They Found The Guy Who Inside-Traded The Venezuela Invasion
No, it wasn't Pete Hegseth.
One of the more intriguing subplots of the current Trump presidency is who the hell is getting rich by using insider information to go on prediction websites and commodities markets and place bets on when certain rumored actions will occur? Because there has been a lot of that going on.
Just a few weeks ago, we wrote about anonymous degenerates making money by placing large bets on questions like What day will the United States start bombing Iran? If you are a government insider who knows the date the bombing starts, you can quickly make an account on Kalshi or Polymarket and place a huge bet on that. Or because the world’s oil trade will be massively disrupted, you can hop online and short oil futures. People are making millions gambling on all sorts of death, destruction, and widespread misery.
What a dystopia we live in! How many times a day do we pause to consider the possibility that we all live in an episode of Black Mirror? And can people place bets on the number? For that matter, can they place bets on whether we really do live in an episode of Black Mirror?
If there is a drawback to making money this way, besides the moral stain on your soul, it’s that it would be highly illegal. You would be leaking classified information for purposes of insider trading. It’s like a Voltron of stupid criming.
On Thursday, the government announced it has indicted a special forces soldier from Fort Bragg who participated in the January operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. It seems that soldier, knowing what date the capture would be attempted, made upwards of $450,000 by placing anonymous bets on Polymarket on the timing and outcome of the operation — 13 bets in all, according to the indictment.
After stories about what The New York Times called “unusual trades” started circulating, the soldier, a brain genius sergeant named Gannon Ken Van Dyke, tried to cover his tracks:
]T]he sergeant tried to hide his proceeds by moving them several times, first to a foreign cryptocurrency vault, then to a personal crypto account and finally to a newly created brokerage account. [...] Sergeant Van Dyke sought to delete his Polymarket account, falsely claiming he had lost access to the email address associated with it.
Van Dyke had also used a VPN so no one would be able to tell he made the trades from his computer at Fort Bragg, where a lot of the soldiers who invaded Venezuela are stationed.
Depending on your point of view, this could be a story covering so many of society’s ills. Was Van Dyke one of our chronically underpaid service members? Was the cost of living in America so high that he was desperate to bring in much more income? Is the only way to get ahead in society anymore to hit a jackpot, whether you buy a lottery ticket or bet on oil futures? Is the wealth disparity in the nation causing more and more people to look at the likes of, say, Mark Zuckerberg, and think If that little shit can get rich, I should be able to get mine? Do we care so little about others that we don’t pause to consider the moral implications of gambling on their deaths?
Or are we simply a society of greedy fucks who can never have enough money?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.
Still, imagine if instead of being a Special Forces soldier, Van Dyke had been Don Jr. and had placed these bets because his sundowning dementia patient of a father kept yammering about the operation during a round of golf at Doral? Or imagine it was some other high-level White House insider — Stephen Miller or Karoline Leavitt or one of the many other depraved sacks of meat that populate the Trump administration. Can you see the Justice Department indicting any of those people?
We certainly can’t. In Don Jr.’s case, his father would probably be too surprised the kid had the brains to pull off such a move.
Trump was asked this week if he had any concerns about people getting rich off insider trading around the Iran war, and he didn’t exactly condemn the practice:
This is Trump’s usual fatalism, as if nothing he says or does has any effect on anything. It’s just that hey, shit happens: Mr. President, do you have anything to say about the soldiers killed in the war you started? Well, a lot more of them are probably going to die. It’s war, what can you do.
He added, “I was never much in favor of it. I don’t like it conceptually. It is what it is. I’m not happy with any of that stuff.” Strong words, Mr. President! Strong, useless words.
Naturally, at least one member of Congress has already called for Van Dyke to be pardoned. And naturally, it is one of the nuttier self-righteous loons to whom the American people in their wisdom have bestowed the mantle of leadership:
Before you ask, no, you do not have to hand it to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna. The woman is a Trumpist through and through. We fully expect she would defend any member of the Trump family — or even the president himself — who was caught using classified inside dope to make a killing on a prediction market. Besides, if there is an easy layup for a member of the House Freedom Caucus, it is whining about all the insider trading going on in Congress.
On second thought, it is entirely possible that Trump’s problem with the gambling is that he’s maybe not getting a cut, which would be in character for him.
[NYT]
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"Gannon Ken Van Dyke"
Once again, a perfectly cromulent porn name gone to waste.
I don't care who robbed the bank, it's still bank robbery.