Maintaining the illusion that there is “systemic racism” in the United States, where racial discrimination has been against the law for six decades, requires constant propagandizing, but never fear: CNN is up to the job. On Wednesday, it ran a lengthy, weepy piece entitled “‘Stacked against you’: Critics say the lottery system is preying on poor communities.” Yes, that’s right: Powerball is racist now.
You might wonder how a lottery that is entirely voluntary, with no one on the entire planet being forced to buy a ticket, could possibly be “preying on poor communities” and hence be racist. Are fiendish Powerball executives scanning convenience store security cameras for white lottery ticket buyers, and making sure they win? Are they quietly disqualifying the tickets of people they suspect are black or Hispanic? Are they selling tickets only in predominantly white areas, so that black folks don’t even have a chance to win the lottery?
Actually, it’s just the opposite. CNN is claiming that marketing lottery tickets to racial minorities is racist, because they buy them, and the odds are so small that they will actually win anything that this amounts to a racist act. Got it? Apparently, the “experts” CNN invokes in this absurd article want to curtail the sale of lottery tickets in minority areas, because that will keep them from wasting their money on them. Great idea, experts! Maybe you could just commandeer the entire earnings of black and Hispanic people, and direct them how they should spend their money responsibly. Oh, wait — you plan to do that for all of us before too long, right?
In the meantime, however, the problem CNN sees is that the lottery is enticing poor people to squander their money on dreams that are almost certain not to come true. “As lottery players across the nation accept that they didn’t win the historic $2.04 billion Powerball jackpot this week,” CNN intoned, “experts are pointing to the flaws of a lottery system they say unfairly targets poor Black and brown communities.”
CNN and its “experts” have identified those flaws: people keep buying tickets even though the odds of winning are very low.
Lottery officials say the lone winning ticket holder of the largest lottery prize ever was sold in Altadena, California. The winner matched all six numbers – the odds of which were 1 in 292.2 million.
But despite the extremely low chances of anyone winning, state lotteries continue to market and sell tickets to low income communities at higher rates leading those Americans to believe it’s a quick way to build wealth, researchers say. These communities are disproportionately made up of Black and brown people. Critics say the consequence is that marginalized people will be driven into deeper debt by a system that is transferring wealth out of their communities.
As is always the case with propaganda, this is a gaggle of lies and falsehoods wrapped around a kernel of truth. State-run lotteries are indeed an insidious voluntary tax, transferring wealth from people who have an extremely low chance of walking away rich and giving it to the government that is already bloated with funds it fritters away more irresponsibly than any lottery ticket buyer could ever dream of. But to claim that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to fall for this than whites and that therefore it’s wrong for Powerball to advertise in poor communities is the real racism here. All sorts of people buy lottery tickets. Since it’s voluntary, if there is any racism here, it’s self-selecting.
Related: CNN: Recessions Are Racist
Nevertheless, one of CNN’s experts, Les Bernal, national director of a group called Stop Predatory Gambling, actually called the lottery “systemic racism” and accused it of “consumer financial fraud.” He said that poor people who buy lottery tickets are “hoping to pay their rent at the end of the month or pay an outstanding medical bill or put their kids through college or they just lost their job and they’re just trying to find a way to make ends meet. And here you have what is a government program encouraging citizens to lose their money on rigged games.”
Sure. But that’s true of white ticket buyers as well as black ones. So where’s the racism? In the CNN offices, of course, among the people who thought that this article would fly among the declining network’s far-Left audience. Who is more foolish: the person who buys a lottery ticket, or the one who believes that CNN is a news network? CNN should stop marketing itself in poor areas; it’s only encouraging racial resentment and irresponsibility, with a hint of totalitarianism lurking in the background. If I had to choose between watching CNN and playing Powerball, I’d buy a ticket in a heartbeat.
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