By Austin Ruse
Crisis Magazine
March 29, 2025
If sitting in front of a machine and pulling a lever or pushing a button like a cocaine rat is your idea of fun, then something called "gaming" is probably for you. The dopamine high is enhanced as you slowly lose all your money.
Face it: casinos are tacky and sad. Go into one on Thanksgiving morning and watch the forlorn push the buttons or pull the levers. Odds are-odds? yes, you can bet literally on anything now-someone is there losing their rent money.
The Sands, owned by mega GOP donor Miriam Adelson, wants to open a casino literally next door to one of the crown jewels of American higher education, the University of Dallas. My friend Patrick Fagan calls UD "the finest Catholic university in the country."
The Sands is spending millions to get this done. According to The Dallas Morning News, "Miriam Adelson...is pumping millions of dollars into over 100 Texas lobbyists...with the hopes that they can turn the momentum in gambling's favor." She has spent $13 million in recent Texas primaries. You see, casinos are now illegal in Texas. And they have a target right on the forehead of the University of Dallas.
The University of Dallas is an oasis of higher learning, a core program that turns out well-formed, intellectually curious, and remarkably accomplished young people. As Catholic scholar George Weigel says, "the Dallas core curriculum-a rigorous set of required humanities courses usually spread over the first two years of college-is both the most demanding and rewarding such core in the country. Period."
Weigel points out the amazing real-world academic success of the University of Dallas:
In 2019, UD grads had an 84% medical school acceptance rate: twice the national average, 21% higher than Cornell in 2016, higher than Duke in 2017 or Dartmouth in 2020, and higher than Penn, Johns Hopkins, and USC in recent years. Moreover, UD was first in the country in the percentage of its math and statistics majors who later earned doctoral degrees in those fields.
The University of Dallas does this against a dominant culture that opposes and often mocks the Western tradition brought to us by Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. And now, UD may have to do this chockablock with one of the cathedrals of American addiction, a gambling emporium.
Gambling addiction is on the meteoric rise in America. How could it be otherwise? Casinos are everywhere-including, like porn, in the palm of your hand. If you wanted to bet on a game back in the day, you had to go to a casino for their "sports book." However, in 2018, the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, making online sports betting legal in 21 states. Now betting apps are everywhere, advertising constantly: FanDuel, BetMGM, Fox Bet, and even Disney has DraftKings. They convince the kids to bet like those we used to call "degenerate" gamblers, that is, people who will bet on anything and everything.
The kids are lured into elaborate "parleys" where you bet on the exact confluence of events in a game. Like most gambling, but especially this kind, it is a truly thrilling sucker's bet. The kids get a high all the while getting fleeced by the big-money boys.
Sports betting rose 69 percent in the single year after legalization and another 270 percent in the first quarter of 2021. According to Stephen Marche in The Atlantic, gambling revenues will barrel past $44 billion and approach the amount spent on books, music, and movies combined. Presumably, this includes the billions coughed up by the Swifties last year.
This is nothing less than predatory gambling, the joining of government and big business to reach into the farthest and deepest corners of mom and dad's pocket, to pluck out every last shekel and convince them all along, "Ain't this fun?" And looky there, Lady Gaga has a residency.
And now the predators want to come and dirty up the area around this jewel called the University of Dallas. The site under consideration used to house the Dallas Cowboys, and UD students could flash their student IDs and get in after halftime. It's been an empty lot for a long time, but now it may be a casino that will inevitably bring crime. Wherever casinos appear, crime rates rise, both crimes against property and persons.
A twenty-year study-granted, from years ago-shows this is true. The study was carried out during the pox dawn of coast-to-coast border-to-border casinos. When casinos open, aggravated assault spikes, rape spikes, and so does robbery. Murder goes down. Go figure. Larceny goes up. Burglary goes up. Auto theft goes up. The study demonstrates that "after five years, 8.6% of the observed property crime and 12.6% of the violent crime in casino counties are due to casinos."
It is a dead certainty that The Sands will sully the sight lines from UD to downtown Dallas. Is it really going to be 50 stories tall? It is a dead certainty that some kid will be robbed on the campus, dorms will be broken into, some girl will be raped, and lots of kids will walk over to The Sands and lose their tuition money.
The good news is that brave Ashton Ellis, head of development and university relations, went to the planning meeting in the small hours and spoke against it. Several UD professors spoke there, too. Most of the people who spoke at the zoning meeting, including all local community members, spoke against it, well into the wee hours.
In the end, the zoning board voted to allow The Sands to develop the property, even though casinos are still illegal in Texas. But the door is wide open. The big-money boys are putting massive pressure on the state to allow it. It seems like only a matter of time before those poor cocaine rats will be sitting in front of machines, pushing buttons and pulling levers.