The Patriot Post® · Sam Bankman-Fried's 'Progressive' Altruism

The red flags were everywhere. Yet no one said a word.

That’s because everyone who should’ve noticed all the strange stuff surrounding Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency scheme was too busy being beguiled and bought off by the young weirdo.

Columnist Becket Adams succinctly sums up a complicated story:

The short of it is this: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is almost certainly a conman and a thief. He opened a “bank” (a crypto exchange), accepted deposits of real money, helped himself to customers’ deposits without their knowledge, and then distributed mountains of cash to friends and, more importantly, Democratic coffers. Indeed, Bankman-Fried ranked as the Democratic Party’s second-biggest individual donor in the 2021–2022 election cycle, pumping an estimated $40 million into various Democratic campaigns and activist groups.

The 30-year-old Demo darling, whose crypto currency exchange collapsed amid reports that up to $2 billion in customer funds had gone missing, was spotted Saturday in the Bahamas, where one source said that he and his dad, a Stanford law professor, were seen with police and federal regulators.

Hopefully he’s feeling some serious heat. To this point — or at least until about two weeks ago, when it all started coming apart — he’s been living large and loving his life of “effective altruism,” which is a philosophy whereby leftists use the levers of capitalism to first enrich themselves and then to funnel their accumulated wealth into one progressive cause after another. No wonder the globalists at the World Economic Forum were so enamored of Bankman-Fried. No wonder they once promoted their partnership with him on the WEF website. And no wonder they’ve since erased any mention of it.

Bankman-Fried, who was at one point worth some $26 billion, is an odd duck, a guy whom, as Ben Shapiro notes, “bragged about never reading books (‘I think, if you wrote a book, you f***ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post’); he lived in a ‘polycule’ — a polyamorous semi-colony — along with nine of his executives; he wore gym shorts and T-shirts to important company events with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair; he placed … as chief operating officer his own intermittent girlfriend and as head of his associated hedge fund yet another intermittent girlfriend.”

What could go wrong, right? Well, plenty, actually. FTX has filed for bankruptcy, and John Jay Ray III, the man whom regulators have brought in to run what’s left of the company, has been stunned by what he’s seen. Ray, who knows a thing or two about corporate malfeasance, had this to say about the mess that is FTX:

I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience. I have been the Chief Restructuring Officer or Chief Executive Officer in several of the largest corporate failures in history. I have supervised situations involving allegations of criminal activity and malfeasance (Enron). I have supervised situations involving novel financial structures (Enron and Residential Capital) and cross-border asset recovery and maximization (Nortel and Overseas Shipholding). Nearly every situation in which I have been involved has been characterized by defects of some sort in internal controls, regulatory compliance, human resources and systems integrity.

When Bankman-Fried is held to account for his massive swindle, his intentional failure to keep basic business records should be Exhibit A. As Ray writes: “One of the most pervasive failures of the FTX.com business in particular is the absence of lasting records of decision-making. Mr. Bankman-Fried often communicated by using applications that were set to auto-delete after a short period of time, and encouraged employees to do the same.”

“Many on the right are wondering,” writes National Review’s Jim Geraghty, “if Bankman-Fried got away with it for so long because he was exceptionally generous to the Democratic Party, and lots of people on the left wanted to believe the image he offered.”

It certainly seems so. Politico described Bankman-Fried as one of “just a handful of donors who spent $10 million-plus backing President Joe Biden in 2020, and in the last year, he’s hired a network of political operatives and spent tens of millions more shaping Democratic House primaries.”

There are a number of reasons why the expected Republican “red wave” of the midterm elections never materialized, but the Democrats’ ill-gotten gains from Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Ponzi scheme certainly played a part. And his generosity toward Democrat lawmakers certainly helped keep the con going.

As Geraghty writes, “When you have $1 billion, you can buy a lot of friends who don’t want to look too closely at how you made your fortune.”

Democrats are now trying to distance themselves from this most infamous Demo donor since Bernie Madoff, but it strikes us as too little, too late. They’re only scrambling because their guy got caught.