How Trump is already narrowing America's racial divide

 Even before he takes the oath of office next week, Donald Trump has already accomplished the most incredible comeback in American political history.

In the space of four years, he's gone from being universally banned by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Spotify, Snapchat, Instagram, Shopify, Reddit, Twitch, TikTok and Pinterest to most of these companies donating to his inaugural celebration and their CEOs clamoring for invites to dinner at Mar-a-Lago with him.

Trump's 2024 election, I predict, will still be written about as an epochal event in American history long after everyone reading this today is long gone.
But that's for future historians to decide.

For the present, Trump's done something even more remarkable than engineer a 312 electoral vote landslide comeback that will be talked about for generations. His monumental 2024 presidential win has done something Trump's most ardent critics never believed was possible – he's produced the least racially polarized presidential win since before the Civil Rights Movement.

Let me repeat that because it's such a staggering and monumental achievement – Trump's 2024 presidential victory is the least racially polarized presidential election win since Lyndon Johnson's in 1964.

That is, White, Black, Asian and Hispanic voters cast ballots that were less racially divisive than at any moment, nearly, in the lives of anyone reading this column today.

Yep, unless you were born in 1946 or before, you've never voted in a presidential election where the races were less divided, where Americans of all colors were more similar in their voting habits.

Not Ronald Reagan in 1984, not Barack Obama in 2008, Trump's win in 2024 brought the races closer together than any election in 60 years.

Doesn't it seem like this fact should be everywhere?

Yet, astoundingly, I bet many of you haven't heard or read any discussion of this at all.

That's because there is often far more money to be made tearing us apart than celebrating how similar we all are.

Indeed, Trump's popular vote coalition may be the most remarkable achievement of his entire political career and it offers an incredible moment of optimism for those of us who have grown accustomed to constant rancor and division.

With a surge in Hispanic, Asian and Black support, Trump moved all 50 states red, won all seven battleground states, and drove a stake into the toxic cancer of identity politics, the root cause of so much hate and division in our country, hopefully once and for all.

How did this happen? How did the man most in the legacy media have spent nine years attacking as America's own version of Adolf Hitler manage to bring so many different people from so many different racial backgrounds into his coalition?

I think the answer is simple: many people of all races came to see the lies they'd been told by the legacy media. Many of these voters weren't just voting for Trump, they were specifically voting against the very people who gave us the Charlottesville hoax and the censorship of the truth during COVID. Trump's win was a statement in support of free speech and the marketplace of ideas.

It was, of course, also an overwhelming rejection of President Biden's economic policies, of our wide open border, and of a rise in violent crime and lenient treatment for those guilty of violent crime.

As I've been saying for some time, this was an EBC election, economy, border and crime.

Everybody, regardless of race, cares about pocketbook issues, the rule of law, and locking up violent criminals.

How else to explain the dramatic growth in Trump voting support? Remember, back in 2016 Trump won the election with 65.8 million votes. By 2024, he would receive 77.3 million votes. So during a nine-year period when the legacy media mercilessly attacked him and claimed he was HItler, Trump gained roughly 12 million votes.

Where did most of these votes come from?

The data tells us – minorities and young men.

Consider, in 2020 – according to the Wall Street Journal, citing AP votecast data – Joe Biden won Black voters by 83 points. By 2024, Kamala beat Trump by just 67 points among Black voters. That's a net move of 16% of Black voters toward Trump, a seismic shift in a short period of time.

Hispanic voters moved in Trump's direction in a massive way too.

In 2020, Joe Biden won Hispanic voters by 28 points. By 2024, Kamala's margin was just 14, a net gain of 14 points for Trump.

Since 2020, Asian voters, similarly, according to Edison Research, have moved from voting for Biden by 27 points to voting for Kamala by 15 points in 2024, a net gain of 12 points for Trump. 

In an election where each side often fights for a point or two on the margins, a double-digit increase in Black, Hispanic and Asian voters for Trump is a political earthquake.

And where did many of these gains come from for Trump? With young men ages 18 to 29 who voted for him by a whopping 14 points. That's a huge victory for Trump by any measure, but it gets even more staggering when you consider that Biden won men 18-29 by 15 points in 2020. So young men moved 29 points toward Trump in just four years.

Putting this into further context, the two most conservative voting groups in America by age in 2024 were men 65 and older and men 18-29 – both of those groups backed Trump by margins of more than 14.

What explains this sudden alignment between older and younger men? Especially since older men tend to be much less racially diverse than younger men?

It's simple, young men of all races are overwhelmingly rejecting woke culture and voting in a similar direction across racial lines.

That is, the identity politics era, especially for young men, is over.
They recognize, better than most, the lies they've been fed.

Indeed, data suggests young men 14-17 years old, the next age cohort that will be eligible to vote in 2028 are even more conservative than their older brothers. Republicans, if they run a strong campaign in 2028 and deliver on economic promises, stand to increase margins among these voters.  

There's been much discussion about how this surge in young male support came to happen – a focus on male-focused podcasts and sports, for instance, by the Trump campaign – but less discussion about what it means when it comes to the racial polarization of America, namely it's all collapsing.

The race baiters who constantly seek to divide us based on the color of our skin are losing in the marketplace of ideas.

Americans of all races are rejecting their arguments and their divisive tactics.

At long last we are moving closer toward Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of a free and equal society that isn't defined by race.

I could write an entire book on this election's seismic impact – and maybe, I should, but that's for the future.

For now, as Trump prepares for his inauguration on Jan. 20, what I'd like for all Americans, regardless of race, to know is that at long last, it has been three generations since the racial divide was less pronounced in American presidential politics.

So as the inauguration nears, I'm incredibly optimistic about what Trump will accomplish for all of us, but even more astounded by what he's already done – bringing the races closer together than we've been in three generations.

That doesn't mean America's perfect, but it certainly does suggest that we are continuing to form a more perfect union where all of us can be judged by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin.  

Clay Travis is the founder of the fastest-growing national multimedia platform, OutKick, which produces and distributes engaging content across sports and pop culture to millions of fans across the country. OutKick was created by Travis in 2011 and sold to the Fox Corporation in 2021. One of the most electrifying and outspoken personalities in the industry, Travis hosts OutKick The Show where he provides his unfiltered opinion on the most compelling headlines throughout sports, culture, and politics. He also makes regular appearances on FOX News Media as a contributor providing analysis on a variety of subjects ranging from sports news to the cultural landscape. 

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/clay-travis-how-trump-already-narrowing-americas-racial-divide

Good Riddance Jake Sullivan - The Architect of America's Long and Winding Decline

 President Biden's National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, appeared on CNN on Sunday for his last national TV appearance. Speaking to a friendly Jake Tapper, who never challenged him throughout the interview, Sullivan said, incredibly: "The American people are safer, and the country is better off than we were four years ago."

It was classic "All-hat-no-cattle" Sullivan who conveniently ignored that his candidate, Kamala Harris, received such a drubbing in November that the Democrats will feel it for years. Sullivan went out of his way to insist that the voters chose Trump because of inflation and that, on national security, Americans were better off under Biden.

Here is our fact-based assessment of Sullivan's record, which contradicts his revisionist attempt to portray himself as a national security superhero.

Biden Administration - Afghanistan. Sullivan's primary failure occurred in Afghanistan when America left behind over $80 billion in weapons to the Taliban—the very organization that Washington spent 20 years, trillions of dollars, and sacrificed the lives and limbs of thousands of American soldiers fighting for a lost cause.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words: The Defining Image of Biden-Sullivan's Failed Foreign Policy

Today, Afghanistan faces a complex and dire situation characterized by a profound humanitarian, economic, and human rights crisis under Taliban rule. Over 28 million people, or two-thirds of the population, require humanitarian assistance due to acute food insecurity, with millions facing emergency levels of hunger. Child malnutrition rates are alarmingly high, and there are reports of increased gender-based violence and child marriage due to economic desperation.

Pre-Biden Administration years. Sullivan has been wrong in every foreign policy decision he has made. In February 2013, as then-Vice President Biden's top security aide, he became the Obama administration's point man for Libya, Syria, and Myanmar. The needle has not moved towards improvement in any of the three countries.

Libya is yet to recover from NATO's actions to remove its leader, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011. Human Rights Watch says Libya has continued to experience mass displacement, dangers caused by newly-laid landmines, and the destruction of critical infrastructure, including healthcare and schools. Foreign fighters are everywhere, pushing Libyans to flee when Europe is in no position to accept more refugees.

Syria embraced Russia as its savior, and America lost its regional influence. It is only in the last month that Damascus fell, marking a significant shift in the Syrian conflict. Sullivan had little to do with these developments, as most of the Western world was surprised by the fast pace of events. Today, America, Turkey, and Israel are attempting to influence the way forward in Damascus, and no one knows the outcome.

Myanmar underwent a coup in 2021 and continues the wholesale displacement of Rohingya Muslims and other minority groups that began in 2017.

Biden Administration—Ukraine. Sullivan will be remembered as the U.S. official who, along with Secretary Antony Blinken and former State Department official Victoria Nuland, brought America closer to nuclear conflict than at any time since JFK's Cuban Missile Crisis.

The U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland leaves the Russian Foreign Ministry headquarters after meeting with the Russian deputy foreign minister in Moscow on October 12, 2021. Photo by ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images.

On November 10, 2021, Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan persuaded President Biden to enter into a strategic security agreement with Ukraine with an entire section devoted to countering Russian aggression that had not yet happened. When Moscow protested that the move was an existential threat to Russia and violated Russia's expectations that Ukraine should remain neutral, Sullivan doubled down, ultimately leading to the invasion in February 2022. The brave Ukrainians repelled the Russians from Kyiv's outskirts but, recognizing the folly of fighting a war with their larger neighbor, were ready to enter into a peace agreement with Russia in Istanbul. Sullivan threw cold water on the idea and urged the Ukrainian President, through former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, to abandon peace talks.

In July 2022, we noted how Jake Sullivan, President Biden's National Security Adviser, had committed a $600 billion blunder by steadfastly committing America to a difficult-to-win war in Ukraine. Sullivan, always an uber-confident TV personality, declared subsequently that the United States would respond decisively to any Russian use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine and spelled out to Moscow the "catastrophic consequences" it would face.

On Sunday with Tapper, Sullivan argued that the United States is the moral leader of the Free World, protecting the liberal order that has existed since World War II. He insisted that the West is more united now than ever before, with Finland and Sweden now being members of NATO.

What Sullivan did not concede was the cost to the world to further his Utopian goals. In reality, Russia now controls all of Ukraine's southeast, a mineral-rich region that forms a land bridge connecting mainland Russia to Crimea along the Sea of Azov. The grinding war has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands, propelled a refugee crisis that has displaced more than four and a half million people, and brought us to the brink of a global humanitarian crisis, with people hungry for food, energy, and fertilizer. Thanks to the war, Europe, the hub of the world's green energy movement, is returning to coal. Ukraine continues to lose territory despite receiving over $200 billion in recent American assistance.

Infographic Dated August 24, 2024

Sullivan's mantra has been that Russia has to be punished for interfering in the sovereign choices of another nation and invading its territory, upsetting the rules of the world order. However, most of the world's population rejects this argument.

They point out how NATO has been interfering in Russia's security by expanding the alliance to Russia's very borders. Before 1990, dating back to NATO's founding in 1949, the coalition had 16 nations. After the Cold War ended, NATO expanded steadily and, as of 2025, has 31 members. Russia saw an existential threat in NATO growing to Ukraine, a point which drew sympathy from countries like China, India, Brazil, and South Africa. Besides, these countries saw Western hypocrisy when the West helped engineer regime changes in Kyiv in 2014. As we have noted, America has been interfering in Ukraine since 2007.

Under Sullivan, America's global standing has suffered immensely. In recent weeks, Ukraine has taken the offensive against Russia by invading it with Western weapons. Russia is now dangerously close to a war with NATO.

Meanwhile, in Israel, American hostages are still being held by Hamas. The conflict has drawn widespread attention, with significant regional implications.

Sullivan's leadership has driven Russia and China closer together, repeatedly declaring a "partnership without limits." Saudi Arabia abandoned a 50-year agreement to stick with the dollar for its oil trades and is moving closer to Iran and China. North Korea signed a technology transfer agreement with Russia in return for sending Moscow weapons, mortars, and now soldiers.

No well-meaning and thoughtful future Democratic administration would ever consider bringing Sullivan back to the national defense scene. His failures are so extreme that it is fascinating that he even agreed to appear before the American people on Sunday. A more decent human being would have bowed his head in shame for the havoc he has caused and quietly ridden away into the sunset.

https://tippinsights.com/good-riddance-jake-sullivan-the-architect-of-americas-long-and-winding-decline/

Pardon Every Single J6 Political Prisoner

 Hey, did you hear about that Trump-loving J6 couple who threw a bomb and permanently injured a cop? He got five years. His wife got no years. Yeah, those J6ers really got off easy. Oh, wait, my mistake. They were not J6 defendants. They were a couple of Antifa scumbags who were mad because conservative commentator Michael Knowles was going to speak about transgender baloney. Instead of being treated with the same scorn and harshness that the J6 defendants have been, this federal judge actually said they were something along the lines of very fine people. How many years do you think a J6 defendant would get if he permanently injured a cop with a bomb? About a million. But there’s a vital difference. The Biden Administration (sic) likes Antifa terrorists and hates patriots.

The fact is we have a dual-track justice system, which is intolerable. That means we must not tolerate it. That means we must not accept it. That means we must not pretend that any verdict rendered by it is fair or valid. That means we must not allow the people who imposed it upon us in order to silence us, intimidate us, and exact vengeance upon us for the crime of defying them to succeed. 

All of the J6 prosecutions are illegitimate, not because the actions of the J6 defendants are all pristine – the vast majority are guilty only of thinking that as part of the People, they had a right to walk through the People’s House – but because they were not treated exactly the same way as those politically aligned with the people persecuting them. And there is no way to undo the taint of the two-tier justice system. There are reports that President Trump will commute sentences to get people out of prison, then follow up with a pardon “process” to evaluate each conviction. No, no, no. Every conviction – every single one, including those by people forced to plead guilty (and they were forced) – is tainted by the actions of the DOJ, the actions of biased judges, and the fact that the venue in DC was manifestly unjust. No J6 conviction can stand. Every conviction was unfair and unjust.

Donald Trump must undo this grave injustice. He must pardon every single J6 defendant/political prisoner – every single one of them (and no, I don’t mean the government flunkies). I don’t care if they walked through the rotunda taking selfies. I don’t care if they looted Nancy Pelosi’s vast booze stockpile. I don’t even care if they slugged a cop. Leftists beat up cops – and worse – all over the country during the riots after the death of that scumbag drug addict felon, and they were not treated exactly the same way as the J6ers. Their charges were dismissed or minimized. They got breaks and excused. They weren’t subject to Javert-like persecutions by deep state Democrats, which included being arrested by SWAT teams, held without bail for extended periods, tortured in the DC jails, charged with crimes that were not crimes, “defended” by leftist public defenders who wanted to see them convicted, tried by judges who had already demonstrated their bias, convicted by partisan 95%+ Democrat DC juries, and sentenced to ridiculously long prison terms.

The savage cruelty and maliciousness of the corrupt Department of Justice and FBI must be repudiated. President Donald Trump must pardon every single one of their victims. There is no other alternative. There is no compromise. Anything less than a total repudiation of this pogrom validates the unspeakable evil perpetrated upon these patriotic citizens. And that’s not all. President Trump should also apologize to them on behalf of the American people and government, as well as direct the Department of Justice to settle their multimillion-dollar civil rights claims without litigation. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It all starts with pardoning every single one of them on Day One of the Trump 2.0 administration. Not commuting – commuting implies some validity to the convictions – but pardoning, because prosecutions that are unjust cannot stand in whole or part, and every single one in those kangaroo courts was unjust.

The left will cry, and that’s good. They need to lose. They need to see what they’ve done come to naught. And they need to be held accountable. The government employees who were behind these atrocities – the prosecutors, the FBI agents, the brutal prison guard thugs – must all be identified and must all be prosecuted where appropriate – unlike them, we are not going to frame or coerce our opponents. We are going to hold them accountable. We cannot let this go. We cannot let this pass. And we certainly cannot abandon the people who have been tortured not because of what they allegedly did but because of who they voted for.

It is a feature and not a bug that the Democrats and the regime media lackeys will be outraged by this righteous act of justice. They need to be angry and shown that they cannot win. This is an important object lesson. The J6 vendetta was a disgraceful crime far exceeding the fake crimes in American history – like “McCarthyism” – the leftists always whine about. But there will also be Republicans who are going to cry about this, and they’re wrong to do so. They’re wrong to do so because the vital issue is not whether some individual went too far on January 6. This is about a systemic persecution of American citizens not resulting from an individualized consideration of their exact circumstances but simply because they were affiliated with the out-of-power party. You cannot tolerate this in a free society. If you do tolerate this, it stops being a free society. 

And to tolerate this because of some lame cliche like “respecting the rule of law” is ridiculous – these prosecutions themselves are a direct assault upon the rule of law. To give these charges and convictions any credibility at all, whether the person is accused of trespassing or punching a flatfoot, is to accept a two-tier justice system. That’s why the notion that people convicted of “violence” should not be pardoned is so misguided. To accept the validity of any J6 judicial proceeding is to accept that these biased, tyrannical prosecutions could ever generate a just result. A two-tier justice system targeting our people in a biased venue in front of biased judges via misapplied statutes can never deliver a just result. None of the proceedings undertaken against these J6 defendants could ever be just. Every single prosecution was and is absolutely corrupt. Every single trial verdict was fatally tainted. Every guilty plea was presumptively coerced. 

None of them can be upheld. To try to pick and choose between the allegedly deserving and allegedly undeserving J6 defendants ignores the reality that every single conviction is morally tainted and must be undone. The only way to obtain justice is by pardoning every single one of them – and then paying them compensation for the gross violations of their civil rights.

As a practical matter, every single one of them must also be pardoned immediately because going through a process of picking and choosing between them to decide who is worthy will take time. These citizens have all suffered enough from this injustice. An allegedly deserving J6 defendant should not wait one more second for his unjust conviction to be washed away and his life to be allowed to begin again while staffers pour over court records trying to pick and choose between who should be pardoned and who shouldn’t be based on some arbitrary criteria, while implicitly assuming that this two-tier justice system could ever be just. If you accept the deserving/undeserving paradigm – which I do not – it is still better that ten allegedly undeserving defendants be pardoned than one deserving defendant spend one single additional day in jail or be burdened by an unjust conviction.

So, the President must pardon every single one of them on January 20.

The New Rules require these pardons as well. Joe Biden has already pardoned his scumbag son, as well as commuted the sentences of 1,300 criminals, including perverts, spies, and even a cartoonishly villainous judge who took kickbacks to imprison kids in a private reformatory. It is almost certain President Demento – or whoever is making decisions for him because, at this point, he’s a human eggplant – will pardon a whole bunch of other scumbags in his inner circle, as well as trash like Liz Cheney and Anthony Fauci. But that’s OK. Their undeserved pardons would provide cover from the whiners for the J6 pardons.

President Trump cannot face his own supporters having let his own people rot while actual criminals who are Democrats get off free. President Trump should rip off the bandage and pardon every single one of them just as soon as he takes his hand off the Bible. By doing it all at once, he will create a media firestorm focused on the pardons that will draw attention away from the dozens of other vital, but potentially controversial, things that he will do that first day. As his enemies focus their fire on the pardons, all the other important stuff will slip through the cracks.

The dual-track justice system of the last four years is intolerable, and what is intolerable must not be tolerated. To do anything but pardon every single one of the J6 defendants is to tolerate this disgusting and disgraceful campaign of persecution. The entire leftist jihad against J6 protesters is tainted and has been illegitimate from the start and throughout. To allow this charade to continue is an injustice to the President's supporters who have been persecuted, and it is an insult to the United States of America and our Constitution. The Founders, in their wisdom, provided a means for the President to undo this kind of malicious prosecution, and he should absolutely exercise it. The screams and moans of the Democrats and their regime media flunkies will only make doing the right thing that much sweeter.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2025/01/16/pardon-every-single-j6-political-prisoner-every-single-one-n2650552

Rise of Gambling Addiction: Another Cost of Covid

W ill Kansas City win a third Super Bowl in a row? Many US football fans will think so, but how many will bet on it?

Sports gambling skyrocketed during the pandemic and given the revenues for companies like FanDuel and DraftKings, it looks like it’s only accelerated since. But at what cost? Is it all fun or are some people losing their shirts and their families? 

Companies like FanDuel and DraftKings offer tempting “matches” so that they will often give a gambler a 25%, 50%, or even 100% match on deposited funds. So with a 50% match, a $1,000 deposit would become $1,500. The only condition is that you bet the total amount before you can withdraw anything. And once you start betting a lot, it’s hard to stop. Experts explain how gambling rewires the brain much like certain drugs.

I’ve met a few very successful gamblers and a key lesson I learned talking to “winners” is “It’s not how often you win, but that when you win you have to win big.” 

The middlemen, the bookies, and the FanDuels of the world have the odds stacked in their favor. As I looked at my own gambling, the spread (if you backed both sides to win) is often well over 9% even on big markets like NFL or NBA games, and over 30% on lesser sports such as smaller tennis or golf tournaments. At the Paris Olympics, where recent data were limited since competitors had not faced one another in months or even years, the spreads were over 60%.

Compare this to trading a stock like Apple, where the spread is less than one percent. The large spreads mean bookmakers make a lot of money as long as enough people take both sides of a bet. It’s why gambling companies give people so much money, or boost potential profits on individual bets, because they know that as long as the market is large enough their returns will be significant. 

In essence, to win any money at all over time you have to beat random chance by well over 9%, and probably closer to 15%. I never did, which is why I lost thousands of dollars.

Successful professional sports gamblers bet large amounts on specific sports they know very well and only when the odds are favorable. In other words, they are patient, have a plan, and stick to it. Betting smaller amounts regularly on sports where there is a lot of randomness, or where one doesn’t have specialist knowledge, is doomed to failure.

Big Market for Suckers

The market for US online sports gambling was estimated at over $91 billion in 2023, with an annualized growth rate of over ten percent, projected to rise to $245 billion in a decade. Over half the US states ban gambling so as those restrictions likely ease, revenue may rise well above the trend. 

Other nations have seen the same growth. On a per capita basis Australia has an even larger market than the US at over $4.5 billion this year. Over a fifth of the population (5.6m) will be gambling online within a few years. Canada may have an even higher number of players per capita.

Infant Market Participants Crave Market Share

Part of the reason companies are so generous with matches, profit boosts, and other gifts is that new markets often have lots of entrants which are whittled down to a handful in more mature markets. FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Pointsbet, ESPN Bet, Bet365, Fanatics, HardRock Bet, Caesars, BetRivers, BallyBet, and dozens of smaller companies or sport-specific groups are vying for market share. Most will probably not survive, and their client lists will be sold to the highest bidders. None of these companies are consistently profitable yet, so the player incentives will continue until the weaker companies are culled.

Gambling Problems: The Nasty Side of Sports Betting

Most men don’t talk about their failings, especially the stiff-upper-lip sporty types. I casually mentioned to someone I had just played golf with that I lost $100 on a bet on a tennis match while we were golfing. He said his son won $17,000 the night before on a football parlay (several linked bets). Others were amazed by this success since they usually lost. This opened up a broader discussion amongst seven men at the bar; five of whom had gambled within the previous week. These were all middle-class professionals; two ran their own businesses, one was a lawyer, another a physician, and another a banker. While their careers had had volatility most had stable jobs, and all said they bet online because they were bored, and it provided excitement. And it all started during Covid when they were unable to undertake their normal leisure activities. I’m not sure if any would have admitted to massive losses but their tone suggested all lost.

I pushed them and others for more information and got some suggestions of others to talk to who had admitted to a gambling problem. I learned about VIP programs at the big gambling companies, where an online host would be in regular touch to make offers, deposit matches, play to gets (a bit like buy one get one free), and other devices to encourage one to spend more money. One of the gamblers I spoke to had the same host as referred to in this article about a psychiatrist who lost over $400,000 gambling during the pandemic. 

On condition of anonymity, he showed me his account. His wife doesn’t know how much he’s lost. He’s 61, semi-retired with an income of about $60,000, a pension he hasn’t drawn down at all, and no debt. So hardly a bankrupt.

Since 2020 he had bet over ten thousand times for a total of $8.65 million, he’d won $8.12 million, which of course meant he’d lost over $518,000. That accounts for “nearly all my additional savings, if I keep gambling I’m going to use my pension up,” he said. He went on, “There were days where I slept only a couple of hours. I bet on baseball and basketball during the day and evening and Asian tennis games, with players I’d never heard of, in the middle of the night. I bet on Eastern European soccer in the early morning, and I even bet on Australian rules football and I don’t know what that is.” 

He’d been given over $48,000 in awards and promotions and another $18,857 in other inducements. No wonder he had a VIP host, DraftKings was making about $125,000 a year from him. His were the most startling losses I’ve seen, but at least three other men, all married and over 45, had lost well over $150,000 in the previous two years. 

When they lost, they tried to recoup losses by increasing the size of their bets. Chasing losses, as it’s known, rarely works. All had deleted the respective gambling app they had used but then downloaded it again, deleted it, and then downloaded it again. None thought they could win, but one said it “made me feel alive and engaged with the world, but it cost me my marriage.” This gambler, Joe, 48, who runs a garage, had run up debts of over $60,000 and his wife divorced him so “she could keep the house.” None had sought out professional advice to help them quit. 

It is easy to blame gambling companies for the sad outcomes of these extreme cases and perhaps companies should be prosecuted if those who have asked to be left alone are hounded to rejoin with gifts. Most companies suggest cooling-off periods and I received texts and emails to encourage me to set gambling limits and where to seek advice (1-800 Gambler in the US). 

These companies are in the business of helping suckers like me part with their money. Most of us wouldn’t have started were it not for the catalyst, which was the same for all the other men I interviewed, the Covid lockdowns. 

Collateral Global is a group of scientists who have been assessing the costs of Covid. They estimate that it runs to $17 trillion and most of that came from the lockdowns, not the disease. It’s an almost unimaginable amount of money and some of it is due to mental health disasters due to addiction. Yet Collateral Global can’t calculate the emotional cost of broken families and bankruptcies from all sorts of addictions run riot by enforced inactivity. 

Different societies will find different partial solutions to the problem of gambling addiction. Western countries are unlikely to ban it outright given the liberal nature of the electorates, and also more cynically given the funding and lobbying pressure from gambling companies to allow the market to remain. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, is pushing for restrictions but there is no significant Federal effort so far. 

The Australian Government may take some action to prevent “predatory marketing” from its leading gambling company, SportsBet. Although the major Australian sports franchises and the sports betting companies that support them are effectively opposing action so far.

Hopefully, charities and mental health experts can come up with solutions to help those most addicted.

Roger Bate is a Senior Fellow at the International Center for Law and Economics (Jan 2023-present), Board member of Africa Fighting Malaria (September 2000-present), and Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs (January 2000-present).

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-rise-of-gambling-addiction-another-cost-of-covid/