(NewsNation) — Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX whose crypto antics have left perhaps a million people without billions of dollars, simply did the seemingly impossible by talking about his own political donations. He criticized the media for having a deep liberal bias while also cutting the knees of a major conservative talking point about him.
Bankman-Fried went from being a billionaire to what he says is less than $100,000 now by using client funds for another of his businesses that failed. He started to look like he was running some kind of Ponzi scheme wrapped up in a crypto package, and he did it while he was investing heavily in elected officials and media companies.
Now, many wonder if that’s why you don’t have regulators everywhere anymore. That is for another day.
Bankman-Fried reported giving $40 million to Democrats in the last election. With Bankman-Fried making the rounds of the mainstream media, the knives came out to the right.
He was one of the biggest midterm donors to the Democrats, which is being used by some on the right to mock left-leaning media coverage.
Imagine if you funded the Republican Party, some news outlets asked. Good question. In an interview with the Coffeezilla podcast, he revealed this bombshell: “All my Republican donations were dark.”
Bankman-Fried says he gave basically the same amount of money to Democrats and Republicans. And his explanation of why he gave overtly to the Democrats and covertly to the Republicans says a lot about our media.
“And the reason wasn’t for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters scare the public. [expletive] if you donate to a republican, because they’re all super liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight. So I blacked out all the Republicans,” Bankman-Fried said.
He’s basically admitting that he donated equally to both parties, which undermines the big conservative talking point that he just bankrolled the Democrats, but also undermines the mainstream media’s nonsense that they don’t have a left-wing bias.
Now, I may be continuing a scam here, and this may not even be true. But if so, this potential crook understood exactly how to play games with our politicians and media: give money to politicians and even upstart media companies, but not give left-leaning media a reason to go after you. And it sure seems to have worked.
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