“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
The FTX Bitcoin empire of 30-year-old CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is in shambles. Or more specifically, his “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.
Mysteriously, only after the conclusion of the midterm elections, did we suddenly learn that this left-wing “philanthropist” and benefactor of Democratic politics, this megadonor to the quid pro quo puff-piece media, this con artist protected from federal securities regulators, had drained off, lost, hidden, or spent billions of dollars of other people’s money.
As a result, the Bahamas-basking, tax-avoiding, polyamorous sybarite, and heartthrob of progressive moralists, now claims he has no wherewithal to honor his financial commitments to his own investors. Preliminary postmortem auditors sigh that they have never encountered a greater financial mess than what Bankman-Fried has left in his wake.
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?
For all the performance-art boasts of simply doing good for others by doing far better for himself, Bankman-Fried may soon be revealed to be one of the great, dissolute con artists in American history. Like the infamous Charles Ponzi, “Bankman” may become our eponymous word in the 21st century for electronically driven, pyramid-scheme theft.
His Stanford-Silicon Valley moral veneer was shiny but otherwise razor thin. Yet Bankman-Fried told at least one truth when he explained to obsequious media what his ilk easily does to fool purported suckers who send him cash, while he avoided federal and media oversight: “This dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”
Well, not everyone. Instead, he might qualify his “everyone” as the like-minded, cynical, left-wing politicos, the kindred media hacks at the Washington Post and New York Times, and brethren investor toadies who helped him render Bernie Madoff a small-potato sinner in comparison.
Bankman-Fried had showered Joe Biden in 2020 with millions of dollars in campaign donations and did so again with larger sums to congressional candidates in 2022. His public relations arm of FTX exuded the usual virtue speak—including promised impending multibillion-dollar gifting—for utopian, Democratic, and progressive causes. And the media on spec gushed about their pet grunger as he sought to buy protection from Democratic fixers.
“Effective Altruism,” Ponzi-Style
Yet Bankman-Fried is merely one in a long line of Bay Area social-justice hypocrites and frauds. They share in common loud but cynical left-wing politics. They choreograph their personas to win exemption from left-wing government regulators, to guarantee puff pieces from a toady media, and to romance the rich, left-wing elite. Consider how the Washington Post gushed of the scam artist:
Harnessing the enormous wealth created by FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that Sam Bankman-Fried had founded, they undertook a project to spend potentially billions of dollars on pandemic prevention, a long-neglected priority on Capitol Hill even amid the coronavirus crisis. The plan, drawn from the brothers’ adherence to a philosophy called effective altruism, sought to maximize philanthropic giving in ways that can have the most impact.
Bankman-Fried surely has had “the most impact.” If he had worn a suit, and said the wrong “shibboleths,” he would now be behind bars.
What were the moral seeds of FTX? Bankman-Fried grew up on the progressive, moralistic Stanford campus, the son of two crusading Stanford law professors who often wrote about morality and the dispossessed.
SBF, as he is known, was groomed and prepped at an exclusive nearby Hillsborough private academy before being packed off to MIT. Progressive souls like Bankman-Fried distrust capitalism so much that, in his case, he retreated to the Bahamas to maximize its rewards. There he embraced a hedonistic lifestyle, tax breaks and lack of regulations, all in order to better short taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars in income tax revenue.
Such vulture capitalism is predicated on 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.” And so, they use the system to defeat the system—defined in their view as toxic traditional mores and values.
Indeed, 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.
Apparently, some of her fund’s wherewithal was dripped in by some in her son’s stash circle—or rather his investors’ cash. Mind the Gap’s specialty was funding “to get out the vote.” To understand these dark-money operations in 2020, simply reread Molly Ball’s obnoxious Time magazine 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.
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? Does the water flow uphill?
So how can the progressive embryos of Silicon Valley, Stanford University, Bay Area prep schools, and progressive humanitarian politics birth such an utter fraud who destroyed so many? Rather the question might be reversed, how could all that not?
Performance Art Grifting
In the context of Bankman-Fried, we recall another kindred Bay-Area erstwhile momentary billionaire charlatan. Do we remember the now felonious and prison-bound young prodigy and Hillary-Clinton aficionado Elizabeth Holmes? She, too, was birthed and swam in similar Stanford-Silicon Valley waters.
Her scheme was Theranos. That was the pretentiously named fake-blood testing corporation that duped some of the most powerful investors in the United States to fork over billions of dollars to a twentysomething con artist. Holmes, like Bankman-Fried, was sired in the orbit of Stanford. She eschewed the slob props of Bankman-Fried, and instead preferred copy-catting Steve Jobs’ slicker all-black outfits.
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.
There is a pattern here of the “good” people doing “good” things with their “good” money that turns out very badly for everyone else.
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. He is now laying off thousands of Facebook employees as his Meta disaster erodes his stock value and takes his net worth down tens of billions of dollars.
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.
Leftists still brag how the good mega-money sandbagged dullard Republicans and helped to give Biden the election.
Zuckerberg recently confessed that his left-wing company had also worked with the FBI to suppress online social media expression. Translated, that meant that the FBI partnered with Facebook to quash news deemed not helpful to the Biden election cause, such as the all-too-true revelations from the incriminating Hunter Biden laptop that was falsely passed off as “Russian disinformation.”
Is that a very liberal, civil libertarian thing to do—to weld the state and the media to punish political enemies and censor the news? Was the FBI-Facebook fusion a sort of “electronic insurrection” designed to warp democracy—absent the buffoonish cow horns and face paint? Might Zuckerberg have passed on channeling his dark money to “nonprofit” leftist organizations, and instead banked it to save a few of his now laid-off employees?
This column could become endless if it referenced all the Silicon Valley and Stanford progressive politico saints with feet of clay. Do we remember Tom Steyer, the Silicon Valley zillionaire, Stanford University board member, and former left-wing green presidential candidate, who spent $191 million without winning a single delegate?
At least candidate Michael Bloomberg got a few delegates at roughly $18 million a pop for the hundreds of millions of virtuous dollars he blew up in 2020. Steyer used his 2020 campaign to lecture us on ending the fossil fuel economy—but only after he had made a fortune in financing dirty coal burning plants in the impoverished Third World.
Posh Virtue
What is going on?
The 21st-century globalized economy saturated the corridor between San Francisco and San Jose with wealth never before seen or imagined. Its beneficiaries discovered a number of things about the arts of becoming and staying ultra-rich.
One, they never needed to worry about the essentials of life that troubled the other 99 percent of the country—affordable fuel, food, and housing, safe streets, and a fair and legal immigration system.
Or to put it another way, they could pose as progressive utopians—preening their moral superiority to the media, pouring money into the Democratic Party, funding foundations and PACs devoted to woke causes, climate change, and diversity, equity, and inclusion—and all the time never subject to the ramifications of their own exalted agendas.
They could not have cared less about crippling $6 a gallon gas, the exorbitant kilowatt cost of air conditioning, out-of-reach $1,000-a-square foot bungalow housing, the mayhem on San Francisco streets, or the reparatory elite university admissions policies that drastically curtailed working-class male admissions. Their wealth guaranteed them leverage, and leverage ensured exemptions.
But Bay Area morality was not just a pragmatic matter of the exempt elite force-feeding utopia down the throats of others who had no such immunity. Boutique, rich leftism also provided penance for the anointed, a mechanism that alleviated any residual guilt of talking like Eugene Debs while living like Marie Antoinette.
The multimillionaire, social justice warrior House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) assumed, as one of the Bay Area’s liberal icons, that she had a right to break quarantine and sneak off to her private hairdresser, or cluelessly boast of her $13 a pint ice cream, home delivered to her $24,000 twin imported refrigerators—all in the midst of a near depression as the national COVID-19 shutdown ruined millions of small business and devastated the educations of tens of millions of children.
As a member of the classy Bay Area elite, she knew the bankrupt political morality of the Left all too well: acts like tearing up the Trump State of the Union speech on national television veneered her privilege and made her one of the proverbial good people fighting for us from one of her various mansions.
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 is the ultimate dangerous and ridiculous expression of the most toxic and creepy culture in America. If he did not exist, someone like him would have to be invented.
The guy was a pervert, a scam artist, a liar, and hypocrite. Of course flaming leftists adore him and make excuses, as he reflects what democrats love.
Only thing that democrats are upset about is another revenue stream has suddenly dried up. Harvey Weinstein gone. Jeffery Epstein way gone. (Bill Clinton is still lamenting that his pleasure trips to Orgy Island ended as abruptly as pal Jeffery did.)
Look at the ;lack or moral values in the family-his mother claims that we should abandon the concept of individual responsibillity for our actions-a bedrock concept of traditional morality. His father was an advisor on taxation to Elizabeth Warren whose policies are rooted in pubnishing individual accomplishment and achievement
Traditional morality?
But can’t you see? Altruism and self-sacrifice ARE ancient, primordial, traditional morality!
“It is obvious why the morality of altruism is a tribal phenomenon. Prehistorical men were physically unable to survive without clinging to a tribe for leadership and protection against other tribes….
What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value….
Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value—and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes….
The social system based on and consonant with the altruist morality—with the code of self-sacrifice—is socialism, in all or any of its variants: fascism, Nazism, communism. All of them treat man as a sacrificial animal to be immolated for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the society, the state. Soviet Russia is the ultimate result, the final product, the full, consistent embodiment of the altruist morality in practice; it represents the only way that that morality can ever be practiced.” – Ayn Rand
Can’t you see that all those multimillionaire silicon valley elites are not altruistic at all, they feel guilty inside their heads because they KNOW that they didn’t need to do a days work for their wealth. They got lucky.
Back in the manufacturing world of wealth, the owners needed to make a profit before any investment was incoming, not so with these elites.
Their behaviour is not altruistic its selfish just like Ayn Rand suggested.
Steve Jobs got lucky? He didn’t produce anything? He didn’t “do a days work” for his wealth?
He produced the Apple products.
Jobs was the most overrated dickhead since Muhammad Ali. Worse.
As if Jobs invented smart phones.
THX is an Ayn Rand cultist, Steve, and his Rand cultus saturates every aspect of his thinking.
He’s a dogmatic ideologue not unlike many leftists we encounter in our social and political world.
Ayn Rand’s fake philosophy was just an excuse for self serving and selfish behavior. Her conceit that people like her were superior was ridiculous.
And her books suck. Not even Kirk Douglas was able to make one of her stories enjoyable.
SBF should be treated as the Madoff of the decade
He probably won’t be because he can claim he was acting ALTRUISTICALLY not selfishly.
Stealing from the rich, the middle class, and the poor, to help the poorest of the poor, is morally sanctioned by altruism.
The poorer you are the higher you are on the list of altruism’s, altruistic, Robin Hoods.
Wrap yourself with the mantle of altruism and anything goes.
If my comment above gets through the moderation you will see that these people are not being altruistic they are guilty of selfishness.
And put his crazy parents in the slammer too.
Why do we allow this Fraud in our country ” over and over again” (The PPC execute the individual for this type of Fraud within 6 weeks) They slap on the wrist our political Elite get still is astonishing. I’m still recovering from the Pelosi Coup. (Of President Trump) WHY are they so afraid of this man?>>> ” Think what if he is the second coming” that is the only thing I can conceive he is treated as such. <<< We seem incapable of identifying or how she surrounded the White House with Troops (After she herself incited the election process months before the election.) Just like she handed out the pens for signing of the impeachment bill (when will she be held accountable for her Fraud) she/ did the same with the Abortion bill (Our catholic house representative) Never held accountable by her faith.! Way back there was a release a local rag on her sexual depravity. I wonder what happened to that. The same hiding of information the media elite seem to be able to hide effectively through intimidation otherization and any other powers they seem to have control of IRS- FBI.
Sexual depravity? Is it similar to Paul’s?
He should be hunted down like an animal but the only way he’ll get into trouble is if all those Dirtbagocrats he donated to get pissed off about their lost revenue source.
Who are they going to turn to now? Not Mark Zoidberg, Jack Dorky or Elizabeth Holes, and certainly not Elon Musk. I doubt Steve Jobs and Jeffrey Epstein will be much help, either.
Jeff Bozos better hide his wallet.
Lack of ethics. The real bad Karma. One can get away with unethical behavior in the short run, but it is liable to result in bad Karma in the long run. One really can’t escape from the consequences of unethical behavior, in other words, as unethical people imagine in the beginning. So best to be ethical from the start, in order to avoid the bad consequences down the road.
Bankman was being perfectly ethical by the standards of the morality of altruism and self-sacrifice.
“It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.” – Ayn Rand
Sadly, karma has been cancelled for the left.
They can do whatever and never ever be voted out. It’s perfect for them. They have hedonistic materially luxurious heaven on earth and own the government and law enforcement so are never punished nor lose power.
The rest of us line up for droplets of gravy from the left’s gravy train and never ever even think the outrageous thought of ending their hold on us.
That would be so impolite.
He has stated in other articles that he wants a more polite candidate than President Trump. .
How would that help?
Ethical behavior is also its own reward. It isn’t as good as sex or personal watercraft but then, what is? It feels good to do the right thing.
These people ARE weird, and their ethics always turns for their own purposes.
That’s because their ethics are pretensions.
The Strange Morality of the Bay-Area Billionaire Left?
That strange, irrational, and evil morality is altruism. John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism is a political implementation of the moral code of altruism.
“Utilitarianism is a union of hedonism and Christianity. The first teaches man to love pleasure; the second, to love his neighbor. The union consists in teaching man to love his neighbor’s pleasure. To be exact, the Utilitarians teach that an action is moral if its result is to maximize pleasure among men in general. This theory holds that man’s duty is to serve—according to a purely quantitative standard of value. He is to serve not the well-being of the nation or of the economic class, but “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” regardless of who comprise it in any given issue. As to one’s own happiness, says [John Stuart] Mill, the individual must be “disinterested” and “strictly impartial”; he must remember that he is only one unit out of the dozens, or millions, of men affected by his actions. “All honor to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyment of life,” says Mill, “when by such renunciation they contribute worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world.” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels, The End Of Freedom In America”
Bankman-Fried really is an end-justify-the-means utilitarian. He was drunk with being the world’s savior that he was negligent with the assets that were entrusted to his care. The losers were sacrificed on the alter of altruism. It was for “others” that he was willing to step on corpses to establish his utopian dreams for the “greater good.” He basically says as much in his Vox interview.
He’s a grifter. Altruism never factored into his scam.
Rand’s idea of altruism is another man’s idea of rational self interest. Rand never did understand the Christian concept of original sin and the fall of man. She was more interested in carving out a place for herself as the greatest philosopher since Aristotle. She was indeed operating on selfish interest in seeking an exalted place for herself in society. The so-called Objectivists that follow her philosophy are hoping for the same kind of self aggrandizement. The concept of self exaltation in man (sin), starts with the rejection of the divine Creator and Redeemer God. This basic atheism was the foundation of Ayn Rand’s system of thought. Her “new” morality follows from her foundation of atheism. Of course, the justification of one’s own personal morality is nothing new, and cannot be considered “objective”. in any sense.
The Mossad tracked the fugitive Eichmann to Argentina, surveilled him to confirm they had the right man, positively identified him, grabbed him, and flew him surreptitiously out of the country (which was then pro-Nazi, and a safe refuge for many Nazis) to Israel, where he was tried as a war criminal in Jerusalem (how galling that must have been to the Jew-hating Nazi!), convicted him, sentenced him to death, and promptly hung him, then burned his corpse and threw the ashes into the sea.
In comparison to that “Mission: Impossible” achievement, snatching “The Bankman” from the Bahamas–a U.S. “friend” where he lives openly, at a well-known address–would be easy for U.S. Marshals, and no more challenging or difficult than a first-week training exercise for any new class of FBI or CIA recruits, or even “Dog the Bounty Hunter.”
One wonders why this greatest Ponzi con man in all of the history of financial crimes hasn’t been brought back to face justice–REAL Justice.
But one doesn’t need to wonder much.
Nobody has t0 snatch the bastard. The Bahamian government will be happy to extradite him; they have no desire to import foreign criminals.
That’s only one strand of Agenda 2030
This is the real agenda for climate change hysteria:
Watch it only if you are feeling strong and without children around.
It’s the most disturbing thing I have ever watched, because of the reality of humanity.
I am a CPA. You’re giving SBF way too much credit suggesting he was some sort of mastermind. He was an idiot who had no real education or experience in business, accounting and finance. Life at the penthouse in the Bahamas was like a frat house. Sure he had some knowledge of the markets from his broker days, but in my opinion, he was in WAY OVER HIS HEAD. He was no genius. His was dumb luck riding the crypto mania wave. And the girlfriend, Ellison. Absolutely as dumb as s*** who basically operated like a teenager. Way overrated.
Older generations are way too trusting and impressed with these tech jerks. And they are jerks.
The bay Area has become to the Moscow
I don’t feel bad for those guys who get f—ed by the crypto-currency scam, especially the ones who invested in Bankman-Fried’s. Only scumbags want to help an organization that donates millions to the Dirtbagocrat party and “woke” causes, both of which are inimical to humanity in general and America in particular.
And how shit for brains stupid does a person have to be to spend real money to buy fake money? It’s hard to respect retards like that. At least you can use Monopoly money to get out of jail. A database of fake money maintained through distributed consensus with nothing to back it up but bullshit? “Ooh! But the fake money data is encrypted, Jeff. Our investments are safe.” DERP. Only web worshiping leftists and consensus conforming commies could love something that stupid.
Bravo, VDH! Insightful and inciteful! As always, Thanks Again!
Excellent article! The most important feature for me, is the connection of the “utilitarian” ethics adopted by self-serving “philanthropists” to justify their criminal malfeasance. These con artists knowingly dupe the public “for its own good” and laugh at the public’s gullibility. Utilitarian ethics are the foundation of political medicine’s tyranny, and the supremacist attitude of corrupt “do as I say not as I do” politicians. These woke western humanitarian hucksters are malignant narcissists, who truly believe that they are the legitimate arbiters of what is the “common good.” How convenient for themselves. Western society is so pathologically other directed, it is duped by key words like sustainable, pandemic prevention, effective altruism. Gaslighting has been honed to a performance art by self-righteous, leftist, humanitarian hucksters wearing jeans and t-shirts. The costume has changed, but the con is the same.