Should’ve seen it coming because of course it would go this way. This die was cast long ago even if nobody could quite have precisely foreseen its abhorrent shape and venal composition:
Polymarket and smaller competitor Kalshi – not to be confused with the lame “health-conscious” breakfast cereal brand Kashi – both launched around the same time, 2020 and 2021 respectively, aimed at putting industrial-scale prop betting on anything and everything people would bet for or against into their hands. Both were obscure and niche until 2024 when many in the wider political world first become acquainted with Polymarket as it asserted itself during that election year.
The Venn Diagram the markets of Cybertruck-incelsphere types and MAGA voters being basically a complete circle of course they predicted a Trump win. Probably still was emotionally motivated reasoning in that they would’ve put more money on Trump even if Kamala Harris had ended up winning but sadly the concept found itself vindicated while so many where tuned in and now we’ve got bets as inane as “Bruno Mars ‘The Romantic’ First Week Album Sales?” with 150,000 to 200,000 at 94 percent for whatever mental invalids felt it necessary to spend their money gambling on that.
Oh and of course the federal criminal investigations into both platforms’ founders magically disappeared in 2025. In a total coincidence Kalshi added Donald Trump Jr as an advisor in January that year, and then seven months later his “1789 Capital” slush fund backed Polymarket.
Can’t bet it all one horse, right?
Anyway, while there were smaller scale insider sandbags with Polymarket and Kalshi in the years since they were founded the whole insider bet trick really put itself on the map when some asshole who had never used the platform before bet on Maria Corina Machado to win the Nobel Peace Prize just hours prior to the announcement and won $30,000. Then in January it really took off with another making $436,000 on a bet anticipating Maduro’s capture right before Trump announced it. Last weekend it was $855,000 dropped in Polymarket bets on Trump ordering the attack on Iran.
A few days before that however on the night of the 23rd, there was another suspicious bet…
According to the Atlantic at 7:45 PM EDT someone dropped $100,000 on Kalshi’s “Will the US confirm that aliens exist before 2027?” and then about 35 minutes later either that same bettor another person put twice as much down. The Atlantic observes that it looks like an insider bet.
Yeah.
Now they also acknowledge that it could just be some irrational exuberance from someone with a lot of money to piss away after the Orange God Emperor posted that he was ordering the military to declassify everything they have about UFOs. But that was four days earlier and not necessarily a timeline one might associate with irrational exuberance. Seems a little more calculated.
A better counterargument could be what one might call a “problem of underdetermination.” Absent a long compendium of articles with headlines like “Polymarket trader puts $5,000 on ‘Dick Van Dyke dead before February 28th'” paired with “Dick Van Dyke still alive and apparently well for 100 despite sketchy Polymarket bet” on March 1st, we simply don’t have any idea of the scope of failed attempts to cash out by murdering Dick Van Dyke and other misreads of situations by insiders. There could be a great many such instances or there could be very few and none worth $300,000.
Epistemic rigor aside, the fact remains that those sums are fuck around money for very, very few and you don’t see that level of activity on “Will Jesus Christ return before 2027?” which is currently selling at 4¢ yes on Polymarket to 19¢ yes for alien evidence made public by 2027 on Kalshi.
Soooo… Now most National Zero readers or at least some of the most vocal ones remain very hostile to the idea of extraterrestrial intelligences advanced enough to travel across the vast gulfs of interstellar space to covertly observe our planet and ourselves from their spaceships and that the US government has classified knowledge of this in the form of technology recovered from downed spacecraft. And that the fat Jabba the Hutt in the White House would allow it to become public and, most crucially, it would come in the form that would be widely accepted enough that these Kalshi bettors would be able to cash out… and not get fucked like those who bet that the Ayatollah would be “out” of power by Sunday only to be told by the site that his death didn’t count as removal.
Still, bring it somewhere inside the realm of the outlandish but theoretically less controversial and imagine this was someone (or someones) putting down $300,000 total on irrefutable proof that a DNA test showing Justin Trudeau really is deceased Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s bastard son would be made public by the end of the month, that it was undeniable, independently verified by experts, and the former Canadian Prime Minister would have no choice but to cop to its authenticity.
Would that give you pause? Would you drop your skepticism for a bit and think “Wow. Holy shit. Maybe that deranged theory is actually true if someone’s spending $300,000 on it.” Such a moment would also have the benefit of being part and parcel of the same culture that spawned it: MAGAmerican chodes’ prophecies becoming self-fulfilled by their own spaces.
For those of us with the misfortune of being both VERY open to the extraterrestrial hypothesis whilst also unremittingly averse to literally anything associated with a malformation like Don Jr it’s of course this is how it happens. Of course this is the way we get vindicated, because some greedy cocksucker in the deepest hallows of the national security establishment that handles UFO sightings and alien technology is mortgaging their house for a payday all thanks to the Trump Regime.
Occam’s razor. Owls aren’t bulletproof. Walks like a duck. Signals and noise. And so on about how clear it should be what direction this is going. The proof is in all the MAGA bullshit pudding.