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What to know about Louisiana's new surgical castration law
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry speaks during the start of a special session in Baton Rouge, La., on Jan. 15, 2024. Landry signed a bill in June allowing surgical castration to be a potential punishment for certain sex offenses against children.
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Michael Johnson/The Advocate/AP
Louisiana is now the first state to allow surgical castration to be used as a punishment for sex crimes under a new law signed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry. This law, which will go into effect Aug. 1, allows judges to order people found guilty of certain sex crimes against minors to undergo surgical castration.
The use of surgical castration as punishment, which is a permanent procedure that involves the surgical removal of the testicles or ovaries ostensibly to stop the production of sex hormones, is rare elsewhere around the world. The Czech Republic, Madagascar and a state in Nigeria have such laws on the books that have been strongly criticized by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations.
Several U.S. states, including Louisiana, as well as other countries have laws allowing for the use of chemical castration — a procedure that uses pharmaceutical drugs to quell the offenders’ sex drive — for certain sex crimes.
The passage of this bill in Louisiana has grabbed headlines and caused ripples of consternation among criminal defense lawyers, advocates and medical experts, raising serious concerns around the ethics and constitutionality of the law and questions over whether this punishment would actually make a difference in reducing sex crimes.
“It’s very confusing, in addition to being absolutely unprecedented, and draconian and overkill,” said Gwyneth O’Neill, a New Orleans-based criminal defense attorney and a member of National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
One of the drafters of the bill, Democratic state Rep. Delisha Boyd, told NPR the law will be a strong deterrent for would-be child sex abusers and would protect children.
So, what does the law say?
The law, as written, targets offenders found guilty of aggravated sex crimes, including rape, incest or molestation against a child under 13. The punishment would be brought in certain cases and at a judge’s discretion and the surgery would be completed by a physician. It will also require a court-appointed medical expert to determine whether the offender is the right candidate for the surgery.
An offender could refuse to get the surgery, but would then be sentenced to three to five years of an additional prison sentence without the possibility of getting out early.
The law doesn’t allow anyone under 17 found guilty of certain aggravated sex crimes to receive the punishment.
Boyd says she was inspired to propose this bill after seeing a disturbing article from a local newspaper about a 51-year-old man who was arrested for the alleged rape of a 12 year old. The story revealed that the man was a registered sex offender. In 2007 he had been arrested for allegedly raping a 5 year old.
Louisiana Democratic state Rep. Delisha Boyd works at her desk at her office on May 3, 2024, in New Orleans. Boyd introduced the bill, now law, that would allow for surgical castration to be used against individuals convicted of certain sex crimes.
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Stephen Smith/AP/AP
Boyd said that she believes the criticism she’s received from opponents of the law is from people who haven’t closely read the law and think it forces a prisoner to undergo this procedure.
“Some of the critics say, you know, that’s cruel and unusual punishment. Well, I disagree. I think the cruel and usual punishment was the rape of that 5 year old,” Boyd said.
The reasons why people commit sex offenses are so much more complicated than something that can be fixed with castration, said Maaike Helmus, an associate professor of School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
Helmus’ research focuses on offender risk assessment and on men who have committed sexual offenses or intimate partner violence.
“In our minds, it’s easy to link castration to the problem that they’re exhibiting and think that’ll fix it, but it’s taking a lot of leaps and logic that are not warranted, and not considering other alternatives,” like the use of medication, she said.
This law is part of the state’s ‘tough on crime’ efforts
In February, the state legislature held a special session on crime and passed several bills that Landry and lawmakers said would bring justice to crime victims and their families, according to Baton Rouge Public Radio.
The member station reported that the series of tough-on-crime bills passed the session “will likely reshape the landscape of criminal punishment in Louisiana for years to come.”
The bills expanded death penalty methods, effectively eliminated parole for anyone convicted after Aug. 1, lowered the amount of “good time credit” with few exceptions and established harsher penalties for some crimes.
Gov. Jeff Landry shakes hands with representatives while entering the House chamber during the first day of a special session on Monday, Jan. 15, 2024, in Baton Rouge, La.
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Michael Johnson/The Advocate/Pool/AP
There are concerns over discriminatory application of the law
If it is challenged, O’Neill, the New Orleans-based criminal defense attorney, said it’s highly likely the law would be deemed unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
“Surgical castration is generally considered, or was considered, to be sort of like the paradigmatic example of cruel and unusual punishment, because it’s a form of physical mutilation. It’s barbaric,” she said.
Once it’s enacted later this summer, O’Neill fears the law could be applied in a discriminatory way — the same way the death penalty and other criminal justice policies tend to be, she said.
There is research that indicates the U.S. criminal justice system is applied unfairly to people of color, especially Black Americans. Research shows the number of imprisoned Black Americans has decreased 39% since its peak in 2002, according to The Sentencing Project, but remains higher for Black Americans generally. And in Louisiana, along with Arkansas, Mississippi and Oklahoma, the imprisonment rates are nearly 50% above the national average, according to the organization.
O’Neill says the law also uses vague and potentially confusing terms.
The law’s language mandates that a “court appointed medical expert” can decide if a person found guilty of a sex offense should undergo surgical castration. “We don’t know who that is, who’s going to qualify to be a medical expert,” O’Neill said. “There’s no guidance about that.”
And that introduces risks for defendants, she said.
“I think anytime you have this vague terminology, you’re not going to get the most qualified people to make such a determination,” O’Neill said. The law also doesn’t establish the criteria to evaluate whether an offender is an appropriate candidate for this punishment, she said.
“Practically speaking, I think it puts defense attorneys in a very difficult position,” she said.
Vehicles enter at the main security gate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the largest high-security prison in the U.S. in Angola, La., in August 2008.
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Judi Bottoni/AP/FR37918 AP
Could this law impact repeat offenses?
Part of the motivation behind this law was to cut down on the possibility of someone reoffending. But the research on sexual offense recidivism rates is tough to parse. The research on surgical castration and its effect has only been done on people who have voluntarily undergone the procedure out of concern they will harm again, Helmus said.
That impacts the analysis because these are individuals who are already working to not reoffend, she said.
“If you combine different studies, over multiple countries and jurisdictions and different types of settings, five-year sexual recidivism rates are generally expected to be in the range of five to 10%. And lifetime rates are maybe around 15 to 20%,” Helmus said.
But that’s only for cases the public knows about.
“We know that not all sex offenses get reported to police for a variety of reasons. And so we know that sexual recidivism rates are to some degree an underestimate, because not everything comes to the attention of police. However, it’s hard to know how much that’s actually going to affect reoffending rates,” she said.
Ultimately there’s very limited research on the effectiveness of any type of castration with people who’ve committed sex offenses, Helmus said.
“The whole point of castration is that it is supposed to reduce the sex drive. If you’re pursuing castration to reduce sexual offense rates, you’re making an assumption that they’re committing a sex offense because of a high sex drive or high testosterone rates in the first place,” but this is not always the motivation for committing these offenses, Helmus said.
Research indicates that there’s no evidence that people who commit sex offenses have higher testosterone in the first place.
“If that’s not the reason why they’re committing sex offenses, then reducing their testosterone is going to do nothing to reduce that risk,” she said.
Surgical castration also doesn’t mean someone cannot be sexually aroused or, in the case of men, get an erection or ejaculate, Helmus said. Not to mention there is still psychological arousal and urges that are not addressed with this procedure.
“Even if castrated, they can later take medications to reduce or reverse the effects of castration and still be able to increase their sex drive,” she said. “So castration isn’t a foolproof way of getting rid of their sex drive. What we know, especially for people who commit sex offenses against children, they don’t need an erection to be able to commit many of the types of sex offenses that they commit.”
Boyd still believes that this law could serve as a strong deterrent.
“These predators have to be stopped,” she said. “Even if just one rapist changes his mind about raping a child, I will take that.”
Federal law enforcement agents confront protesters during a demonstration outside the Bishop Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Thursday.
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Octavio Jones/AFP via Getty Images
Up to 1,500 U.S. active-duty troops in Alaska are on standby for possible deployment to Minnesota, a U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly has confirmed to NPR.
The move comes days after President Trump again threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to control ongoing protests over the immigration enforcement surge in Minneapolis as well as clashes between federal agents and residents. Trump later walked back that threat.
The troops on standby are from the Army’s 11th Airborne Division, which specializes in cold weather operations, according to the division’s website.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said Sunday in an emailed statement to NPR that the “Department of War is always prepared to execute the orders of the Commander-in-Chief if called upon.”
Over the weekend, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz directed the Minnesota National Guard to prepare for possible deployment to assist local law enforcement and emergency management agencies, though they have not been deployed yet.
The Guard said in a Facebook post that these “Minnesota National Guardsmen live, work, and serve in our state, and are focused on protecting life, preserving property, and ensuring Minnesotans can safely exercise their First Amendment rights.” If activated, members would wear yellow reflective vests to “help distinguish them from other agencies in similar uniforms.”
The developments follow days of rising tensions, confrontations and violence stemming from what the Department of Homeland Security has described as its largest operation in history, involving thousands of federal agents, including those from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that it would be a “shocking step” if Trump sent the military into the city, too.
“To those that are paying attention, you’ve got to understand how wild this is right now,” Frey said. “In Minneapolis, crime is dramatically down. We don’t need more federal agents to keep people safe. We are safe.”
Joseph Nunn, an attorney at the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, said the Insurrection Act is a “break-glass-in-case-of-emergency type of tool.” It is meant to be used when civilian authorities are overwhelmed by a crisis, he said, and not simply to quell protests — even violent protests.
“It would be a flagrant abuse of the Insurrection Act” if Trump invoked it now, Nunn said, “unlike anything that’s ever happened before in the history of the country.”
Logan Sudeith, 25, estimates he clocks about 100 hours a week on prediction markets.
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Evan Frost for NPR
Ask Logan Sudeith how many bets he places in a week and he’ll laugh. It’s a comical line of questioning for the 25-year-old former financial risk analyst, who estimates he clocks about 100 hours a week on prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket. After a while, understandably, some of the bets blur together. What are his net profits, though? That’s a number he’s got at the ready.
“Last month, I made $100,000,” said Sudeith, who does most of his trading from his laptop while bed-lounging in his Atlanta apartment. He’s executing so many orders on the sites, he says, that he has no time to cook. So he DoorDashes every meal.
“My last salary was $75,000 a year, so I left my job to trade full time,” he said
Some of his biggest hauls in recent months include lucrative stakes on Time Magazine’s person of the year ($40,236), the most-searched person on Google last year ($11,083) and a wager on the New York City mayoral race ($7,448). And of course, a couple thousand here, a couple thousand there on questions like, how many times will a sports announcer say “air ball”? And will President Trump use the phrase “drill baby drill” at an upcoming press conference? (Traders had $500,000 on the line on this market.)
“I’m not a fan of Trump, though I do spend most of my day listening to him and tracking what he is doing,” said Sudeith, noting that whatever candidate in the next presidential race is the most friendly to prediction markets has his vote. “I could be a single-issue voter. If they’re super-super heavy anti-prediction markets, it would be hard for me to vote for them.”
Sudeith says he made $100,000 last month on prediction market apps.
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Evan Frost for NPR
The boom of online prediction markets is being driven by the Sudeiths of the world. He’s one of millions of traders logging on every day to services like Kalshi and Polymarket to place high-dollar and incredibly risky bets on the outcome of the world in real time, whether it’s an award host’s turn of phrase to the number of migrants the U.S. will deport this year.
Much like previous financial crazes around meme stocks and NFTs, true believers view prediction markets through a stick-it-to-the-man prism. It’s a movement against the elite establishment, they say, whether it’s the mainstream media, pollsters or government agencies. This growing group of renegade traders maintain that core truths emerge only after thousands of people express their opinions with their pocketbooks.
“Markets are the most efficient way to get to real information,” Sudeith said. “If you’re watching on election night, I think you’ll know who the winners are before the news can report it.”
While the industry may position itself an alternative to the mainstream, the mainstream is embracing it.
CNN and CNBC have struck deals to incorporate Kalshi prediction markets into coverage. The Wall Street Journal‘s owner, Dow Jones, is partnering with Polymarket, as did the Golden Globe awards this year, with announcers updating viewers on Polymarket odds before every commercial break.
Founders of the prediction markets apps say they enable people to turn their opinion into a financial hedge against things like inflation or a government shutdown, yet skeptics say that is twisty and self-serving logic.
“They are gambling sites no different than FanDuel or DraftKings, a corner bookie, or a casino in Las Vegas,” said Dennis Kelleher, chief executive of Better Markets, a nonprofit that pushes for Wall Street reform.
Kalshi says ‘there’s no house,’ not all agree
Traditional gambling often means wagering against “the house,” where the casino acts like the banker, extracting fees and maintaining a competitive edge.
Prediction markets like Kalshi say they’re different.
Advertisements by the company Kalshi predict a victory for Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election before the polls closed on Nov. 4, 2025.
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Olga Fedorova/AP
Here’s how they work: A staff member creates “a market,” often after one has been suggested by a user, like what will President Trump say at his next Oval Office briefing?
Then anyone can propose a “strike,” the lingo for a term that’s being bet on, whether, for instance, Trump will say “Greenland,” or “Minnesota,” or some other word or phrase.
Kalshi staff pick what terms will be bet on for both sides of that “yes” and “no” wager.
In order to work, however, there needs to be money on both the “yes” and the “no” side of the market, so Kalshi relies on institutional partners, like the hedge fund Susquehanna International, or everyday users with large enough portfolios to front the cash. This is called being a “market maker.” Kalshi provides financial perks and data access to traders who do this.
But because traders are competing with other traders, Kalshi argues there is no house involved in these transactions.
Several federal lawsuits against Kalshi have challenged this notion, claiming that the Wall Street firms that Kalshi taps are indistinguishable from a traditional “house.”
One suit filed this month in the Northern District of Illinois highlights that the company itself has a separate entity, Kalshi Trading, that supplies cash on the opposite side of trades.
“Thus, Kalshi users are betting against the house exactly the same way it would in a brick-and-mortar casino,” wrote lawyer Russell Busch in the complaint.
Kalshi denies this. Company spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana told NPR that market makers merely price bids and asks and do not have a competitive advantage.
“Market making is completely different from being a house, because a house has monopoly pricing power, whereas market makers compete with thousands of other market makers to take bids,” she said.
The Trump family invests in prediction markets. The administration is taking a friendly policy stance
While the Biden administration sought to rein in this industry, Trump’s regulators are breaking down barriers to allow it to flourish.
More than $2 billion is now traded every week on Kalshi, an amount the company says is 1,000% higher compared to the Biden years.
Polymaket, which was forced in 2022 to shut down in the U.S. for operating as an unlicensed betting site, recently won the Trump administration’s blessing to re-launch in the U.S.
The Trump family is also getting in on the action. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., is on the board of Polymarket, and his venture capital firm invests in the company. He is also a “strategic adviser” to Kalshi. Truth Social, the president’s social media site, is planning to launch its own prediction market called Truth Predict.
Donald Trump Jr. speaks during The Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas on May 27, 2025.
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Ian Maule/AFP via Getty Images
The explosive growth and permissive regulatory environment has ignited a debate about the underbelly of an industry that essentially turns many features of modern life into potential monetary wins and losses. Fears persist that when elections, politics and foreign invasions become a gamble that insiders could abuse their access for profit and market odds could influence what actually happens.
Then there’s the most prosaic, but perhaps more immediate worry: That the prediction markets gamify trading with slickly designed apps, one-click checking account deposits and constant push alerts, catering to compulsive online bettors. They’re not unlike other app-based trading platforms, but now almost anything is a potential betting opportunity, which economists and other financial experts say can enable a new generation of gambling addicts.
While individual bets on Kalshi are not public, the app has a leaderboard showcasing top profit winners.
That offers hope to some traders who turn to Discord and Reddit to discuss how losses have set them back.
“I’m down 2000 this week when I was up 1200 last week,” wrote a Kalshi trader who goes by Educational_Pain_407 on Reddit. “Lost it all and keep trying to claw it back. So I don’t know what to tell you but right now I don’t have enough to pay my bills in my bank account so I can’t bet even if I wanted to.”
There are three federal lawsuits against Kalshi seeking class action status alleging the apps have sucked young traders into gambling addiction.
Officials at Kalshi have said if traders “lose their shirt that’s on them,” and even the Reddit user behind on his bills concedes it’s a matter of personal responsibility: “Live and learn and pay for your mistakes. The consequences of being an adult,” he wrote recently.
While online sportsbooks and gambling are nothing new, the rapid speed, volume of cash and ease at which transactions flow across prediction market apps set them apart from other forms of betting, according to legal and financial experts.
“Like sports betting, these platforms can be addictive. It is the adrenaline rush that the target demographic is chasing,” said Melinda Roth, a visiting professor at Washington and Lee University’s School of Law who studies prediction markets. “I do believe this is a looming public health crisis.”
Decoding the lingo: ‘Mogged,’ ‘Fudded,’ ‘PMT’
Evan Semet, 26, is another diehard prediction markets trader who left his salaried position in finance as a quantitative researcher after he started raking in six figures a month on Kalshi.”I don’t feel the need for another job at the moment,” he said.
His first golden ticket came via bets on the number of Transportation Security Agency screenings that happen across a certain period on Polymarket.
Evan Semet quit his job in finance to do prediction market trading full time.
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Meredith Nierman/NPR
Semet said he set up a dedicated server through Amazon Web Services to host statistical models that he runs to help him decide where to place bets.
“It was pretty modelable,” he said, noting that he leans on the finance savvy he gleaned at a trading firm to make money on predictions. “Most day traders draw some shapes on a chart and think it has some statistical significance but it’s really just astrology,” he said. “They’re old-school gamblers going off of intuition. I try to be driven by statistics.”
To stay tapped in, he’s often toggling between multiple live trades on one screen and following a discussion among other traders on the social network Discord.
Keeping up on what’s happening there requires understanding a hyper-specific type of lingo that’s a blend of Generation Alpha and Gen Z slang, repurposed finance terminology and a grab-bag of other cultural influences from gaming to crypto to the gutter humor of fringe sites like 4chan.
If you’ve been out-maneuvered by another trader, you’ve been “mogged.”
If a market has “fudded,” people are selling their positions out of fear, uncertainty and doubt. A “rulescuck” is someone who is a stickler for the rules of a betting market and will try to win on a technicality.
A “bondsharp” is a well-known community member who frequently puts up money on the other side of a bet.
These are just a handful of the terms required to stay apace of the chats on Discord, where PMTs are often discussing their full port (prediction market trader, and full portfolio, of course).
“It is a good amount of terminology. It’s borrowing lingo and terms from stuff I’ve heard at real trading firms mixed with online pop culture,” Semet said.
“Sometimes I prefer to not look at all and see how I did later,” Semet said.
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Meredith Nierman/NPR
Prediction market trading can be a compulsive sport for many of them, who admit they can be dopamine junkies. Others prefer to avoid the pressure-cooker feeling of watching a bet win or lose live.
“It’s an antsy, gambling-like feeling watching it all happen live,” Semet said. “It’s intense, almost feels like the fog of war, trying to decide what to do,” he said. “Sometimes I prefer to not look at all and see how I did later.”
How predictions markets got into politics
Kalshi’s big day came, as it were, on Election Day in November 2020.
That’s when they got word that Trump’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates futures contracts, greenlit it as a “designated contract market,” a blessing that essentially gave the platform a license to operate as a financial exchange.
It was a long time coming.
For years before that, Kalshi’s co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, former Wall Street traders who met at MIT, had been battling a skeptical CFTC, which had long rejected similar applications over concerns that an events contract platform would operate a type of gambling outside the purview of state gambling commissions. Regulators also feared the bets invited insiders to rig the outcomes of events from sports to elections.
Tarek Mansour, (left) and Luana Lopes Lara are co-founders of Kalshi.
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Alexey Yurenev/Bloomberg via Getty Images
As Kalshi hired lawyers and lobbyists leading up to their CFTC approval, another prediction market, where most are betting with cryptocurrencies, Polymarket, was exploding in growth. It, however, had not bothered to even try to receive federal buy-in. The Biden administration shut down the exchange for operating without a license. Now, Polymarket has the CFTC on its side, and is staging a U.S. comeback.
Two developments helped Polymarket’s return: the company acquired a little-known derivatives exchange QCX, which had already obtained CFTC approval. And the Trump administration’s CTFC and Justice Department abandoned investigations into Polymarket.
States, however, are on the attack. Massachusetts has sued to push Kalshi out of the state. Eight other states, including New York, New Jersey and Maryland, have sent the company cease and desist letters alleging that it is operating as an illegal and unlicensed sports gambling site. The motivation is clear: Gambling brings in serious tax revenue for states, while prediction markets bring in none.
For both Kalshi and Polymarket, one of the most controversial areas of prediction market trading is elections, an issue Biden-era regulators took Kalshi to court over.
Under the 1936 Commodity Exchange Act, which was updated in 2008 after the financial crisis, future event contracts cannot involve terrorism, assassinations or “games,” but political betting is not explicitly banned.
The Polymarket prediction market website is seen on a computer screen.
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Wyatte Grantham-Philips/AP
Biden administration lawyers argued that placing wagers on races amounted to a game, a word that is not defined at all in the law. Election bets, the regulators contended, could turbocharge the spread of political misinformation and create financial incentives for voters to cast a ballot even when it’s contrary to a voter’s political views.
It also puts the CFTC in the awkward position of having to investigate news, whether real or fabricated, that moves a prediction market. Former CFTC officials told NPR that the agency has never been equipped to be “an election cop.”
The federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. rejected that framing and handed Kalshi a major victory. The court also pointed out that the harm these markets would cause the government was not “concrete” enough.
The Trump administration dropped the appeal, unleashing what is expected to be an unprecedented torrent of prediction market cash into this year’s midterm elections, which is raising alarms among those pushing for stricter regulations on this industry.
“AI, deepfakes, and other nefarious activities to attack candidates could easily impact the betting activity and odds, as well as the actual outcome of elections,” said Kelleher of Better Markets. “They don’t really care who wins or loses. They only care about the volume of bets and driving that volume as high as possible.”
Regulators appear unprepared. The CFTC usually has five commissioners but currently only has one. Meanwhile, Kalshi’s board includes former CFTC Commissioner Brian Quintenz, who was among the officials who gave the platform its federal approval in 2020.
Former CFTC Commissioner Kristin Johnson, who left the agency in 2025, said that lack of commissioners comes on top of high levels of turnover among the most senior staff lawyers.
“We’re essentially asking the CFTC to get involved in engaging and policing an element of our democratic process that we really haven’t thought carefully enough about,” Johnson said.
Insider trading scrutiny grows
Before a U.S. operation ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, one trader on Polymarket banked a nearly half-million-dollar profit on a bet Maduro would not remain president for long.
While the trader’s identity remains a mystery, speculation continues to rattle around the internet about whether the person had insider information. The episode has renewed scrutiny on how the companies ensure bets aren’t rigged.
On Discord, when traders see a large bet placed that immediately stands out as an outlier, cries of “the market is insidered” are common. Proving it is another matter.
As is often the case on the platforms, open-shut evidence of insider trading is elusive. Kalshi requires a government-issued ID to sign up in order to trace any possible market manipulation back to a real person. Polymarket does not, but it has yet to publicly re-launch its U.S. app. Internal and third-party surveillance tools, the companies say, are on the lookout for unusual activity.
Congress has begun to take notice. Following the Maduro trade, Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-NY, and 30 other Democrats, sponsored legislation banning federal officials from using prediction markets to trade on policies or political outcomes using non-public information.
Being up against an insider is always a risk, said full-time prediction markets trader Semet.
“There’s always going to be someone who has more information than you, unless you’re the insider,” he said. “There are certain accounts that miraculously have every single Google and OpenAI release date nailed perfectly, and it’s like, all right, just don’t fade those people,” he said using the slang word for voting against another trader.
Being up against an insider is always a risk, said full-time prediction markets trader Semet.
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Meredith Nierman/NPR
When asked if he thinks Kalshi and Polymarket are doing enough to combat insider trading, he gave a blunt assessment: “F*** no,” Semet said. “I really don’t think they care.”
“Tailing,” or making a bet joining in on a suspiciously large bet is common on the platforms. Bloomberg on Monday reported on a new tool that allows traders to get alerts when anomalous transactions occur so they can potentially cash in on what could be a winning wager.
From the vantage point of these traders, nearly everything has a trading implication.
And that kind of thinking can fuel conspiratorial theories about why something did or did not happen.
Take, for instance, a recent White House press briefing in which press secretary Karoline Leavitt left the room seconds before hitting 65 minutes. To most, that was unremarkable.
Yet on Kalshi, that looked like a secret message, because many thousands of dollars in bets were at stake that she would cross the 65-minute mark.
The chatter about Leavitt was mentioned on CNBC, which got the attention of traders on Discord, who wondered if this or another incident will ever lead to a PMT, prediction market trader, testifying in Washington about rigging the markets.
“PMT getting called before Congress,” wrote a Discord user, whose handle is “permanent resident of hell,” they added: “Let’s get a market on it.”
The Justice Department is investigating Minnesota officials, including Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey under the theory they conspired to impede federal immigration agents through public statements they have made, a senior law enforcement official and a person familiar with the matter told NBC News.
Minneapolis has been the backdrop of intensifying protests since an ICE officer fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three and a U.S. citizen, last week. Immigration enforcement arrived in Minneapolis weeks ago, but federal officers have flooded the city since Good’s shooting.
Both Walz and Frey have been at odds with federal officials who have argued the officer, Jonathan Ross, was justified in shooting Good. They have criticized the federal response and questioned why the FBI cut out local authorities from the probe into the Good shooting. CBS News first reported on the investigation.
Walz said in a statement Friday the investigation is purely political.
“Two days ago it was Elissa Slotkin. Last week it was Jerome Powell. Before that, Mark Kelly. Weaponizing the justice system and threatening political opponents is a dangerous, authoritarian tactic,” he said. “The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her,” he said.
Frey said in a statement in response to reports of the DOJ investigation that he “will not be intimidated.”
“This is an obvious attempt to intimidate me for standing up for Minneapolis, our local law enforcement, and our residents against the chaos and danger this Administration has brought to our streets,” he said.
He added, “Neither our city nor our country will succumb to this fear. We stand rock solid.”
The Justice Department declined to comment. The federal statute used in the investigation into Minnesota officials has been rarely used and has roots in the Civil War-era. But it was on a list of statutes listed in a memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi last month, obtained by NBC News, that offered a roadmap for federal prosecutors on how to boost investigations into individuals she dubbed domestic terrorists.
Bondi posted on X Friday, “A reminder to all those in Minnesota: No one is above the law.”
The prospect of an investigation which would involve political speech by public officials raises First Amendment concerns that normally would involve a consultation with the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section before federal officials opened a criminal probe into public figures or took any proactive investigative steps, according to a person familiar with the matter.
But the Public Integrity Section has been decimated and sidelined in Trump’s second term.
Aaron Terry, director of public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said in a statement Friday that if criticism of the administration’s immigration enforcement operations is the basis for the investigation, “it is blatantly unconstitutional and intolerable in a free society.”
“The right to condemn government action without fear of government punishment is the foundation of the First Amendment,” Terry said.
In Minneapolis, tensions continue to run high; a federal officer shot a man in the leg in Minneapolis on Thursday night after he allegedly fled a traffic stop and attacked an officer.
Kristen Welker and Raquel Coronell Uribe contributed.
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