US Extremists

will put this here although it could also go into the since 2020 elections thread...

Source:  Heritage foundation.  A right wing conservative think tank based in Washington, DC.  These are their figures for documented voter fraud in the United States and they often cite this data as a rally cry for stricter voter laws.   It's laughable, even by their own numbers. 

Voter Fraud in the United States is *not* a problem

Based on data from the Heritage Foundation Election Fraud Database and national voter turnout statistics, here is a concise summary of documented voter fraud cases in the United States from the year 2000 to the present.
The following chart categorizes the "proven instances" of fraud (cases resulting in criminal convictions, civil penalties, or official judicial findings) and compares them to the total volume of ballots cast in U.S. elections during the same period.

Documented Voter Fraud Cases (2000–Present)
Total cases estimated based on the Heritage Foundation’s historical database growth and the Brennan Center for Justice's longitudinal analysis.

Documented instances since Y2K: 


Category of Fraud
Estimated Proven Cases
Fraudulent Use of Absentee Ballots
~380
False Registrations
~250
Ineligible Voting (Felons, Non-citizens, etc.)
~185
Buying Votes
~125
Duplicate Voting
~100
Ballot Petition Fraud
~85
Impersonation Fraud at the Polls
~15
Other (Altering counts, illegal assistance, etc.)
~100
GRAND TOTAL (Proven Cases)
1,240

Ratio of Fraud to Total Votes Cast
To calculate the percentage ratio, we compare the documented cases to the total number of ballots cast in all U.S. elections (Federal, State, and Local) since 2000.
Total Ballots Cast (Estimated): ~2,500,000,000 (2.5 Billion)
Grand Total of Proven Fraud Cases: 1,240
Cases Per Million Votes: 0.49 cases
PERCENTAGE RATIO: 0.0000496%
Conclusion:  The odds of winning the Powerball or being struck by lightning twice in the same day have higher odds than these figures. 

Tennessee Holler adbook post

oops. White nationalism is a helluva drug.

will put this here just because of tge svummy nature of it. 

April 5, 2026 (Sunday)

This weekend, a betting market opened on whether an American soldier bleeding in an Iranian mountain would be found alive.

Yesterday, he was found.

For 48 hours, the United States and Iran raced through the mountains of Isfahan province for the same man — a colonel, wounded, evading on foot after ejecting from a downed F-15E. One crew member was pulled out within hours of the crash. This man vanished. Iran offered $60,000 to anyone who found him first. The IRGC searched. American special forces searched. A CIA deception campaign seeded false information inside Iran to buy time. Equipped with little more than a pistol and a tracking beacon, he scaled terrain to a ridgeline 7,000 feet above sea level and waited more than a day while two governments hunted him from opposite directions.

Polymarket, a prediction market where anonymous traders bet real money on real-world events, opened a market on which day the United States would confirm his rescue. People placed bets. On a man in a mountain.

He was found. Trump posted “WE GOT HIM.” The market closed. Someone collected.

It was not the only market.

Whether Gaza starves. Whether Gaza is cleansed. Whether the Sudan war ends before December 31. Whether a Ukrainian city falls, and by which date. Whether the Strait of Hormuz closes. Whether Kharg Island changes hands. Whether U.S. forces enter Iran by December 31 — 90% odds, $142.4 million behind it. Whether a nuclear weapon detonates before 2027. Whether a ceasefire arrives before the famine does.

Another market, confirmed open: whether another African coup happens by October 31. Not a specific country. Not a named government. Just the continent. Whether it produces another one before the deadline.

Two hundred nineteen war markets. Still open.

On the morning of February 28, before the first bombs fell on Tehran, a trader placed a bet. Polymarket’s own odds said 17% chance of U.S. strikes that day. He bet yes. By the time smoke rose over the skyline, he was collecting. One trader made nearly $1 million from dozens of bets placed hours before unannounced U.S. and Israeli military actions, winning 93% of five-figure wagers on operations nobody was supposed to know about. Six suspected insiders, identified by a blockchain analytics firm, placed a combined $1.2 million bet that the U.S. would strike Iran. In Israel, a military reservist was indicted for using classified material to bet on Polymarket during the war. During his interrogation, an air force officer said this: “The entire squadron is on Polymarket. The entire air force is betting.”

In the United States, nobody has been charged.

“Super cool,” the CEO of Polymarket called it, that the platform creates financial incentives for insiders to share information with the market.

Named strategic advisor to Polymarket and investor through his venture fund, Donald Trump Jr. also advises Kalshi, Polymarket’s primary competitor. His father commands the soldiers whose survival was wagered on this weekend, and his father’s administration sued three states this week that tried to regulate the industry. A spokesperson said Trump Jr. does not trade on prediction markets. He only advises them on marketing strategy.

Polymarket did not call the market on the colonel’s rescue a death bet. Nobody did. The nuclear detonation market ran for days, at its peak 22% odds, hundreds of thousands of dollars in volume, before disappearing without a public statement, as if it had never existed.

The people it was pricing did not disappear.

Long before there were prediction markets, there were lotteries. The 13 original colonies ran them to fund their infrastructure, and a $1.5 million lottery financed the Revolutionary War itself, and Virginia’s wealthy landowners had already, by the 1680s, formalized horse racing bets into a system with written rules and set stakes and careful limits on who could participate. Gambling built this country, and then the country banned it, repeatedly, whenever it became associated with the wrong people — the wrong skin, the wrong neighborhood, the wrong kind of desperation. The mob ran it underground until Nevada legalized it in 1931, and Atlantic City followed in 1978, and tribal gaming opened in 1988, and state lotteries spread through the 1980s sold as education funding. Sports betting, federally restricted in 1992, was unlocked by the Supreme Court in 2018. Within seven years, 38 states had legalized it. By 2024, commercial gaming revenue hit $71.9 billion.

Every expansion arrived with a rationale — economic stimulus, state revenue, personal freedom — and each one made the next easier to accept.

Although governments learned this last, clinical research had confirmed it long before: what makes a reward addictive is unpredictability. A slot machine programmed to pay out on any spin without pattern produces more compulsive play than one that pays reliably, because the next pull might be it, and that might is the drug. Even loss drives continuation. A near-miss, the horse that finishes second, the slot that shows two of three, activates the same response in the disordered brain as a win. Not disappointment. Want. Governments learned what the industry always knew and built lotteries. Then sports betting. Then prediction markets. Each expansion dressed in the language of the last.

Between the scratch ticket and the war market, a two-hundred-year staircase. The industry built it one step at a time.

Someone has opened a market on whether you will starve.

Not whether aid will arrive. Whether the famine will be severe enough, widespread enough, confirmed by a trusted source, to resolve the contract. Your hunger is the variable. Below the threshold, the bet does not pay. Above it, someone collects. This is the Gaza market, open now, denominated in dollars.

In Sudan, after three years of civil war and more than 150,000 dead, famine spreading across Darfur, an open contract asks whether a ceasefire arrives before December 31. Resolution is what the contract requires. Not peace.

Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo — banned from accessing Polymarket under OFAC sanctions. Someone else is pricing their wars. They cannot see the odds assigned to their survival. They cannot see the market.

There is a market on whether another African coup happens by October 31. Not a specific country. Not a named government. Just the continent, and whether it produces another one before the deadline. Someone looked at Africa and saw a recurring event, something that happens often enough to price, a pattern that pays.

Your survival is irrelevant to the contract. What it requires is confirmation. That enough of you die, or enough of you live, that the question resolves.

Polymarket told users clicking its most disturbing markets that prediction markets could give people directly affected by the attacks answers that TV news could not. A public service, it called this.

Gaza was not clicking. No reliable internet. No reliable food. Someone else was clicking on their behalf, pricing the threshold, waiting for the confirmation.

There is a word for what Polymarket is. The industry prefers exchange. The Trump administration calls it a swap, a financial derivative. Three states called it gambling and got sued for saying so.

The word underneath all the other words is action. The compulsive gambler does not care what he bets on. He needs the action. Once you have trained tens of millions of people to need it — through two centuries of expanding access, normalizing risk, building the staircase one legal step at a time — you do not need to tell them what to bet on. Someone will open the market. Someone will price the famine.

The nuclear detonation market is gone. The soldier came home, and the markets stayed open.

Gaza is still there. The continent is still waiting.

The next market is already open.