Seriously, fuck your feelings. It feels great to say that to you, the Citizens of MAGA Nation, you white-privilege-card-carrying, Mr. Potato Head-loving, Jew-space-lasers-totally-exist-but-Trump-Russia-collusion-was-a-hoax scumbags. How dare the rest of us – meaning Democrats, Liberals, Independents, Republicans who didn’t drink your orange Kool-Aid, etc – apply pressure to Major League Baseball to relocate an otherwise meaningless exhibition game that was a novel event 50 years ago but nowadays appeals mostly to nerds who know shit like Craig Biggio’s statistical claim to fame and the meaning of the term “hot stove”.
We didn’t start this. You did. All your buddies in Georgia needed to do was to take their losses like men and work on expanding the Republicans’ appeal to finding new voters or winning over old ones who stayed home in November and/or January. They could’ve told Trump to shut up and concede already but instead you let him go apeshit over it and make all these claims about fraud which then cost your party the Senate majority. Trump did this to you, not Stacey Abrams or Keisha Lance Bottoms or fucking Brad Raffensperger. Trump did this to you and you did it to yourselves. He’s under criminal investigation in the state for his post-election meltdown. Every single pretext for this voter suppression is complete horseshit and everyone knows it. Especially you.
But your heroes went ahead like they always do, knowing they’ll get away with it like they’ve gotten away with everything else for the past decade. You can’t say “damn the consequences” when there are no negative ones to speak of. Until now.
Your cries and wails of “cancel culture” and everything else that has just been watered down into noise are like sweet music. Your tears are like a gentle spring rain falling upon verdant fields. The fake motions of retaliation like vowing to revoke the MLB’s antitrust exemption are the hilarious tragicomic performance theater of Italian opera clowns with those frilly polka dot suits.
The best part is when you really boil it down to is simple mathematics, where Major League Baseball weighed both sides of the proposition: Either keep the game in Atlanta and face the wrath of angry Americans who value Democracy or make a statement that voter suppression is not okay and enrage the already perpetually enraged MAGA cult. They found that it was in their best interest to go with the latter option. That’s it. Just pure numbers. You had them in the Georgia legislature and we had them everywhere else. The law’s still on the books, sure, but the MLB just created a permission structure for other influential entities to apply pressure in their own way. It’s easy for us to be optimistic with the direction this is going. You play your zero sum game, we’ll play ours.
Maladjusted, spoiled children accustomed to getting everything their way all the time – you know, so much winning you’re sick of it – often freak out and have screaming meltdowns when challenged. It’s okay. It happens. Disappointment is part of life. You can feel like this is unfair, this is fascist, this is un-American. Please feel however you want to feel.
Because fuck your feelings.