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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I had never heard of handball until seeing this article.
Me neither but I’m liking the players. A lot.
Brilliant news.
Ww need the IHF to dig their feet in and for the players to form a single, defiant block and give the IHF authorities a monumental sex and travel response.
This has the potential to be a real goody. A sporting war. Loads of publicity and lots of bad press for the poison pushers, statistics all over the place, tragic stories. Billy and Klaus flapping. Bourla nowhere to be seen. Fishy in his cave. Sage in a bunker somewhere. Michie on a fact- finding mission in Antartica and Raine AWOL.
Marvellous.
Come on you lot.
Oh I fervently hope so.
In my own circle of musicians we dodged a bullet when a minority of Karens on a management committee tried to make vaccination a requirement of performing a symphony concert. They failed to impose the requirement, but then the venue owners imposed their own restrictions which scuppered the concert at the last moment. It’s chaos. We can’t be sure that some unknown authoritarian Karen isn’t going to veto our next attempt. Legal action looks prohibitively expensive, presumably it would be ECHR Right of Assembly Case versus Article 13 lawfare.
That’s upsetting to hear.
All the best
Michie the Bichie in the snow ! Frostbite would be too kind ! Mind you her hatchet face would probably melt the thickest ice
Nice one Freddy
The person who runs the IHF needs to be named and publicly shamed for the petty tyrant that he is.
Not yet. We want a proper set to, something that even The Times cannot ignore.
Come on lads. Get in to them!
Being a personal fiefdom, The Times can ignore whatever it wants!
I’ve looked him up. His name is Hassan Moustafa.
He’s been the president of the federation since 2000. So he’s been running the sport for 22 years, being reelected 6 times, the last 3 unopposed.
I bet he runs it like a personal fiefdom. That’s how most of these international federations operate, accountable to no one but themselves.
The Sep Blatter of Handball then !
You beat me to it Freddy.
Since when does the International Handball Federation, a perfectly private organization, have the authority to prescribe mandatory medical procedures for people attending or playing handball matches?
NB: The obvious answer is It doesn’t.
Governments have signalled over the last three years that they are quite happy for private companies and NGOs to do as they like in this regard and essentially do their dirty promotion and enforcement work for them.
And these international sports federations are completely unaccountable to anyone but themselves. Not unlike the WHO or UN. They have these pseudo democratic processes that elevate a delegate from each country to a global council which then sets rules for the entire world. And because it’s “democratic” then everyone has to follow their rules.
The moment you open your eyes, it’s impossible not to see the world as just a series of cartels. The pharma cartel, the media cartel, the energy cartel, all the sports cartels, the tech cartels, the banking cartel… etc….
The thing is the IHF really doesn’t have this authority, no more than they can randomly arrest people on premises they happened to rent. It’s neither a sovereign government enforcing some laws on its own territory nor an organization created by sovereign governments which have chosen to delegate certain powers to it. The people behind this may have the chutzpah to try it nevertheless, on the grounds that bullying oftentimes works, but bullying is all they have to support their stance.
They can keep the players out of the tournament which belongs to them, unless there are laws explicitly prohibiting that sort of discrimination.
I don’t know what the laws in Sweden and Poland say in this regard.
Of course, the players can get together and decide to boycott. At this point, they’re insane if they don’t.
After Damar Hamlin, I find it hard to imagine there is any athlete of any note who is not concerned about the vaxxes and certainly don’t want any / any more at this point in time. It only stops when we make it stop.
I don’t think your theory that the IHF is a sovereign government which has automatic exterritoriality in any place it may rent somewhere and is thus not subject to the laws of the countries its operating in and authorized to make up its own laws as it sees fit and enforce them violently is correct. But please feel free to prove me wrong by coming up with something which shows that private associations of businesspeople do actually have these rights in Sweden and Poland.
Re private companies setting mandates…
The situation is really bad in Australia where it’s likely millions have been impacted by jab mandates set by state governments, businesses, sports clubs etc.
In regard to companies, I’m challenging the jab mandate set by Westpac Bank for its employees, a jab mandate which is still in place.
See my email to the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Westpac Group: Westpac and Covid jab mandates – why were employees denied a voluntary decision on this medical intervention? 4 January 2023.
Well maybe, but where were they when people including children were being forced, coerced and gaslighted into being injected and generally vilified if they weren’t.
Most sports governing bodies are inept, corrupt because they are monopolies. Competition is the only thing that can keep them on their toes. There is little to prevent a group of professionals setting up a more democratic leaner and meaner organisation and ensure by a comprehensive constitution that the tendency to corruption and being captured by bad actors is democratically blocked. Two competing governing bodies in a region or country tend to keep each other a bit more efficient and honest. Perhaps Iceland should make a start.
Now the “Long march through the institutions’ is complete the march through sporting associations seems well underway as the England squad demonstrated in Quatar.