From Sam Bankman-Fried:
Ya. Hehe. I had to be. It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those guys who get f—ed by it, by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Bitcoin empire is now in shambles, notes Victor Davis Hanson. The 30-year-old’s “dumb game” cryptocurrency exchange has destroyed thousands of lives.
Electronically, he may have robbed perhaps a million investors, and along with them hundreds of large institutional investors.
Protecting the Con Artist from Fed Security Regulators
How can it be that only after the midterm elections, VDH reminds readers of American Greatness, we are now learning that this left wing “philanthropist and benefactor” of Democratic politics has “drained off, lost, hidden or spent billions of dollars of other people’s money”?
How does the most sophisticated financial system in the history of civilization allow a virtue-signaling nerd to nearly wreck it? Where were the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, the IRS, and all the other alphabet soup agencies that supposedly exist so that someone like Bankman-Fried does not? Where is Merrick Garland and his special prosecutors, the FBI with its televised SWAT swoops and leg irons?
… the presumption that young, loudly left-wing Bay Area hipsters in ratty clothes are the cool “good guys” if they have deep Democratic pockets and talk of “equity” and “fairness.”
How did Sam use the system to defeat the system, defined in progressive views as toxic traditional mores and values?
Bankman-Fried’s mother, Stanford Professor Elizabeth Fried was a “utilitarian,” perhaps best defined as advocating any means necessary to achieve what she felt were the best ends for everyone. She moonlighted from her supposedly full-time job by running “Mind the Gap,” a central collection agency for Silicon Valley dark money to be funneled secretly to the “right causes.” The means of getting the millions was always excused by the ends of how it was used.
To understand these dark-money operations in 2020, simply reread Molly Ball’s obnoxious Timemagazine story of February 2021—a long boast of how stealth left-wing money, a toady progressive media, an army of lawyers, and social media combined to change voting laws, modulate the Black Lives Matter/Antifa street protests, and warp dissemination of news to craft a good utilitarian “conspiracy” that saved us from Donald Trump.
Does Water Flow Uphill?
Will the Bankman-Fried family now atone, and try to give back to the robbed and deluded any of the real money that was funneled into Democratic candidates from the massive fraud?
Mr. Hanson writes also of another erstwhile billionaire charlatan Elizabeth Holmes. Prison-bound Hillary Clinton aficionado Holmes also was birthed and swam in similar Stanford-Silicon Valley waters as SBF.
Holmes assembled on her fake corporate board some of the biggest names associated with Stanford University and Silicon Valley, whose brands masked what was likely the greatest corporate medical fraud in American history.
Silicon Valley multibillionaire and fellow leftist Mark Zuckerberg prefers T-shirts, sneakers, and jeans to the Bankman-Fried bum-look or Holmes’ Apple black-draped getup.
But it was just two years ago that Zuckerberg answered the utilitarian call of fellow leftists to use his mega money and power to stop the prince of darkness, Donald Trump. So Zuck, as he is known, poured $419 million into pro-Biden left-wing activist groups. That unprecedented sum was used to absorb the work of state election officials in key precincts to ensure the right people voted in the right way to ensure the right winner.
Bay Area ZIP codes have produced the now-familiar rich, liberal politicians whose exempt lives are not damaged by the ideology that damages others. Consider the billionaire Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who for two decades was chauffeured by a Chinese spy while head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, or multimillionaire former Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), now ensconced in Rancho Mirage as a registered foreign agent for a Chinese surveillance firm, or multimillionaire Gavin Newsom, who bragged how the COVID lockdowns might greenlight “progressive capitalism,” as he pushed social distancing and mask-wearing—while he palled around with lobbyists, maskless, at the French Laundry.
Sam Bankman-Fried, continues VDH, is the “ultimate dangerous and ridiculous expression of the most toxic and creepy culture in America.”
If (Bankman-Fried did not exist, someone like him would have to be invented.
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