Karmic Justice: World Series in Georgia After All-Star Boycott

CLAY: I’m headed down to Houston tomorrow with my 11-year-old, die-hard Atlanta Braves fan. And this is karmic justice, Buck, because you’ll remember — even as somebody who is not a die-hard Major League Baseball fan –, Rob Manfred, the commissioner of MLB pulled the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in a misguided attempt to placate woke social justice warriors over the Georgia voting bill.

The Georgia voting bill, by the way, that was far more lenient than the rules in New York State where Major League Baseball is based or in Delaware where Joe Biden’s been elected for over four decades now and the Georgia voting bill that was in some ways, that was in some ways less restrictive than the Colorado bill. So they moved the Major League Baseball All-Star Game out to Denver.

Well, the Atlanta Braves hadn’t been to the World Series since 1999. They’re going up against the L.A. Dodgers, the defending World Series champs, and so Saturday night they closed them out, the Braves did, to advance. Now, as a result, you have got the Houston Astros hosting the Atlanta Braves, and there will be at least probably — could get a sweep, but at least — two, probably three World Series, which were infinitely bigger in terms of viewership than the All-Star Game would have ever been, and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is exalting.

So are many other baseball fans. I hope that Rob Manfred, Major League Baseball commissioner, goes to Atlanta and they put him on the jumbotron, and the Atlanta people let him have it. It would be best of all, as Astros fans, if the Braves won it in game 5 in Atlanta and Rob Manfred had to present the Major League Baseball World Series trophy and the Atlanta Braves fans could just tee off on him. But the governor of George, Brian Kemp, who’s been fighting back against this idea of taking away the All-Star Game, wanted to take a little bit of a victory lap and enjoy the Braves success. Here’s cut 18.

KEMP: Well, look, this is gonna be great for hardworking Georgians. That was what was so outrageous about the last decision to took a $100 million of economic impact away from small business owners, a lot of minority businesses and employees — in Atlanta and then Cobb County, where the ballpark is — for really no reason other than politics. So it’s great to see the game coming here for the team and the fans and the organization, but it’s also good for those small business owners and hardworking Georgians.

CLAY: We should mention, Buck, this is pretty great, right? To cut through and feel like you won the ultimate battle here.

BUCK: Absolutely, and notice how he makes this case. I think it’s so important for what often happens when there are these social-media driven, virtue-signaling cancellation campaigns out there that you have a bunch of people who are clustered in places like New York, D.C., Los Angeles, saying, “Oh, Georgia,” which just voted for Biden, by the way. Sorry, but that’s the outcome. We won’t get into whether there were some votes that were problematic. Every time I say this people start emailing me. I know about the issues. I’m just saying technically, Georgia got racked up as a victory for Biden, and also those two Senate seats, obviously, that went for Democrats.

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: But, Clay, they think, “Oh, we’re going to send some big message by stopping the All-Star Game from being in Georgia as a state in the Atlanta area.” It really affects people that need that business. It effects the guy that owns a pub a block or two away. It affects the people selling merchandise. It affects the vendors and those folks.

It reminds me in a sense of what you see even here this morning with the climate Extinction Rebellion and a bunch of left-wing climate change lunatics. Who are they actually hurting by lying down in traffic on the FDR Drive and the major arteries into Manhattan? The really rich people, for the most part, are already in Manhattan. They’re hurting a lot of working-class people — a lot of folks are commuting into their jobs — and not doing anything in the process other than feeling good about themselves.

I think that’s just a classic left-wing thing. And you see it here with the baseball situation where what was accomplished by all that? All that nonsense about how Georgia’s voting laws, it’s just because people wanted to play into a narrative of the Republicans trying to suppress minority votes — which is not true — and beyond that, people just want to feel like they’re good when they don’t have to sacrifice anything. They’re sacrifice other people’s stuff, though.

CLAY: Yeah, and I loved this. One, the Atlanta Braves haven’t been there since ’99. But to do it in this year of all years when the All-Star Game got pulled, it just feels like karmic justice in many ways for the Atlanta Braves and that organization. And I do think Brian Kemp’s point is a good one. They calculated this is gonna be a $100 million cost, and now those people who were harmed get an unexpected boon from the NLCS and the World Series.

I’ll just point this out: The most popular people in Georgia, Buck — I know that state pretty well — they’re not Republicans, they’re not Democrats, they’re not independents. It’s the Atlanta Braves and the Georgia Bulldogs. Those are the teams that cut across state lines in a way that nobody else is popular in the state of Georgia.

And if you remember, Buck, even Stacey Abrams herself got caught editing her USA Today article to make it look like she was fighting against the All-Star Game getting pulled out of Atlanta, ’cause Stacey Abrams didn’t want to have to take any responsibility for this even though it was her organization and her fight that led to in happening. And she tried to say, “Oh, that wasn’t me.” Well, unfortunately it was. She tried to go back and edit. I’ve never even heard of that happening, going back and editing an editorial that had already run in an effort to try and protect yourself going forward.

BUCK: The moment you start to analyze where the Democrats are so dug in on this narrative of — as they’ve called it many times, including Joe Biden, so let’s — this is not some fringe Democrat issue. This is from the very top, the literal top of the Democrat Party, the very head of the organization, so to speak, the guy who’s calling the shots.

They call it Jim Crow 2.0. The reason they do this is they want to create laws in the states and actually create laws at the federal level that will mandate in all the states that will favor Democrats. And somehow, Democrats are always favored by having looser voting restrictions, looser voting laws that make it harder to prove or find fraud. That’s one part of it.

Another part is just constantly calling Republicans racist so they get that benefit of, “Oh, if you want to move a voting booth or if you want to do anything — if you want to change 10 days of voting to eight days of voting — that’s racist.” That’s all they’ll say and ultimately, Clay, and I think we have to remember this, too.

The last election they got what they wanted, by and large, or at least with Biden and then in Georgia essential the two Senate seats. But the next time around, what do people think Pelosi and Schumer…? The most mainline, mainstream media Democrats, what are they going to say if it is a midterm shellacking that they’re in for? “Oh, it was voter suppression!”

The people that lecture us all the time about, “You won’t accept the election results,” their obsession with voter rights, restrictions, et cetera — their obsession with Jim Crow 2.0 lies — is that it’s a built-in, psychological mechanism for, “We never lose elections. Republicans just suppress minority votes!” That’s what they’re building with every one of these statements they make.

CLAY: Stacey Abrams lost the election in 2018 in Georgia by more votes than Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, right? She lost by 50,000 votes in Georgia. Trump lost — even by the numbers that are out there right now — the 2020 election by 40,000 votes. Stacey Abrams refused to concede. She said they cheated. She became a Democratic hero. Donald Trump does the same thing and it’s “a fundamental threat to democracy.” They’re not playing by the same rules. We all know that.