Commentary
The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried and his fraudulent cryptocurrency empire at FTX is news at its most entertaining. Who doesn’t love the story of a bigshot billionaire revealed to be an outright fraud? It’s black-and-white. FTX owes billions in debt and doesn’t actually own a dime of the assets it claimed. Game over.
At first blush, the story seems simple. A con man cynically convinced a bunch of gullible financiers that he was an eccentric young visionary and a really great guy, and he ran off with the dough.
But take a closer look at the mainstream coverage, and you’ll realize there’s far more to this story than a classic financial fraud. In fact, the puff pieces from mainstream outlets about SBF and the causes he was funding—most notably, the pandemic planning industry—even after his empire was revealed to be an outright fraud, are the clearest instance we’ve seen of the modern political machine in all its cynicism….