Seven months after left-wing activist forced Major League Baseball to yank a summer all-star game from Atlanta, the Braves’s 7–0 win Tuesday over the Houston Astros, closing out a six-game World Series, saw a full-circle symbolic reversal of cancel-culture.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred prominently disavowed his earlier stance last week, admitting that he had caved to political pressure and a desire for risk-aversion after left-wing activists threatened a boycott over Georgia’s election-integrity laws.
But in doing so, Manfred in fact had stumbled into a political quagmire devised by the Left, breaking longtime precedents to stay out of the fray. The league suffered serious criticism and boycotts from conservatives—who likely comprise a much stronger audience base—as a consequence.
“We always have tried to be apolitical,” Manfred said Tuesday, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Obviously there was a notable exception this year. I think our desire is to try to avoid another exception to that general rule.”
Manfred made clear last week that he had no intention of yanking the World Series from Atlanta as he had the all-star game.
““Atlanta played great down the stretch, did a tremendous job in the playoffs,” he said. “They earned their right to the World Series, and we’re looking forward to being back in Atlanta.”
As an apparent gesture of good-will, the MLB invited former President Donald Trump to attend game 4, where he was seen participating in the team’s traditional “Tomahawk Chop.”
That, too, triggered cancel-culture advocates on the Left who successfully forced teams like the former Cleveland Indians and the NFL’s erstwhile Washington Redskins to abandon their names during a frenzy of politically correct fervor last year in the wake of the George Floyd death and subsequent race riots.
A counter-reckoning now appears to be underway, with recent reports suggesting that the once vaunted Black Lives Matter and the “defund the police” movement were facing growing backlash.
While the Braves’s sports success had little to do with those causes, the Left’s insistence on making everything political had thrust it into the spotlight, turning what would have been an entirely disjointed event into a symbolic victory on the same night that Republicans swept Virginia’s elections and deep-blue New Jersey remained too close to call.
In Minneapolis, voters also rejected a referendum to defund the police department on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, in Atlanta—a heavily blue buttress in an otherwise deep-red state—Democrats continued to dominate as the race to replace mayor Keisha Lance-Bottoms moved into a run-off among several of the city’s political mainstays, the Atlanta Journal–Constitution reported.
Many eyes were focused on whether the race among Democrats would see issues similar to those that plagued last year’s national election, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, activist Stacey Abrams and others colluded to swing the state blue using unmanned ballot-drop-offs and partisan poll workers, among other tactics.
The fallout prompted Republicans in the state legislature to close several of the loopholes exploited by the Left, and also triggered several calls for election audits.
Despite evidence suggesting many votes violated chain-of-custody laws, none have gained sufficient traction for a full-fledged forensic review.
