Jeffrey Tucker American Institute For Economic Research

A series of revealing texts and tweets past Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO of FTX, the one time high-flying but now belly-up crypto exchange, had the following to say about his image as a practise-gooder: it is a “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the correct shibboleths and so everyone likes the states.”

Very interesting. He had the whole game going: a vegan worried near climate change, supports every mode 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., plenty to brand his shady company the toast of the boondocks.

Equally part of the mix, there is this thing called pandemic planning. We should know what that is by now: it means you tin’t be in charge of your life because there are bad viruses out in that location. Every bit baroque as it seems, and for reasons that are still non entirely clear, favoring lockdowns, masks, and vaccine passports became part of the woke ideological stew.

This is peculiarly strange because covid restrictions have been proven, over and over, to harm all the groups most whom woke ideology claims to care and then securely. That includes fifty-fifty animal rights: who can forget the Danish mink slaughter of 2020?

Regardless, it’s just truthful. Masking became a symbol of beingness a good person, same every bit vaccinating, veganism, and flying into fits at the drop of a lid over climate modify. None of this has much if anything to do with science or reality. Information technology’south all tribal symbolism in the proper name of group political solidarity. And FTX was pretty good at it, throwing around hundreds of millions to evidence the visitor’southward loyalty to all the correct causes.

Amid them included the pandemic-planning racket. That’south right: there were deep connections betwixt FTX and Covid that have been cultivated for 2 years. Allow’s take a look.

Before this year, the
New York Times
trumpeted a report that showed no benefit at all to the use of Ivermectin. Information technology was supposed to be definitive. The written report was funded by FTX. Why? Why was a crypto commutation so interested in the debunking of repurposed drugs in order to drive governments and people into the utilise of patented pharmaceuticals, even those similar Remdesivir that didn’t actually work? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Regardless, the study and especially the conclusions turned out to be artificial. 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-xix therapeutics and vaccines that nominally compete with ivermectin.”

For some reason, SBF simply
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 information technology true and the New York Times played its assigned part in the whole operation.

Information technology was just the start. A soft-peddling
Washington Mail service
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 ameliorate biosecurity and prevent the adjacent pandemic.”

I tin practise no better than to quote the
Washington Post:

The stupor waves from FTX’s gratuitous autumn have rippled across the public health earth, 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 coin so I can go on advocating to lock more people down!” Alas, the collapse of the commutation, which reportedly holds a mere fraction of the assets it once claimed to have, makes that impossible.

Amongst the organizations nearly affected is Guarding Against Pandemics, the advancement 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 regime 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 discover emerging virus threats (amid lackluster support, the measure was punted to 2024),
to investing more than $11 million on the unsuccessful congressional primary entrada of an Oregon biosecurity expert,
and
even a $150,000 grant to assist Moncef Slaoui, scientific adviser for
the Trump assistants’s “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine accelerator, write his memoir.

Leaders of the FTX Future Fund, a spinoff foundation that committed more $25 million to preventing bio-risks, resigned in an open alphabetic character last Thursday, acknowledging that some donations from the organization are on agree.

And worse:

The FTX Future Fund’s commitments included $10 million to HelixNano, a biotech start-up seeking to develop a side by side-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 constabulary schoolhouse graduate’due south chore at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Overall, the Futurity Fund was a force for adept,” 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 recollect long-term … to build pandemic preparedness, to diminish the risks of biological threats.”

More:

Guarding Against Pandemics spent more than $1 one thousand thousand on lobbying Capitol Loma and the White House over the by year, hired at least 26 lobbyists to abet for a still-pending bipartisan pandemic programme in Congress and other issues, and ran advertisements backing legislation that included
pandemic-preparedness funding. Protect Our Future, a political activeness commission backed by the Bankman-Fried brothers, spent about $28 million this congressional cycle on Autonomous candidates “who will be champions for pandemic prevention,” according to the grouping’s webpage.

I think you get the idea. This is all a racket. FTX, founded in 2019 following Biden’south declaration of his bid for the presidency, past the son of the co-founder of a major Democrat Party political action committee called Mind the Gap, was nothing only a magic-bean Ponzi scheme. It seized on the lockdowns for political, media, and academic cover. Its economic rationale was as nonexistent equally its books. The starting time auditor to take a wait has written:

“Never in my career have I seen such a consummate failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy fiscal information every bit 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 state of affairs is unprecedented.”

It was the worst case of a phony perpetual-move machine: a token to back a company that itself was backed past the token, which in turn was backed by zilch simply political mode and woke credo that roped in Larry David, Tom Brady,  Katy Perry, Tony Blair, and Bill Clinton to provide a cloak of legitimacy.

And you tin’t make this stuff upward anymore: FTX had a close human 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 performance of the Democratic National Committee and the unabridged lockdown entrance hall.

I volition tell y’all what infuriates me well-nigh these billions in fake money and deep corruptions of politics and science. For years at present, my anti-lockdown friends have been hounded for being funded by supposed dark money that simply doesn’t exist. Many dauntless scientists, journalists, attorneys, and others gave upwards great careers to represent principle, exposing the damage caused by the lockdowns, and this is how they accept been treated: smeared and displaced.

Brownstone has adopted as many in this diaspora as possible for fellowships as far as the resources (real ones, contributed by caring individuals) tin become. Just nosotros cannot come anywhere near what is necessary for justice, much less compete with the 8-digit funding regime of the other side.

The Great Barrington Proclamation was signed at the offices of the American Constitute for Economic Research, which, patently, six years prior had received a long-spent $sixty,000 grant from the Koch Foundation, and thus became a “Koch-funded libertarian retrieve 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, coin, and influence swarming the darker realms of the social-media dungeons. In fact, the actual Koch Foundation (probably unbeknownst to its founder) was funding the pro-lockdown work of Neil Ferguson, whose ridiculous modeling terrified the Us and Britain into denying homo rights to billions of people the world over.

All this fourth dimension – 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 effectually by operators of a Ponzi scheme based on cheating, fraud, and $fifteen billion in leveraged funds that didn’t be while its principal actors were languishing in a drug-infested $40 million villa in the Commonwealth of the bahamas fifty-fifty as they preened near the virtues of “constructive altruism” and their pandemic-planning mechanism that has now fallen autonomously.

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. Only just as the money was based on nix but puffed air, the harm they have wrought on the world is all too real: a lost generation of kids, declined lifespans, millions missing from the workforce, a calamitous autumn in public health, millions of kids in poverty due to supply-chain breakages, nineteen direct months of falling real incomes, historically high increases in debt, and a dramatic fall in man morale the world over.

And so yes, we should all be furious and demand total accountability at the very least. Whatever the final truth, it is probable to be far worse than even the egregious facts listed above. It’s bad plenty that lockdowns wrecked life and liberty. To discover that vast support for them was funded by fraud and fakery is a deeper level of abuse that non even the virtually cynical among us could accept imagined.