In a Wednesday interview with ESPN’s Sage Steele, President Joe Biden weighed in positively on the possibility that Major League Baseball could remove the scheduled July All-Star Game out of Atlanta over Georgia’s new Election Integrity Law.
“I think today’s professional athletes are acting incredibly responsibly. I would strongly support them doing that,” Biden said.
Last Thursday, Tony Clark, the executive director of the MLB Players Association, signaled that the players union might be willing to use such strong-arm tactics against the State of Georgia over the new law, which looks to strengthen the integrity of the state’s voting system.
“Players are very much aware” of the new voting bill, Clark said. “As it relates to the All-Star Game, we have not had a conversation with the league on that issue. If there is an opportunity to, we would look forward to having that conversation.
In his typical halting, semi-coherent style, President Biden lauded MLB players for considering punishing Georgia fans over the actions of the Georgia legislature and governor.
“People look to them, they’re leaders,” Biden said. “Look at what’s happened with the NBA as well. Look at what’s happened across the board. The very people who are victimized the most are the people who are the leaders in these various sports.
The average salary for an MLB player is approximately $4 million per year. The average salary for an NBA player is approximately $7 million per year. It’s hard to see just which of these millionaire athletes are “victimized the most” by a Georgia voting law.
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Biden continued to spout left-wing talking points about the Georgia law — most of them completely inaccurate.
“And it’s just not right,” the president continued. “This is Jim Crow on steroids what they’re doing in Georgia and 40 other states…. Imagine passing a law saying you cannot provide water or food for someone standing in line to vote. You can’t do that? C’mon. Or, you’re going to close a polling place at five o’clock when working people just get off? This is all about keeping working folks and ordinary folks that I grew up with from being able to vote.”
Even the left-wing Washington Post gave Biden four Pinocchios for his recent rants against the new voting law in a recent fact-check. While the new law attempts to tighten up certain aspects of voting such as requiring voter ID, it actually expands opportunities to vote and it simply does not close polling places at five o’clock. Either Biden or whomever prepares his answers for him is lying about the Georgia law.
The main areas of contention regarding the bill are the need to show ID for absentee voting and the tightening of electioneering rules within a close radius of polling places. The new electioneering rules prohibit political activists from giving out food and water in promotion of candidates or other issues being voted upon.
This is hardly the first time a professional sports league has attempted to punish fans over something a state’s legislators or voters did or didn’t do. In 1991, the National Football League punished the fans in the State of Arizona over the voters’ decision to not make Martin Luther King Day a paid holiday.
Then, in 2017, the National Basketball Association punished the fans of North Carolina over the so-called bathroom bill, which required individuals to use public toilets according their gender “assigned at birth,” meaning that biological males who claim to be females couldn’t use the same toilet facilities as young girls.
In both cases, the states in question eventually flipped on the specific issues that got the sporting event cancelled. In November of 1992, voters in Arizona voted to recognize Martin Luther King Day as a paid holiday, and in 2019, the portions of the North Carolina “bathroom bill” most objectionable to the LGBT agenda were removed.
Some in the sports world actually take credit for those reversals. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in 2017, “Sports have a long history of helping to change attitudes around important social issues.”
Yes, but now they’re doing it by blackmailing fans with the threatened removal of their product. It used to be that blackmail was a crime — not a political tool.
