Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

Are you sheeple even getting the picture of 1984 yet?


The COVID/Crypto Connection: The Grim Saga Of FTX & Sam Bankman-Fried

https://brownstone.org/articles/covid-crypto-connection-ftx-and-sbf/

To discover that lockdowns were funded by fraud and fakery is a deeper
level of corruption that not even the most cynical among us could have
imagined.

https://www.cato.org/regulation/summer-2022/ivermectin-together-trial
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/animal-news/here-s-why-denmark-culled-17-million-minks-now-plans-n1249610
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/11/16/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-pandemic-prevention/
https://www.againstpandemics.org/
https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/guarding-against-pandemics/
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xafpj3on76uRDoBja/the-ftx-future-fund-team-has-resigned-1
https://twitter.com/ddiamond/status/1486052177986695171
https://www.protectourfuture.us/
https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/FTXFILING.pdf
https://gbdeclaration.org/
https://brownstone.org/donate/
https://charleskochfoundation.org/stories/dare-to-be-different/
https://content.sitemasonry.gmu.edu/news/2020-03/masons-tyler-cowen-leads-efforts-incentivize-coronavirus-response
https://milkyeggs.com/?p=175
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-crypto-bankruptcy.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/health/covid-ivermectin-hospitalization.html

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

Very interesting. He had the whole game going: a vegan worried about
climate change, supports every manner 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., enough to make his shady
company the toast of the town.

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

This is particularly strange because covid restrictions have been
proven, over and over, to harm all the groups about whom woke ideology
claims to care so deeply. That includes even animal rights: who can
forget the Danish mink slaughter of 2020?

Regardless, it’s just true. Masking became a symbol of being a good
person, same as vaccinating, veganism, and flying into fits at the
drop of a hat over climate change. None of this has much if anything
to do with science or reality. It’s all tribal symbolism in the name
of group political solidarity. And FTX was pretty good at it, throwing
around hundreds of millions to prove the company’s loyalty to all the
right causes.

Among them included the pandemic-planning racket. That’s right: there
were deep connections between FTX and Covid that have been cultivated
for two years. Let’s have a look.

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

Regardless, the study and especially the conclusions turned out to be
bogus. 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-19 therapeutics and
vaccines that nominally compete with ivermectin.”

For some reason, SBF just 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 it true and the New York Times
played its assigned role in the whole performance.

It was just the start. A soft-peddling Washington Post 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 improve biosecurity and prevent the next pandemic.”

I can do no better than to quote the Washington Post:

    The shock waves from FTX’s free fall have rippled across the
public health world, 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 money so I can keep advocating to lock more people down!”
Alas, the collapse of the exchange, which reportedly holds a mere
0.001% of the assets it once claimed to have, makes that impossible.

Among the organizations most affected is Guarding Against Pandemics,
the advocacy 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
government 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
detect emerging virus threats (amid lackluster support, the measure
was punted to 2024), to investing more than $11 million on the
unsuccessful congressional primary campaign of an Oregon biosecurity
expert, and even a $150,000 grant to help Moncef Slaoui, scientific
adviser for the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine
accelerator, write his memoir.

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

And worse:

    The FTX Future Fund’s commitments included $10 million to
HelixNano, a biotech start-up seeking to develop a next-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 law school graduate’s job at the Johns
Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Overall, the Future Fund was a
force for good,” 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 think long-term … to build pandemic
preparedness, to diminish the risks of biological threats.”

More:

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

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

    “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of
corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy
financial information as 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
situation is unprecedented.”

It was the worst example of a phony perpetual-motion machine: a token
to back a company that itself was backed by the token, which in turn
was backed by nothing but political fashion and woke ideology that
roped in Larry David, Tom Brady,  Katy Perry, Tony Blair, and Bill
Clinton to provide a cloak of legitimacy.

Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Sam Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas April 2022

And you can’t make this stuff up anymore: FTX had a close 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 operation of the Democratic National Committee and
the entire lockdown lobby.

I will tell you what infuriates me about these billions in fake money
and deep corruptions of politics and science. For years now, my
anti-lockdown friends have been hounded for being funded by supposed
dark money that simply doesn’t exist. Many brave scientists,
journalists, attorneys, and others gave up great careers to stand for
principle, exposing the damage caused by the lockdowns, and this is
how they have 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) can go. But we cannot come anywhere near what is
necessary for justice, much less complete with the 8-digit funding
regime of the other side.

The Great Barrington Declaration was signed at the offices of the
American Institute for Economic Research, which, apparently, six years
prior had received a long-spent $60,000 grant from the Koch
Foundation, and thus became a “Koch-funded libertarian think 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,
money, and influence swarming the darker realms of the social-media
dudgeons. 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 world into denying human rights to
billions of people the world over.

All this time – 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 around by operators of a Ponzi scheme based on
cheating, fraud, and $15 billion in leveraged funds that didn’t exist
while its principle actors were languishing in a drug-infested $40
million villa in the Bahamas even as they preened about the virtues of
“effective altruism” and their pandemic-planning machinery that has
now fallen apart.

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. But just as the money was based on
nothing but puffed air, the damage they have wrought on the world is
all too real: a lost generation of kids, declined lifespans, millions
missing from the workforce, a calamitous fall in public health,
millions of kids in poverty due to supply-chain breakages, 19 straight
months of falling real incomes, historically high increases in debt,
and a dramatic fall in human morale the world over.

So yes, we should all be furious and demand full accountability at the
very least. Whatever the final truth, it is likely to be far worse
than even the egregious facts listed above. It’s bad enough that
lockdowns wrecked life and liberty. To discover that vast support for
them was funded by fraud and fakery is a deeper level of corruption
that not even the most cynical among us could have imagined.