hand, calling for the state of Georgia to be deprived of playing host to the treasured – and highly enriching – MLB All-Star Game and amateur draft.
With the heat turned up by the White House, it took only a matter of hours and, boom, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, demonstrating the courage of a lion, caved in with nary a whiff of objection: “I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft … Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box … Fair access to voting continues to have our game’s unwavering support.”
One wonders which is more disturbing; a president condemning and interfering with a high-profile entertainment business, or that business instantly waving the white flag?
All of this, because the duly elected legislature and governor of the peach state had the audacity to pass a new election law that threatens to shut down the virtual airdrop of ballots we witnessed in 2020 – and we can’t have that. So, this president – increasingly making Barack Obama look like a moderate – and his handlers succeeded in pulling off another drive-by cancellation. Was MLB left with any choice after Biden, unwittingly demeaning the blood, sweat and tears of minority voters in decades past marked by actual state-sponsored voter suppression, called the new law ”Jim Crow on steroids”?
American Culture, Canceled
Once again, the left flank of his party called on the president to do what they do best – shame, boycott and cancel, even when (or perhaps especially when) it involves one of America’s most popular forms of entertainment; in this case our national pastime. And he ever so dutifully complied in what amounts to just the latest evidence of a pattern of surrender to the loudest voices in the room.
How is it that any president should have any influence over a long-pondered decision by any independent business for the sake of political expediency? President Trump hectored the NFL about kneeling during the national anthem, a clear, if symbolic, act of rebellion, but there is a world of difference: he never tried to have the Super Bowl, or any other game, boycotted, moved, or canceled.
Never mind that this former six-term senator who landed in the White House never supported such a typically invasive, hard-left tactic in the entirety of his congressional career. In fact, is this not the type of progressive virtue-signaling and shaming he vowed to forgo as the centrist alternative to the socialist Bernie Sanders? Give ol’ Bernie props for honesty about his intentions, unlike the man selected by the Democratic establishment to take him down.
Unity, Schmunity
This is a president whose entire message as a candidate – alpha to omega – was “unity.” That vanished about one minute after his inaugural address. Then again, any career politician who would, for example, repeat publicly over and over that he would ban fracking, and then deny it in the face of a mountain of video evidence – while reversing several other positions he held for decades – can hardly be taken at his word.
But there is a larger issue at play in the shaming of Georgia beyond the hypocrisy of this president. Are states headed to a future in which the Tenth Amendment, delineating the respective responsibilities of the state and federal governments, is effectively a dead letter? Where the federal government can stick its unwanted nose into the affairs of states, hectoring, demonizing, and overriding anything they deem to be racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.? And when something as significant as a showcase event watched by millions happens to be the victim, is it mere collateral roadkill?
Between the social justice demands of the emboldened left, and the willingness of its targets like MLB to surrender, one wonders what it will take to break the cycle of toxic wokeness we are seeing unfold before our very eyes.
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