Brownstone Institute
Sam Bankman-Fried and the Missing Billions for Pandemic Planning
From the Brownstone Institute
Yes, I watched the appalling scenes of Sam Bankman-Fried’s media tour. He repeatedly returns to the theme of his philanthropy: pandemic planning. What does this 30-year-old computer guy know about infectious disease? No more than Bill Gates did when he began his malanthropic crusade through the universities, journals, and nonprofits and imposed his lockdown-and-vaccinate ideology on them, thus compromising a whole generation of infectious-disease scientists.
Bankman-Fried saw how much influence this bought Gates and decided to replicate the experience in a mere few years in the midst of a pandemic. As we’ve documented, he gave millions but promised billions. The promise tends to be even more effective than money in the bank. All the better, he backed his “pandemic planning” support with $40 million (Elon Musk speculates it was far more) for politicians who shared his supposed passion to control infectious disease.
And so Sam of FTX, who seems to have stolen and otherwise misdirected billions from his own crypto scam, was invited to speak at a New York Timesevent called Dealbook. A seat in the audience cost $2,400. He had been booked for the gig long before because he was a darling of the left, having thrown around many millions to back Democrats in the midterms.
He was also loved for running the second-largest crypto exchange in the world while babbling left-wing prattle about effective altruism. He advertised himself as the world’s most generous billionaire at a mere 30 years old! He urged others to do the same, giving to his brother’s charity devoted to pandemic planning, just as an example.
With his disheveled look and halting speech patterns, he struck many as a genius. One would have to let go of all normal intuition to believe that, but here is where we are today.
The interview pitched a series of softball questions with the mask of a tough interrogation. Bankman-Fried replied with a bunch of financial-sounding mumbo jumbo that the interviewer could not really follow, so of course he gave him a pass. In the end, the interviewer and the audience gave the thief a round of applause for his frank answers and accessibility.
Sam claimed that his lawyers advised against this particular appearance. I don’t believe it. I suspect that his lawyers understand something very dark about our times. If you can bamboozle an audience at the New York Times, you stand a better chance of favorable treatment in a court of law. That’s why he is continuing his media rounds. Hey, why not a speaking tour to boot?
How did Bankman-Fried justify himself? Essentially he said that he had downplayed the downside risks in a possible bear market in which his tokens suddenly lost 90% of their value. He had not anticipated this. And, he seemed to imply, had the markets not changed direction, his company would be solvent. Hence, none of this is really his fault. It’s just what happens when the market winds change course.
By comparison, Bernie Madoff’s scam was rather simple. He used the money of new investors to pay a return to old investors. He gradually came to realize that he had better success in business by doing this than relying on market forces themselves. By offering a predictable 9 percent return, he could always attract new money in up markets or down markets. In a sense he was right: his Ponzi scheme lasted 20 years!
When the housing market crashed and the money dried up, and he could no longer find new chumps to pay the old chumps, he admitted it. He said he lied and that he was running a scam. He pled guilty, went to jail, and died. One son killed himself and the other died. His widow today lives a modest life, still reeling from the horribleness of it all.
Sam’s scheme was far more complicated. It involved mixing funds over a huge range of companies that he owned, so his own exchange had an open spigot of customer funds going to his own Alameda Research, which would use those funds to buy the token FTT in which customer funds were held. It was the same scam as Madoff but tokenized in a world that has stupidly come to believe that anyone can create a thing of value with a few mouse clicks and some incantations of the word blockchain.
Crucially, Bankman-Fried paid off all the right people along the way. He paid nonprofits, media companies, and politicians, and made all the right noises about the need to regulate the industry more than is currently the case. As a result, his media darling status persists even now, as the New York Times and MSNBC work hard daily to rehabilitate him, despite his not being able to account for some $20 billion in missing funds.
In the dystopian novel and film The Hunger Games, the elites have divided society into many districts depending on their function and economic status. Only District One truly lives well, and here you find the greatest champions of the system, which is kept alive through top-down tyranny. The games themselves are designed to shore up regime stability by necessitating random sacrifices of the lives of kids forced into a zero-sum game of murder.
The whole thing looks implausible on first viewing. How could the richest of the rich sit by and watch, cheering on this blood-thirsty tragedy? On second thought, the whole thing is wholly believable. Elites socialize themselves to believe whatever it is that protects their wealth and status. That’s exactly why such a large crowd of people gathered at the New York Times to watch the validation and vindication of Sam, and they happily cheered his fake honesty and transparency at the end.
The display was disgusting but entirely predictable if you understand something about how our own hunger games are played. In this decade and a half of easy money, a whole class of people has risen to the top of the cultural echelon not by productive labor but by educational credentials and being part of the corporate float. They have come to believe that the system makes sense simply because it has benefited them.
This is why they so gladly took to pandemic controls when they were at their height. They would “stay home and stay safe” while the proletariat slogged through the streets carrying dinners in bags to drop off at doorsteps. In some extremely strange way, this felt like a utopia for the upper classes. This – and $10 trillion to back the whole scheme – is why the lockdowns lasted as long as they did.
We are nowhere close to getting to the bottom of the whole scam. SBF gave millions away to all sorts of institutions while marketing his grift as altruism. He later admitted that his fake-woke philosophizing was nothing but a cover, as it is for all these people, which is why his admission didn’t really disqualify him from continued membership in the class of media and business elites.
Nothing exposes the economic and financial hypocrisies of our time as much as this FTX caper. We can report some good news however: it is not long for the world. Elon Musk is demonstrating how a competent leader can take over a single company, fire 75 percent of its employees, make the platform work better than ever, and still possibly make a profit. For the sake of civilization, let us hope that the Musk model will inspire many coming corporate upheavals.
District One needs to be thoroughly cleansed and the sooner the better. The cleansing fire in our times takes the most implausible form one can imagine: positive real interest rates. If the Fed sticks to its agenda – and it likely will – we will see every manner of upheaval coming in the next six months. The court dockets will become even more full than they currently are, and there won’t be enough investigators available to unravel this and so many other scandals of our times.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages.
People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?
More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.
The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion has been reversed by a federal judge. That might be a fluke or might not be: maybe the lawfare is dialing back too. The cabinet of the incoming administration is being filled by voices that were fully censored for years. Employees are reportedly packing their bags at the FDA and other agencies.
Mainstream news commentators are sputtering around with less bravado than they have shown in years. CNN is firing major personalities.
Trump is talking about abolishing the income tax and granting $10K in tax credits per homeschooled child, not to mention blowing up college accreditation systems, among other sweeping changes.
The American Bastille day is coming, not only freeing the political prisoners of January 6 but also many of the unjustly persecuted including Ross Ulbricht, Roger Ver, and Ian Freeman, among so many others. That will be a day of rejoicing.
Oh, and peace seems to have broken out in some contentious areas of the world, for now.
What is happening? This is not the usual transfer of the resident of the White House. This is starting to look like an actual transfer of power, not just from Biden to Trump but from the permanent government – ensconced in many sectors – that has been long in hiding to an entirely new form of government responsive to actual voters.
As it turns out, there was no late surge for Kamala Harris. All the polls were wrong, and the rest was media blather. What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop.
There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future.
After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that.
The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement.
The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.
Sylvester Stallone called Trump a second George Washington but another reference point might be Andrew Jackson. The overwhelming victory for Trump is on a scale not seen since 1828 when, four years after the presidency was stolen from Jackson, Old Hickory came back in a wild landslide and cleaned up Washington. Trump arrives in Washington with a mandate for the same, with 81% of the public demanding that the government shrink in size and power.
It has all happened so quickly. We are barely ten days into the realization of what just transpired and the entire lay of the land seems different, like a tectonic shift in politics, culture, mood, and possibilities. We are even seeing blunt and open talk about the horrendous Covid response that so utterly demoralized the country and the world, after years of silence on the topic. We have promised hearings coming, and court cases galore now on fast track.
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages. It provides the beginnings of an answer to the great question on our minds for decades: how precisely does an authentic revolution take root in an industrialized Western democracy? Are elections capable of delivering real results?
For now, the answer seems to be yes. That should thrill any responsible observer of social, cultural, economic, and political affairs. It means that the early architects of the American system were not wrong. The intolerable costs of political upheaval of ages past can be mitigated by planting power firmly in the hands of the people through the plebiscite. This was their view and their gamble. All the evidence of our time points to the wisdom of the idea.
In the darkest days of the last year of the first Trump presidency, the bureaucracy was riding high, in full revenge mode against an elected government it hated and sought to overthrow. The agencies were passing strange edicts that felt like laws but no one knew for sure. You are essential, you are not. You must stay home, unless you have an emergency. Your elective surgery needs to wait. The kids cannot go to school. That European vacation cannot happen. You can eat at a restaurant but only if you are six feet away from other patrons and you must put this China-made cloth on your mouth if you get up to go to the restroom.
The flurry of edicts was mind-boggling. It felt like martial law, because it was some form of exactly that. The best research points to the astonishing reality that this was never really a public-health response but a scheme by security and intelligence sectors to enact some kind of global color revolution, which is why the policies were so similar the world over. It was indeed an awesome display of power, one that invaded all our communities, homes, and families.
No one knows this better than Team Trump, even if there has been near silence on the topic for all these years. They have had time to put the pieces together and figure out what happened and why. And they carefully, and in seclusion worthy of a Cistercian monastery, plotted their return, leaving nothing to chance.
Meanwhile, the past two years have had the Covid insurrectionists quietly stepping away from the spotlight, while leaving as much of their newfound power in place: the censorship, the technology, the mandates, and the propaganda that all of this shock-and-awe was nothing more than “common sense health measures.” It was never tenable, and vast numbers have come to realize that something went very wrong, like a kind of evil settled over the world and burrowed itself within all institutions.
In an instant, the whole scheme seems to be crumbling. The incredible result is that the administration under which this calamity occurred is now coming back, which is probably the strangest irony of our times.
And yet, even though no one has yet been open about precisely what happened in the White House in March 2020 to cause Trump to greenlight the lockdowns, there is a widespread belief that it was never really his choice. It was some kind of coup – egged on even by his closest advisors and the VP – that he either could not stop or lacked the personnel to marshal effective resistance. Regardless, he has been forgiven because, implausibly, the next administration not only owned the worst of it but added even more on top of that, including the wicked combination of mask mandates, forced injections, and continued school closures.
The result has been a continuing economic crisis, one far worse than agencies admit, in addition to a health, education, and cultural crisis. Meanwhile, all those involved in causing this from behind the scenes have been rewarded with professorships, loving interviews in the mainstream media, and lavish security provisions to protect them from legions of what they suppose are angry workers and peasants.
Therefore, among many of the ruling class, the results of this election are certainly not welcome, and nor are many of the early appointments. They represent the coming together of MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE, the fulfillment of decades of cultivation of disparate groups of dissidents who had not previously realized their common interests and common enemies. It was the Covid era and the imposition of top-down rule that brought them all together.
It was like three groups wandering around in a giant maze who suddenly confront each other and then, realizing that they all shared the same predicament, figure the way out together. These new alliances have not only shattered right and left, as traditionally understood, but reshaped the structural basis of political activism for the duration. It turns out that medical freedom, food freedom, free speech, political freedom, and peace all go together. Who knew?
The incumbent world of academia, think tanks, and most media simply finds itself unprepared to deal with the new realities. They had hoped everyone would forget about the last five years as if it was just a thing that happened but is now over; everyone just needs to grapple with the great reset and learn to love our new lives of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, perpetual war, poison food, unaffordable everything, and endless injections of potions for our own health and well-being.
Well, times have changed. How much? Early signs point to a dramatic unfolding of revolutionary change over the coming months. Is believing this the triumph of hope over experience? Absolutely. Then again, no one believed five years ago that most people in the world would be locked in their homes and communities, stuck drinking and streaming movies until biotech could come up with a cure for a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Then it did not work and made people more sick than ever.
That was nuts but it happened.
If that could happen, with predictable results, the response could be equally implausible and more much thrilling. What’s man made can be unmade by man, and something new built in its place.
Author
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