Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp appeared on FOX News Channel’s “FOX & Friends Weekend” on Saturday morning, lashing out at Major League Baseball, President Joe Biden, and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams for their response to the passage of the state’s new Election Integrity Act.
MLB announced on Friday that the league would relocate the 2021 All-Star Game and draft from Atlanta to an undetermined location after pressure from the bill’s critics. As The Daily Wire previously reported, the decision came after Biden likened the reforms to “Jim Crow” laws earlier in the week during an interview with ESPN.
Abrams, a Democrat who blamed voter suppression for her loss to Kemp in the 2018 gubernatorial race, had previously called on corporate leaders to “use their clout” and “speak out forcefully against voter suppression bills.”
“It’s unfortunate that Major League Baseball has caved to the cancel culture, and quite honestly, President Biden and Stacey Abrams and a lot of other people are simply lying about this bill to pressure these organizations,” Kemp told FOX & Friends. “This is just a cancel culture, and I’ll tell you, the people at home should be scared because their ballgame is next, their business will be next, their way of life will be next. It is time to stand up and fight this and say, ‘look, we’re not going to take this anymore.’ It’s ridiculous.”
Kemp went on to accuse critics of the new law of using “buzzwords” like “suppression” to “browbeat” corporate executives into publicly condemning the reforms. Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastain responded to pressure to publicly oppose the measure on Wednesday, changing the company’s initial stance “after having time to now fully understand all that is in the bill,” he said. Bastain issued a statement that claimed, “it’s evident that the bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives.”
Citing a fact check by The Washington Post that concluded Biden had made false statements about the law, Kemp said the president is partly responsible for creating a distorted narrative that has harmed public discourse.
“It certainly doesn’t help when you have the President of the United States saying that, and nobody in the national media, at least in the mainstream media, will even ask for a correction when he simply lies,” Kemp said. “He’s not being truthful. He continues to lie and mislead about what the bill does.”
Fact Checker: Biden falsely claims the new Georgia law "ends voting hours early" https://t.co/zQEf2otQHY
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 30, 2021
Kemp insisted the bill adds opportunities for people to vote legally and does not constitute suppression. He said some vocal opponents of the measure had not specified its alleged flaws “because they know damn well their people were in the Capitol working with us on the bill” before changing their positions.
“What Major League Baseball should do if they have an issue with a provision in the bill, they should simply talk to me about it, because I’d be glad to do it,” Kemp told FOX & Friends. “They have yet to do that. They have yet to bring up one thing that is actually in the bill that they are mad about.”
Partial transcript as follows:
FOX & FRIENDS HOST WILL CAIN: So to be clear, governor, there have been no specific demands of you on how to change this bill? There’s been no specific problems, as you pointed out earlier, that had been illustrated or laid out for you? Simply the characterization of it being Jim Crow 2.0, voter suppression, has been used as a cudgel to browbeat corporations? That’s the end of the story?
GOVERNOR KEMP: Well, if you look at Jim Crow 2.0, the domain name was registered weeks ago before anybody even knew what was going to be in the final version of the bill. I think the playbook for this was written over a month ago because the left, and the radicals, Stacey Abrams and including President Biden – obviously his team didn’t even know what was in the bill – I think they thought it was going to be suppressive and it was going to be bad. But, you know, the end result was not. Because it went through the process. We worked with the House, the Senate, with reasonable people, got things in there to provide even more access, but also just make sure that in Georgia, it is easy to vote and hard to cheat. And I guess they don’t agree with that. But none of the statements from Delta, Coca-Cola, or Major League Baseball that I have seen cite one single thing in this legislation that we need to fix. And if there is something, bring it on. Let’s talk about it.
Former President Donald Trump accused MLB of being “afraid of the Radical Left Democrats who do not want voter I.D.” on Friday, urging Americans to “boycott baseball and all of the woke companies that are interfering with Free and Fair Elections.”
Kemp said he thought Trump shared his frustration with “this cancel culture” and described the situation as “a political play” by Biden, Abrams, and other progressives who want to federalize elections and remove control from the states.
“It’s just so sad for baseball fans that the league has now made baseball in the United States of America so political,” Kemp said, stressing the Atlanta Braves franchise does not support MLB’s decision to move the All-Star Game.
“This is terrible for the organization; it’s terrible for the fans, it’s terrible for the small business owners in the metro Atlanta community and our state that were looking forward to hosting this game and put a lot of resources into it. All because of a big lie.”
Related: Stacey Abrams Pushed Misinformation About Georgia Voting Bill. Now She’s Upset By The Consequences.
Related: Trump Calls For Boycotting Major League Baseball After They Cave To ‘Radical Left Democrats’
Related: ‘#GowokeGobroke’: Cruz, Lee Call To End MLB Antitrust Protections After League Boycotts Georgia