Betting on Power: Insider Trading in Democracy

Monday, April 27, 2026

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You're listening to American Ground Radio with Louis R. Avallone and Stephen Parr. This is the full show for April 23, 2026.

We open with a story that exposes a dangerous new frontier in political corruption — candidates for Congress placing bets on their own election outcomes on prediction markets like Kalshi, effectively insider trading on democracy itself. We dig into the cases of a Minnesota state senator, a Texas Republican, and a Virginia candidate who were suspended from the platform for wagering on races they were actively running in — and the jaw-dropping detail that the Minnesota senator had sponsored a bill to ban prediction markets in his own state while placing bets on one. Then we cover the U.S. Army soldier who used classified information about the capture of Nicolas Maduro to place $33,000 in wagers on a prediction market and walked away with $400,000 — betting on whether American military personnel would live or die. We ask the harder question of whether prediction markets themselves are making corruption easier, elections cheaper, and American lives into a commodity.

Our American Mamas Teri Netterville and Kimberly Burleson tackle a growing and painful trend — parents who leave the bulk of their inheritance to their troubled children and nothing to the responsible ones, reasoning that the good kids will be fine on their own. We get into why this rewards bad behavior, what the Prodigal Son story actually teaches us about fairness, why it's usually the responsible child's spouse who feels the injustice most acutely, and the smartest thing one mama's mother ever did — she started giving things away before she died so everyone could choose what they wanted with no hard feelings.

In our Digging Deep segment, billionaire Ken Griffin — owner of the most expensive home ever sold in the United States, a $238 million penthouse at 220 Central Park South — has been personally called out by New York City Mayor Mamdani as a target of his luxury property tax. Griffin is now reportedly reconsidering a $6 billion development project in New York City. We explain the difference between taxation and targeting, why class warfare isn't just bad politics but bad economics, and what happens to a city when the people who build things decide the message is clear enough and leave.

Then we go deep into a City Journal report on what is happening inside Massachusetts women's prisons after the state passed a 2018 criminal justice reform law allowing any male prisoner to transfer to a women's facility simply by telling a guard he identifies as a woman — no clinical diagnosis required. We read directly from the report. Serial rapists. Wife murderers. Child molesters. Transferred into facilities housing female inmates and female guards. Female correctional officers with documented histories of sexual assault trauma being ordered to strip search male inmates — and told they could be held in contempt for refusing. We ask where the feminist left is on this, and what it means when ideology crashes into reality and real women pay the price.

We also cover Mike Vrabel stepping away from the New England Patriots amid a personal scandal involving a reporter — and what it tells us about the difference between a leader who tells his team what to do and a leader who shows them.

For our Bright Spot, The Atlantic — one of the most left-leaning publications in the country — accidentally published a masterclass in conservative economics. San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit solved its vandalism crisis and cut crime by 41% with one simple change: they made people pay a fare to ride. Crime fell. Vandalism dropped by a thousand hours of cleanup. Revenue is up $10 million a year. We celebrate The Atlantic for accidentally proving what the right has been saying for 50 years — when something costs you even a little, you treat it differently.

And we close with Curry Arnold of Atlanta, Georgia — a dad who started taking his one-and-a-half-year-old daughter to the library to read, posted videos on Instagram, and accidentally started a movement of fathers and children reading together called Library Dads. By age two and a half, his daughter had a vocabulary of over 250 words. One thing to have men in your circle. Another thing entirely to have men in your corner. May your pursuit of happiness bring you joy.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, visit AmericanGroundRadio.com, and join the conversation at 866-AGR-1776!

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