A minor league baseball team in California has lost a sponsor, after the club aired a Memorial Day video showing New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among several notorious communist dictators.
The video, called Enemies of Freedom, showed Ocasio-Cortez between images of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and former Cuban President Fidel Castro. Though the team apologized immediately for the incident, that wasn’t enough to prevent Sun-Maid Raisins from pulling their sponsorship of the team.
Sun-Maid Raisins e-mailed a statement on their decision to the Fresno Bee:
We are deeply disappointed by the Memorial Day tribute video the Fresno Grizzlies aired on Monday. Sun-Maid does not support the views or sentiments expressed in the video, nor does it condone the airing of it. 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 signage was prominent in left field of the Grizzlies’ ballpark. It’s unclear how long the two organizations had been partners,” Fox News reports.
Here is the Enemies of Freedom video that played in the stadium on Memorial Day:
The Fresno Grizzlies were quick to point out that they had nothing to do with the production of the video:
The video was not produced, created or commissioned by the Fresno Grizzlies. It was carelessly taken from YouTube. There are multiple versions of this video available on the internet, the version that our employee selected contained offensive content. The airing of the video in the ballpark was the result of an unintentional oversight by an employee who did not view the video in its entirety. The employee responsible has been reprimanded by the organization.
Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter to point out how videos like the one shown at the baseball game, inspire a “flood of death threats” against her.
What people don’t (maybe do) realize is when orgs air these hateful messages, my life changes bc of the flood of death threats they inspire.
I‘ve had mornings where I wake up & the 1st thing I do w/ my coffee is review photos of the men (it’s always men) who want to kill me. https://t.co/hiYbPghad7
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 28, 2019
Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter @themightygwinn
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