I have a long investigative piece out today all about Major League Baseball’s (MLB) unseemly support for groups that promote or directly provide sex-change drugs and surgeries for minors. If you’re looking for a Sparknotes-length version, I wrote a long-ish Twitter thread on the highlights (or lowlights) from the piece:
Why are the biggest franchises in @MLB funneling money—sometimes to the tune of six-figure sums—to groups that perform sex changes on children?
I dug into it. In total, 20 teams are backing groups that promote or provide medical sex changes to minors.🧵https://t.co/AxsRB103xf
— Nate Hochman (@njhochman) August 31, 2022
And here’s the full team-by-team breakdown:
For reference, here's the full list of the 20 MLB franchises that are promoting and/or funding groups that advocate for or directly provide drug-induced and/or surgical sex changes for children.
I'll break down the specifics below 🧵 https://t.co/lawWiIKIdW pic.twitter.com/NcBbN9akPm
— Nate Hochman (@njhochman) August 31, 2022
I spoke with Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, to get his thoughts on the topic. In the interest of length, we only included a few relatively short quotes from him in this morning’s piece, but I wanted to share a few other insights he provided, as I think they’re valuable.
Roberts rightly noted that MLB’s embrace of far-left transgender groups is “a classic case of institutional capture by the Left,” telling me that the power of left-wing activist groups “has become ascendant in American institutional life, such that the most conservative and traditional of our sports leagues, with the most conservative fan base, is on the brink of going woke.” So how should conservatives respond?
There have been a variety of debates on the Right about the role of government and public policy in confronting the cultural power of the Left. Conservatives of various ideological stripes can disagree in good faith about the extent to which the Right should be using government to wrest control of our institutions away from the Left. But one thing that we should all be looking to harness is the power of organized voluntary action. On that front, Roberts’s suggestion surrounding public-pressure campaigns and fan boycotts seems like a good place to start. The first step, as I wrote in the piece, is “forcing a public reckoning for the MLB’s support for hard-left groups.”
As Roberts noted, “The fan base is obviously our biggest ally” in this endeavor — MLB fans tend to be more conservative than NBA or NFL fans, and MLB’s center of gravity traditionally sits in red America. “If we can do a really good job of highlighting this, I actually think the fan base will turn on Major League Baseball,” Roberts said. From there, “We need to find the one or two or three worst offenders among the baseball teams, and we need to say on this night, we’re not buying tickets. We’re not going to this game. . . . The reason that they have these Pride Nights is because the Major League Baseball ownership and managers perceive that it helps in the market. We’ve got to send a market signal, so to speak, that shows that it doesn’t.”
That requires commitment at the grassroots level, but also a coordinated effort by elite conservative institutions to put together a viable movement. “We just need to orchestrate it,” Roberts told me. “We have to do this. It’s just really about saving American culture.”