Why John Oliver Blatantly Lied To You About Online Gambling
The anti-online gambling effort increasingly looks like a foreign political op
Today tens of millions of Americans will happily place a billion bets they know they will lose. The tradition of March Madness office pools, one of the healthiest forms of camaraderie-based parlay gambling, will take place all across America, with people who have never seen a single game played by any college basketball team this season picking UC San Diego over Michigan, because they know a guy who knows ball and he has a feeling. Or, even more popular, the all-mascot bracket, which will struggle with this year’s Houston-SIU game – because they’re both the Cougars. Best to flip a coin? (Houston by a million points – this is not gambling advice.)
Thanks to the hook of this annual March Madness tradition, John Oliver, Britain’s most patronizing Puritan Peanut Man export, took to the airwaves on Last Week Tonight to unleash a 32-minute viral rant against online sports gambling that managed to combine nearly every false narrative, flimsy claim and shrieking catastrophized fear mongering you may have read of late in the writing of journalists who are deep down just mad at themselves that their Chiefs-Kelce-Gatorade color parlay didn’t hit last month.
The central absurdity of the American anti-online gambling movement is its ignorance of the alternative. With the exception of a few prudish authoritarian conservatives, there is a noticeable lack of great social conservative prohibition movement against online sports gambling. Perhaps this speaks to the popularity of the major sports among red state communities (gambling is a great uniter – a Pew study found that Democrats and Republicans gamble at similar levels). Or perhaps it’s because the major funders pushing against online gambling in the United States are foreigners – particularly, foreigners who are working not out of an altruistic motive, but because they profit from the alternative scenario.
As a member of the generation of Americans who emerged from college at the height of the worldwide poker craze, I and my cohort are well aware of the ease of access to offshore betting markets and gambling apps of dubious legality – as well as the even seedier world of bookies and criminal enterprises whose threats go far beyond getting banned from apps. The illegal marketplace in gambling is enormous. The American Gambling Association estimates that Americans bet over half a trillion a year on illegal or unauthorized books, including “nearly $64 billion with illegal online sportsbooks and bookies; another $338 billion with illegal online casinos; and up to $109 billion on more than 580,000 unrelated gaming machines.” The marketplace for illegal gaming dwarfs legal gaming – no wonder, considering it hasn’t even been legal for a decade – yet Oliver never bothered to mention this fact.
This is the fundamental problem with the conservative prudes who tut tut about the need for prohibition. They don’t seem to ever acknowledge or understand that their concept of a ban is simply a reversion to the prior state of things, where untaxed, unregulated and zero transparency books have far more latitude to rip off gamblers – particularly those who are prone to addiction – without any customer protections. For legal books, all these aspects are mandatory, or the regulators will fine them and shut them down.
Oliver also lied to his audience about the state of marketing gambling on college campuses. Early agreements that were signed by multiple books were rolled back after regulators questioned the practice of marketing gambling to college students under the age of 21 – but Last Week Tonight falsely presented old material as if it was still currently happening.
Perhaps the most egregious aspect of Oliver’s rant was the presentation of British leftist Matt Zarb-Cousin as a neutrally minded altruistic vocate, when he is in reality the CEO of Gamban, a company that contracts with states to block people from gambling online. Their whole business model runs on selling contracts to states and companies to restrict problem gamblers – literally profiting from the restrictions they push. It’s a similar tale with another foreigner backing anti-American online gambling campaigns, Labour backer Derek Webb, whose profit motive is tied to boosting land based casinos over the online variety.
Consider it a standing rule: when someone lectures you about the evils of online gaming, always check and see if they stand to profit from their argument. More often than not, it turns out they’re rooting for gamblor, just by different means.
When you take a step back from the oversaturated market of apocalyptic predictions regarding legalized gambling – including studies that range from the flimsy to the outright ridiculous (one widely cited survey relied on Facebook searches and stadium proximity to claim online gambling coincided with an increase in emotional toxicity and domestic violence) – what you can actually see is an activity that lends itself to entertainment and enjoyment for the overwhelming majority of sports fans.
In fact, according to a Southern Methodist University study that looked at hundreds of thousands of sports bettors over the course of five years, the cost of the median online deposit from 2019 to 2023 amounts to a random date night at Outback Steakhouse: $136. And that’s over five years. People will spend more on that today just watching the afternoon games in Buffalo Wild Wings. It wouldn’t even buy you half a ticket to the Final Four.
To suggest that online gambling is a social ill even approaching the level of alcohol or drugs would require a vast number of Americans to be the everyday equivalent of Hunter Biden. It’s just not true to claim they are. And the people who do, whose fake holier-than-thou altruism would drive the most at-risk people back to illegal marketplaces to bankrupt themselves at will, are going to continue to lose. Americans are risk takers. We don’t like a stick in the mud. We like to gamble. How else are we going to make Drake-Mizzou interesting?
Now if you don’t mind, I’m off to enter my two brackets as I do every year – both for pools overwhelmingly filled with journalists and media figures, several of whom are paid by the very same people who pay John Oliver. Let’s go, Cougars.
Is Chuck Schumer Living on Borrowed Time?
The rapid nature of the turn against Chuck Schumer, ostensibly the most powerful Democrat in Washington as Senate Minority Leader, is a sign of a Democratic Party in utter chaos. Axios reports today that the calls from House Democrats for Schumer to step down from his post have already begun, following on outside progressive groups who deemed him unworthy as a wartime consigliere. The colossal miscalculation of standing up the possibility of fighting only to cave immediately to keep the government from shutting down has consequences. For the aging Senator who has held on so long, his spectacles perched at the edge of his nose, it seems like he is living on borrowed time.
Progressives may have a rehab program in mind, but how long can that last? In just six months, Schumer will once again be faced with spending choices that could lead him to play Charlie Brown with the football once again – a status no leader wants, but one teed up by the diminutive leadership of a toothless Democrat House. Their demands, in triplicate, are ridiculous on their face:
The groups want to influence the discussion earlier in the process and a more proactive plan to battle Republicans
Elevate younger voices in the party, especially Senators Chris Murphy and Brian Schatz and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Schumer brought Murphy and Senator Cory Booker, known for their media savvy, into his leadership team this year
Go on offense. They want more fight from Schumer – and are pushing him to encourage his members to host town halls in their states’ redder areas if the GOP representatives don’t. ‘It is a source of real pain for the Republican party when veterans and Trump voters in Republican districts have a voice,’ PCCC co-founder Adam Green told Axios
Yes, that’s what America wants from Democrats – more Chris Murphy, more Brian Schatz, come on down! – as if that is something Schumer was working to prevent. But Nancy Pelosi, the Italian Emerita Speaker could not resist twisting the knife into Schumer’s side, leaning into the obvious: if you’re good at something, never do it for free. Per Politico:
“I myself don’t give away anything for nothing,” Pelosi told reporters during a news conference at a children’s hospital in San Francisco. “I think that’s what happened the other day.”
“We could have, in my view, perhaps, gotten them to agree to a third way,” Pelosi said. She said a potential outcome could have been a bipartisan continuing resolution to delay a shutdown for up to four weeks while negotiations continued.
She added, “They may not have agreed to it, but at least the public would have seen they’re not agreeing to it – and that then they would have been shutting (the) government down.”
The problem for Schumer – currently on an aborted book tour, but still managing embarrassing appearances on CBS and The View – is that he doesn’t really have an answer that satisfies his left flank at all. Instead, he’s reduced to arguing against his fellow Democrats that no, it’s not time to go. It has shades of Joe Biden in his senility – an old man, clinging to power, damaging his party, unwilling to do the one thing they need to rip off the Band-Aid and start healing again.
More here from Politico, and from The New Republic.
Democrats Face Angry Constituents, Republicans Face Cursing Partisans
Congressional Democrats — who were hoping to blast Republicans over budget cuts — instead took incoming from their exasperated constituents when they traveled home to host town halls.
In Arizona, Sens. Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly were confronted at a joint forum Monday by an attendee demanding to know if they “would support removing” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. In Oregon, an audience member told Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Janelle Bynum on Sunday that he is “so pissed off right now at the leadership in the United States Senate that they are not willing to step up and fight.”
“Schumer has done what I think is the most destructive thing that he could possibly do as Democratic leader,” another cried on Saturday to Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont.
And those reactions were relatively mild compared to the scene that played out in the Washington suburbs Tuesday night when Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) held a town hall.
“You’re not fighting!” one woman shouted from the balcony, before being escorted out. “We are suffering!”
If Democrats were wondering where their 2017-era grassroots resistance army had gone, they’ve found their answer. Schumer’s willingness to vote with Republicans to advance a spending bill — and avoid a shutdown — has enraged the Democratic faithful not just in Washington, but across the nation. The blast radius is spreading throughout the party, far beyond Schumer.
In testy exchanges, town hall attendees pressed congressional Democrats to stop trying to strike compromises with Republicans, to adopt a stance that matches the gravity of the moment and to cease using court rulings or the midterms as their solution. What many hoped could have been a unifying force — a principle-driven government shutdown — exposed deep cleavages in a party still smarting from widespread losses last fall.
U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman walked right into a hornet’s nest Wednesday night.
More than 500 people packed into the Gryphon Theatre at the Laramie Civic Center for her town hall, with at least 75% there to oppose her, a startling dynamic in the deeply Republican state of Wyoming.
It continued a trend of Democrats and those who oppose President Donald Trump and his policies, and Hageman’s support of them, challenging her during a series of her events over the past week.
Things in Laramie turned ugly from the get-go, with some people screaming profanities and flashing the middle finger to Hageman as soon as she took the stage.
But Hageman would not back down, staying on stage for more than 45 minutes and telling the audience that they were behaving in an embarrassing manner.
At one point she urged them to stop screaming or they might have a heart attack…
David Wilhelms, who organized a pre-town hall rally against Hageman, told Cowboy State Daily before the event that he appreciated that she was holding the town hall despite not agreeing with her politics. But much of the audience didn’t show the same appreciation.
Wilhelms and Albany County Democratic Party Chair Klaus Halbsgut both promoted the event beforehand as an opportunity to conduct civil discourse with Hageman and let her answer their questions better than a similarly raucous town hall in Rock Springs.
Halsbgut said absolutely nothing was achieved Wednesday, lamenting that the heckling was out of control and not productive.
“We are better than this,” Halbsgut told Cowboy State Daily. “This doesn’t represent Albany County, I’ve lived here too long. I’m heartbroken. This is not who we are.”
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Quote
“And as for my gambling, it's true I lost it all a few times. But that's because I always took the long shot and it never came in. But I still have some time before I cross that river. And if you're at the table and you're rolling them bones, then there's no money in playing it safe. You have to take all your chips and put them on double six and watch as every eye goes to you and then to those red dice doing their wild dance and freezing time before finding the cruel green felt.”
“I've been lucky.”
— Norm Macdonald