The Video That Exposed Tucker Carlson in Seconds
PDS Published 05/04/2026
-
We have to talk about how Tucker Carlson just got exposed on Trump straight to his face in the fallout. Why Iran's firing on U.S. ships after Trump announced Project Freedom with things just spiraling.
How Congress might actually be about to ban itself from betting on prediction markets.
But we break down why that's still probably not going to be enough to stop insider trading on them.
Live Show & Tour Announcement
But first, I have an exciting announcement, an update for y'all. We did our sold out live show in New York on Friday.
And I'm like, I'm still went in prepared and I was hoping that it would be a good night, but it was honestly one of the best nights I've ever had on stage in like my 20 years of doing this. The energy in that room.
Right.
The connection, the fact that I got to actually stand there after the show and meet y'all and hear people talk about their connection to the show in real life. And it's not just numbers on a screen, right.
Not just some comment section, not an algorithmic ranked feed. It just in person.
It was we had people that were coming alone, making friends in line, couples making it a date night. People messaging us afterwards saying it was cathartic, it was fun.
It was and so I'm saying like it felt like a family gathering, but when you actually wanted to go. The one thing that actually makes me more excited is that I get to do this with even more of y'all in 12 different cities at 12 different venues and you can be a part of it if you go get your tickets right now at crashing out tour. Some selling out faster than others.
Or we have Seattle, Portland, Boston, Philly, San Francisco, Phoenix, Denver, Atlanta, Chicago, Saint Paul, DC and definitely just before it's too late, go to crashing out, get your tickets, come crash out with us.
I promise you, you will be glad you did.
Trump & Iran Conflict
But with that said there's a lot we've got to dive into today, starting with this.
Donald Trump has now ordered the military to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz and Iran. They may once again be targeting U.S. troops, commercial ships and other countries in the region.
But also at the same time, according to the White House, the war actually ended way back on April 8th.
At least that's what Trump told lawmakers on Friday to argue that he didn't need their permission to continue said war, despite it being the 60th day since he formally notified Congress of strikes against Iran.
Which according to the War Powers Resolution of 1973, is generally the longest American forces can remain engaged in hostilities without congressional authorization. But again.
Trump said that the conflict had been terminated since the cease fire took effect on April 8th, even though his blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which is an act of war under international law, remains in place.
Not to mention the fact that just a few hours after he said that the U.S. wasn't at war with Iran.
You had him saying to supporters in Florida, “You know, we're in a war because I think you would agree. We cannot let lunatics have a nuclear weapon.”
And so of course, you again have many experts saying it, the administration's legal argument, it doesn't hold up. And even actually several Republicans are growing increasingly skeptical.
There were also many experts and lawmakers have argued that this war was illegal from the very beginning.
And now, as it was then, there's nothing actually stopping Trump from doing what he wants, including setting the country's terms for a deal. Right.
Iran Proposal & U.S. Response
And with that, you had him writing on social media on Saturday that he would soon be reviewing a new proposal from Iran and adding, “Can't imagine that it would be acceptable in that they have not yet paid a big enough price for what they have done to humanity and the world over the last 47 years.”
The proposal that he was reportedly looking at was a 14 point plan rehashing Iran's earlier demands, including by calling for the U.S. to withdraw its forces from near Iran's borders and its naval blockade of Iranian ports, accept Iranian involvement in the management of the Strait of Hormuz and include Lebanon in the cease fire.
In any subsequent peace deal.
And actually on that last point, they reportedly demanded that a final agreement be reached within 30 days.
Maybe most notably, according to Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesperson, there were absolutely no details regarding the country's nuclear issues in the proposal.
So on Sunday, you had Trump telling an Israeli media outlet that, as he predicted, the proposal wasn't acceptable to him.
Reportedly saying, “The Iranians want to make a deal, but I'm not satisfied with what they've offered,” saying there are things I can't agree to.
With that you also had Iran's Foreign Ministry saying that it's reviewing a U.S. response to its proposal. And while the administration, they haven't confirmed that they've sent a response. By the way, it appears that a deal right now, it just kind of remains out of reach.
Project Freedom & Escalation in the Strait
And in the meantime, there have been more attacks threatening the cease fire. Yesterday, for example, we had the first reported attacks on ships in or near the straits since April 22nd. One cargo ship claiming it had been attacked by multiple small boats, while another vessel said that had been hit by unknown projectiles.
And then you had Trump announcing his latest effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz on social media.
With Trump presenting it as a humanitarian effort to be undertaken on behalf of the rest of the world, seemingly including nations that he's previously criticized for not doing something about the strait themselves. Right.
Claiming that countries from all over the world, which he described as neutral and innocent bystanders that had done nothing wrong, had asked the U.S. for help writing:
“For the good of Iran, the Middle East, and the United States, we have told these countries that we will guide their ships safely out of these restricted waterways so they can freely and ably get on with their business.”
He said that this process, dubbed Project Freedom, would begin Monday morning, but “East time,” which is not a time zone. You know, you get what he was going for maybe.
And, he also claimed that his representatives were having very positive discussions with Iran before finally adding, “If in any way this humanitarian process is interfered with, that interference will unfortunately have to be dealt with forcefully.”
With that, you also had U.S. Central Command saying in a statement that its forces would begin supporting Project Freedom and U.S. military support to Project Freedom will include guided missile destroyers, over 100 land and sea based aircraft, multi-domain unmanned platforms and 15,000 service members.
But also with this very notably, the military reportedly will not actually be escorting ships through the strait.
That is, at least for commander Admiral Brad Cooper did reportedly present a plan for that last week.
But then at the very last minute, Trump opted for a more cautious approach, which will instead involve the military advising ships on how to avoid mines while passing through the strait and standing ready to intervene if Iran attacks.
And so with that, you had one administration official telling Axios that the rules of engagement for American forces in the region, they've changed, with troops now authorized to strike immediate threats against ships that cross the strait, including IRGC fast boats or Iranian missile batteries.
And then you had another official reportedly telling the outlet that Trump decided on this option after becoming fed up with the no deal, no war stalemate in Iran, saying, “The president wants action. He doesn't want to sit still. He wants pressure. He wants a win.”
You also had a source described as being close to the president, claiming this is the beginning of a process that could lead to a confrontation with the Iranians. Right.
And saying that this so-called humanitarian mission to free ships stranded in the strait means if the Iranians do something, they will be the bad guys and we will have the legitimacy to respond.
Which could also honestly kind of make it sound like these civilian run commercial vessels are being used as bait because even as the U.S. military, they've been hesitant to enter the strait.
Shipping Warnings & Iranian Threats
The U.S. led Joint Maritime Information Center, they reportedly advised commercial ships today to cross the waterway while sticking in the territorial waters of Oman. Saying it has set up an enhanced security corridor.
And you have the organization also warning ships to stay away from the usual shipping lanes, which quote, “should be considered extremely hazardous due to the presence of mines that have not been fully surveyed.”
And but also understand it may ultimately be hazardous almost anywhere as Iran. One senior official claiming that any interference in the strait would be seen as a cease fire violation.
You had the IRGC Navy issuing a new map of the Strait of Hormuz, which it said showed the area under its control.
With also a top military commander telling commercial ships and oil tankers not to pass through without coordinating with Iran's armed forces and adding:
“We warn that any foreign armed force, especially the aggressive U.S. military, if they intend to approach or enter the Strait of Hormuz, will be targeted and attacked.”
Right.
Missile Exchanges & Regional Attacks
Then with all this early today, you had the Iranian government claiming to have stopped a U.S. destroyer from entering the strait, with a semi-official Iranian news agency even reporting that two missiles hit a U.S. ship sailing through the strait after ignoring a warning from Iran's navy.
Though then Iranian outlets later claimed that the military had only fired warning shots against U.S. ships that had attempted to approach the strait.
And then also, you had Centcom firmly denying that any American naval vessels had been hit, even later reporting that U.S. Navy guided missile destroyers were actually operating in the Persian Gulf after transiting the Strait of Hormuz and as a first step to U.S. flag merchant vessels have successfully transited through the Hormuz and are safely headed on their way.
Now, Iran responded by issuing a statement claiming that no commercial vessels or tankers have traversed the waterway over the past few hours, saying claims by U.S. officials are baseless and complete lies.
Whatever the case may be there, it now appears that Iran's following through on their threats with new attacks on ships in the strait and energy facilities in the region. Right.
Centcom, for example, saying the Navy had shot down Iranian cruise missiles and drones fired at ships and commercial vessels in the Gulf.
Also reporting that army helicopters destroyed six Iranian military speedboats that had threatened the shipping lanes.
You also have the UAE issuing its first missile alert since the cease fire. Saying that it downed three missiles fired from Iran over its territorial waters, with a fourth one crashing into the Gulf.
And in the country's largest port and storage area, it was reportedly attacked by an Iranian drone, sparking a major fire.
With the Foreign Ministry then issuing a statement saying they reserved the right to respond to Iranian aggression.
Also you had Oman State News Agency reported that a residential building, housing company employees was targeted in an apparent strike.
And you even had a South Korean cargo ship catching fire after an explosion in the Gulf, though that one might have actually been an accident with authorities saying that the blast originated on the port side of the ship's engine room.
But that said, it still led to Trump writing on social media, “Perhaps it's time for South Korea to come and join the coalition.”
Fallout & Lebanon Conflict
So ultimately, at least for now, this kind of appears to be the most intense exchange of fire that we've seen since the cease fire and so as a result.
Oil and gas prices are likely to keep rising. Right.
And for now, we're going to have to wait to see if any of this changes anything for either side. Does it lead to a deal? Does it just lead to more continued fighting? What's going to happen?
Though right. With the other ceasefire connected to this whole thing. Right. The one between Israel and Lebanon.
The fighting never really stopped. In fact, you have many experts saying that Israel is doing what it did to Gaza, to southern Lebanon, continuing to order evacuations, occupying the territory and destroying homes and buildings while continuing to launch new strikes with massive loss of life.
You have the Israeli military claiming that they're just targeting infrastructure and positions belonging to Hezbollah, which according to the Israeli military, has launched hundreds of drones, rockets and anti-tank missiles at Israel and has killed at least 17 Israeli soldiers since early April.
Then on the other side just since last Thursday, Israeli strikes have killed 77 in Lebanon, according to the country's health ministry, with a total death toll now being around 2700.
And as many European countries have somewhat spoken out against Israel.
There are also those who think that Netanyahu may be emboldened by the unflinching support from the United States, especially under Trump, who many see as a president who finally listened to Netanyahu's arguments for starting a war with Iran.
The New Yorker now have Obama telling The New Yorker that he also heard when he was in the Oval Office.
-
And now you're also seeing more and more people on the right leaning into this idea that Trump basically got tricked into launching the war by Netanyahu.
Tucker Carlson’s Claims About Trump
For example, Tucker Carlson giving an interview to The New York Times in which he claimed that Trump is being held hostage by Netanyahu and had no choice in starting the war.
And in this he described the conversation that he supposedly had with Trump shortly before the war began and which the president said:
“He said it's going to be all right. And I. He said, do you know how I know that?
And I said, no.
He said, because it always is.”
You would Tucker stressing, albeit without getting into details, that most of the pressure for war, it came from outside of the White House, and that people on the inside were just too cowardly to resist.
In fact, in one of the wackier, we'll call it moments of the interview, he said that Trump turns people into cowards with his supernatural powers.
“There is a kind of quality that he has that's spellbinding. And I think it probably literally is a spell.
And the effect is to weaken people around him and make them more compliant and more confused. And I've experienced this myself.
You spend a day with Trump and sort of like you're in this kind of dreamland. It's like smoking hash or something.
It's interesting, very interesting, and there may be a supernatural component to it.
I'm not a theologian, but it's real, and anyone who's been around him can tell you it's real.”
Antichrist Comments & Denials
Now. Unfortunately, Lulu Garcia Navarro didn't press him on specifically. Which kind of spell casting this is right.
Are we talking, like, Harry Potter style?
Maybe more something like Lord of the Rings, or perhaps more of a Macbeth witchcraft kind of because of course, the public has a right to know what kind of sorcery their presidents engaged in.
Though really it actually seems more likely that Tucker is pointing to something more Christian in flavor, or rather anti-Christian.
And when Garcia Navarro brought this idea up, she fact checked him right there on the spot.
“You know, you've been talking on your show about whether Trump is the Antichrist.”
“I have not said that.”
“Here's a leader who's mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of gods and exalting himself above them. Could this be the Antichrist?”
“I actually did not say, could this be the Antichrist.”
“Could this be the Antichrist?”
“Well who knows?
I don't know where that comes from, but I know that those words never left my lips because I'm not sure I fully understand what the Antichrist is if there's just one.
I actually tried to understand it.
I may have said some are asking that. I'm not weighing in on that because I don't understand.”
James Comey “8647” Controversy
Now whether you buy his defense or not.
One argument that some people are making is that his statements about Trump have been at least as though probably more inflammatory than former FBI Director James Comey.
Would that be in the Instagram photo that he posted where seashells are arranged to read 8647.
Which much of the right interpreted, or at least are saying they interpreted as code for advocating for Trump's assassination.
Many others say that is a stretch, noting that 86 is a restaurant term that people have been calling for impeachments this way.
But regardless, you had Comey taking it down the very same day and he apologized.
But that did not get Trump off Comey's ass.
And in fact, Comey ended up getting charged by Trump's DOJ.
And so then bringing all this together, you would CNN's Jake Tapper bring on U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, and he played the same clip of Tucker suggesting that Trump might be the Antichrist.
“Whatever Tucker Carlson says is not relevant to me right now.
I really don't care about what he says.
I'm really not here as a political pundit anymore. I'm here as a prosecutor.
My job is to not talk about talking heads and what they say.”
Meanwhile, you had Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche doing an interview with NBC.
And they also made a similar point, noting that dozens of products on Amazon contain the numbers 8647, but only Comey has been charged.
“That's posted constantly.
That phrase is used constantly.
There are constantly men and women who choose to make threatening statements against President Trump. Every one of those statements do not result in indictments.
Of course, there are facts. There are circumstances. There are investigations that have to take place.”
Now have critics here in both of those answers going, okay, yeah, that's meaningless bullshit.
And really the only difference is that Comey is Trump's political enemy and Blanche keeps vaguely suggesting that there's other evidence beside the seashells that incriminate Comey.
But neither he nor the indictment itself have actually hinted at what that might be.
Ted Cruz Joke
But also, you know, with everything that we've said as unhinged as a number of the people that we have heard from are.
There is at least one thing Tucker said that I think we can all agree on.
“But if you had to sit across from Ted Cruz, it's just there's something about him. It's just, like, repulsive.
I mean, it's like disgusting.
Like, if you entered a men's room and Ted Cruz was there, you would be like, I can hold it. I'm good.”
-
But first, let me thank a sponsor and say, you ever feel one weird pain and you immediately start negotiating with your body like, hey, maybe just fix yourself and we'll never speak of this again because, yeah, apparently a lot of us would just rather spiral on the internet than just book the appointment.
Which to be fair, says more about how annoying booking doctors has actually become than it does about us.
That is actually why I use today's sponsor Zocdoc and you should too.
A free app and website that helps you find and book high quality in network doctors so you can find someone that you trust.
You need a dentist, dermatologist, primary care doctor, or something more specialized. Zocdoc has your back.
With over 150,000 providers across all 50 states covering 200 plus specialties.
You can also filter by insurance, location and whether you want an in-person visit or just do a video appointment.
And read verified patient reviews, you're not just rolling the dice on who you're seeing.
And the best part is you can see real time availability and book instantly, with appointments typically happening within 24 to 72 hours, sometimes even same day.
That's why I use it. And it makes the whole process way less stressful.
Stop putting off those doctor's appointments and scan that QR code or go to Zocdoc.com/DeFranco to find and instantly book a top rated doctor today.
This message is sponsored by Zocdoc.
Just go to https://www.zocdoc.com/phil and download the Zocdoc app for FREE. Then find and book a top-rated doctor today!
-
But then diving right back into the news less than a week after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, you got Alabama and Tennessee already racing to redraw their congressional maps in emergency special sessions this week.
They’re targeting Black majority districts because they want to get up to three more Republican seats in the U.S. House.
Just to get us on the same page again, last week the Supreme Court flipped Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act just on its head, ruling that Louisiana’s majority minority district amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
Democrats called it a death sentence for the VRA. Trump basically told state legislatures to take the win and run with it.
And what you saw was Alabama hearing him, with Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall filing motions literally the day after the Louisiana decision.
And he’s looking to appeal the court rulings that are blocking Republican drawn maps from 2023.
And all those court ordered maps were supposed to be locked in until after the 2030 census. They might not survive this week.
You’ve got Governor Kay Ivey saying the special session will wrap within five days.
And Republicans currently hold five of Alabama’s seven House seats. They think that these new maps will give them all of them.
Marshall adding that Alabama’s primaries are on May 19th, saying that the timing is critically important, which is essentially just code for if the courts don’t bless this fast, they’re stuck.
So for the Democrats that are hoping to slow this down, that tight window is kind of their best chance.
Though with this power grab, I would say do not count on it.
Right, in Tennessee they’re playing the same game, but from a slightly different angle.
See, Governor Bill Lee’s special session kicks off tomorrow, and their target is District 9, which is currently the only Democratic held seat in the state.
The VRA was really the main thing that was keeping their District 9 intact.
And so with that protection weakened, you have Republicans seeing a path to flipping it and just giving themselves a full sweep of Tennessee’s House delegation.
Right, and they’ve been waiting for this. This is not new behavior from them.
Back in 2022, Tennessee Republicans carved Nashville into three pieces and flipped the fifth district.
And now they’re in Memphis, which is the most heavily Black city in the state.
But also Tennessee has a timing problem that its own leaders are openly worried about.
The candidate qualifying period ended in March. Primaries hit in August.
And so Democrats are hoping that the courts just simply rule that it’s too close to Election Day to bulldoze the map.
Now Lee’s party is calling it “representation issues,” saying that “we owe it to Tennesseans to ensure our congressional districts accurately reflect the will of Tennessee voters.”
Which I will say sounds noble until you literally look at a map and you go, oh, one district you’re specifically targeting here is the one anchored in a majority Black city.
Honestly, this part, you know, it’s just my opinion. I’d appreciate if everyone was just honest at this point.
Trump and his conservative Supreme Court, they pushed the country into an end game situation. Everyone’s trying to fight for power, for power’s sake, though obviously for different reasons.
And Republicans, they’re not dumb. They’re looking at the polls.
They’re like, oh my God, everything that Trump is doing right now, it’s just so unpopular.
Republicans want a chance to not just be completely wiped out by the electorate. We gotta suppress the vote. We gotta change things up.
And on the Democratic side, I think more Democrats are realizing, oh, we can’t fight with our hands behind our back if we want to get to a tomorrow where, among other things, there’s a national gerrymander ban.
We’ve got to fight for power’s sake now. Otherwise we’re gonna get completely wiped out.
Right, if you don’t do something now, the door will get closed. You’ll never get another chance.
And with all this, you’ve got Black lawmakers and civil rights groups not being subtle about what they think this is.
Senator Raphael Warnock, for example, from my home state of Georgia, said that the redistricting fight is “a continuation of the effort to roll back the civil rights movement,” and saying that “this is not a new method, it’s a Jim Crow method.”
Also, even before the Supreme Court ruling, you had Congressman Shomari Figures saying that gutting Section 2 would “drastically reduce the number of realistic opportunities to elect Black members to Congress.”
And Alabama Democrats are calling the special session “a blatant power grab by Republican leadership in Montgomery to eliminate seats held by Black Democrats.”
And then again with this news, of course, we have to remember it is more than Tennessee and Alabama.
I mean that both for the 2026 midterms as well as the 2028 general election, cards are being played right now that are forcing hands, and things have to get crazy before they can get normal again.
So it seems, at least until the end of 2028, extreme gerrymandering is just on the menu. It’s the name of the game.
-
But then also, you know, while we’re talking about types of crackdowns, or at least attempted crackdowns, we then have to talk about the Supreme Court blocking a ban on mail order abortion pills, at least for now.
Because this new ruling, it’s subject to change in just as soon as maybe a week or so.
All of this is stemming from a case out of Louisiana because the state previously sued the FDA, arguing that its policy allowing people to receive mifepristone by mail violates its near-total abortion ban.
What you ended up seeing last Friday is that a federal appeals court sided with Louisiana and blocked mail orders of abortion pills.
And that ruling said “every abortion facilitated by FDA’s actions cancels Louisiana’s ban on medical abortions and undermines its policy that every unborn child is a human being from the moment of conception and is therefore a legal person.”
But as you can imagine, that decision was incredibly controversial.
You even had the AP calling it “the biggest jolt to abortion policy in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade was overturned.”
Especially since there’s actually very little precedent for a federal court to overrule scientific regulations of the FDA.
Which first allowed people to obtain abortion medication via telehealth during the COVID pandemic in 2020, and they finalized the rule in 2023.
So over the weekend, you had drug manufacturers taking the issue to the Supreme Court, asking them to reverse this ban and reinstate the ability to get mifepristone via mail and telehealth.
And you had Danco Laboratories arguing that the decision “injects immediate confusion and upheaval into highly time sensitive medical decisions.”
You had BioPro calling it “an unfounded and baseless attack on an essential medication.”
All of that turned into this morning the Supreme Court temporarily restoring mail access to those pills.
If you support that they did that, do not get too excited.
Because the court, they didn’t just overnight become a bunch of pro-choice liberals that all of a sudden care about women.
Justice Samuel Alito simply put the lower court’s ruling on pause until May 11th so that way the court has more time to consider its next steps and weigh the emergency appeals.
Also ordering the parties in the case to file responses by Thursday.
So while you had places like Planned Parenthood supporting this temporary decision, they still condemned the legal attempts to continue to restrict abortion access.
You had the president, Alexis McGill Johnson, saying “If mifepristone access returns to where it was on Friday morning, the whiplash and chaos that patients and providers are navigating have already had consequences for people’s lives and futures.”
Because this notably comes as medication abortion has been under a string of attacks from courts, lawmakers, and more.
In March, for example, Senator Josh Hawley introduced legislation that would effectively ban the abortion pill, calling it a safety issue.
But there you immediately had reproductive experts noting that the science that Hawley cited when pushing for this is highly questionable at best.
Mifepristone is approved for use in nearly 100 countries, and there are four decades of peer reviewed research proving it to be safe.
And also just to get technical and specific, while mifepristone is specifically the drug getting caught up in all these legal battles, it’s actually used with a second drug called misoprostol.
When those two are used together, they’re 93 to 99% effective at completing medication abortion.
But ultimately while we wait to see what happens with the Supreme Court, we really shouldn’t be surprised.
It really makes sense that Republicans are taking aim at this. It’s the most common method of abortion.
If you can chip away at access to the pill, you chip away at abortion access overall.
And these telehealth prescriptions of mifepristone have been especially crucial for access since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
In fact, earlier this year there was a study that found that there were over 1.1 million abortions in the United States in 2025, meaning that numbers were essentially unchanged from 2024 and actually marked the highest number of abortions provided since 2009.
Very notably, travel across state lines from those who live in abortion ban states decreased between 2024 and 2025, while telehealth prescriptions to states with bans increased.
There you have many noting that shield laws, which blue states have passed to protect healthcare providers who prescribe those drugs to out-of-state patients, have helped to boost access.
So you’ve got the Guttmacher Institute saying “telehealth across state lines has played an increasingly critical role in ensuring access to abortion care in a national landscape where many states have total bans or other restrictive policies.”
Saying “extending shield laws to telehealth provision is vital to ensuring that patients can continue to access the care they need, especially if they live in states with total abortion bans.”
With the court, you know, it’s actually upheld mifepristone access before. What comes next here, that’s unclear.
It’s one that we have to keep eyes on because, I mean, it really could determine the future of reproductive care access in this country.
-
But then from that, the final thing that I wanna talk about today is all this news around prediction markets.
Starting with the fact that a few days ago the Senate actually made a real move. There was a unanimous resolution banning members and staff from participating in prediction markets.
The official rationale is that there are concerns about insider trading by people who have access to nonpublic information about exactly the kinds of events these markets settle on. Things like wars, sanctions, confirmation votes, cabinet picks.
Actually both Kalshi and Polymarket immediately backed the resolution.
Kalshi’s CEO posted that the company already proactively blocks members of Congress and enforces against insider trading, and called the resolution “a great step to increase trust in our markets by making it an industry standard.”
You had Polymarket saying that its rulebook already prohibits this kind of trading, and that codifying this into law is a step forward for the industry.
But also the counterpoint there is what would we expect them to say?
“No, we want insider trading and to be shut down and for people to not trust and use their money on us?”
But also here’s the deal. There is a “52% problem.”
Right, that’s something we learned about thanks to last week’s report from the Anti-Corruption Data Collective.
Because you see they looked specifically at longshot bets on Polymarket. Wagers of $2,500 or more placed at odds below 35% across the platform.
Those long shots, they paid off around 14% of the time, roughly what you’d expect from long shots.
But get this. On political markets, the longshot success rate jumped to 25%.
And on bets tied to military or defense related events specifically, the success rate was 52%.
As you had experts who reviewed the data saying a 52% hit rate on long odds defense bets is essentially statistically impossible without insider trading.
And you don’t even have to just rely on the statistics.
Earlier this year you had a U.S. Special Forces soldier indicted for allegedly using insider information about the capture of Nicolás Maduro to win roughly $400,000 on Polymarket.
Among other things, there was also a string of suspicious betting patterns around events in the Iran war that multiple news outlets flagged.
And so the Senate’s self-imposed ban, it handles at most maybe the most visible end of all this. Right, members of Congress and their staff.
But the data suggest that the actual leaks are somewhere kind of, let’s say, broader.
Think the executive branch, intelligence community, the military.
And at this point, I mean, anyone in those orbits who knows somebody with a market account.
And in the meantime, you’ve got Kalshi, right, the U.S. regulated prediction market.
They’re trying to get ahead of the next wave of pressure.
Just this morning the company announced a series of new measures aimed at keeping minors off the platform.
While anyone under 18 is technically already banned, you had Kalshi acknowledging that some kids have been getting around age verification by using their parents’, siblings’, or other relatives’ IDs.
So the new rollout includes Face ID by default for users with the feature enabled, selfie based document verification, two factor authentication prompting, and a new feature that lets users check whether someone else is logged in with their ID.
And their blog post explicitly referenced a bipartisan bill from Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Dave McCormick that would ban federally elected politicians from prediction markets, beef up age verification, and add consumer protections.
Kalshi saying that it’s proactively implementing measures outlined in the bill and more.
But then also regarding age, one of the bigger things being talked about right now is the age floor.
Right, that’s because over the past few weeks the NBA, PGA, and NCAA, they’ve all been lobbying federal regulators to raise the minimum betting age to 21.
The NCAA, they want the floor lifted to 21 for college sports specifically, and the NBA and PGA, they want 21 across all sporting events.
But there you had Kalshi’s CEO telling Axios that he wants the floor to stay at 18, arguing that prediction markets aren’t fundamentally different from trading equities.
Claiming in his words, “most of the activity you see is healthy.”
Though we also noted that Kalshi’s rolling out features that suggest deposit limits to users showing signs of unhealthy trading, plus a new tool called Inner Circle that lets you share your trading activity with friends and family.
You know, a tool that sounds like you definitely need if your product isn’t ruining lives.
Like this part is my opinion, but it literally sounds like you’re describing a tool that’s like, “hey, we’re a parasite and we’re going to bleed you, but we don’t want to bleed you completely dry.”
But that said, right, there is a regulatory split that’s forming here.
On one side, you’ve got the incremental approach.
Ban Congress, tighten age verification and disclosures, punish individual cases of insider trading as they pop up.
And you’ve got Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer pushing in that direction.
But also it looks like he wants to kind of cast a wider net.
He’s calling on the House to pass its own ban and on the White House to sign a sweeping federal prohibition that would cover every government official, staffer, and employee in the executive branch.
And he singled out the West Wing specifically as a glaring conflict of interest.
You also have Republicans in both chambers co-sponsoring various bills that would at least stop federal officials from trading on insider information or betting on political events.
But then also on the other side, you’ve got Senator Chris Murphy, right, who’s basically arguing that the incremental approach can’t work in principle.
And so his bill would ban entire categories of bets like wagers on government actions, terrorism, war, assassinations, or any event where someone could plausibly know or control the outcome.
His argument is, hey, staff has inside information. White House staff has more inside information. Their friends have it. Their friends’ friends have it.
And so in his words, “you can’t fix this problem by banning people from trading. You can only fix this problem by banning the markets to begin with.”
And that, my friends, you beautiful bastards, is the end of your Monday Philip DeFranco show.
Though I’ll end on two quick ones.
Of course yes, this is a news show, but it’s also a conversation.
So anything that stood out to you today that you want to dive into, leave some comments down below.
And two, remember I’d love to see you in person. Go get your tickets at Crashing Out Tour.
No matter what you do, let me just say thank you for watching. I love yo faces, and I’ll see you right back here tomorrow.
