Tag: discrimination

The World Series of Poker and the New Jim Crow

Every year the best poker players in the world gather in Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker, the largest and most prestigious tournament series there is.  I look forward to playing at least one WSOP event each June, and have three cash finishes to my credit.  This year the series was moved back from June until October, so I was planning to head out to Vegas for a few tournaments, and had already won a $1,500 seat into the “Monster Stack” event.  Then the discrimination began. 

On August 27 the WSOP announced that they would be requiring all entrants into this year’s tournaments to show proof of vaccination.  Reactions from the poker world were divided.  2003 WSOP main event champion Chris Moneymaker, who gave hope to millions and started the poker boom by winning without being a very good player, previously had planned to sit out the series because he doesn’t understand odds and was afraid to play, but now is thanking the WSOP for their intrusive decision.  On the other side of the coin, 2009 WSOP main event champ and four-time bracelet winner Joe Cada says he will now be staying home this year because of the rule.  Can you guess which one the media portrays more positively?

Remember that the left uses a playbook to make it seem like their position is the norm and any people who disagree with them are on the fringe.  They want you to feel like you are crazy if you don’t think the way they tell you to.  Because of this, I am going to predict the narrative that the media will push about the WSOP this year.  There will undoubtedly be smaller fields in the tournaments than normal and the media is going to lie to us about the reason.  My prediction is that we will soon see stories about how there are fewer entrants this year because people are worried about playing poker due to coronavirus fears and restrictions on international travel.  While there will surely be some players who do not play because they overestimate the odds of dying from Covid (the odds are nearly 100 times less likely than randomly drawing the 4 of clubs from a deck of cards), this will not be the main reason for the lower participation.  The real reason is actually the exact opposite.  People will not play because they are not living in fear like the left wants them to be.  A large number of would-be participants will not attend because they think that people should have the freedom to assess their own risks and make decisions without being bullied.

If it was just the World Series of Poker doing this, it would be a major problem, but this vaccine mandate situation is a lot bigger than that.  Somebody who I respect told me that she does not see vaccine mandates as a hill to die on.  She has been vaccinated so the mandates do not really affect her.  Here is the problem with that thinking.  This is not about the vaccine.  It is about government power and overreach.  Do you think that a tax on tea would be a hill to die on?  I’ll go out on a limb and guess that at least one of those people who threw tea into Boston Harbor didn’t even like tea.  This has as much to do with our opinions on the vaccine as the Boston Tea Party had to do with their opinions on tea.

There are only two directions this can possibly go.  We can choose liberty and allow people to decide for themselves whether or not to get vaccinated, or we can relegate anybody who will not do exactly as they are told by the bullies on the left into a permanent, Jim Crow style underclass.  These tyrants do not want unvaccinated people to be allowed to work, shop, enjoy entertainment, eat, or socialize.  They claim to care about people but are perfectly fine with firing millions of Americans who are willing and able to work.  These good, hardworking citizens will be pushed into poverty or into a growing black-market economy.  Is it strange that the left says they are doing all of this to save lives but seem to have no problem if you die of starvation because they forced your job to fire you?

You may be wondering what I plan to do about the WSOP.  Honestly, I considered pretty much every possible option, but ultimately decided that I do not want the WSOP to profit from me until they stand up for freedom and change this policy.  Not only is it invasive, but it is illogical.  If the vaccine works, then nobody in the building should be worried.  The people who would be scared are vaccinated, and the people who are not vaccinated would not be there if they were scared.  Neither the unvaccinated nor the vaccinated should play if they believe in liberty. 

Instead, I plan to take my $1,500 over to a tournament series at The Wynn and play an $1,100 buy-in event on the same day that the WSOP Monster Stack event is taking place, then go over to The Golden Nugget the next two days for $200 events.  I encourage any other poker players to join me.  Organizations or businesses that discriminate based on vaccine status should be treated the same way as you would treat places discriminating based on race.  In other words, they should not receive a penny from any of us.

Intolerant Democrats Get Jewish Man’s Yarmulke Shop on Etsy Shut Down

This story starts a couple of years back when my mother started getting into family genealogy.  She mapped out what we already knew, but then had a few family members spit into a tube to send to 23andMe and Ancestry.com to find out more information.  We expected most of the interesting stuff to come from my mom’s side.  How involved was the Italian part of our family in the mob way back when?  Were we even Italian, or were we more Albanian as one of the tests showed?  Was my aunt really the mailman’s daughter as they joked with my grandparents? 

Interestingly enough, the most surprising thing we found out was on my dad’s side.  The test came back and said that he is half Jewish.  We had no idea that we had any Jewish in our DNA at all, much less 50%.  If you know my dad, his reaction was exactly as you would expect.  He took me to the Katella Deli and ate corned beef, latkes, matzah ball soup, babka, gefilte fish, knishes, challah bread, and blintzes.  I love my dad.

Fast forward to Christmas, 2019.  I wanted to get my dad something imaginative that he wouldn’t expect and would also give him a laugh.  Then an idea hit me.  I looked online for a “Make America Great Again” yarmulke.  It was perfect!  I found one on Etsy, a website where people can make crafty products and set up their own “shop” to sell their wares on.  The gift was a hit. 

Fast forward again, this time to August 27 of this year.  In my email I find a message from the guy who I bought the yarmulke from.  It began like this:

Dear Valued Customer,

Please forgive us for sending you this unexpected email, you are receiving this because you purchased a “Trump Make America Great” Kippah or Yarmulke from our Etsy store during the past two years.  First, I want to thank you for the purchase, you should know that this store was a labor of love to help my kids pay for their Bar and Bat Mitzvah’s, my family is ever grateful to you for being part of that. 

We really need you to know the recent sad events that have transpired at our Etsy shop, Etsy who sides in many leftist causes came under pressure from the social media mob and have succumbed and permanently suspended our shop where we sold these MAGA kippahs.  It appears a customer showed off their wares on TicTok and got a tsunami of leftist outrage.  We were used to getting nasty messages on Etsy but this time Etsy sided with this outrage mob and has shut us down. 

My jaw dropped.  It isn’t surprising that leftist bullies would go on the attack.  Democrats do not tolerate disagreement.  The astonishing part was that Etsy had let them get their way and actually closed down this man’s shop.  I responded to the email and asked if I could speak to him about what happened and he agreed.

We spoke on the phone last week and he asked that I don’t use his name out of concern for his kids.  He told me that his son is a supporter of the president and has been harassed at school and has even been called out on what was described as a “mean girls” kind of webpage meant to “cancel” people.  For that reason I will call him Daniel in this article.

Daniel is an interesting man with some insightful perspective on how the left is using Marxist tactics to silence anybody who disagrees with them.  You see, Daniel is a Russian Jew who fled here in 1979 at the age of 9.  He has seen the left in action in the Soviet Union and is alarmed at the similarities he sees with the Democrats in the United States today.  He fears that Democrat policies and tactics will lead to the communism that his family fled from in the Soviet Union.  He sees how the left is promoting division and pitting everybody against each other by pushing a victim mentality on people; rich vs. poor, black vs. white, gay vs. straight, male vs. female.  He sees the left trying to silence people for having different opinions. 

Daniel mentioned another tactic that is being used here in the United States and compared it to something I had never heard of before and had to look into, Josef Stalin’s “Doctor’s Plot.”  In it, Stalin falsely accused Jewish doctors of plotting to kill Soviet leaders.  Jews were denounced as poisoners and Daniel’s grandmother, who was a doctor with many patients, was reduced to seeing just a handful of patients in secret.  Daniel sees Democrats doing the same thing by spreading horrible propaganda against people and vilifying them for political purposes.  Just look at the slander the left has perpetrated against the police in our country and you can see the obvious comparison.

I told Daniel that it mystifies me that some Jews in America could ever vote for Democrats after seeing the rising antisemitism in that party.  Between Representative Ilhan Omar’s openly anti-Semitic comments, Democrat’s support of the Iran Nuclear Deal that freed up $150 billion for a country that shouts “Death to Israel,” Democrats walking out on a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama turning his back on Israel in the United Nations, some Democrats supporting the “BDS” movement, and the Democratic Convention booing an amendment to their platform that mentioned God and supported recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, it seems unfathomable that any Jew could support Democrats.  Daniel told me that many secular Jews have forgotten their roots.  He said that “Democrats have been letting Jews down for 80 years.” 

I asked Daniel what he thinks us as Americans can do.  He said that we need to focus on bringing the culture back.  He said, “The left has won the culture war.”  When we have major commercial websites shutting down shops for selling items that show support for our president, I fear he is right.  This is just the tip of the iceberg of what kind of censorship and persecution we can expect if Democrats win next week. 

Daniel had sold over 7,000 Trump yarmulkes before his shop was shut down.  Whenever he tried to contact Etsy they told him that his complaint would be sent up the ladder but he never got anywhere with them.  I reached out to Etsy and have not received a response.  I also looked on Etsy at what other yarmulkes are allowed to be sold and found many, including “Biden/Harris” and “Black Lives Matter” versions.

Daniel has moved his business over to Ebay, and although he does not want me to confirm his identity, if you would like to support him just search on Ebay for “Trump kippahs” and many of the results will be from his shop.  Just pick your favorite design and it is likely coming from him.