A series of revealing texts and tweets by Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO of FTX, the once high-flying but now belly-up crypto exchange, had the following to say about his image as a do-gooder: it is a “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us”.
Very interesting. He had the whole game going: a vegan worried about climate change, supports every manner of justice (racial, social, environmental) except that which is coming for him, and shells out millions to worthy charities associated with the Left. He also bought plenty of access and protection in D.C., enough to make his shady company the toast of the town.
As part of the mix, there is this thing called pandemic planning. We should know what that is by now: it means you can’t be in charge of your life because there are bad viruses out there. As bizarre as it seems, and for reasons that are still not entirely clear, favouring lockdowns, masks, and vaccine passports became part of the woke ideological stew.
This is particularly strange because Covid restrictions have been proven, over and over, to harm all the groups about whom woke ideology claims to care so deeply. That includes even animal rights: who can forget the Danish mink slaughter of 2020?
Regardless, it’s just true. Masking became a symbol of being a good person, same as vaccinating, veganism and flying into fits at the drop of a hat over climate change. None of this has much if anything to do with science or reality. It’s all tribal symbolism in the name of group political solidarity. And FTX was pretty good at it, throwing around hundreds of millions to prove the company’s loyalty to all the right causes.
Among them included the pandemic-planning racket. That’s right: there were deep connections between FTX and Covid that have been cultivated for two years. Let’s have a look.
Earlier this year, the New York Times trumpeted a study that showed no benefit at all to the use of Ivermectin. It was supposed to be definitive. The study was funded by FTX. Why? Why was a crypto exchange so interested in the debunking of repurposed drugs in order to drive governments and people into the use of patented pharmaceuticals, even those like Remdesivir that didn’t actually work? Inquiring minds would like to know.
Regardless, the study and especially the conclusions turned out to be bogus. David Henderson and Charles Hooper further point out an interesting fact: “Some of the researchers involved in the TOGETHER trial had performed paid services for Pfizer, Merck, Regeneron and AstraZeneca, all companies involved in developing COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines that nominally compete with ivermectin.”
For some reason, Bankman-Fried just knew that he was supposed to oppose repurposed drugs, though he knew nothing about the subject at all. He was glad to fund a poor study to make it true and the New York Times played its assigned role in the whole performance.
It was just the start. A soft-peddling Washington Post investigation found that Sam and his brother Gabe, who ran a hastily founded Covid nonprofit, “have spent at least $70 million since October 2021 on research projects, campaign donations and other initiatives intended to improve biosecurity and prevent the next pandemic.”
I can do no better than to quote the Washington Post:
The shock waves from FTX’s free fall have rippled across the public health world, where numerous leaders in pandemic-preparedness had received funds from FTX funders or were seeking donations.
In other words, the “public health world” wanted more chances to say: “Give me money so I can keep advocating to lock more people down!” Alas, the collapse of the exchange, which reportedly holds a mere 0.001% of the assets it once claimed to have, makes that impossible.
Among the organisations most affected is Guarding Against Pandemics, the advocacy group headed by Gabe that took out millions in ads to back the Biden administration’s push for $30 billion in funding. As Influence Watch notes: “Guarding Against Pandemics is a Left-leaning advocacy group created in 2020 to support legislation that increases Government investment in pandemic prevention plans.”
Truly it gets worse:
FTX-backed projects ranged from $12 million to champion a California ballot initiative to strengthen public health programs and detect emerging virus threats (amid lackluster support, the measure was punted to 2024), to investing more than $11 million on the unsuccessful congressional primary campaign of an Oregon biosecurity expert, and even a $150,000 grant to help Moncef Slaoui, scientific adviser for the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine accelerator, write his memoir.
Leaders of the FTX Future Fund, a spinoff foundation that committed more than $25 million to preventing bio-risks, resigned in an open letter last Thursday, acknowledging that some donations from the organisation are on hold.
And worse:
The FTX Future Fund’s commitments included $10 million to HelixNano, a biotech start-up seeking to develop a next-generation coronavirus vaccine; $250,000 to a University of Ottawa scientist researching how to eradicate viruses from plastic surfaces; and $175,000 to support a recent law school graduate’s job at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Overall, the Future Fund was a force for good,” said Tom Inglesby, who leads the Johns Hopkins center, lamenting the fund’s collapse. “The work they were doing was really trying to get people to think long-term… to build pandemic preparedness, to diminish the risks of biological threats.”
More:
Guarding Against Pandemics spent more than $1 million on lobbying Capitol Hill and the White House over the past year, hired at least 26 lobbyists to advocate for a still-pending bipartisan pandemic plan in Congress and other issues, and ran advertisements backing legislation that included pandemic-preparedness funding. Protect Our Future, a political action committee backed by the Bankman-Fried brothers, spent about $28 million this congressional cycle on Democratic candidates “who will be champions for pandemic prevention,” according to the group’s webpage.
I think you get the idea. This is all a racket. FTX, founded in 2019 following Biden’s announcement of his bid for the presidency, by the son of the co-founder of a major Democrat Party political action committee called Mind the Gap, was nothing but a magic-bean Ponzi scheme. It seized on the lockdowns for political, media and academic cover. Its economic rationale was as nonexistent as its books. The first auditor to have a look has written:
Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.
It was the worst example of a phony perpetual-motion machine: a token to back a company that itself was backed by the token, which in turn was backed by nothing but political fashion and woke ideology that roped in Larry David, Tom Brady, Katy Perry, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to provide a cloak of legitimacy.
And you can’t make this stuff up anymore: FTX had a close relationship with the World Economic Forum and was the favored crypto exchange of the Ukrainian Government. It looks for all the world like the money-laundering operation of the Democratic National Committee and the entire lockdown lobby.
I will tell you what infuriates me about these billions in fake money and deep corruptions of politics and science. For years now, my anti-lockdown friends have been hounded for being funded by supposed dark money that simply doesn’t exist. Many brave scientists, journalists, attorneys and others gave up great careers to stand for principle, exposing the damage caused by the lockdowns, and this is how they have been treated: smeared and displaced.
The Brownstone Institute has adopted as many in this diaspora as possible for fellowships as far as the resources (real ones, contributed by caring individuals) can go. But we cannot come anywhere near what is necessary for justice, much less complete with the eight-digit funding regime of the other side.
The Great Barrington Declaration was signed at the offices of the American Institute for Economic Research, which, apparently, six years prior had received a long-spent $60,000 grant from the Koch Foundation, and thus became a “Koch-funded libertarian think tank” which supposedly discredited the GBD, even though none of the authors received a dime.
This gibberish and slander has gone on for years – at the urging of Government officials! – and Brownstone itself faces much of the same nonsense, with every manner of fantasy about our supposed power, money and influence swarming the darker realms of the social media dudgeons. In fact, the actual Koch Foundation (probably unbeknownst to its founder) was funding the pro-lockdown work of Neil Ferguson, whose ridiculous modelling terrified the world into denying human rights to billions of people the world over.
All this time – while every type of vicious propaganda was unleashed on the world – the pro-lockdown and pro-mandate lobby, including fake scientists and fake studies, were benefiting from millions and billions thrown around by operators of a Ponzi scheme based on cheating, fraud and $15 billion in leveraged funds that didn’t exist while its principle actors were languishing in a drug-infested $40 million villa in the Bahamas even as they preened about the virtues of ‘effective altruism’ and their pandemic-planning machinery that has now fallen apart.
Then the New York Times, instead of decrying this criminal conspiracy for what it is, writes puff pieces on the founder and how he let his quick-growing company grow too far, too fast, and now needs mainly rest, bless his heart.
The rest of us are left with the bill for this obvious scam that implausibly links crypto and Covid. But just as the money was based on nothing but puffed air, the damage they have wrought on the world is all too real: a lost generation of kids, declined lifespans, millions missing from the workforce, a calamitous fall in public health, millions of kids in poverty due to supply-chain breakages, 19 straight months of falling real incomes, historically high increases in debt, and a dramatic fall in human morale the world over.
So yes, we should all be furious and demand full accountability at the very least. Whatever the final truth, it is likely to be far worse than even the egregious facts listed above. It’s bad enough that lockdowns wrecked life and liberty. To discover that vast support for them was funded by fraud and fakery is a deeper level of corruption that not even the most cynical among us could have imagined.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared.
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Pointless law. Unenforceable without creating all sorts of knock on problems. Like driving even more support for the religious martyrs they will create.
We’re stuck with the problem. Shouldn’t have let all those Muslims in in the first place if they didn’t want them to have political influence.
It’s one thing to let Muslims have political influence over worldly affairs which concern them, eg, regulations for mosques in resdential neighbourhoods. But Imams claiming that Allah requires people to ‘vote’ for a certain foreign policy is something entirely different, as they’re not formally speaking in their own capacity as fallible and opinionated humans in this case. An atheist would claim that they obviously do because this cannot possibly be different. But not all people are atheists.
Does it really matter what the method of coercion is?
What’s the difference between an Imam saying God will be angry with you or a BBC appartchik telling you you’re a facist if you think certain things?
To me both act with coercive intent.
To believers I guess there would be a huge difference
Not even the most ardent admirers of the BBC believe that life is a temporary trial to prove yourself worthy in the eyes of the BBC and that – after death – a council of former BBC directors general, Dr Who actors and Chris Packham as climate expert will judge your eternal soul to either be worthy of joining the ranks of the blessedly carbon free in paradise or spend an eternity being tortured among the other damned in hell.
Two historical examples:
In Mein Kampf, Hitler made a dedicated effort to show that what he believed to be his political mission was grounded in a positive vision of lived Christanity and that he was really doing (or rather, panning to do) the true work of God on earth.
From January to September 1915, divisons of the German 5th army under crown prince William of Prussia conquered most of the forest of Argonne in a series of bloody, close-combat trench fighting actions from the French. This involved weeks of digging saps while constantly being shelled until the sap heads where sufficiently close to the French trenches. After preparatory artillery barrage, the German infantrists would climb out into the open, work their way accross the devasted forest of no man’s land as good as they could and finally, break into the enemy trenches and kill those who didn’t surrender with hand grenades and bayonets. After each major success, a field church service the crown prince attended would be held where the exact same people, now in as good a dress uniform as they could muster, would listen to a sermon and sing hymns to thank the Lord Almighty that he had granted victory to them.
Religion used to mean a lot more to people than us modern moral relativists and spiritually lazy agnosticists can imagine. It sill means a lot to people who aren’t.
Hardly a problematic law if it has been applied only once.
Useful else otherwise churches will have to register as campaign organisations and account for their expenditure; more seriously it would facilitate religion based politics which we got rid of a long long time ago in GB.
It’s nice to see Mr Tucker apply his considerable writing skills to a serious topic instead of just trying to be funny.
Giles Fraser, a left-wing Anglican priest, or, worded in another way, Giles Fraser, a professional Christian preacher who just doesn’t believe in God, is making a fallacious argument, either knowingly or because he simply can’t imagine that religion could be more than going through some traditional motions: 500 British business leaders arguing for a certain economic policy they believe to be necessary is them talking about a topic people can legitimately have different opinions about. Eg, is a policy 500 British business leaders favour really good for everyone or mainly for themselves and could 500 British business leader not as well live with policies favoring them a little less and other people somewhat more? This is not true for a Vote for Rufur Lameun’ or your soul will be damned for eternity! statement by some set of religious leaders. These deal with absolute truths. They’re not absolutely truths to non-believers, like one Giles Fraser, but to believers, they are.
The very concept of elections requires that voters are free to make up their own mind, ie, that elections are part of the way humans organize their own worldy affairs with God tacitly tolerating whatever folly comes from this. People who claim otherwise seek to abolish them.
The spiritual influence law should definitely not be repealed, but I would not be at all surprised if it was being broken behind closed doors and in a language other than English.
In some constituencies the Imams instruct the ‘bruvvers’ to apply for postal votes and when received the Imam sends his troops out to collect the unmarked slips which are then filled in at the local mosque.
George Galloway won the Rochdale by-election with a postal vote amounting to 42 % of votes cast. Fraud? Heavens know. Move along now.
Seems pretty clearly to be a free speech issue. The imam should be free to make his statement about who should be voted for. The person who votes has the autonomy to follow the imam’s directive or not. Any other organisation or person can mount a campaign against the imam’s directive if they think it is wrong. The best counter to misinformation is information, not suppression.
“The person who votes has the autonomy to follow the imam’s directive or not.”
Our idea of democracy relies fundamentally on the protestant notion that man is the arbiter of his own conscience. Religions which deny that can only coexist peacefully with it when the religious leaders refrain from making political statements in their capacity as such. The Imam is free to speak his opinion. But he must not claim that it would be the will of God instead of just his opinion.
Freedom of speech refers to the freedom to inform others and not to the freedom of giving illegal or illegitimate orders to them.
I suppose Blair will be kicking himself fo not revoking that law as he revoked so many other useful laws. No doubt hiw protege Starmer will do it instead.
Our Jess only won her seat by 600 votes.
On the other hand, Dr Alin-Khan who has done medical service for charities in Gaza and Israel increased her majority by some thousands.
On the Gaza issue itself, as a start-up party with little funding, the Workers Party secured 200,000 votes.
And these Labour MPs try to deflect attention from all this by claiming that people from all diverse backgrounds voted for Labour.
Shouldn’t Steven Tucker be concluding that we ought to discriminate against Moslems for some or all of … entry to the country/right to reside/right to vote/citizenship?
I’m sure he left that to us. And I have long thought as much.
Although I hate to say to, and I’d love to think I am wrong, but as our present governments, including those of the future, will not see a problem until it is far too late, there is a high probability of a civil war of religion within the next fourty years.
Yes, I do fear for my grandchildren.
But why leave it at all? Why not follow what he thinks to where it takes him? Is he, for all his outspokeness, afraid to take that last step?
The British Establishment, particularly Labour, currently has the tiger they imported by the tail but their grip is visibly slipping.
They are now terrified of what they have done, since it has started to impact on “their people.” The widely publicised pictures of Angela Rayner, wearing a cover-all dress, pleading with a group of Muslim “Community Leaders (all men, no women permitted) for their votes demonstrates that Labour is now awake to the threat but thinks that appeasement will work.
It won’t.
We are rapidly heading towards large-scale civil unrest.
What of the ‘spiritual influence’ of political activist college tutors sending out e mails to their students to get up and vote Labour? That certainly happened and no doubt happens.