Another unexpected trove full of information has come from a trove devoid of money. Among the big-name tech companies that pay superstar athletes, models and actors for 150-second Superbowl ads (when 30-second ads cost $6 million), name major arenas after themselves, and develop cozy relationships with political operatives was ftx.
ftx was a familiar name among tech enthusiasts and investors. Founded in 2019, it ballooned in three quick years to become the world’s second-largest exchange for cryptocurrency.
In November 2022, it ran out of cash, to put it mildly. The ongoing train wreck is the biggest cryptocurrency disaster yet. Investors who lost billions wanted to know what they did wrong. Now we have the answer: almost everything.
The scandal is so big it goes far beyond those just interested in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. It links to corruption at the highest levels and may have even affected the United States midterm elections. The media, financial authorities and the Democratic Party are all implicated.
The more truth that comes out about ftx, the more the radical left, and society in general, is being exposed for what it really is.
ftx was essentially a platform that allowed people to easily trade cryptocurrency. Set up an account, and you could buy, sell and save bitcoin and other new types of electronic money.
But ftx wasn’t just going to help you get rich. It was going to save the world. Its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was both banker and saint—hailed as a “savior” and “the world’s most generous billionaire.” He preached a gospel of “effective altruism,” or “earning to give.” He wanted to get rich, but only so he could give it all away. But what did he do to get rich? He cheated in spectacular fashion.
ftx promised that whatever digital money you put into your ftx account was yours. What it actually did was help itself to its customers’ money. But nobody really knows what it spent that stolen money on. The “assets” ftx has in its atrocious and minimal records are essentially ftx loyalty points. The company made up its own currencies and created as much of them as it wanted. It swapped this made-up money with the real money in its customers’ accounts.
One writer said this was worse than $16 billion in worthless “magic beans.” ftx’s assets were “magic beans” that it invented itself and acquired for zero dollars—while the $16 billion its customers stored with it simply vanished.
Where is the—real—money?
These billions could have evaporated into bad investments and ridiculous expenditures by ftx executives. But a good chunk of them appears to have been used to fund Democrats.
Bankman-Fried donated the second-largest amount of money to the Democratic Party during the 2022 midterm elections, behind George Soros. In 2020, he donated $5.2 million to Joe Biden, the second-largest amount after Michael Bloomberg. There was brief talk that he could donate $1 billion in 2024. Even his nightmare of a balance sheet made his political leanings clear: $7 million was mysteriously marked “trumplose.”
Bankman-Fried’s mother runs a secretive political action committee that has funneled over $20 million to Democrats. His brother formerly advised wealthy donors on how to give to Democrats before moving on to another outfit, funded by Sam, that focuses on “pandemic preparedness.”
Bankman-Fried donated to people on important financial committees, which apparently shielded his company (which was run something like a fraternity house) from investigation. He donated to the head of the Senate Agriculture Committee, a Republican who happens to oversee cryptocurrency regulation. The father of his girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, is head of economics at mit and close to many of the key bureaucrats in charge of financial regulation.
The gang running ftx believed they could get away with all kinds of fraud because they backed the Democrats. The media would give them glowing write-ups. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission would look the other way. They had nothing to fear from Congress, the Senate, the Justice Department or the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
But God wanted all this graft and deceit exposed. And so it was.
Here at the Trumpet, the Bible is our guide for watching world events. One core passage guiding our analysis right now comes from the book of Amos, which is an end-time book for the people descended from ancient Israel, most notably America. The Anchor Bible Dictionary states, “Amos decried the social injustice, the oppression of the poor, and the lack of any moral or ethical values on the part of the rich and powerful. According to Amos …, Israel was a violent, oppressive and exploitative society. The poor had to sell themselves into slavery to pay off trivial debts (Amos 2:6; 8:6). The rich falsified weights and measures (Amos 8:5) and traded dishonestly (Amos 8:6). Even the courts, the last bastion of hope for the poor, were corrupt. Judges were bribed to cheat the poor out of what little they had (Amos 2:7; 5:10, 12). In fact, Israel was no longer capable of acting with justice (Amos 3:10; cf. 5:7, 24; 6:12). Truth and honesty were now hated (Amos 5:10).”
America’s wealthy are “falsifying the balances by deceit.” Change that to “balance sheet,” and you have ftx.
We tend to focus on the prophecies of lawlessness and political turmoil. But these prophecies are accompanied by forecasts of rampant corruption. We are seeing the results before our eyes. If the law is not enforced, people will cheat to grow rich. They can cheat at the ballot box, and they can cheat in business.
But the story of ftx’s corruption could go even deeper.
With such a strong background in murky democratic financing, ftx could be a major player in Washington, D.C.’s corruption. Billions are missing. What Bankman-Fried is known to have donated is a tiny fraction of that. If you are going to cheat in an election—engaging in practices like ballot harvesting or worse—you need access to off-the-books cash. A dodgy cryptocurrency enterprise could be a great way to generate or hide it.
Evidence that ftx was involved at that level hasn’t yet been uncovered, but it is plausible. Certainly, the way the left-wing media has swooned over Bankman-Fried is reason enough for suspicion.
There is profound corruption at all levels of business and government—and more is about to be exposed. Bankman-Fried was arrested in December and extradited to the United States, and this led to yet another solid, intriguing, condemning revelation. The indictment accuses him of campaign finance omissions. It alleges that the former billionaire wasn’t just the second-largest donor of funds legally, but that he also illegally donated to politicians using other people’s names. This man is in the middle of a hole measured in billions of dollars, and he is a channel for money into the Democratic Party. More revelations are sure to come.