This time, they’re coming after baseball.
Baseball. Get it? The national pastime. The inner sanctum of homespun goodness. Your last refuge from the crazy. The leftists intent on politicizing everything, changing society, and coercing changed behavior won’t leave you alone, ever, anywhere.
If you thought you could ignore this attack on your way of life, you were fooling yourself. If you thought the “culture wars” were for others, think again. The choice here is binary: You surrender or you fight this evil with all your might.
The place this time is Los Angeles. Yes, the Dodgers, one of the most hallowed franchises in the most hallowed sport. And the medium is one of the things that you hold most dear—your religion, your faith, your God.
The Dodgers have allowed a depraved group of satanic bigots that styles itself the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” (it’s only funny if you’re debauched or lack all sense) to blackmail the team into submission. The group is made up of men whose antics include sexualizing Jesus and the cross he died on for your sins (as the world’s 2.6 billion Christians believe). You can see a sample here (warning: this video may offend viewers) or just take my word for it.
The Dodgers at first showed some sense and disinvited the group from its “Pride Day.” Then the marketing department changed its mind again, issued an abject apology to the group, and told it that, yes, members could go to Dodger Stadium and show their depravity to the children and families hoping they could retreat from the frenzy and enter a world with the cadences of a lost America.
For that is what baseball is, in case Major League Baseball executives have forgotten: two-and-a-half hours of nostalgia, sudden bursts of camaraderie with perfect strangers, peanuts, Cracker Jack, and standing up at a designated moment and collectively singing a tune that everyone knows by heart.
Football may have more fans and may be (though I am not ready to concede this point) more exciting. But it can never match baseball’s offer. There is a reason General Motors for years ran ads that sang of “baseball, hotdogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.” For the price of a ticket, you leave the Bronx, Chavez Ravine, and Chicago’s South Side and enter a field of dreams.
That is why it must be sullied by those who must sully everything—because if they can make baseball and the Dodgers complicit in their evil, they will have raped innocence itself. This transgression is on a different order from Bud Light or Target, two other companies whose marketing departments caved to the woke mob and whose shareholders wound up paying a steep price.
This shows us again what Larry Fink, the chairman of investment firm BlackRock, had in mind when he said in 2017: “You have to force behaviors. … Behaviors across the entire firm have to be similar, and every citizen of the firm has to understand what is acceptable behaviors and what is unacceptable behaviors. … And if you don’t force behaviors, whether it’s gender or race … you’re going to be impacted.”
BlackRock is the world’s largest asset management firm, with $10 trillion under management. When it tells companies whose shares it manages that they must coerce their employees into submission, they will listen, even if this Stalinist approach flouts the Constitution.
Coercing behavior is what the Toronto Blue Jays are doing to Anthony Bass, a right-hander with a powerful slider and an abiding belief in God. When he shared an Instagram reel that decried Target teaming up with a demonic fashion company and Bud Light with a man who plays a ditzy woman for a living, he was instantly attacked as “homophobic.”
The Blue Jays, rather than respecting his beliefs, ordered him to do reeducation work. Bass’ belief suddenly became less abiding: He, too, apologized. “Right now, I’m using the Blue Jay’s resource to better educate myself and make better decisions moving forward,” he told the press in what sounded more like a statement from a hostage than an assertion from a free American.
But there are rays of hope, like those beams of sunshine one sees at dawn that confirm the existence of God.
Clayton Kershaw, for one, is not taking it. The veteran Dodger pitcher has told his team he disagrees with inviting a group that insults religion. Another Dodgers pitcher, Blake Treinen, is also speaking out, saying the drag group is hateful and that it “promotes hate of Christians.” Washington Nationals pitcher Trevor Williams also is decrying what the Dodgers have done, calling on his fellow Catholics to dump the team.
Will these pitchers be pressured into submission, Larry Fink-style, as Bass was?
They will have to be courageous to stand the heat. But the players are not alone. Consumers have delivered a severe spanking to Bud Light and Target. Share prices for Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Budweiser, have dropped 18.4%, as sales for Bud Light have fallen by a third. Target, meanwhile, has shed 17.5% of its share price since the controversy hit, losing $13 billion in value.
The brave pitchers speaking out are being encouraged to do so by a Twitter space that has suddenly been free since Elon Musk bought the company, and it is precisely on Twitter that the boycotts got their wind. There is no question that all this would have been censored by the old Twitter.
So, if what the Dodgers are doing offends you, stop buying tickets and team merchandise and throw that beloved Dodgers cap into the fire. But don’t forget to video yourself doing it and to post it you-know-where.
That’s how we fight.
This article originally appeared in the Washington Examiner.
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