Braves Fans Should Chop to “Let’s Go, Brandon”

CLAY: Have you been paying attention to all the controversy? So the Atlanta Braves… He’s gonna be, Trump is, at Game 4 in Atlanta between the Astros and the Braves of the World Series on Saturday. It’s gonna be an electric environment. We got a lot of listeners in Atlanta. They have not hosted a World Series game in Atlanta since 1999.

By the way, I’m talking to Herschel Walker as soon as we finish this show a little bit later in the day. I’m gonna be doing an interview with Herschel, who is running for Senate in Georgia, and I’m gonna ask him about the World Series. He’s down here for the Florida-Georgia game in Jacksonville where I am right now. But they are right now demanding, Buck, that the Atlanta Braves tomahawk chant — which is they play it everybody starts raising their arms like the tomahawk chant — allegedly started back when Deion Sanders was playing for the Atlanta Braves.

Deion was a legendary baseball-football double athlete went to Florida State where they do the Seminole chant which is endorsed by the Seminole tribe in the state of Florida, and so I was told that that’s where that transported to Atlanta, it’s an amazing thing, everybody gets their phones out, they do the tomahawk chant. Here’s what I want Braves fans listening to me to do, I want you to do the tomahawk chant while chanting “Let’s go, Brandon,” simultaneously to break the left-wing sports media woke fragile brains in one fell swoop. It would be amazing television.

BUCK: This has gotta go in the category of like the Apache helicopter. Look, I get it. Like, with everything there are sometimes where you can make a distinction between are we celebrating some aspect of a culture? Basically is this something that we think is cool about another culture, group in history, whatever? You name sports teams generally speaking after things that you think show bravery, courage, you know, excellence, whatever it may be.

And the Braves… You know, look, I understand there’s some other team names in the past that were… There’s a more good faith case to say, “I don’t know about that.” Fine. The Braves is like an Apache helicopter. We name one of more most amazing aerial helicopters after the Apache because we considered them to be formidable warriors in their day. It is not disrespectful. No one thinks it is meant to be disrespectful, and cultural appropriation is not a real thing. Always remember this. All cultures steal from all other cultures. We have carpets because of the Mongols, folks. Okay? There’s a lot we could talk —

CLAY: We have coffee because of the Ethiopians. The idea that you are only allowed to use things that people created who look like you is fundamentally wrong.

BUCK: The Arab traders from Yemen taking the coffee from Ethiopia, so they were, I guess, appropriating it, and then they spread it across to Europe but this is the whole point, right? Everything is… We have chocolate because of the Aztec. I don’t think we’re supposed to…

CLAY: We have democracy because of the Greeks and Romans, right? Like they don’t get to hold democracy and nobody else gets it.

BUCK: So this is where… Did you see — I think it was TIME Magazine and I bet they deleted it but there was a tweet out; I gotta find it — where they said that the Vikings discovered America a thousand years before Europeans?

CLAY: Oh, that’s amazing.

BUCK: Just to give you a sense of really what education system in this country looks like, the journo elites. It wasn’t Europeans, it was Vikings. Okay. So here’s what you see though. We can no longer have these honest discussions about whether we’re actually celebrating something, and this has come up before, sometimes tribes, Native American tribe will say, “No, like, this wasn’t…

“They weren’t mocking us. It wasn’t some cartoonish characterization of, you know, what a group looks like or something in some way that might actually feel a little bit over the line.” We’re, again, talking about Braves, Apache, you brought up the Seminoles. You bring up these things. Clay, we’ve gotten to point now where what do we have left? We can name sports teams after like wind, fire, and water?

CLAY: You can’t even do that because eventually people are gonna be like why in the world would we name the Miami Hurricanes team after a hurricane it kills people and people are gonna say how in the world can you have the Fighting Irish? That’s offensive to Irish people. It doesn’t end. That’s the problem. Because once it ends, all these lunatic, loser, left-wing, woke nobodies don’t have a reason to exist. So they have to find something else to be offended by every single time.

BUCK: How boring a world would be to live in — I really mean this — where no one was ever offended. A world in which no one is ever offended is one in which there’s no honest and serious discussions happening and there’s no intellectual breakthroughs possible because everyone just walking around all the time with the most anodyne nonsense and trying to offer each other slogans that are —

CLAY: It’s a totalitarian regime. That’s what happens, when everybody votes for Saddam Hussein, when everybody votes for whoever the dictator is because they know they get killed if they don’t.

BUCK: I’m worried that they might start trying to pull down Major League, which I will say is maybe my all-time favorite.

CLAY: Such a good movie. Such a good movie.

BUCK: It’s a great movie. But because there’s a lot of… There’s guys dressed up as natives, oh, there’s a lot of that stuff. So who knows. But we’re fighting the fight on this one, folks.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

JOY REID: The World Series between the Atlanta Braves and the Houston Astros is happening now, shifting to the stadium in Atlanta for the next three games, which means viewers across the country will soon be subjected to a particular show of fandom that has roiled baseball for decades — and that’s the tomahawk chop. Correction: “The racist tomahawk chop,” a synchronized movement of the arm by Atlanta fans at home games, a gesture and chant promoting stereotypes, caricatures and, frankly, hatred of Native American people. The chop gets its World Series spotlight starting tomorrow.

BUCK: Welcome back to Clay and Buck show. There you hear the other side, the leftist MSNBC approach to the tomahawk chop, because it makes people think racist things. It makes them dislike, hate people, even. It’s just not true. No one is doing it. Not a single person is doing the tomahawk chop is doing it because they hate Native American people, or they have some reason that they’re trying to be disrespectful to them.

If anything, it’s supposed to be… Well, for one thing, it’s supposed to just be about baseball and people coming together from all different backgrounds, races, religions, et cetera, and enjoying sport together, which used to be, as Clay often talks about, the great unifier in America. Now even that has been pulled apart and corroded with wokeness.

But it’s obviously just not the case. It is just not the case that this is done to be racist, to be disrespectful. And, Clay, that’s obvious, but we keep coming back to this. You know, every team is gonna have to be the mastodon and the banana slug. It’s gonna have to be random animals until PETA gets too upset and says not allowed to have that anymore.

CLAY: Yeah, PETA doesn’t even want the phrase bullpen to be used because it’s offensive to animals. The bullpen of course is where all of the backup pitchers that might come into the game gather and get loose as well. But I just think it’s important to note, where did the tomahawk chop come from? In Florida State, the Seminole fans, they are the Florida State Seminoles.

The Seminole tribe has specifically said Chief Osceola — and if you’ve watched those games when they run out with the flaming spear and they throw it into the midfield in Tallahassee. It’s one of the great college football traditions. The Seminole tribe has specifically said, “We consider this to be a great honor, that you want to brand your team based on the warrior characteristics of the Seminole tribe,” and so they have specifically — ’cause they were getting attacked at Florida State.

The Seminoles have said, “Oh, no, no, no. We love this. We like the association of Florida State with the Seminole tribe and our history,” okay? So the Atlanta Braves tomahawk chant comes from Florida State which has been endorsed by the Seminole tribe via Deion Sanders who was a legendary Florida State Seminole player who also played football for the Atlanta Falcons, Dallas Cowboys, 49ers, many teams, but baseball for the Atlanta Braves.

He memorably took a helicopter to play in a football and baseball game in the same day, which is one of the craziest sports accomplishments of all time. And so, this is a direct commendation endorsement of Deion through the Seminoles. So if you actually look at how the tomahawk chop came to be, it was a endorsement of the incredible athleticism of Florida State Seminoles star Deion Sanders while playing for the Atlanta Braves. It is an honoring of a black man and his athleticism by the Atlanta Braves fan base which I’m sure Joy Reid doesn’t even know.

BUCK: Speaking of Atlanta — yeah, actual history and knowledge of it is not the left’s strong suit. You know what I said before about the TIME magazine story? Actually I got it confused with a different story. It is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

CLAY: Oh, no.

BUCK: They said yesterday — yup, the biggest — I think it’s like the biggest — newspaper in Atlanta.

CLAY: Yeah, that’s… Oh, yeah. Biggest newspaper in the state.

BUCK: This was their tweet. “The Vikings landed in America a thousand years ago, long before Europeans,” which is amazing.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: These are the people that think they should be not only telling you about reality and informing you about America and about history and the world around you, but they’re also ones that object to you wanting to have any input into what your kids are learning in school. And since we’re speaking about the Vikings, I’ve been saying this for a long time. Just wait ’til the libs figure out that, you know, the Vikings —

CLAY: They were raping and pillaging.

BUCK: — weren’t a bunch of Swedish chefs walking around with horned helmets on. They had a whole society built on pillage, slavery, and, you know, the most predatory practices of those tribes and groups around them. But give it time. They’ll get there. They already went after the Fighting Irish, Clay.

CLAY: Oh, yeah. They play the Viking horn and have a Viking mascot on the sidelines at Minnesota. Now, by the way, that Atlanta Journal-Constitution thing is so perfect because when you see everything through the prism of race, you ultimately blind yourself to the most basic factual realities. They were trying to argue, “Oh, Columbus and everybody else who’s European, they stink. Look who actually discovered America.” Oh, it was other Europeans. My bad.

BUCK: They just… They’re so focused. This is one of the problems on wokeness in the schools and this is why — bringing in the Youngkin-McAuliffe race for a second — the whole parent revolution against the school boards and the absurdity that is often being inflicted upon children on a day-to-day basis in the name of wokeness and diversity and inclusion, all the rest of it? Basic learning is suffering as a result of this. You have limited attention span, limited time in the classroom. We want kids to not grow up and think that the Vikings were not European for example.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

JOY REID: The World Series between the Atlanta Braves and the Houston Astros is happening now, shifting to the stadium in Atlanta for the next three games, which means viewers across the country will soon be subjected to a particular show of fandom that has roiled baseball for decades — and that’s the tomahawk chop. Correction: “The racist tomahawk chop,” a synchronized movement of the arm by Atlanta fans at home games, a gesture and chant promoting stereotypes, caricatures and, frankly, hatred of Native American people. The chop gets its World Series spotlight starting tomorrow.

BUCK: Welcome back to Clay and Buck show. There you hear the other side, the leftist MSNBC approach to the tomahawk chop, because it makes people think racist things. It makes them dislike, hate people, even. It’s just not true. No one is doing it. Not a single person is doing the tomahawk chop is doing it because they hate Native American people, or they have some reason that they’re trying to be disrespectful to them.

If anything, it’s supposed to be… Well, for one thing, it’s supposed to just be about baseball and people coming together from all different backgrounds, races, religions, et cetera, and enjoying sport together, which used to be, as Clay often talks about, the great unifier in America. Now even that has been pulled apart and corroded with wokeness.

But it’s obviously just not the case. It is just not the case that this is done to be racist, to be disrespectful. And, Clay, that’s obvious, but we keep coming back to this. You know, every team is gonna have to be the mastodon and the banana slug. It’s gonna have to be random animals until PETA gets too upset and says not allowed to have that anymore.

CLAY: Yeah, PETA doesn’t even want the phrase bullpen to be used because it’s offensive to animals. The bullpen of course is where all of the backup pitchers that might come into the game gather and get loose as well. But I just think it’s important to note, where did the tomahawk chop come from? In Florida State, the Seminole fans, they are the Florida State Seminoles.

The Seminole tribe has specifically said Chief Osceola — and if you’ve watched those games when they run out with the flaming spear and they throw it into the midfield in Tallahassee. It’s one of the great college football traditions. The Seminole tribe has specifically said, “We consider this to be a great honor, that you want to brand your team based on the warrior characteristics of the Seminole tribe,” and so they have specifically — ’cause they were getting attacked at Florida State.

The Seminoles have said, “Oh, no, no, no. We love this. We like the association of Florida State with the Seminole tribe and our history,” okay? So the Atlanta Braves tomahawk chant comes from Florida State which has been endorsed by the Seminole tribe via Deion Sanders who was a legendary Florida State Seminole player who also played football for the Atlanta Falcons, Dallas Cowboys, 49ers, many teams, but baseball for the Atlanta Braves.

He memorably took a helicopter to play in a football and baseball game in the same day, which is one of the craziest sports accomplishments of all time. And so, this is a direct commendation endorsement of Deion through the Seminoles. So if you actually look at how the tomahawk chop came to be, it was a endorsement of the incredible athleticism of Florida State Seminoles star Deion Sanders while playing for the Atlanta Braves. It is an honoring of a black man and his athleticism by the Atlanta Braves fan base which I’m sure Joy Reid doesn’t even know.

BUCK: Speaking of Atlanta — yeah, actual history and knowledge of it is not the left’s strong suit. You know what I said before about the TIME magazine story? Actually I got it confused with a different story. It is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

CLAY: Oh, no.

BUCK: They said yesterday — yup, the biggest — I think it’s like the biggest — newspaper in Atlanta.

CLAY: Yeah, that’s… Oh, yeah. Biggest newspaper in the state.

BUCK: This was their tweet. “The Vikings landed in America a thousand years ago, long before Europeans,” which is amazing.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: These are the people that think they should be not only telling you about reality and informing you about America and about history and the world around you, but they’re also ones that object to you wanting to have any input into what your kids are learning in school. And since we’re speaking about the Vikings, I’ve been saying this for a long time. Just wait ’til the libs figure out that, you know, the Vikings —

CLAY: They were raping and pillaging.

BUCK: — weren’t a bunch of Swedish chefs walking around with horned helmets on. They had a whole society built on pillage, slavery, and, you know, the most predatory practices of those tribes and groups around them. But give it time. They’ll get there. They already went after the Fighting Irish, Clay.

CLAY: Oh, yeah. They play the Viking horn and have a Viking mascot on the sidelines at Minnesota. Now, by the way, that Atlanta Journal-Constitution thing is so perfect because when you see everything through the prism of race, you ultimately blind yourself to the most basic factual realities. They were trying to argue, “Oh, Columbus and everybody else who’s European, they stink. Look who actually discovered America.” Oh, it was other Europeans. My bad.

BUCK: They just… They’re so focused. This is one of the problems on wokeness in the schools and this is why — bringing in the Youngkin-McAuliffe race for a second — the whole parent revolution against the school boards and the absurdity that is often being inflicted upon children on a day-to-day basis in the name of wokeness and diversity and inclusion, all the rest of it? Basic learning is suffering as a result of this. You have limited attention span, limited time in the classroom. We want kids to not grow up and think that the Vikings were not European for example.