Americans wagered $1.4bn on the Super Bowl 2025 alone, but liberals cunningly whitewash such excesses. Part 2 of a series on U.S. gambling.
According to an English proverb, the best throw of the dice is to throw them away.
Despite its perennial truth and undisputable usefulness, this sagacious advice has not been heeded in the US in recent times. Much to the delight of permissive liberals, the road to a brave new world of ever-expanding gambling and concomitant social control through entertainment is getting broader there in real time, while the path to virtue is shrinking at the speed of a roulette wheel that is spinning at full tilt. According to the magazine Economist, by 2030 people in the US could well bet a staggering $630bn online.
The recent breathtaking expansion of the gambling business in the US – especially the growth of non-traditional online variants – is partly due to dazzling legal breakthroughs in the country where streets were long believed to be paved with gold.
A crucial turning point in this regard was the decision adopted by the American Supreme Court in May 2018 to legalize commercial sports betting across the US. Among other things, this landmark reversal of an earlier wide-reaching federal ban suddenly made it possible for fans not only to enjoy sports games, but to wager on their outcomes, too – even after the action had already started.
As an example of the phenomenal growth of gambling, Americans, spurred on by a seemingly endless stream of ubiquitous and ensnaring adverts (which even target poor college students with misleading offers of seemingly “free” and virtually “risk-free” wagers) bet an estimated $1.4bn on Super Bowl LIX alone, according to the American Gaming Association (AGA), a leading national gambling trade group in the US.
Dramatic technological change has turned out to be another potent driver of this pernicious trend. The innovation-driven revolution is affecting both suppliers and consumers of gambling services, enabling more convenient and faster access to a more attractive and profitable offering.
For example, the gambling industry is increasingly using sophisticated augmented reality tools, which allow punters to immerse themselves in simulated virtual casinos populated by gambling personnel and other players. Trail-blazing artificial intelligence tools help gambling businesses to better analyze and predict consumer behavior (including granular gambling patterns), personalize their marketing approaches and raise their level of customer service, for example, through intelligent chatbots. The gambling experience is further improved by blockchain technology, which can increase the security of transactions, including interchanges without intermediaries paid for by crypto currency. Much of gambling nowadays occurs on convenient and enticing apps on mobile devices, making it possible for pikers and high-rollers to chance it everywhere 24/7.
All along this disruptive journey, the growth-enabling deregulation of games of chance is backed and fueled by the harmful sophistry of shrewd and sneaky liberals. Their interrelated techniques, which are used to rationalize, justify and promote other social sores, too, are distilled in my new model called the “Liberal Warfare Toolbox”.
My previous column covers two underhanded stratagems that are part of this toolbox. The first is appealing to a higher-order good, that is, negative freedom, while neglecting positive freedom – which I formally define as the state of an individual who, based on his rich knowledge of different options and highly developed power of discernment, is internally and externally resourced and empowered to achieve his voluntarily selected objectives in accordance with his freely chosen values that help him realize God’s plan for him and thus his full potential as a dignified human being. The second is delegitimizing and discrediting authority, damning the origins and proponents of disliked views to preclude debate.
There are several additional highly impactful methods of machination. Denying the plasticity of social reality and focusing on performance outcomes irrespective of ethical considerations is one of them.
3. Referring to immutable social laws and technocratic efficiency
A favorite technique used by lenient corruptors is to allege that there are immutable social laws, which, by definition, are immune to human interference. Those patterns are said to produce never changing empirical social realities in different spheres. An intricate logic and syntax of deception is used to sway the audience with this guileful stratagem.
For example, apodictic liberal polemicists are claiming that an almost irresistible tropotaxis towards gambling constitutes an unalterable part of human nature. This claim occasionally is backed up by seemingly authoritative sources. This can be done by referring to classical masterpieces of literature depicting plungers with a notorious, compulsive and high-strung gambling drive such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Gambler (1866).
Due to the presumed instinctive drive, so the argument proceeds, people will always engage in gambling – irrespective of the legal framework and its enforcement. So-called iteratives, a syntactical construction denoting repeated verbal action, are used as a persuasion technique in this contextual web. Those can be situated in the present or past and, among other things, be spotted by the appearance of the signaling word “whenever”.
Using a present-iterative to depict a repressive pattern that is deemed undesirable, a liberal sophist might propose the following seductive argument: Whenever gambling is prohibited, players tend to frequent underground casinos to engage in games of chance. And whenever gambling goes underground, crime, left free to flourish, will multiply in a wild west manner.
After vividly portraying this allegedly immutable social law, the permissive dissembler might put on a technocratic hat and appeal to efficiency devoid of ethics, reasoning as follows: Given that gambling will occur anyway, it is better to remove the respective restrictions so that it can take place in a transparent way and the observed fallout be easily addressed. An example of an after-action damage-reducing measure would be building a clinic that focuses on treating gambling addiction right next to a casino.
As an add-on to this argument, the happy-go-lucky seducer might highlight that legalized gambling also creates economic wealth directly and through spillover effects and yields significant tax revenues. Indeed, according to the AGA, US businesses specializing in gaming (which is a euphemism for gambling) support 1.8mn jobs, create an annual economic impact of $329bn and yield annual tax revenues of $53bn.
The crafty liberal argument can be dismantled by means of a stark counterexample that uses a comparable reasoning pattern and leads to an absurd conclusion. For example, it might be posited that there will always be murders, since the urge to kill a fellow human being is an immutable part of human nature. Given this alleged propensity to extinguish human life, it might be argued that it is more efficient to legalize murder and allow it to happen in a clearly defined space with the use of advanced drugs so that victims will not suffer and there is no need for a subsequent cleanup. To avoid excess, every person may only be allowed to murder one individual per month. As an add-on, one might point to the cost-savings accruing from dispensing with the need for investigating, prosecuting and punishing the crime of murder. Obviously, no person with a sound mind would concur with such an absurd argument but would urge its proponent to seek help in a psychiatric clinic.
Liberal apologists also use past-iteratives, which are used to depict repeated actions in time gone by. For example, they allege that whenever governments attempted to regulate gambling before, their interventions failed due to the presumed powerful human penchant to engage in games of chance. A recent usage of this scheme is the claim that the anti-gambling crusade of the Chinese government failed, even though the jury is still out on the issue of how the campaign fared in the final analysis. The permissive tricksters conclude that in view of the repeated failure of gambling regulation attempts in the past, future control efforts in this field are utterly futile and deregulation is the silver bullet for solving the perennial gambling problem.
This stratagem, like all the other instruments of machination in the “Liberal Warfare Toolbox”, is cunningly used in other contexts, too. Fortunately, though, once you have understood the knavish technique, it is easy to spot such applications. An example is the following deceiving argument, which, like many other usages of the ploy, exploit well-entrenched topoi (that is, widely accepted and therefore highly persuasive common places), which are often based on biases, prejudices, stereotypes and wrong assumptions, especially with regard to human nature and the alleged impossibility to cure or at least control it: Devil-may-care apologists claim that given human dispositions and propensities, Catholic priests, who are called to be celibate, are bound to break abstention rules and engage in lewd compensatory acts. Liberal tempters who are cunning as a fox conclude that given such a surmised psychological and behavioral pattern, it is better to abolish bigoted celibacy rules and allow priests to marry – even if this entails forming a homoerotic liaison, which in the Bible is classified as a mortal sin. As a bonus, such a radical reform is argued to increase the number of candidates for priesthood, which in many countries has been dwindling in recent years.
A similar subterfuge is the unscientific claim that there is a homoerotic gene – an assertion that can be easily debunked, since if this type of disordered behavior were to be hard-wired, strictly homoerotic people would have become extinct after a single generation, since they could not reproduce themselves. Due to this alleged immutable reality, duplicitous progressives argue that it would be unfair and ineffective to declare homoerotic acts as illegal (as has been the case even in modern Singapore, where such deviant behavior was criminalized according to Section 377A of the island state’s penal code until 2022).
Likewise, latitudinarians claim that due to human nature, there will always be prostitution. To vividly stress its alleged perennial nature and coat it in an aura of respectability, those corrupters echo an expression used by Rudyard Kipling in his short story On the City Wall (1889). More specifically, the progressive spin-doctors euphemistically and slyly call whoring the “most ancient profession in the world”. This is despite the fact that a plurality of reputable human endeavors merits this distinguished title. Examples include acting as a farmer, warrior, doctor, teacher and hierophant – or perhaps, in imitation of Adam and Eve, as a tailor! After all, according to the Book of Genesis, which tells the story of the creation of the world in poetical terms, this first human couple fashioned green perizomata (loincloths) for themselves by sewing fig leaves together.
On the basis of their assumption regarding human reality, moral perverters argue that it is better to legalize harlotry than quixotically trying to eradicate it. Such an approach, according to these doom-bringing sirens, has the presumed additional benefit of authorities being able to monitor the health of the service-providers. Rather conveniently, liberal impostors euphemistically restyle and upgrade those rakehells as “sex workers” to dodge the blows of opponents. As a result of health monitoring, so the casuist argument proceeds, there would be significantly less cases of sexually transmitted diseases (which, of course, would be zero if all acts of love were to take place exclusively in the only admissible framework for this purpose, that is, wedlock). Moreover, due to an improved health situation, the costs of providing medical care would be lower. Finally, proponents of legalized hooking point to the additional tax revenues accruing from this immoral industry.
A key problem of all these wily maneuvers aimed at whitewashing and destigmatizing disordered behavior is to deny its sinfulness, overlook the root causes of the social malaise, which lie in the corrupt heart of the debaucher, and to dogmatically refuse to cure them, as well as to prioritize damage removal over prevention. Yet sin does not disappear simply by calling it other names, but only through root-and-branch moral reform. The choices of the liberal inveiglers are inspired by materialistic positivism and a technocratic focus on efficiency devoid of Christian-humanistic values. These perverters deny the metaphysical existence of one God and the principles of true happiness laid down by him, which are echoed in the law of nature and in harmony with sound reasoning.
Fortunately, there is strong empirical evidence supporting the optimistic belief that social behavior is in fact malleable. On the one end of the spectrum, communists in the People’s Republic of China, through a powerful mix of education and coercion, managed to implement a one-child policy. At the outset of the campaign, it would have been hard to imagine that people would comply with such an outlandish government-ordained curtailment of the sacred freedom to reproduce.
Here is a more upbeat example on the other end of the spectrum: The standard method used by hands-off liberals for rejecting prohibition is to refer to an eponymous campaign rolled out in the US from 1920 to 1933, which they considered to have failed, since it yielded unintended consequences, such a rise in contraband activity. Yet the effective prohibition of drinking wine (khamr, which literally means wine made from grapes) and, by extension, ingesting any kind of intoxicants clouding the intellect in Islamic countries serves as a powerful counterexample demonstrating the plasticity even of hard-to-tackle problematic social phenomena such as excessive alcohol consumption.
Literally in the same breath with gambling (!), in the Holy Quran, drinking wine is branded a great sin in one decidedly balanced verse, which weighs its costs and benefits (Quran 2:219), and as a Satanic means of defilement in another one (Quran 5:90), which constitutes the only absolute prohibition of alcohol. In yet another verse, (Quran 5:91), the proscriptions are explained by reasoning that through wine and gambling, Satan sows enmity and hatred among people and turns them away from God.
Scientific studies reveal that the rate of alcohol consumption is significantly lower among Muslims than among adherents of other major religions that do not ban alcohol and among non-believers. For example, according to India’s 5th National Family Health Survey, only 6% of Indian male Muslims consumed alcohol, whereas among those who did not belong to a major world religion the respective share totaled 49% (see Figure 1).
The key reason for the comparative effectiveness of the alcohol ban among Muslims is the fact that it is religiously ordained and explained, as well as systemically reinforced by a functional social macro- and micro-context. The remaining possibility that deviant cases occur – as would be expected in a still imperfect world – does not tarnish the overall resounding success of the social reform.
Likewise, there are many edifying examples of saintly catholic priests who made great progress in curing disordered desires and thus proved the permissive anti-celibacy apologists wrong. The magic word in this context is sublimation. Put in a nutshell, rule-abiding priests correctly welcome celibacy as an empowering gift instead of loathing it because they erroneously view it as a debilitating fetter. Spurred by this positive attitude, they gracefully channel unclean urges into morally acceptable and productive outlets. As a result, they happily give birth to a large cohort of spiritual children, who become part of their faith-based family, instead of physical ones. The latter are the wonderful gifts bestowed on married couples, who are endowed with a different calling than priests.
Those who criticize only moderately successful social reformers for having made solely insignificant incremental progress not worth the effort, or, in case there has been overwhelming success, assert that the ills have not been completely removed and therefore brand efforts at combatting them futile use several Machiavellian ploys at once. Those include the fallacy of the continuum, which entails claiming that small improvements do not make a real qualitative difference, or, in more lucid terms, that one more hair does not transform a man without facial hair into a bearded man (even though you can clearly distinguish both variants!). The liberal tricksters also resort to the fallacious technique of voicing nothing but objections, a method through which you can bury virtually any proposal, and the perfectionist’s critique, demanding things that (at least in the short run) are impossible.
However, as predicted by “broken window” theory, even small changes targeting low-hanging fruits, such as closing down a few highly visible houses of ill repute, can build momentum for eventual inflective transformation. This is surely the case if in the given context, the Pareto principle of factor sparsity applies whereby 80% of consequences are caused by the famous 20% “vital few” drivers. Such targeted initial action can also help to prevent damage, which is much better than allowing harm to happen and then cleaning up after disaster has already struck.
Moreover, getting a large part of a job done even if some work remains to be completed can often constitute a great success to which no reasonable person will object. For example, it obviously makes a real qualitative difference and matters tremendously for society whether, due to valuable social taboos transmitted across myriads of generations, tough laws and their almost perfect enforcement in a well-functioning system, there is only a relatively small number of hidden and non-organized Magdalenes left, which are branded anti-social parasites, or whether the social evil is produced on an industrial scale. There is also a world of difference as to whether, after a crackdown on gambling, only a few underground casinos are remaining, which are frequented by a small number of die-hard gamesters, or people en masse are putting their head on the block in legalized bets.
Liberal ideologues and activists have got an even greater number of poisoned arrows in their quiver, though, which – far from adopting a lackadaisical approach that befits a dégagé leftist – they use vigorously in the manner of crusading warriors to account for, vindicate and foster gambling deregulation and a permissive stance towards other social sores.
