Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Miscellaneous | July 17, 2026
Prediction markets are a massive scam, a toxic system that has turned everything into a gambling ring, and it might bring about the end of society as we know it. Companies like Kalshi have tried to make themselves seem like the hip new way to hustle, bringing on board shills like Timothee Chalamet to advertise their rotten wares. But they may end up sinking their own ship thanks to their own near-parodic inability to stop being the absolute effing worst.
Kalshi's newest campaign is designed around America's 250th anniversary, presenting major moments in U.S. history as hypotheticals you can bet on. One installment asks, "Will Baseball End Segregation?" and assigns the outcome a 0% chance in 1946. The ad then moves to 1947, when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the market "settled." Wow.
"Kalshi asks us to imagine a world in which the question, 'Will Black men be treated as human beings?' was simply a gaming line you could bet on," wrote journalist Hazel Trice Edney, who called out the ads in an op-ed for the New Pittsburgh Courier. "History did not 'settle' in 1947. It shifted painfully and left a great many people uncompensated on the losing side of a market they never chose to enter."
Kalshi has quietly pulled the ad. But here's the problem: turning the desegregation of sports, the very act of civil rights and a man being harassed and abused for his race, into a betting ring is the entire point of prediction markets. While the vast majority of Kalshi is used for sports betting, it's also been involved in many controversies over allowing people to bet on things like elections, insider trading, the death of Iran's supreme leader, and the genocide of the Palestinian people. Kalshi fined and suspended three congressional candidates for betting on their own political campaigns earlier this year, as though that wasn't something the very set-up of their brand encouraged. Many states are trying to regulate prediction markets and guess which administration is aggressively contesting those efforts? Le gasp!
Kalshi and others of its ilk are craven opportunists who want to turn everyone, particularly younger generations, into addicts who can't live their lives without thinking of everything as a contest. The weather? The football results? The fate of a marginalized group in the face of annihilation? Place your bets, boys! That Jackie Robinson ad was abhorrent but it was also honest about their intentions.
