Of Course Young Men Are Betting on War

As American missiles struck Tehran and the world watched with consternation, a cadre of young men was refreshing their Polymarket browsers with a more pressing question: had their bets paid out?

You can slap any number of monikers on prediction markets. Twisted. Nihilistic. The most craven form of unchecked capitalism. Hotbeds for insider trading. An unwelcome intrusion of gambling into politics. None of it would be wrong.

But don’t call it surprising that, once more, it’s a young man’s game. For a generation that never knew politics as anything but spectacle, prediction markets are hardly a corruption of civic life – they’re the logical endpoint. This endpoint should alarm us all.

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Prediction markets have exploded in trading volume and public consciousness since Trump returned to office. Polymarket and Kalshi, the two leading platforms, function like stock markets: users buy and sell contracts tied to future events, with prices reflecting the odds the “crowd” assigns to each outcome. Browse either site, and you’ll find a dizzying mishmash of available wagers: “Will Trump take back the Panama Canal?” “Will the U.S. take control of any part of Canada?” “Who will win the Nobel Peace Prize?” – alongside bets on college lacrosse games and Oscar awards. Whereas Kalshi is federally regulated by the CFTC, requiring users to disclose their name and social security number, Polymarket’s prediction market is not, though, a VPN circumvents restrictions easily enough.

These platforms are, as we’re discovering in real time, ripe for abuse. Since the start of 2026 alone, two Israeli soldiers have been charged with using classified intelligence to place bets on Polymarket. An anonymous bettor placed over $60,000 on the U.S. striking Iran right before it happened, walking away with nearly half a million dollars. Another wallet collected over $400,000 following Maduro’s capture. And these are likely just the tip of the iceberg.

Young men are driving these markets; though, usage is still relatively minor – eight percent of men aged 18-24 reported using a prediction market in the past six months, per a recent Ipsos/American Institute for Boys and Men (AIMB) survey, compared to three percent of the general public – the volume of bets and frequency of advertisements has risen sharply in recent months.

As these markets have taken off, it’s worth asking: how did we get here? To a place where young men bet on foreign invasions the same way they’d bet on Premier League matches?

Since the Supreme Court legalized state-authorized sports betting in 2018, adolescent boys and young men have become the industry’s prime target. DraftKings, FanDuel and the likes blanket the airwaves with advertising fine-tuned for this demographic: previous analyses of sports betting advertisements found that the lion’s share of “winning” characters are men, with the language often framed around a masculine-coded premise – that staking money is the only way to prove your acumen and nerve.

The marketing has paid enormous dividends for the industry – their profits ballooning year over year – while proving devastating for the young men taken for a spin. AIBM has found that sports gambling is linked with increased bankruptcies and lower credit scores.

Prediction markets are the latest chapter in this story. Polymarket and Kalshi inherited the infrastructure pioneered by companies like DraftKings and FanDuel – but they’ve shown a shrewdness of their own. Popular social media accounts like NFL Memes and Insider History have formed partnerships with Kalshi and Polymarket, posting market odds alongside political news and sports highlights, all in one scroll. These platforms know their core audience, and their social media aesthetic delivers: headlines in the meme-coded, big-header style of the edgelord internet (“EPSTEIN FILES IGNITE PIZZAGATE’S RETURN” is one such post), each one another piece of ragebait with trading odds attached.

But the gambling industry alone didn’t teach young men to see bets on Iranian leadership change as synonymous with NHL spreads.

For most of the young men patronizing Polymarket and Kalshi, the crass self-interest of Trumpism in the face of wars and disasters isn’t a departure from “normal” politics – it is normal politics. Young Americans came of age watching four years of unmitigated chaos, culminating in a televised insurrection that should have, in any functioning democracy, been disqualifying. Evidently, it wasn’t. The lesson was simple: politics is an unserious business built for entertainment and self-enrichment, not deliberation.

Of course, Trump’s first presidency also collided with the rise of a nihilistic internet society and combative online politics – a digital culture that elevated and rewarded those of his ilk, reinforcing the theatrical nature of it all. The campus-confrontation model perfected by PragerU and Turning Point USA; the “facts don’t care about your feelings” ethos of Ben Shapiro; the viral montages of journalists like Jordan Klepper hunting for Trump supporters to humiliate – this format flourished in an age of shock-value-driven social media, and young men were the primary audience.

Thus, the memeification of Charlie Kirk (“Kirkification”) after his assassination, the POV videos of young men in the Middle East “reacting” to drone strikes, the White House posting Call of Duty-style footage of its strikes on X are all part of the same phenomenon. When war is presented like highlight reels or gaming compilations, when presidential debates are indistinguishable from boxing matches and redistricting wars from scorekeeping, the distinction between betting on a Knicks win and wagering on territorial conquest crumbles.

These platforms market themselves as forecasters simply chiming in on current events. But Kalshi and Polymarket were built for exactly this environment – one where regime change, global conflict, and political chaos of any form translate directly into volume and profit. Instability is a feature, not a bug.

Polymarket and Kalshi are monetizing the wreckage of a gamified politics and ruptured social contract. No, they didn’t create the conditions, but they’re cynically exploiting a generation primed for exactly this moment.

Regulation of these markets is overdue, and the AIBM/Ipsos poll suggests a general appetite amongst the public for it. But the larger battle is bringing young men back into the collective project of democracy — reigniting, in them and in all of us, a sense of common good.