In the last few weeks, the CEOs of Georgia-based companies including Delta Air Lines, Coca-Cola, and Aflac Insurance condemned Georgia’s new election integrity law. President Joe Biden condemned the law as “Jim Crow on steroids,” and he encouraged Major League Baseball players to condemn it. MLB pulled the All-Star Game out of Georgia, citing Biden’s comments. This will cost the state about $100 million, and small business owners who will suffer from it are speaking out.
Trudy Rodney of Rodney’s Soul Food in Atlanta said her business will “suffer.”
“We’re trying to build back from a pandemic that happened last year, and something like this is not good for business. Rodney’s will suffer,” she told Fox 5.
Georgia small business owner: GA boycott “crushing,” “we’re trying to build back from a pandemic”https://t.co/sBk9GlS311 pic.twitter.com/QcRSRrV5Lu
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 5, 2021
“We were expecting a boost beginning to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just like the pandemic hit us, now the Major League Baseball All-Star Game has been snatched from under our feet, and it’s like deja vu, all over again,” Darrell Anderson, the black owner of a limousine business in Atlanta, told Fox & Friends on Sunday.
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“As the owner of a transportation service in Atlanta, I know firsthand how badly our community wanted the All-Star Game played here,” Anderson told the Washington Free Beacon last week. “The $100 million in revenue to this area was going to be the opportunity for all of us to recover some of the losses that we incurred during the pandemic. Now, not only is that revenue gone, we may lose even more because conventions that were planned for Atlanta are now up in the air thanks to this decision by the MLB.”
“We got ourselves through COVID, running small businesses,” Andy Erbacher, owner of AJ’s Famous Seafood & Poboys, told Fox & Friends. “And we’re looking forward to going up, instead of going back down.”
Anderson, a black man in Atlanta, someone ostensibly targeted by Georgia’s election integrity law, said, “I don’t think our interests were being protected” by the MLB pull-out and other attacks on Georgia. “I think we got caught up in the cross-fires.”
“Small businesses are the heartbeat of America. Without small businesses, our economy would be in the toilet,” Anderson argued. “When you have issues like this, it should be settled at the ballot box,” not through boycotts.
Alfredo Ortiz, president of the small-business advocacy group Job Creators Network, sent MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred a letter demanding he reverse his decision, warning that pulling the All-Star Game out of Atlanta “will have an outsized impact on minority-owned businesses.”
“Your decision is punishing the very group you claim to be defending,” Ortiz warned. “Small businesses in Georgia are hurting and you pulled a multi-million dollar rug out from underneath them…. Don’t let activist groups weaponize America’s pastime to push radical ideas that MLB fans don’t support.”
While some have claimed that Joe Biden won the presidential election due to fraud, the reality is far more complicated. Biden most likely won with the most legal votes, but last-minute election changes and cash infusions from the Center for Tech and Civic Life tilted the playing field in his favor. Voters are rightly concerned about election integrity and new laws like the one in Georgia represent a response to these abuses — not an attack on legal voting.
CTCL sent funds to election offices in blue areas, ramping up turnout that benefitted Joe Biden. Georgia’s new law rightly makes this practice illegal. The law also requires voters to present a valid photo ID to register for an absentee ballot. The Washington Post gave President Joe Biden four Pinocchios for repeatedly claiming that the Georgia law “ends voting hours early.” In fact, the bill extended voting hours.
According to a recent poll from the Honest Elections Project, 77 percent of Americans support requiring an ID to vote. This includes majorities of self-identified Biden voters (62 percent to 24 percent opposed), black voters (64 percent to 22 percent opposed), and Latino voters (78 percent to 16 percent opposed). Most voters (64 percent) said they want to strengthen voting safeguards to prevent fraud, rather than eliminate them to make voting “easier.” Even majorities of black voters (51 percent), Hispanic voters (66 percent), urban voters (59 percent), and Independent voters (61 percent) agreed.
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Yet the Democratic-legacy media echo chamber has been blasting the false narrative that Georgia’s new law is a racist attempt to prevent black voters from going to the polls. Biden has condemned the law as “Jim Crow on steroids,” even though Georgia’s election laws are far less stringent than those of Biden’s home state of Delaware or MLB’s home state of New York.
While Georgia Democrats have rightly condemned MLB’s move, this weekend about 100 business leaders and CEOs gathered to strategize about how to oppose election integrity laws like the one in Georgia. It seems woke capitalism is gearing up for the next fight, even though it will likely leave victims like the small business owners in Georgia.
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