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
By 
Who Controls the Administrative State?
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
By
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterizations of things I have said that are simply not true. When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Within hours, my news feed was populated with angsty articles hand-wringing about the future of vaccines under Kennedy, whom legacy media and the establishment are certain would confiscate life-saving vaccine programs, raising the spectre of mass waves of illness and death.
In particular, this quote from Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the only Republican who voted against Kennedy’s confirmation, appeared over and over again:
“I’m a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”
Yet, I could not find one piece of mainstream coverage of this quote that mentioned the astonishing fact that 98% of polio cases in 2023, the most recent year for which we have full data, were caused by the polio vaccine.
You read that correctly. In 2023, 12 wild polio cases were recorded (six in Afghanistan, six in Pakistan), with a further 524 circulating vaccine-derived cases, mostly throughout Africa. This trend is in keeping with data from the previous several years.
An important contextualising detail, wouldn’t you think?
The cause of this polio resurgence is that the world’s poor are given the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which contains a weakened virus that can replicate in the gut and spread in feces, causing vaccine-derived outbreaks.
People in rich countries get the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which does not contain live virus and therefore does not carry the risk of spreading the very disease it’s vaccinating against.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and vaccine-promoting organisations say that the way out of the problem is to vaccinate harder, as the argument goes that outbreaks only occur in under-vaccinated communities.
This may be well and good, but the total omission of the fact from media coverage that the goalposts have shifted from eradicating wild polio (not yet complete but nearly there, according to the WHO) to eradicating vaccine-derived polio (the main problem these days) underscores that this is why hardly anyone who knows anything trusts the media anymore.
A member of my extended family has polio. It’s nasty and life-altering and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
That’s why I would hope that any vaccines given would be safe – contracting polio from the supposedly preventative vaccine is the worst-case scenario, second only to death.
This is Kennedy’s expressly stated aim.
“When people actually hear what I think about vaccines, which is common sense, which is vaccines should be tested, they should be safe, everyone should have informed consent,” he said at his confirmation press conference.
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterisations of things I have said that are simply not true.
“When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Grown-ups who support vaccines can walk and chew gum. From the point of view of the public health establishment, the polio vaccine has prevented millions of cases and has nearly eradicated the disease.
At the same time, the world’s poorest are afflicted with polio outbreaks which we can work to prevent, and the safety of all polio vaccine products on the market should be subject to the rigorous standards applied to all other medicines.
Unless you think that poor people don’t matter, in which case the status quo might suit you fine.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
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