It’s the best time of the calendar year for sports: we’re in the meat of the World Series, both college and professional football are in full swing, and the NBA season has officially begun. There’s no shortage of something to see on TV if you’re into the general idea of, well, anything sport-related.

However, now that means you see more gambling ads than ever. The NBA just announced an official partnership with two major ‘prediction market’ apps. (Prediction market has to be the dumbest ‘just make sure we don’t call it gambling’ workaround ever.)

Even if there weren’t so many disgusting celebrity-packed advertisements for this shit, and even if every broadcast of any sporting event wasn’t filled with sponsored, real-time betting lines, the fact remains that gambling addiction is a real thing that is being treated like nothing at all. The media in the United States has laws in regards to marketing alcohol and cigarettes, but when it comes to gambling, it’s not only unregulated, but these companies are allowed to sponsor sporting events that people bet on.

I don’t know anyone who likes sports who supports any of this—most people I talk to find it all infuriating. But I do feel for the people who have a gambling problem out there, because this can’t be easy. I know a guy who goes to GA (Gamblers Anonymous) and watched him go through a six-month relapse a couple years ago. Every day it was hours and hours at the tables, up thousands, down thousands, wild swings of financial fortune and loss in rapid succession.

It just feels like these companies are counting on people like this, waiting to take their money, regardless of the consequences, and the leagues and broadcast networks are all-in.

When it was announced that Saturday Night Live would be expanding to the UK, my immediate thought was, Aren’t we suffering enough? I can’t remember the last time I watched an episode of the American version and laughed even once. Possibly not since the Gosling UFO bit. Generally speaking, SNL is unfunny because it is mostly toothless, safe comedy that tries to walk a ‘bi-partisan’ line.

Yet the UK version is proving to be everything that the American original has lost. Weekend Update is biting and smart—the recent mockery of Ed Sheeran and Robert Kraft is better than any of the Colin Jost and Michael Che reviews in some time. It wasn’t overly aggressive; it just wasn’t scared of offending a conservative audience.

The thing about the liberal idea of ‘playing it safe’ in entertainment as to not offend anyone in a right-wing country is that the moderate position on speech—and, well, everything else—increasingly moves toward conservatism if it isn’t pushed back against. American values have always leaned into white supremacy, but waving Nazi flags at public events doesn’t even make the news—though it would have been nationally admonished not 20 years ago.

The result is self-described independents running for office who largely represent conservative values, but from an earlier, 20th century vision. Less obvious racism, but no ambition for social policy that would help the underclass—and certainly no criticism of modern American foreign policy and the nature of being a superpower.

Shows like SNL are reflective of where the United States is at, because like liberal politicians, it still attempts to attract a large swath of the country, no matter how disgusting their values might be. So it should not be a surprise when there is a barbarically stupid monologue by a talentless oaf kicking off the show, because they’re trying to appeal to the demographic that defends the Cornell rapists.

Some might argue that the content of a 50-year-old comedy show and the current state of extremist right-wing politics are disproportionate in importance, and I agree there—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t connected. The way we represent ourselves, the dialogue that occurs within the context of media that can stir a national conversation, can absolutely steer public opinion.

Governance, like comedy, is trending toward punching down, focusing hatred on women and minorities, appealing to the worst stains of ideas within the greater social fabric, and represents a national embarrasment as representative of a dying empire and its influence both politically and culturally remains steep in decline.

Reflecting

There’s this really famous scene from the first season of The West Wing where, after an episode of built-up debate surrounding funding for public education, Rob Lowe makes this speech about how, “Education is the silver bullet.” It’s been on my mind today.

This liberal-minded idea that if we were all just smarter everything would be magically fixed about society is pretty insane. Every election it’s a manufactured debate—how did the college-educated vote against the non-college-educated? It becomes a whole discourse, another thing that keeps us divided.

But those Cornell rapists? Well, they’re going to Cornell. Aren’t they educated? George W Bush, Dick Cheney, the Clintons, and JD Vance all went to Yale. Benjamin Netanyahu graduated from MIT while taking classes at Harvard. Richard Nixon went to Duke. I’m pretty sure it’s a requirement to go to Oxford to be Prime Minister in England. Half of the psychopath tech guys in Silicon Valley attended Stanford.

I do believe that all education should be free and excellent, but these ideas that cross into areas of discrimination and bias about intellect and aptitude and leadership can really irk me. The people who have done the most harm to the world are the ones who come from the best schools. An education happens in many ways outside of reading pages from a book and it doesn’t take much time to see in the news what these men are really learning in American schools.