The madness of the left
Before the midterm November elections, Sam Bankman-Fried was a left-wing billionaire heartthrob.
He properly grew up on the Stanford campus, where his parents were well-known left-wing activist law professors. He went to a tony prep school and on to MIT.
Bankman-Fried mocked society's bourgeois capitalist conventions by dressing and looking like a slob in cut-offs and T-shirts.
Indeed, he bested the nose-ring, Charles Manson-esque appearance of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. He outdid the all-black, Steve Jobs copy-cat get-up of another fallen leftist icon, the now-convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy.
The Left canonized Bankman-Fried for the hundreds of millions of dollars he created out of thin air and channeled to left-wing congressional and state candidates, President Joe Biden, and a host of "progressive" causes under the cool slogan "effective altruism."
For decades hence - or so Bankman-Fried promised - his cryptocurrency company FTX would churn out billions. Its politically correct gifting won exemptions from the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Democratic-controlled congressional oversight committees.
The loud-talking, left-wing slob promised billions of dollars more in gifts to come. He was knighted as the successor to the kindred financial market manipulator and progressive "philanthropist" George Soros.
SBF may have been a sloppy, immature fool, but he was no dummy.
He had learned early on that loud leftist talk, big promises of philanthropy, and huge cash infusions to the media and leftist candidates - all under the veneer of "effective altruism" - ensured de facto immunity for his Ponzi schemes from both bad press and government investigation.
Then, suddenly, the midterms were over. Powerful financial interests were screaming their millions had vanished at the hands of SBF.
The Republicans took the House. They promised embarrassing hearings, with Bankman-Fried the loose-talking star villain. And so - presto! - he was finally indicted by the Biden Department of Justice.
Bankman-Fried, in desperation one last time, had turned to his old props of raggedy dress, nerd talk, and contrived naivete.
His schtick no longer worked. Too many leftists were embarrassed that they got too much money from him. Too many exposed "regulators" had known what this wannabe Madoff character was up to before the midterms.
The now albatross Bankman-Fried was loud and everywhere, then suddenly not--and won't be again.
In contrast, consider how the Left now despises Elon Musk as much as it once worshiped Sam Bankman-Fried.
Musk once mixed vaguely liberal politics with a David-versus-Goliath self-confidence, as he took on Big Auto and Big Space - and won.
But then he turned to Twitter and Big Tech. Or, rather, Musk realized Silicon Valley was no longer the irreverent embryo of boy geniuses he remembers from his youth, which outsmarted and preempted the global technology establishment.
Instead, it had become a dreary, constipated place of hard-core, uncompromising leftists in need of a shake-up.
Tech moguls used their billions, their monopolies, and their exemptions from oversight to warp the way Americans searched the Internet, communicated with each other, voted, and accessed the news - all in service to left-wing causes.
Musk's mortal sin was not just buying the money-losing Twitter and reinventing it as a free-speech platform.
It was not even exposing the company's rot of a lazy, overstaffed, woke, and pampered workforce and its giddiness in censoring free expression and wounding the public careers of any who challenged the status quo.
Musk's crime was far worse.
First, was the sin of betrayal. A month ago, all those Teslas on the streets of Palo Alto, Austin, and Cambridge were virtue-signaling proof of green moral superiority. Then suddenly, these still wonderful cars are seen as fuel for the prince of darkness.
Musk, of all people, now the progressive apostate, would dare to end Twitter as a left-wing bulwark. And he promised to flip this time-tried Pravda to host anyone to say what he pleased.
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One of the first cases I prosecuted as a young lawyer was against a Ponzi schemer who convinced a religious sect that God was going to make them rich if they invested in his scheme. It looks like SBF may have done the same thing with liberals while using the money invested to buy more influence within the Democrat party.
It is also not surprising that the left would be upset that Musk turned Twitter into what it was supposed to be to start with rather than limiting its potential to liberals who want to manipulate opinions.
See, also:
Progressive Regulators Are Salivating over the Sam Bankman-Fried Scandal
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