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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Very good article. All just a cock-up, nothing to see here, move on!
Clearly I missed my chance should have set up the Canute Centre for Sea-Level Rise and the Kleenex Centre for Mucal Research and applied for funding from SBF to fund my research. Where is the next slush fund?
Nothing new under the sun.
The Dutch call this “links lullen, rechts vullen” – more of less means talking out of the left side of your mouth while filling your pockets with you right hand.
I believe Christopher Hitchens referred to this as making promises to the left and delivering to the right.
That these “social justice warriors” sought to enrich themselves is not surprising, that they used this scam to further any number of nefarious causes that harmed hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and are still doing so (desire for an unending war in Ukraine, funding of politicians claiming by their words to fight fascism, while being fascist by their actions) is, however.
I was never in on the crypto thing myself, but I understand why it appeals to people. I’m just afraid these probably intentional collapses will be used to get people on board with CBDC – on the basis that the idea is sound, it just needs to be regulated properly and backed up by government.
I’ve come to understand that money is basically a technology, the production of which is highly regulated and controlled, but a technology nonetheless.
Cryptocurrency is an innovation and like many innovations can be very disruptive to the market and the people who hitherto control the technology.
It is hard to halt innovations towardd superior technologies. And purely from a functional stand point cryptocurrency can be seen as functionally superior.
Like any valuable technology, there will be a race to adopt it and harness its power. And the people who currently have most power with the current technology – governments, central banks and banks – will be figuring out how they monopolise, control and ultimately shut anyone else out of the new technology, hence CBDCs.
Technological innovation is virtually unstoppable and CBDCs will be hard if not impossible to stop.
Indeed. The depressing truth (for me) is that technological innovation seems to lend itself to being used to control people more effectively.
I think the unabomber pretty much reached that conclusion. His manifesto is a fascinating piece of writing.
Yeah I think I skim read some of what he wrote a few years ago. At the time he seemed like a nutcase, guess that’s partly how we got into this mess.
Interesting stuff.
A key question for me is this.
Was FTX a vehicle for bankrolling lockdown policies and other lefty pet projects or did the FTX fraudsters fund whatever was hot, like lockdown and anti-ivermectin studies as a means of siphoning money off for themselves?
In other words was FTX set up from the outset for the purpose of funding certain political projects or was it basically a scammy type business that ended up being the funder of certain political projects.
The shocking part of this is that many on the left will see no wrongdoing whatsoever. As with judges who give free passes to environmental activists, having a “good cause” excuses their actions.
Ironically this scam has very little to do with crypto. Rather, it exploited people who wanted to get the benefits of crypto without the bother/risk of holding crypto, managing a wallet, etc themselves, it was for risk averse, would-be crypto investors. If you control your own wallet no one’s going to steal your investment like this. Your investment might lose or gain value but not get stolen. Those trying to avoid risk were, unbeknownst to themselves, taking a much bigger risk.
Yep I was travelling back on a plane the other day and fell to talking to someone who was working with crypto backroom stuff (nothing to do with FTX). His advice…only ever hold it in your own wallet – just don’t lose the code! This was a couple of days before FTX exploded.
Dems >> Congress >> Treasury >> UKR.AID >> UKR Govt >> FTX >> Dems
Elites >> Parliament >> Treasury >> FOR AID >> FOR Govt >> Skim >> Elites
Elites >> Parliament >> Treasury >> Climate Aid >> NGOs >> Skim >> Elites
Taxpayer >> Charity >> NGO >> Save Africa >> Waste >> FOR NGO >> Elites
Lots of ways of doing it, rampant in every western country for over 40 years. Pure Fraud and money laundering
Any pictures of warmonger Blair are guaranteed to spoil my day. He gets around doesn’t he, poking his nose in the trough.
That picture of Blair, Clinton and the Bankman-Fried cretin is enough to spoil anyone’s week, never mind day!
If there’s a trough, particularly a nasty, fraudulent one Bliar will find it.
Wow, what a gripping piece of writing.This guy is so angry. It is palpable. The vilification of the signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration is an abomination.
Very pleasing to see the eternal creep Bliar is very much involved in this criminality – right in the middle of it where he belongs.
Got to keep the flag flying haven’t you Tone?
Scumbag.
I wonder if any funding support went into this load of interfering, garbage spreading ‘do-gooders’ who ‘advise’ governments on policy.
Tony Blair institute for global change:
https://institute.global/
In the thick of it, all the current challenges – Covid 19, Ukraine, net-zero transition – they are there, ‘helping to seize tomorrow’s opportunities’, bless ‘em.
Helping to seize more money more like
What a fascinating article. And if it’s correct, then this story has a very long way to run yet.
Clearly, real journalism isn’t dead. The MSM may be done for; but green shoots are popping up all over the place elsewhere.
Judging by the look on Bliar’s face in the photo. he’d trousered yet more money to attend and lend his name to this Ponzi scheme?
Good article and what a flipping joke the world at large is. Of course never mention this fraud’s ‘race’. The Uketopia money laundering from yet another ‘Chosen one’, allied with the ‘Chosen one’ who runs the WEF; on behalf of the un-Democratic party largely run by the ‘Chosen Ones’, during a scamdemic in which most of the Pharma poisons were pushed by the ‘Chosen Ones’? Colour me racist and not surprised.
And in another coincidence the Uketopia is run by the ‘Chosen Ones’ as well. So in this shining example of freedom we have biolabs, money laundering, FTX and an ATM for much of the criminal US political elite, all faciliated inter-alia by the Chosen Ones. Reminds me of the white-Christian slave trade in the Middle Ages, much of that to the great profit of the Chosen Ones. But no need to bend a knee to the history of massive White enslavement. The arse checkers inform me it never existed. And of course the Uke war is about ‘democracy’, ‘values’, and freedom to die for on that hill in Keev. Experts say.
Interesting speculation on Redacted that this collapse will be used to rush in extremely restrictive crypto regulation (to keep us safe, of course) and hasten the introduction of CBDCs:
https://youtu.be/9UvwlX-CKWM
As they say, maybe the collapse of FTX was engineered to achieve precisely this?
Sceptics have, from the outset, said “follow the money.”
This article is a very interesting addition to the evidence of the huge SCAM we have been subjected to.