The Fresno Grizzlies baseball team, a triple-A minor league affiliate of the Washington Nationals, which made a superfrightening and idiotic statement on politics this past Memorial Day weekend, is out a sponsor. The team showed a video between the two games of a doubleheader at Fresno’s Chukchansi Park. Fresno Bee reporter Carmen George tweeted on Monday that the video, which you can watch below, is the kind of jingoistic drivel that former President Ronald Reagan spewed throughout his eight years in office. In fact, the video includes parts of a speech Reagan gave about fighting against all of our enemies and never surrendering to evil because “we are Americans.”
It’s the kind of thing that people who spend too much time cleaning guns listen to before bedtime. After a couple of minutes of footage showing American soldiers achieving great things while fighting, Reagan’s speech moves to a finale, saying that we cannot bow to America’s threats, beginning with the line, “As with the enemies of freedom, those potential adversaries, they will be reminded that peace is the highest aspiration of the American people.” It is at this point that the video shows an image of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, followed by one of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, followed by Cuban leader Fidel Castro, followed by footage of antifa protestors. In that order. Ocasio-Cortez shared this domestic threat and pointed out that the producers and exhibitors of the video are the people threatening violence against Americans and American ideals.
Needless to say, the majority of people who saw the video felt it was projecting a particularly dangerous message by juxtaposing images of leaders of countries that have historically been adversaries of the United States with one of a democratically elected congresswoman. The people who didn’t find this video problematic most likely went back to playing that game where you try to stab a knife safely between your fingers outstretched on a wooden table.
The outcry brought on by the video led to the Fresno Grizzlies apologizing and saying that it was a “vetting” issue. Unfortunately for the Grizzlies, their foray into political advertising has lost them actual advertising, as Sun-Maid—a major sponsor of the team—said on Wednesday that it was “disappointed” by the video, and that “While the Grizzlies have apologized for this mistake, we are standing on the side of what we believe is right and terminating our sponsorship of the team.”
Sun-Maid told The Washington Post that it didn’t want to take a political side in the matter, but just wanted to do what was right. The Post also notes that Sun-Maid has a long history with Fresno, and that the loss of its support is a bigger deal than just a loss of money.