A couple weeks ago, I posted this booklet on Reddit with a summary of my research findings from 1,500 hours of research since Peter Thiel collapsed Silicon Valley Bank, with my certain claims that the world economy is about to collapse, and we’ll be intentionally thrust into World War III.
In short, cryptocurrency is the world’s first planetary decentralized Ponzi scheme, created mainly out of Harvard, Stanford and Silicon Valley. These criminals invested in blockchain technology for the express purpose of hiding their transactions as they funneled cash out of crypto exchanges and through their well-known companies.
Right now, those trillions of dollars have already been stolen out of the economy, though this won’t be revealed to the public until the cryptocurrency liquidity pool hits zero (which is inevitable: Ponzi schemes always go insolvent eventually since there is no investment). When this happens, we’ll have a brutal global economic collapse, dwarfing the Great Recession.
Such a massive crime (larger than all of history’s previous Ponzi schemes combined) didn’t come out of nowhere: We are victims of a totalitarian con-job that has taken over U.S. government and industry. These supervillains have behaved like cult leaders on a national scale: They’ve bombarded us with non-stop messaging to make us bitter, divided, and irony poisoned; endless problems with no solutions to make us anxious, depressed, and hopeless; undermining truth and promoting nonsense conspiracy theories, all so we accept our shitty circumstances while they bleed us dry.
If you saw that post, you may have seen a link to an extensive write-up supporting my claims that was removed by Reddit shortly after I posted it. Now you can find that info here.
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To understand Reddit’s role in this crime crew, the best place to start is 2014, when they announced a new $50 million funding round from some of the biggest names in the crypto super-Ponzi. Notable names include:
- Peter Thiel: My original villain whose venture capital firm started the run on Silicon Valley Bank and threw me into the rabbit hole.Thiel is a career Ponzi schemer. His promotion of offshore drilling, manmade “Seasteading” islands, and cryogenics were all for Ponzi schemes: They promise these fantastical investment opportunities but they fake some evidence, never invest, and steal the money instead.
And he’s played a huge role in crypto since its inception: He invested in a fraudulent Stanford start-up called “Clinkle” that was just so they could launder their money into the crypto Ponzi. He invested in companies like Polychain and Tagomi that helped build blockchain tech to let them secretly move assets off the public blockchain in massive volumes using high-frequency trading. He was the keynote speaker at Bitcoin 2022, where he claimed Bitcoin would be as valuable as the entire global stock market in a matter of years: These fantastical promises help keep victims from cashing out, which would eventually expose the Ponzi.
- Mark Andreessen: Another huge crypto VC, backing Polychain, Coinbase, and countless others. Notably, he and Thiel were two of the earliest and most influential investors in Facebook. Facebook orchestrated a massive crypto money laundering scheme via Libra Association, funneling their cash through Credit Suisse, which intentionally collapsed for this purpose.
Just today, it was announced that Andreessen’s VC firm is investing more into AI. Since they’ve already cashed out of the crypto Ponzi (which is how we know it will collapse soon), they’ve pivoted heavily toward AI for the next round of Ponzis. Obviously, some AI technology is very real and very powerful, but they use that promise of AI to sell bogus Ponzi schemes. For a fun example, check out TomBot, from Stanford’s StartX.com Ponzi factory. It’s a literal puppet that they’re pretending is a robot dog with powerful mood-detecting AI sensors.
- Sam Altman: Best known as the CEO of OpenAI, he’s another Stanford grad (like Thiel) who has invested heavily in the crypto and AI ponzis. His most flagrant bullshit science is his new WorldCoin, which promises to use neural network technology to create a cryptocurrency that will solve universal basic income by getting people to scan their retinas in an orb.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, meanwhile, showed up on a staggering investors list on an Israeli crypto company called Starkware Industries, along with some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley (his fund is “Das Kapital Capital, LLC,” the cheeky bastard).
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Let’s revisit that 2014 funding announcement, where they also introduced Reddit Gold. Check out the title: did you know that Reddit Gold was a literal cryptocurrency?
That’s unusual, because it didn’t behave like a cryptocurrency at all: It wasn’t a speculative asset, or ever pitched as an alternative to fiat currency. It was just a platform’s reward system – something that could have easily been accomplished without using the blockchain.Why did they do that?
To best understand that, we can first look at a detailed write-up on how PayPal directly plugged into the crypto Ponzi via the blockchain. Then, let’s look at the Clinton family’s secret crypto conference: Virtually every participant of the Clinton Global Initiative has strange ties to cryptocurrency if you go looking for them.
Moderna, for instance, launched a blockchain pilot for vaccine tracing. The supply conglomerate Agility Logistics used blockchain to track container shipments. Welcome.US promises “the use of blockchain technology in securing housing rights in post-conflict Iraq.”The reason all these disparate companies invested in blockchain technology was because the blockchain was their source of theft: They link up to their unregulated criminal blockchain, and they funnel stolen cash from crypto exchanges and through their companies.
Why was Reddit Gold linked to the blockchain? So Reddit could steal their piece of the pie – and we can suspect that when posts would get showered with Reddit Gold, it was these criminals laundering their stolen money.
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But the crypto theft is just one part of the operation, and companies from all sectors did the same. Since we’re talking about Reddit, who’s in the same crime network as Facebook and Twitter, we can identify another layer of supervillainy: Bad-faith actors are heavily manipulating the discourse across countless subreddits in order to promote divisive, partisan content, convince us we’re helpless to do anything about our crumbling society, sow bullshit conspiracy theories, and make sure you don’t find out that they’re supervillains.
Just before they announced their Reddit Gold cryptocurrency, the admins made the choice to hide individual upvote and downvote counts. Their justification was that they used artificial vote-fuzzing to normalize the counts, and it threw off the numbers. I’m an IT guy – this seems logical. But the obvious good-faith solution would be to omit the number of “artificial” votes and show us the real ones. Instead, they hid the counts completely.
This allowed Reddit to put a huge thumb on the scale without us realizing it: They have a sea of trolls whose job is to promote content that is incendiary, divisive, and wrong. If they don’t like a post (like if it’s exposing all of their preposterous crimes), they can throw hundreds of downvotes at it.
It’s easy to spot these downvote brigades if you get a lot of shares. My last post on r/conspiracy got 530 shares with only 250 net upvotes. Since a post would virtually never organically have more shares than upvotes, this lets us know that there were way more than 250 upvotes, but also a flood of downvotes.
Once you understand the criminal interests being served by this media manipulation (keeping things divisive, ironic, jaded, bitter, partisan, hopeless, etc.), you can easily spot trends by looking at the number of upvotes vs. shares. Take the endless discourse on the Israel-Hamas War: If a post promotes war, strife, and division, it will have way more upvotes than shares. If it promotes unity and calls out the criminal governments of Israel AND Hamas as they both send their people to the slaughter, it will have a much higher ratio of shares to upvotes (because the trolls are downvoting it).
Want to know what “they don’t want you to see?” Look for posts with a high share to upvote ratio.
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If you saw my last post, you likely saw a bunch of very similar comments, all with lots of upvotes. They hand wave away my claims without engaging with the content at all: Assertions that I’m obviously very wrong, crazy, or stupid.
Let’s look at some top comments from my post on r/conspiracy:
“entertaining, but not remotely believable. imagine doing "15000 hours" of "research" to say crypto is "mysterious." (120 upvotes)
Notably, I never said cryptocurrency was “mysterious.” I said cryptocurrency was “the world’s first planetary, decentralized Ponzi scheme that will soon collapse the world economy.” That’s the opposite of mysterious.
“You'd think people on this subreddit could think for themselves, then you see the uninformed ramblings of someone pretending to understand Bitcoin at even a surface level get praise and realise just how lost some people are.” (70 upvotes)
Here, we get an assertion with no evidence: “These are the ramblings of a madman and he doesn’t know anything about Bitcoin.” What was I wrong about? They don’t engage. What about the very specific claims that it’s the world’s largest Ponzi scheme? They don’t engage. They are practicing the art of sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt: A rotten propaganda technique to get you to doubt me.
“Should let everyone know, this is disinfo made specifically to discredit conspiracy.” (21 upvotes).
A very bold claim without any evidence on this one: It’s one thing to say I’m incorrect; it’s another entirely to say I’m intentionally spreading disinformation. They give no motive or explanation for what purpose this disinformation would serve, and they also don’t engage in a single word I’ve written.
If all we have are just these three comments, we don’t have evidence of much. But the main reason I’ve been able to prove so many preposterous claims is in the repetition of evidence: I’ve been implicating Reddit in a global crime for months, and I’ve dealt with hundreds of comments like this. Once I understood Reddit's role in the con, I realized I was producing interactive evidence every time I posted.
If I’m suspicious of a user, I’ll check their comment history and find that virtually all of their comments serve these criminal interests: One discredits me, the next reeks of tribalism in whatever subs they frequent, the next ironically mocks somebody for being earnest, the next promotes Amazon, and so on.
This is social media at its most haunted: They’ve monopolized these spaces, curated them to make us feel as divided and disillusioned as possible, and convinced us that that’s reality while these con artist supervillains bleed us dry. They are cult leaders on history’s largest scale.
Lucky for us, the cat’s out of the bag on the secret kleptocracy, which means we’re about to build some desperately needed collective action, armed with truth, pointed squarely at the parasite class that has been gaslighting us and bleeding us dry.
Anyway, looking forward to the comments.
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Quick facts:
- Bill Clinton established the Clinton Global Initiative with Jeffrey Epstein (as Epstein’s lawyer, Alan Dershowitz said in court).
- Bill Clinton shared the stage with Sam Bankman-Fried at a Bitcoin conference in the Bahamas.
From left to right: Con Artist
It turns out that the charity is just to funnel massive investments into their criminal networks, but you don’t need to know that part yet; you just need to know that virtually everybody who spoke at this president’s conference last year is rolling in cryptocurrency.
They had over 200 participants at their conference last September, many of them are world leaders in business, government, bands that stopped being good 30 years ago, and philanthropy. I only went through the first 40 of them, but here are some of their crypto connections.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said he would make the city the “center of the cryptocurrency industry,” and vowed to take his first three city paychecks in Bitcoin.
The African Development Bank invests global public and private capital in African member states. They offered an intensive four day cryptocurrency workshop on cryptocurrency and money laundering. They also moderated a panel where “Experts call for African cryptocurrency,” according to their press release.
Before joining venture capital firm Vistria, Margaret Anadu worked at Goldman Sachs for 18 years. As partner, she led $10 billion of investment through Goldman’s One Million Black Women initative. This includes organizations like Steph Curry’s Eat.Learn.Play Foundation, a non-profit that partnered closely with FTX and sold NFTs.
Solidarid is a global supply-chain organization that helped found the Fairtrade movement. Last year, they developed ann app that allows farmers to sell their products on the blockchain.
weConnect provides regulatory compliance support for global businesses. This includes services like “Setting up a Singapore Company in the Crypto and Blockchain Industry,” and how to get around regulations to set up a crypto exchange in Japan.
Moderna is a pharmaceutical company best known for creating a COVID vaccine. In March 2021, they announced a blockchain pilot project for vaccine tracing. Months later, their stock had a sudden increase in trading volume, increasing 400% before falling back to previous levels six months later.
They appear to be one of many companies that used the “COVID boom” as cover for moving their fraudulent crypto Ponzi scheme winnings in and out, as discussed in The Ponzi Papers: PayPal does a Ponzi.
2) The Santo Domingo Foundation is named after the second richest man in Columbia. A theater with his name on it is hosting this year’s World Business Forum, with topics such as “Blockchain and the Digital Future.”
3) The King Abdullah II School of Information Technology at the University of Jordan is named after Queen Rania’s husband. They write papers like “Blockchain for Banking Systems: Opportunities and Challenges” and hosted a cryptocurrency lecture by Binance Academy earlier this month.
4) The Millennium Challenge Corporation is a U.S. foreign aid agency providing grants to countries based on their economic policies. One such policy is a blockchain-based tracking of agricultural products. One former director now runs a blockchain services firm, while another contributed to a report called “Enabling Blockchain Innovation in the U.S. Federal Government.”
5) Agility Logistics, a Kuwaiti supply chain conglomerate, became the first freight forwarder to use blockchain to track container shipments and writes blog posts such as “Why Your Supply Chain Needs Blockchain. Chairperson Henadi Al-Saleh spoke on a panel at Davos 2021 about how new technologies like blockchain can drive public-private partnerships.
Provided “effective aftruism”-sized donations alongside Florida International University, which began accepting cryptocurrency donations last year.
The Organization of American States is a Washington, D.C. based organization heavily involved in South and Central American elections. They intervened in the Haiti 2010 presidential election and tried to plant Juan Guaidó as Venezuelan president in 2019, for instance. The OAS is studying international criminal money laundering around cryptocurrency, but a 2021 progress report suggests it is a rare occurrence
World Central Kitchen is a U.S. non-governmental organization that provides food assistance in the wake of disasters. Founder José Andrés was the second recipient of Jeff Bezos’ $100 million Courage and Civility Award.
In 2021, they partnered with The Giving Block to accept donations in cryptocurrencies such as Polkadot, Axie Infinity Shards, and ELON. Later that year, they received donations from Quiznos’ sandwich chain’s 3D space-themed NFT raffle. *Launched its first cryptocurrency donation campaign in 2021.
4) Hispanics in Philanthropy describes themselves as “an impact catalyst reshaping the Latinx future.” Earlier this month, they sponsored a “Shark Tank style event” called El Paso Pitch, where they showcase NFT and artificial intelligence startups.
They were featured on a non-profit fundraising blog before the author decided to “refocus on just these timely topics: cryptocurrencies, Blockchain and crowdfunding.”
5) New American Funding is a mortgage provider, recently announcing their exclusive partnership with hyper-local news platform Patch. The company laid off 1,000 workers last year. Last month, co-founder Patty Arvielo and her husband gave Costa Mesa’s Vanguard University the largest donation in school history.
Welcome.US is a non-profit formed in 2021 to provide support for Afghan refugees, working with assistance from four former U.S. presidents and first ladies. Their senior director won the Social Innovation Blockchain Hackathon for developing a framework for “the use of blockchain technology in securing housing rights in post-conflict Iraq.”
BlocPower is a “climate technology company that analyzes, finances and upgrades homes and 1buildings.” They’ve received funding from crypto tech VC Andreessen Horowowitz, along with criminal co-conspirators Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs, and Elon Musk’s brother Kimbel.
As Governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker signed a bill that included $45 million in grants for “artificial intelligence, robotics, fintech, quantum computing, blockchain, and blue tech.” In 2019, Baker spoke at the Better Government Competition, which included proposals such as “city-backed cryptocurrency” to fund local projects.
The Syrian American Medical Society is a non-profit that provides humanitarian medical support for Syrians in need. Dr. Ballour treated wounded Syrians in an underground hospital during the Syrian Civil War. She was the subject of the Oscar nominated film “The Cave,” which at least one blogger was pre-emptively sure Russian trolls would say is misinformation. As the author notes, the film’s director has been accused of spying for the CIA and faking news.
Though I haven’t watched the full film, the short follow-up documentary doesn’t provide anything irrefutable that couldn’t be faked, and offers none of the characterization, tension or cinematography I would expect from an acclaimed filmmaker.
5) The Natural Resources Defense Council is a U.S. based environmental advocacy non-profit. They recently wrote a Statement of Record for the Cryptocurrency Asset Mining Transparency Act. They expect the cryptocurrency industry to be worth $32 trillion by 2027, and advocate for crypto assets to be created “in an environmentally responsible, equitable, and just manner.”
Abhijit Banerjee received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019 for his groundbreaking work in antipoverty research, such as his well-regarded 2010 study on the impact of lentils as incentives for immunization in rural India.
While I appreciate Banerjee’s contributions to the scientific canon, the study hardly seems worthy of the most prestigious award on the planet. Though it’s described as groundbreaking, it’s a basic sociological experiment that sounds like something out of Freakonomics, which was wildly popular five years earlier. The paper even notes a similar study from Nicaragua’s socialist government in 1985, which reported greater effectiveness (because they probably got better food).
2) Sam Bankman-Fried is the biggest crypto criminal name you knew until ten minutes ago, I hope.
And so on.
[Originally posted on /r/conspiracy on 6/16/23 but removed by mods]
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More information and links to key evidence:
Cryptocurrency is a Ponzi Scheme:
When first researching the SVB collapse, we found several clues that pointed to cryptocurrency, which is what threw the researchers into the rabbit hole:
Silvergate Bank, which was used almost exclusively by the crypto industry, collapsed days prior to SVB.
The word “cryptocurrency” shows up 42 times on the 2023 Financial Crisis Wikipedia Page, which suggested that it may have something to do with crypto.
Peter Thiel, whose venture capital firm Founders Fund started the bank run, is a long-time crypto promoter. He gave the keynote speech at the 2022 Bitcoin Conference, for instance.
While people in the media were blaming regional banking for the financial crisis, we found that several of the most alarmist voices had previously promoted cryptocurrency. Former Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh wrote an article called The U.S. Needs Economic Regime Change in the wake of the SVB collapse, and had promoted Bitcoin here, for example.
From there, we combed through all of Founders Fund’s investments to get a sense of what they were doing with cryptocurrency. A huge break was discovering partner Napoleon Ta’s role as the company’s crypto expert, then following his actions and his family trust, CN2T Capital LLC.
In brief, cryptocurrency was planned and created intentionally as a global, decentralized Ponzi scheme out of Stanford University, where Thiel attended.
Through crypto company Polychain and its “Ecosystem” Funds, several associates of Founders Fund invested in blockchain tech for the express purpose of:
Using “Zero-knowledge proofs” to allow blockchain transactions to be hidden
Using “Layer 2” technology to move assets from public to private blockchains and vice verse
Building a high-frequency trading network via Napoleon Ta’s Tagomi Systems.
With all of the above, they were able to secretly funnel out all of the cash that was invested in cryptocurrency and/or shuttle crypto assets across different exchanges.
Important documents include:
Summer Highlands LTD SEC Registration: A very shady registration for an offshore company using tax loopholes to create an offshore exchange of unregulated securities. This appears to be an early dual crypto-currency exchange in the British Virgin Islands and China.
Greenhouse v. Polychain: A very informative lawsuit: Polychain’s management effectively stole SAFTs (a crypto derivative asset) from its partners on behalf of mysterious and powerful associates. At nearly the exact same time, Orchid Labs, which Polychain and other related Silicon Valley VCs backed, reported a SAFT offering with the SEC. This suggests possible theft to hide provenance.
Clinkle: A bizarre failed start-up the Thiel invested in - they had the largest seed funding round in VC history, promising mysterious sound-based payments technology. The tech never came to light and the company went up in smoke due to well-publicized unforced errors. Along with big Silicon Valley names, investors included Richard Branson, Ross Perot Jr., StartX.com (A Stanford University investment fund), and multiple Stanford Professors.
Westpac, Offshore Bank Accounts in the Cook Islands: One of the investors in Clinkle was Stanford professor (and WestPac bank CEO) Robert Joss. This is his only case study, and it appears to be a criminal recruitment document, looking for Stanford students with no ethical qualms about unregulated offshore banking.
Affirm Holdings SEC Investors Rights Agreement: Affirm is a PayPal spin-off, whose stock has long trended toward zero, and appears to be used to move their money into the crypto Ponzi pool. This investors list includes some the richest and most powerful people on the planet who are seemingly losing their money.
Starkware Investors List: This Israeli crypto company investors’ list includes virtually all the big names in Silicon Valley, highlighting just how many have gotten into the crypto theft bonanza.
On that note, there is fundamentally no difference between Bitcoin and any other “alt-coin” cryptocurrency. It appears that the smaller Stanford + Harvard + Silicon Valley crew were the original investors, then others in their networks saw how much money they had stolen with Bitcoin, and they all flooded into the space with more and more alt-coins. They are positioned as alternatives, but they’re all the same Ponzi scheme.
Additional information, such as a damning Bitcoin volume anomaly, is found in The Ponzi Papers Part 4.
Big Ponzi Players:
Notably, a super-deluxe trillion-dollar Ponzi industry doesn’t arise out of nowhere. Cryptocurrency was built on top of networks of existing Ponzi scheme operators who had grown larger and larger.
For more details on what Ponzi schemes entail, we recommend the Wikipedia page, which provides an excellent overview.
Not covered in the booklet is what makes for good Ponzi schemes. Since the goal is to get victims to invest in something fake, they need to be investments that you can’t see, or that you can fake evidence for. Among the hundreds of Ponzi schemes we identified, we found a few flavors:
“Far away” Ponzi schemes, where the inevstor would never actually see where the investment is occurring. Examples include offshore drilling (which was a favorite of Thiel’s early VC funds), mining for rare earth metals in remote locations, or Seasteading (another Thiel favorite) where they sold libertarians on the idea that they would build manmade islands in intenternational waters, away from evil government regulation.
A subset of these are “adventurer” Ponzi schemes, favored by Richard Branson. Virgin Galactic promised to take people to space, but the company failed. Virgin Oceanic promised to take people to the deep sea but never did.
While we’re on Branson, huge shout-out to Virgin Cola, whose obvious Ponzi kayfabe helped crack the code: A Coca-Cola executive feared Virgin Cola and bribed convenience stores not to carry it. Since Reportedly, Virgin Cola couldn’t compete with that subterfuge and went bankrupt. Afterwards, the Coca-Cola exec was rewarded with a position as Virgin Group’s account manager.
Bullshit science Ponzi Schemes. Since they focus on speculative technology, they always have a justification when the investment fails. Theranos would be a good example, except her billionaire investors were in on it.
This was the crux of Jeffrey Epstein’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University, which he promoted via Scientific American magazine.
There are countless examples on StartX.com, an $8 billion Ponzi factory out of Stanford: Theranos-like companies that promise fantastical diagnostics with a drop of blood; retinal scans and breath inhalers that do the same; manufacturing made out of (thin) air; and Tombot, a poorly-disguised puppet that promises AI-powered therapy for elderly dementia payments.
Elon Musk has his own example with Neuralink, which promised sewing computer interfaces into the brain.
More recently, Stanford Alum and crypto/AI guru Sam Altman has offered the absurd claim that his WorldCoin project will provide universal basic income cryptocurrency through the mysterious power of a retinal-scanning orb.
Richard Branson: His career has been littered with Ponzi-shaped failures, but he’s made billions nonetheless. We’ve got a list of several here.
The Clintons: We’ve got a breakdown of the Clinton Global Initiative’s crypto connections here (written in code, since the original posts got removed). If you Google any other speakers at Clinton Global Initiative along with the words “blockchain” or “crypto”, you’ll likely find many more crypto connections.
Notably, many of these people work in the government or non-profit industries, which helps highlight just how rampant this Ponzi theft has spread.
As mentioned, Jeffrey Epstein allegedly co-founded Clinton Global Initiative, which helps explain why Bill Clinton had flown on Epstein’s plane dozens of times.
The purpose of so many “charities” associated with the mega-rich and powerful is international laundering: They’re investing billions in organized crime network under the guise of goodwill. Because Ponzi schemes require a pool of cash on hand (to pay out investors whenever they sell their assets), the vast majority of this cash was used to seed crypto liquidity pools in various exchanges. These investors would expect to “lose” their money, but would later receive huge returns elsewhere when victims’ cash gets stolen out of the crypto exchanges.
See Effective Altruism for an entire cottage industry out of Silicon alley that is used to justify mega-donations for this purpose. Notably, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother, Stanford Professor Linda Fried, is a huge proponent.
Ross Perot: While we have less information on older companies his Electronic Data Systems stock had one of the largest rises and then a sudden collapse, giving Perot the world record for most money lost in a single day.
Beyond that, his role in the criminal network becomes clear once we know that George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were on the same side: Perot ran as a third-party candidate in 1992 to take votes away from Bush and give Clinton the victory.
And as mentioned, his son was one of the big-time investors in Clinkle, which was one of the first money laundering fronts for cryptocurrency.
Mark Cuban: Along with buying Perot Systems, Cuban has been a huge crypto proponent.
Elizabeth Holmes: Her story is well-known (except that her investors were in on it, which we can tell through the repetition of the scam from Clinkle (with both companies out of Stanford), the fact that all of her investors have gotten much richer, and that she recently got a puff piece written up in the New York Times. Notably, her father was an Enron executive.
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Secret Kleptocracy: You already have a sea of evidence that our society has not functioned at all like a representative democracy since 1989, which we’ve put together here.
You can find Bill Clinton’s 1988 DNC speech here. The Rob Lowe Sex Tape is notable because it was filmed at the same event days before (Lowe was there in support of Dukakis) and includes a clip of Lowe meeting with Tom Hayden of the Chicago Seven. From that, we know it’s political blackmail.
For a detailed write-up on the speech, see our long-form essay here. In a nutshell, the evidence in the speech includes:
The early reference to Clinton getting excited that Dukakis is “squeaky clean”
The odd reference to Mike and Kitty Dukakis being “different as black and white”, but that soon we’ll see that Kitty Dukakis is a wonderful role model for all of the country’s children.
The bizarre anecdote where he brags about boys from the Ozarks running a crack ring into Detroit.
The fact that when taken as a whole, the speech makes no sense whatsoever unless it’s a mob boss slyly admitting to blackmail.
For more on Bush passing Clinton torch, we recommend Ghost Stories for the End of the World’s Arkansas episodes. We also recommend the entire Octopus series for an excellent account of Danny Casolaro and the Inslaw Affair. The Ponzi Papers/Dipshit Secrets research is the best validation of the theories of a criminal deep state that Casolaro called “The Octopus.”
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Kayfabe:
Throughout this research, it became clear that many lies in the media were being sold as truths:
Blaming the SVB collapse on regional banking but secretly promoting crypto
Clinkle’s failure had a very convenient justification of their failure where images were leaked of the CEO and Richard Branson setting money on fire (linked above).
Richard Branson’s Virgin Cola decline, mentioned above.
All of the political debates, press conferences, and social media posts where these secret con artist allies attack one another. For instance, Elizabeth Warren has taken a progressive stance against Elon Musk, but her Harvard connections make clear that she is in their same crime crew.
As mentioned, these lies are necessary for Ponzi schemes - otherwise, the Ponzi nature would be obvious. Intuit, which invested in crypto via Affirm Holdings has two notable bits of kayfabe:
First, Stanford Law professor Joseph Bankman (father of Sam Bankman-Fried, and likely one of the architects of cryptocurrency) has taken a public stance against Intuit, promoting simpler tax returns. However, when we know that they both have connections to cryptocurrency, we recognize this as kayfabe intended to make them seem like enemies.
Second, Intuit has been notably pro-Trans, even as Budweiser and Target suffered fake (or at least infinitely less impactful than reported) anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ boycotts. It’s highly likely that Intuit is doing this just so they can justify the loss of billions (that they stole out of Intuit via the crypto theft) with a fake anti-trans boycott.
Another important propaganda technique is the Theory of Bullshit developed out of Princeton University: “The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn’t care if what they say is true or false.” Notable bullshitters include Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel.
By mixing truth and lies with no concern for either, these criminals help create so-called “Post-Truth America:” They give everybody different slices of truth and lies to help divide us into our online social tribes. Once they get bullshitters bullshitting at one another, the public can no longer tell which way is up and the actual truth (that they’re all supervillain con artists) remains hidden.
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When Shit Hits the Fan
We know there will be an economic collapse because trillions of dollars were already stolen out of our stock market and it hasn’t yet been revealed. And we know it will be soon, because the March 2023 bank failures signaled that they were no longer investing in the crypto Ponzi pool: It is now exclusively trending downward, and will go insolvent at some point before long.
Therefore, they’ll need one of hell of a fireworks show to justify it.
We know that the Titan sub will play a role because there is no video evidence it can go to deep sea, which all successful adventure tourism companies would have. Meanwhile, people in this crime network all offered up statements that it was legitimate (if not safe), including a Simpsons writer, a Navy officer, and a friend of Richard Branson. Meanwhile, it looks precisely like Branson’s Virgin Oceanic Ponzi Scheme, mentioned above.
Meanwhile, there has been a spread of Titanic Conspiracy Theories over the past few years. Once we understood that all of the main characters in Pizzagate and QAnon were in the same group of financial criminals, it became clear that they did this to spread misinformation and have the public produce their own: It’s why the media repeatedly promoted these theories (even as they “cast doubt” on them). The Titanic conspiracy theories appear to be setting up a bizarre geopolitical event at that location as part of some larger attack, so people will latch onto these bunk theories in search of explanations.
Because so many Silicon Valley companies have been used to funnel out crypto money (as evidenced by chasing their fund and looking at their Ponzi-shaped stocks), we can expect several of these companies to collapse completely (Musk appears to have been running Twitter into the ground since the day he bought it). This would have the added benefit (for the criminals) of shutting down social media communication channels completely.
Additional clues for a mass blackout include the Metcalf sniper attack: A highly professional 2013 attack on a power substation, and a flurry of news articles warning of a potential mass blackout from a power grid attack.
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Crime Schools:
New York University:
Political revenge killings are covered here.
Evidence of a coverup in the deaths of two NYU students in Puerto Rico shortly after the SVB bank failure. They were killed by an unknown party when they reportedly got stuck in random crossfire, and a 3-second video clip was presented as strong evidence in media.
Meanwhile, NYU Presidents Global Council appears to be functionally identical to the Clinton Global Initiative: A thinly-veiled international money laundering operation conceived of by Chandrika Tandon, wife of Ponzi financier Ranjan Tandon.
Evidence for a blackmail ring includes:
A statistically massive number of student suicides, listed here.
There are several online documents that mention “snooker,” but are secret references to blackmail - an example of Thieves’ Cant. This may sound farfetched on its own, but these documents were found on websites connected to cryptocurrency and other Ponzi scheme websites. With this in mind, here we have a strange biography of snooker player Steve Davis that matches perfectly to the story of Jeffrey Epstein when we know that snooker = blackmail and poker = Ponzi schemes (and “online poker” = cryptocurrency).
In that light, we can identify “Lucania Snooker Club” as NYU, where Epstein attended college before being whisked away to the Dalton School, where he was hired by a CIA/OSS officer. ‘Lucania’ is Lucky Luciano’s birth name, and it suggests that NYU inherited Luciano’s blackmail ring from his mob headquarters just down the street.
This theory was confirmed when we read the referenced book, How I Play Snooker by Joe Davis (which costs a staggering $300 for a used copy). Sure enough, if we read it of the mind that it’s a coded blackmail guide, we were given an excellent introduction for how to blackmail somebody. A brief key:
The blackmail artist is the snooker player.
The cue ball is who they present as to the victim.
The object ball is the victim.
The distance between the two balls represents how close or distant our relationship is with the victim.
The screw shot is the reveal where the victim’s trust is betrayed for the purposes of blackmail.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:
Student Body President Eve Carson was reportedly murdered by two thugs from the hood who had carjacked her. Notably, the only evidence of the murder itself is hearsay: A friend of the two said that they told him all the details of the murder, and got a federal drug charge reduced for his testimony. This should be completely inadmissible in court - the fact that it’s the only evidence strongly suggests a coverup.
Once we know about Bill Clinton’s sly admission of blackmailing Governor Dukakis, we can see UNC President (and former Clinton chief-of-staff) Erskine Bowles’ speech at Eve Carson’s memorial in the same light: He is stifling a laugh throughout, and makes several curious statements and gestures (with one evoking her face being ripped open with a shotgun blast). Additionally, the introductory audio clip of Eve ends with a jarring cut implying that she wants to take from the needy.
In the video, we’re given the same motive as the Dukakis blackmail: Carson was assassinated because she was a noble, honest public servant who fought for her student body, demanding that a board meeting to raise tuition rates be opened up to the public.
Additionally, once we know just how often high-tech biomed is used for Ponzi schemes, it appears that UNC President Holden Thorp (who was hand-picked by Bowles), has made a career in Ponzi schemes.
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The Simpsons and Mass Media Propaganda
While The Simpsons can’t obviously collectively brainwash the masses on its own, it’s just one example created for this specific purpose. We find similar goals of instilling fear and partisan division throughout new media and daytime television: We are bombarded with messaging with the express purpose of dividing us and instilling learned helplessness: It’s a cult leader tactic on a global scale.
Simpsons creator Matt Groening revealed his hand on the cover of the very first issue of Life in Hell, his pre-Simpsons comic book:
He said, “What you see is what you breath.” He called it “Life in Hell.” He’s telling us we’re in hellworld so that we’ll belieev it.
Another example is The Simpsons Movie, which primed us all for COVID: An unexpected global event that we’re all too dumb and divided to do anything about, while we must accept the unknowable power of our almight government.
Other criminal propaganda examples include:
Stanley Kubrick:
Dr. Strangelove (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb): Ever wonder what that bizarre subtitle is about? “I” is “The Public:” He’s such a cocky supervillain that he’s telling us he’s brainwashing us - making a (beloved) comedy about nuclear war was done so we’d get comfortable and complacent and ignore the very real threats of endless militarization and the arms race.
A Clockwork Orange: Shows us “ultra-violence” mixed with happy-go-lucky “Singing in the Rain,” and then offers the preposterous theory that forcing someone’s eyeballs open and exposing them to ultra-violent media will make them less violent.
Full Metal Jacket: More blackpilled ultra-violence.
Eyes Wide Shut: Like an early version of QAnon: It promotes the absurd theory that the world’s elite are all evil bizarro ritualists, when the truth is that they are just the world’s worst financial criminals. Note the title: it isn’t “Eyes Wide Open.”
Stephen Soderberg:
Directed Contagion to prep us for COVID by letting us know that a pandemic could play out exactly as we were told: at a wet market in China.
His films The Panama Papers and Che both completely neuter their subjects to serve the CIA’s interests.
He often works with George Clooney, who is a close associate of the Clintons and Richard Bransons, and whose films align perfectly with our government’s interests. Clooney also once received a blowjob from Ghislaine Maxwell.
Beyond specifics, consider how daytime talk media and news has transformed into nothing but divisive, partisan fear-mongering that repeatedly tells us to oppose our fellow man, to be afraid and helpless at the state of the world, and to buy consumer comforts to deal with our sea of problems.
—
The meme accounts are everywhere, and are best recognized scrolling through many of their memes and noticing precisely the same themes ad infinitum. A few off instagram include, therecoveringproblemchild, shitheadsteve, and mindsetoftherich (which also promotes lots of Ponzi schemes).
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The Truth About 9/11
We didn’t dig deep on this, but realized it slotted perfectly with what we knew about all of their other supervillain-level crimes.
Epstein’s Bush painting features a child-George W. Bush having knocked over two Jenga towers with a paper airplane. It was one of just two paintings left in his $70 million townhouse after his arrest, despite the fact that he would have had much more art: It was an intentional “fuck you” from our government, daring us to see the truth and laughing at how invincible they felt.
Between that, the truth about COVID, the populate “Bush Did 9/11” memes (remember the Theory of Bullshit - they tell the truth sometimes), George H.W. Bush’s known ties to Osama bin Laden and Saudi Arabia, and the wretched criminal lies across our media, we feel tis has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
The Truth About COVID:
Once we became expert at recognizing Ponzi stock charts and realized how many trillions of dollars were funneled through half the stock market, this one was proven. Even if COVID hadn’t happened, there would still have been the same massive anomaly in the market. An explanation was required, so they cooked up COVID. They unleashed a deadly pandemic to help facilitate the threft of trillions of dollars from the global public.
__________
Make a sign that says TRUMP IS WITH HILLARY on the front, and AND THEY’RE DOING A MILITARY COUP AGAINST US on the back.
Get fucking loud.
And if any of that sounds dangerous, know that you and everybody you love are already in extreme danger.
I knew the global $5 trillion crypto rug pull was coming soon, and I wasn’t sure what that was going to look like until that truck fire outside Philly.
__________
Comrade,
I know this is a lot of words and I apologize: blame Cory Booker, not me.
But if you don’t know about the magical world of longform investigative journalism, you’re missing out on learning all the best true crime stories two years before the Netflix documentaries come out. The field is also imminently dying (which is bad news for true crime fans), so I hope you enjoy its death knell.
Plus, it’s like a Tarantino movie, and you watch those: It’s a long and violent satire where nothing is sacred, filled with references you don’t understand. It’s drenched in self-indulgence and it rewrites history at the end.1
The clickbait title is true, but it’s not the name of this story: revolutionaries need clicks too. History would do well to remember this story as The Devil and Mike Dukakis. Consider it Paul Revere’s only request.
If you’re wondering when I became a revolutionary, it’s when I watched a video that could start one.
Yours,
Less hot Danny Casolaro
P.S.: If you really like conspiracies, save this as a text file now in case you don’t get around to reading it until later.
1 Four Rooms is his best ending, uncontested. It might be the best ending. Please stop doing this, Q.
--
That's Rob Lowe.
You probably know Rob Lowe: He's a super famous actor and he's been in lots of stuff.
Some of you spring chickens may not know that he was a teen idol who had a serious fall from grace in 1988: A sex tape leaked of Lowe in a threesome with a 16-year-old. It was very damaging to Lowe’s reputation at the time: a black spot that took him years to shake off.
But here's one even the Xest of Genners don't know: The Rob Lowe sex tape is our best evidence of a Jeffrey Epstein blackmail operation.
Horrible, isn’t it? You must be wondering which U.S. Presidents would do such a thing.
--
Let’s get some details on how this sex tape happened. Rob Lowe and some other Brat Pack members are in Atlanta. Some gracious host or another guides them to the Club Rio VIP room, where they’re given free reign and free champagne.
Two eager fans ask the waitress if they could have an introduction and Lowe approves. The three of them go to Lowe’s hotel room and they film the threesome, though it’s unclear if it was done secretly or with Lowe’s approval. When Lowe passes out, they take the tape, steal some cash and pills, and leave.
They reportedly begin circulating the tape the next day, though news of the tape doesn’t hit the public until the following year when mention of it shows up in the teen’s mother’s divorce case (as evidence of the father’s bad parenting). The affidavit also said the teen spoke of “blackmailing” Lowe for $2 million.
Okay, so it was a blackmail job, and it sounds like we already know who did it. What the hell does that have to do with Jeffrey Epstein?
For starters, Rob Lowe wasn’t in Atlanta for a film shoot or a press tour; he was at the Democratic National Convention supporting Michael Dukakis’ Presidential nomination against George H.W. Bush.
And the tape isn’t just the underage encounter; it actually has two different Rob Lowe threesomes.
But the hottest part by a mile sits in between (and if anyone can find it, please please let me know): a recording of Lowe meeting with Tom Hayden, a member of the Chicago Seven.
Most of them.
The Chicago Seven were an important bunch because they practiced the most effective from of protest in modern American history, and if we had kept doing it, we never would have gotten Rob Lowe’s bad boy arc (and Bo Derek wouldn’t have given at least one revolutionary a MILF fetish)2 : They met the U.S. Government on its home turf and mocked the ever-loving shit out of it.
In 1968, they were arrested for conspiracy for organizing an anti-government protest at the Democratic National Convention at the height of the Vietnam War, and that was back when protests were real. The event, in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, was the flashpoint of 1960s counterculture. Notably for our tale, that is the exact same quadrennial event that Rob Lowe was filmed having sex with a teenager for blackmail at 20 years later.
I’ll let Tom Hayden tell us where he stood, as he told the U.S. Government during his sentencing (If you’re looking for role models, pay attention):
[The Government was] bound to put us away. They have failed. Oh, they are going to get rid of us, but they made us in the first place. We would hardly be notorious characters if they had left us alone in the streets of Chicago last year, but instead we became the architects, the masterminds, and the geniuses of a conspiracy to overthrow the government. We were invented. We were chosen by the Government to serve as scapegoats for all that they wanted to prevent happening in the 1970s.
The event they were arrested for protesting was the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the very same event where Rob Lowe was filmed having sex with a teenager. And again, that sex tape included footage of a meeting with Tom Hayden, a man who mirthfully and heroically teabagged the U.S. Government twenty years prior.
2 And I'd never read about a truck fire and think a coup might be starting.
The great Tom Hayden. I hope he had a smokin' hot wife who joined him in his heroism, because he deserved one.
I hope you’ve inferred as much from the above, but thieves stole the public education system, so I’ll let you know what this tells us with certainty:
The Rob Lowe sex tape was political blackmail.
--
Some of you know enough about the CIA to see where this is going, but let’s walk through it for everybody. If you know what Poppy means and you know what kind of job a “Cuban exile in Miami” would have had, feel free to skip ahead.
If you weren’t around for his tenure as president (or even if you were), you’d be forgiven for thinking that Bush Senior is a footnote in history: a modern Chester A. Arthur stuck between Reagan and Clinton. Maybe too quaint to be harmful, or a legacy to a time when politics was decent and wise. Perhaps most likely, you never gave him much thought and you’re not sure you could pick him out of a lineup.
But that’s all just a classic spy trick: be invisible.
You've got no clue what his eyes look like, do you?
In 1976, the Central Intelligence Agency was dealing with some bad press. Nixon’s career had blown up in the Watergate scandal, and when you hear about anything Nixon did in Watergate, it’s usually shorthand for “Nixon and the CIA.” This led to the most intense public scrutiny of the CIA in its history, and all sorts of wild stuff was coming to light.
Suddenly, the public learned about The Family Jewels: the bombshell reports of the CIA’s Vietnam era hijinks. This spy branch of our government was engaging in kidnappings, break-ins, illegal surveillance, stealing mail, behavior modification research and assassination plots, to name a few. For the first time in their history, they brought on an outside director to clean up shop: a Nixon political appointee named George H.W. Bush.
But that can’t be true: no criminal organization would ever accept an outside boss.
If calling the CIA a criminal organization feels unearned, know that it’s true even if you’re pro-CIA: If assassinating democratically elected world leaders who don’t fully embrace extractive capital is necessary for our health and safety, it’s still a criminal activity that requires organized crime: good luck doing a military coup in a country where you don’t have mobsters on your side.3 If you need more evidence than that, read about The Family Jewels again.
That paradox was solved the year of Lowe’s sex tape, incidentally: An FBI memo from 1963 surfaced citing “George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency.” He was in Miami meeting with Cuban exiles seven days after the Kennedy assassination (for those unaware, “Cuban exiles in Miami” in a 1963 FBI document would be best read as “anticommunist mobsters”).
So that’s who George H.W. Bush was: the pretend outsider to the most criminal arm of the United States government who secretly stroked the family jewels the whole time. Oh, and he was working with the networks at the heart of the JFK assassination one week later. Probably had a dumb little code name too (He did, it was Poppy).
His story continues (he became Vice President, for example), but some of us had our first orgasm listening to a John Parr song, so let’s skip ahead. When Michael Dukakis runs against him in 1988, Bush’s role at the big kidz secret crime clubhouse would be best described as mob boss.
For more on Poopy, Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets is in a league of its own, as far as I’m aware.
3 To steal explosives and mask their provenance so you can use them to shut down critically important highways, for instance. For more on theft to hide provenance, see The Inslaw Affair or Greenhouse v. Polychain for its lesser-known sequel.
--
Here’s a band-aid I’m going to rip off quickly, and I promise I’m not getting libertarian on you: Jeffrey Epstein was not a pedophile.
We know this because we know what his job was: He was a blackmail artist. Some of you just learned this when it broke that he tried to blackmail Bill Gates, but we had a hell of a lot of evidence before that. I won’t fault you if you didn’t know that, because the most important piece is the global media that refuses to talk about the mountain of blackmail evidence.
I won’t share that evidence because we’ve got a St. Elmo’s Fire to burn (and because I fucking dare somebody with flair that reads like ghost kitchen copy to call me on it in the comments), but if you approach that theory with an open mind and good faith and you learn about Jeffrey Epstein, you could be the lead plaintiff in the Betsy DeVos class action and you’d still get it: Jeffrey Epstein was a blackmail artist, and probably the world’s best.
Blackmail is an extremely specialized job. And since Jeffrey Epstein was one of the best in history, it lets us learn a whole lot more about him than we realized.
Jeffrey Epstein. Worse than a pedophile.
[Unrelated note and hopefully fun parlor trick: Despite what some may assert with no evidence in the comments, this post was written by a human]
The rabbit hole does strange things to a man, but he’s pretty hot, right? Not back in the day with the David Berkowitz haircut, and certainly fucking not when he got into the elevator to Harvard Heaven, but Bear Stearns executive4, jet-setting real-life George Clooney character (who hung out with George Clooney) Jeffrey Epstein? He’s no dime, but I’ve learned what “daddy” means enough to know Jeff Epstein could get it.
4 See: Silvergate, Signature, Credit Suisse, First Republic
Well lucky him, because it helps with the job. Makes it easier to gain peoples’ trust.
And he had eyes like a hawk too, you can see them in the picture: perfect for spotting someone a bit too trusting, a bit too reckless. If you met him at a party, you might be quite taken: he’d be charming and inviting, treating you like the only one he sees in a room full of billionaires.
He would exude comfort and poise with a ginger ale in hand: his sobriety is no surprise because it’s a job requirement of all pro snooker players: they need to be fully aware and in control of the operation that often requires drugs and alcohol.
Another strict job requirement is that you can’t be a pedophile. If you have Epstein’s job, most of your time with your sex abuse victims is built to gain their trust: You need to be their good guy against the evil person who did that to them. It’s why so much of his victims’ testimony isn’t about sex dungeons, it’s about talking and hanging out with people. In some situations, as may be the case with Mr. Lowe, the victim of sexual abuse is also a conspirator in the blackmail: they’re in on the con together – best not to go diddling that up.
If you don’t know former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, add him to your list because he’s another criminal who can go fuck his own corpse with a tire iron. He’s also a pedophile: He spent decades abusing children driven by his pedophilic desire to abuse children. Now imagine him trying to run a child sex blackmail operation:
“Okay, Dennis, here’s the child who we’re going to get a sultan to have sex with on camera. Please don’t fuck this child, because then we lose a whole lot of money instead of expanding our drug cartel.”
“Of course, Mr. President. I will not fuck this child.”
“Who’s supposed to fuck the child, Dennis?”
“…”
“The sultan, Dennis. The sultan fucks the child.”
“Got it, got it. Sultan fucks the child.”
“Right, exac-- Oh, come on Dennis! Stop fucking the child!! That’s it, we’re moving you to Ponzis.”
See? Not a pedophile; it gets in the way of the job. Did he sexually abuse minors? Oh absolutely, he did. He was a sex trafficker, he was a rapist, and he was a blackmail artist. Did he do it because when he gets horny it’s because he’s thinking about children? Impossible (And if you’ll own half of Amway someday and think this is the paragraph most worthy of discourse, please read the summary of pedophilia on Wikipedia first).
To be clear, I’m not letting Jeffrey Epstein off the hook on anything. In fact, Jeffrey Epstein is much more wretched than most understand (which I hope is a high bar). Though most crimes aren’t so easily quantifiable, blackmail is the one that belongs in the Ninth Circle of Hell. Because it’s the one where you get to be the devil.
Jeffrey Epstein (left)
Think about it: You get someone to entrust you with their deepest, darkest secrets, often by becoming their best friend in the world. And then you suddenly and ruthlessly exploit that trust as much as you can, a breach no less personally violating than rape. If we knew the statistics (and I bet NYU does), we would see a tragically high suicide rate among blackmail victims.
Though he may be gracious and charming, that’s just because he has the mask on; blackmail artists usually do. As every victim of blackmail knows, that mask stays firmly on until they’re ready to yank the rug out. And they always yank the rug out; inevitable as a Ponzi scheme: It’s why they’re doing blackmail. Only then do they take off their mask and show the devil underneath.
--
Okay, we know the Rob Lowe sex tape was political, the CIA is criminal, and Epstein did blackmail. Now let’s tie those together.
Organized criminals often use blackmail because it can be very lucrative (sometimes in the ballpark of “everything you own, now and in the future”). It was a favorite of Lucky Luciano, for instance, who ran his operation half a mile from Washington Square Park in Manhattan.
Though we mostly haven’t recognized it as such, it was a line item on the balance sheet just like running drugs or slot machines. And since the CIA is a criminal organization that is intertwined with the mafia (see: Lucky Luciano), the CIA had blackmail networks. They probably had a cute little nickname for it too (They did, it was snooker. And not many non-kleptocrats know that yet.)
Lucky Lucania. A man who could have used a longer one-way ride.
Jeffrey Epstein was most likely recognized and groomed to be a blackmail artist by the CIA. We don’t know for sure, but it would be a damn good guess: If a story has a blackmail artist and a CIA officer, the blackmail artist usually works for the CIA.
In 1974, he was hired at the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan for some reason, despite having just dropped out of college, where OSS officer Donald Barr served as headmaster. The OSS was what became the CIA, and when you stroke the family jewels, you stroke them for life: Jeffrey Epstein almost certainly got hired there because he was recognized as a bright young talent as a blackmail artist at NYU.5
(If anybody would like to read Donald Barr’s trash sci-fi book Space Relations, I bet it’s a code book because CIA officers write code books. If it reads so dense and terribly as to put off any reader, then I know it is because it’s not written for them, unless it’s copy on a Stanford/Harvard/MIT AI/biomed/underwater Ponzi startup but that’s less likely. If it offers too many phrases that don’t make sense for the subject matter, it could be argot, which the spy boys use sometimes: often a general knowledge instructional. Might tell you how to run weapons or Ponzi schemes or something.)
5The school with all the dead students Underneath Their Robes.
Somebody should jump on this grenade for us, and I've already watched 10 hours of Peter Thiel interviews.
We also know the father of Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine, was Robert Maxwell, an international spy with deep ties to maybe every espionage organization you’ve heard of, including the CIA. His role hasn’t been quite pegged down, but he worked with a whole lot of them before he fell off his yacht in 1991. And he probably wanted to put spyware in Tetris, which sounds like something the Langley Dildoes could get behind.
Plus, Jeffrey Epstein had an extremely close relationship with Bill Clinton: They flew around the world together, and Clinton had 13 points of contact in Epstein’s little black book (see Doug Band, the man who answered Papa Bill’s phone). Epstein helped start his multi-billion-dollar Clinton Global Foundation that takes money from autocrats. (Researchers take note: This organization may have something to do with all those flights around the world). Obviously, Clinton ran against Poppy so they’re on opposite sides, but it's clear that Epstein was close to the U.S. halls of power.
A global multi-billion dollar institution co-founded by a blackmail artist and funded by autocrats (You know her investors were in on it, right? Henry Kissinger doesn't get conned by Ponzi schemes.)
Okay, so maybe Epstein was a CIA agent. But why blackmail Lowe? I’ll offer a few theories:
First, Rob Lowe was a rising star in Hollywood. It can be great to blackmail someone like that into the game so they can make movies promoting your soft power goals. A “Clooney type,” some might say.
Second, the devil likes having fun, and maybe they just wanted to take the cocky teen idol down a peg.
But remember, we know it’s political blackmail. So maybe it’s not about Lowe at all; maybe it’s about Dukakis. He was running against a piece of shit mob boss, after all.
Maybe it’s because Dukakis is a squeaky-clean loser who can’t be blackmailed and thinks his job is to help poor people. Maybe I’m proudly running drugs around the country while a pussy like Mike Dukakis thinks poor people should have better lives (and don’t be surprised when the whole world finds out your wife drinks rubbing alcohol, Mike). You know, something to that effect.
--
Since the days of the Kingly Seven, The Democratic National Convention had become a more ceremonial event: A chance for the party to show some unity and announce the winner of the party primary to the world when everybody already knows who it is.
Primaries can be messy, but the convention typically goes off without much fuss these days: They pretend they all like each other, they say the right things, and it’s impossibly dull. But that was not the case in Atlanta in 1988 (I will say with a hint of understatement and then slightly more understatement).
“‘Nationally televised political suicide’, was the consensus.” Though the Democrats’ fastest rising star did soared on the back of his speeches, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton was universally panned for his nominating speech of Mike Dukakis at the DNC that year. I’m sure all these journalists had a big ol’ carton of egg on their faces when that man became President of the United States 4 years later (and that none of those articles were kayfabe).
It’s ruthlessly funny, and also the most important political speech in world history, but you’re still not going to watch it, so I’ll tell you what happens. The links that follow are timestamped clips; 1.25x speed is perfect if you’re not from Arkansas.
Here’s another link to Bill Clinton’s 1988 DNC Nomination speech: the most important political speech in world history in case you changed your mind.
It doesn’t take long for us to realize that Bill Clinton loathes Michael Dukakis. He starts with some words about Dukakis but it’s unclear where they’re going. But you can tell from the tone and cadence that they’re building toward some great point - say what you will about how Bill Clinton is a fuckface criminal who should get pissed on as long as he doesn’t like it, he’s one of the best orators in the game:
“Michael Dukakis should be the first President born of immigrant parents since Andrew Jackson.”
In case you don’t know much about the United States, this is a racist right-wing talking point that I’m sure you’d find all over newsstands at the time. And again, Clinton and Dukakis are both Democrats and this is the Democrat unity speech.
I thought he was part Cherokee.
He spins up one of those politician stories about a fake friend back home: “He said, ‘Bill, are you excited about Mike Dukakis becoming President?’ And I said, ‘I sure am!’” he says with a masterful shake of the jowls.
“And then he looked at me and smiled and said, ‘…How can you get excited about a guy who mows his lawn with a hand-powered mower, and is so clean he squeaks when he walks?’
“And I thought about it, and I said, ‘Well that’s one reason I AM excited for Mike Dukakis to become President.”
So he absolutely hates the guy, and his favorite thing about him is that he’s squeaky clean. And Rob Lowe was just blackmailed. Huh.
Then he says something inexplicable (if you don’t know about snooker): “His character is steadfast and consistent. And one thing about Mike Dukakis is, he wakes up in the same world every morning,” his eyes sweep over and lock right onto to Dukakis, “which a trait of considerable importance for a President.” If you’re not great at picking up subtext, consider that Rob Lowe woke up in a viciously different world that Monday.
He continues: “I found Mike willing to listen: An important lesson, and one that Mike Dukakis and I learned the hard way.”
If that phrase didn't give you pause, I’d like you to think about any mob movie you’ve ever seen and read it more slowly.
He weaves out of this one and delivers the laugh of the night: “Mike and I met after our defeats: He was teaching at the Kennedy School, and I was the youngest ex-governor in history.”
At this point, even the ones who think Shark Tank is real see what’s going on: the crowd turns on him completely and a “We want Duke” chant takes over. It’s a big moment: he’s thinking on the fly, and it’s one of the last times Bill Clinton was nervous.
But then he throws his arm in the air: “Go ahead!” and an invincible smile takes over as he relishes in the hostile crowd. For just a second, he looks to his left and gives a smile at somebody, a little “whew, you like that one?”
(Epstein is this story’s MacGuffin: The Rob Lowe sex tape has the Kool Krime Kubscouts written all over it, but it could have been anyone at the DNC who’s sharpened a snooker cue. It could have been Ballbag Billy himself for all we know; 24-year-old Rob Lowe couldn’t have been the toughest mark. But if you find good crowd footage and want to go hunting, follow that smile.)
He lets the crowd think they matter for a beat, giving a villainous laugh in the middle. He slips the party unity mask back on and picks the speech back up, but he just tees up another Republican talking point.
This next bit is critical so I’ll quote it in full:
“When Mike Dukakis speaks out for the American family, you can believe him. I have never known a person more devoted and his wife and to his children. He and Kitty are as different as daylight and dark, but they’re so good together, and they’ll be wonderful role models for our young people. And Kitty Dukakis will be a First Lady this whole country will be proud of, and one who will gain respect worldwide.”
The next year, the world found out about Kitty Dukakis’ drinking problem when she was hospitalized for drinking rubbing alcohol. In case it's unclear, this is exactly what Bill Clinton just said:
"Mike Dukakis is such an eagle scout, you'd never guess that his wife has a drinking problem. And that's a secret that we'll share with the whole world very soon."
After some more racist vitriol of the day (I'm no expert on 1988 culture war issues, but I think Dukakis is a secret Mexican?), he tells us a bit about what Dukakis has done: “He has worked hard to bring good jobs to poor people in poor communities…in his state,” a jab lost on most.
The hits keep coming, but he lets us know a bit more about the Mike Dukakis:
“He cares that one in four children under five are living under the poverty line…he understands that today, a middle-class family has to spend a lot more of its income to send a child to college and he thinks government ought to help make up the difference [he says with disdain]…He feels the pain of a mother who leaves for work worried sick that her child is not in a good childcare center.”
A great and humble servant to this country, eyebrow legend Michael Dukakis.
He pivots to the state of crime, and he offers this curious anecdote:
“A few weeks ago, the police in Detroit, Michigan broke a huge crack ring. And I’m sorry to say, the ring was being run by two people in my state [author’s note: his sorrow doesn’t translate to film]. They came from the poorest part of Arkansas, and they brought over one hundred young men up there to help them peddle dope. And the news stories were very touching: they said, “We brought these kids up from the country because they’re more reliable than those city kids; they’ll give us a good day’s work for a good day’s pay.”
Bet you've never heard a U.S. President brag about his state's drug cartels before. There are some more gems, but I’d rather not die in a Kinko’s so let’s bring it home.
Do we know who blackmailed Rob Lowe? Sadly, we don’t. While it’s almost certainly related to the villains of our story, that could have been an entirely separate political blackmail job at the DNC that year. And though I highly doubt it, I’m not even kidding: there might have been a snooker tournament in Atlanta that week.
But what we do know, with enough evidence that we could prosecute in a court of law if the rest of this sentence wouldn’t make it farcical, that President Bill Clinton blackmailed Governor Mike Dukakis (and we can guess Kitty had a less sensational drink of choice). And almost all of that evidence is in one of the funniest political speeches in history. And very few people know that.
Infinitely more importantly, as the Chicago Seven showed us, we can prosecute in the court of public opinion.
We also have a strong lead that Bill Clinton runs with drug dealers. That might sound like a blockchain too far, but I’ll kick you over to the podcast Ghost Stories for the End of the World’s Arkansas episodes, and the best Tom Cruise movie you probably haven’t seen for more on how that’s completely true.
We can open an investigation into collusion between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the 1992 Presidential election (and therefore, Gore v. Poppyseed in 2000, Hillary Clinton v. Trump in 2020, etc.).
We can’t prove it here, but Bush was a secret CIA mob boss and Clinton was supposed to give a speech supporting Mike Dukakis against that mob boss but made fun of Mike Dukakis and talked about how he tried to blackmail him instead. I think that one will close quickly: as Racist Bill said when ambushed by a world hero who asked about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein (with a devilish grin), “I think the evidence is clear.” (And that’s before we realize Ross Perot was the grandfather of crypto and it was a three-man job)
There’s a cold case from the early aughts we can reopen now, too. That one might take a bit more digging, but I’ll kick it off with exhibit A, which is about as on-the-nose as an FBI memo saying George Bush was meeting with Cuban exiles in Miami one week after JFK was killed (because Poppy leaked it, the cheeky little bitch).
One of the only two paintings that remained hanging in Jeffrey Epstein’s $70 million townhouse after he was arrested, and the only thing the Octopus could have bought me with (besides a date with Cathie Wood because I'd give you all up to fuck a hot older criminal):
Tell the appropriation committee I've got dibs.
I think we’ve long outgrown our need for someone else to tell us what to do, but if I have to vote, I’m voting for Dukakis. I can’t vouch for his record, but I don’t hate wanting to improve people’s lives.
But he gets my vote because Mike Dukakis is a man so good, that for thirty minutes in Atlanta in 1988, the devil took off his mask.
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If anyone would like to join me, I’m headed to Washington to practice the lost art of the Chicago Seven and mock the ever-loving shit out of our criminal government and give them the complete lack of respect they deserve.
And if your kids are going to wear Blackwater surplus one day, know that we’ve got some pretty good ammunition.
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[Warning: This post is violent, grotesque, and true]
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If someone meets with a mafia boss, it doesn’t mean they’re a criminal. If they meet with a mafia boss every week, it still doesn’t mean they’re a criminal but now it’s a lot more likely.
Repetition is evidence.
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Two weeks ago, Franco Medina Andulo, 29, and Sergio Palomino, 28, were shot and killed outside of a club in Puerto Rico. They were on vacation with classmates from NYU Stern School of Business. According to police reports, the two were killed in the crossfire between two separate parties, with no other injuries.
A brief video showing a woman holding a gun in a crowded area was released; though a gunshot is heard, the video offers no further information as to what occurred. The woman has been apprehended and released on $150,000 bail. According to Captain Edwin Figueroa, they’ve recovered more shell casings than are consistent with the video, and that the video may not tell the whole story.
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David Lat was an assistant prosecutor for the United States attorney’s office in Newark. In 2004, Lat started an anonymous blog called “Underneath Their Robes,” self-described as a “combination of People, Us Weekly, Page Six, The National Enquirer and Tigerbeat, focused not on vacuous movie stars or fatuous teen idols, but on the federal judiciary.”
The blog was a huge hit in the legal world, eventually leading to Lat being outed as the writer. As news requests flooded the U.S. attorney’s office, Lat took the site down. Though many wanted him fired, U.S. Attorney Chris Christie took a fatherly tone and praised Lat for his work, saying he didn’t want Lat to resign since it would look bad for the office. Lat left law to go write for Wonkette not long after.
Over a year earlier, just two weeks after Lat had started his blog, his sister Charlene walked to David’s midtown Manhattan apartment while he was at work. She fell to her death from his 25th floor apartment. She was a graduate student at New York University.
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In the early 2000s, the U.S. Department of Justice investigated collusion among several semiconductor manufacturers in the DRAM price fixing scandal. In October 2005, Samsung Electronics pled guilty and agreed to pay $300 million.
One month later, American and Korean media reported that Lee Yoon-hyung, the daughter of billionaire Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee, was killed in a car accident in New York City, but reporters couldn’t find the facts to support it.
After The Korea Times investigated further, a police report settled the matter: the first year NYU graduate heiress was found hanging from her Manhattan apartment by an electrical cord.
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Allan O. Hunter had an impossibly American resumé: He was a special agent for the F.B.I. during World War II before joining the precursor to the C.I.A., the Office of Strategic Services. After a term in the U.S. House of Representatives, he practiced law and helped develop and operate an active-seniors retirement community before being chosen by Nixon to run Fannie Mae, the country’s largest housing finance provider.
His son, Allan O. Hunter Jr., co-founded Rent.com in 1999, the country’s largest apartment listing site. He served as the company’s president until it was acquired by eBay in 2005 for $433 million. That same year, Hunter Jr. was named as a director of the holding company of the Virgin River Casino, two hours outside of Las Vegas.
Allan O. Hunter III went by Trey. He rarely spoke about his family and was reportedly “tormented by family issues.” Nevertheless, he was enjoying his first month at NYU where he pursued a career in screenwriting. According to sources, he got in a fight with his girlfriend and jumped off the roof of the building shortly after 5 a.m. His baby sister was born 10 hours earlier.
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These are just some of the suspicious deaths that have taken place at New York University over the last two decades. Since the year 2000, at least 31 suicides or accidental deaths have been reported at NYU; many of them much more public than is typical. Many of these are suspicious for their individual circumstances, but all are suspicious when taken collectively, representing something far scarier than overworked students in an isolating city.
Beyond the deaths, several headlines out of NYU are bizarre, wretched, or uncanny.
In 2013, student Asher Vongtau stepped out to get some fresh air at 7 a.m. on a Saturday after partying all night. Soon after, someone pulled a fire alarm. When the alarm was cleared, Vongtau had vanished. For 36 hours, he was trapped between two buildings, having fallen from a high floor or possibly the roof. Vongtau has no recollection of how he had fallen.
In 2015, student Jaime Castano set his roommate on fire while she was sleeping, sang while he filmed it, and posted it to Snapchat.
In 2017, NYU student Christian Gutierrez pleaded no contest to animal cruelty and theft after a dozen albatrosses were bludgeoned and mutilated in Hawaii.
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Twenty-year-old Tumi McCallum’s death was like these; though It was prosecuted as a simple case of a jealous and possessive lover, this case is not just suspicious but almost unexplainable.
Her mother was a professor at NYU, and Tumi was staying in her apartment while her mother was traveling. Tumi was found dead in her bedroom in August 2007, her bedroom door locked from the inside. Her boyfriend Michael Cordero eventually confessed to the crime: he had been jealous that she had a party and didn’t invite him, so he reportedly “squeezed her neck with such force that she bled from her nose before dying.”
Cordero maintained that it was entirely unplanned; ultimately pleading down from murder to a 25-year manslaughter sentence.
But when Tumi was found, she had suffered so much blunt force trauma to the face that she was unrecognizable, her bed splattered with blood. Her body was surrounded by empty 40-ounce malt-liquor bottles, and not just empty condom wrappers but empty boxes. Despite this grotesque staging of a gang rape, police reported no sexual assault.
So, the story that reality has presented us is this: In an unplanned fit of jealousy, Michael Cordero strangled and killed Tumi McCallum after she had a party. He then bludgeoned her violently and repeatedly in the face. He either already had several 40s and boxes of condoms, or he bought them, came back, and spread them around her corpse, though he did not sexually assault her. Despite this horrific crime, he pled down to manslaughter.
It doesn’t add up but what else could? I mean, this would explain it better, right?
Tumi McCallum was violently gang raped by a group of criminals powerful enough to get the police to say no sexual assault occurred and get her boyfriend to take the fall. Their vile scene wasn’t just to let someone know what they did to their loved one, but to let them know they could get away with it.
Hell, it doesn’t even sound far-fetched at NYU.
But what would compel these monsters to do this to her of all people? I’m still sniffing that one out, but it’s looking like one hell of a satire.
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But why so many deaths? Surely not everybody’s dad colluded to defraud the U.S. government, right? Facts are scarce on many (NYU has not released the names of almost all suicide victims since 2018), but I have a few theories.
One: You’re an overachieving freshman who’s long dreamed of the magical promise of academia. At some point, you are met with the sudden realization that the institution you put your faith in engages in shameless, villainous criminal activity. You commit suicide.
Two: You are let in on some bit of criminal enterprise and you express revulsion. You are killed and it is covered up as a suicide.
Three: You’re having trouble fitting in and New York City is isolating, but you feel such a wave of relief when someone comes up to you after class with a warm smile who wants to be your friend. They look you in your eyes and they open up to you, such a blessing in the city of uninterested glances. They show you a New York you were too afraid to explore: the art of haggling with the bootleg CD guy; the exotic perfection of dim sum; and the art (oh the art!). They are your first spring day in Washington Square Park.
They know a bar that doesn’t card and the two of you slide into a booth with a pitcher. They grab you by the wrist and look you in the eyes:
“Would you ever fuck a dog?”
You burst into laughter, already drunk with adventure.
“I’m just saying, lotta sexy dogs out there.” You nearly fall out of the booth.
An extra pitcher later and you’re propping each other up on the long stumble to the dorms, passing a clove back and forth. An old man walks past with an old beagle. “Eh?” They look at the dog and give you a nudge. “Eh??” They wink and smile.
A block later and you muster up the courage. “I mean, it’s not like I don’t have perversions.”
“Oh?” They stop and grab your wrist, looking into your eyes.
“Okay, but like. You can’t tell anybody this, okay?”
“Are you kidding, I fuck dogs!” They laugh and give a reassuring smile.
“Well…when I was a kid, I used to…”
You feel a wave of panic as your shameful skeleton pours out, but they look you in the eyes and give you the biggest, warmest hug of your life.
The next morning at brunch, they lean in toward you. “Hey, remember that thing you told me? About the [redacted]?”
The panic sets in again.
“Well, I’m going to need fifteen thousand dollars or else I’m telling the whole school.”
You commit suicide.
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Did you know that Jeffrey Epstein, the world’s most notorious blackmail artist, attended NYU?
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Welcome back to the Ponzi Papers, where we’ve been building a growing body of evidence of the largest criminal theft in human history, currently in progress.
You can find links to previous posts at the bottom, but I’ll be providing the context you need as we go. Here’s the backstory to get you up to speed:
Every major cryptocurrency exchange was participating in the same decentralized Ponzi scheme orchestrated over multiple decades, with investments from a whole host of tech venture capitalists and very powerful people.
This fraud was built on top of existing global criminal networks that have been in place for decades, though digital currency and internet technology allowed them to replicate and grow to new heights. You know a bit about this crime network because one of the masterminds and financiers was Jeffrey Epstein, who also ran an international blackmail ring to keep people in line and make a tidy profit wherever possible.
You also know about these networks because they’ve permeated our daily existence online, in the media, and in some of the highest political offices.
This isn’t metaphor or theory; hyperbole or speculation: Ruthless con artists and violent criminals have gained totalitarian control of our world and I believe that’s something you ought to know.
And they’ve escalated their crime dramatically in recent months, intentionally collapsing Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank, Signature, Credit Suisse, and First Republic as they funneled stolen cash out of them.
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The reason I am certain this theory isn’t the result of delusion or psychosis or good ol’ stupidity is that it is repeatedly able to explain things that are inexplicable in our conventional narrative, even things that didn’t occur until after the theory was established. This thing has explanatory power for days. Let’s pull some fresh examples from the headlines to see what I mean.
Last Sunday, the New York Times ran a puff piece on Elizabeth Holmes, the criminal founder of Theranos out of Stanford. Conventional wisdom is that this woman conned some of the most powerful and connected people on the planet, so why would a newspaper that supports those same people ever run a piece like this? It’s completely antithetical to what they tell us is true (It’s also strange how they never call this a Ponzi scheme even though that’s what this would be).
In this tall tale of mine, her famous and powerful investors were actually in on it, investing their cash into global criminal networks to fund things like a decentralized cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme. In my story, this article makes a hell of a lot more sense, doesn’t it? She’s their secret crime buddy so they’re giving her the spotlight.
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Last week, the public learned that LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman visited Epstein’s island in 2015. I’m sure most people don’t know much about Hoffman, but also that they hadn’t made any association between him and Epstein. In my theory, Reid Hoffman and Jeffrey Epstein are long-time co-conspirators in the same criminal scheme in 2015, which would certainly explain the island visit.
The week prior, The Wall Street Journal reported Epstein’s meetings with Harvard professors Noam Chomsky and Martin Nowak. The public has Epstein in some university orbits, but my theory has him participating in the same massive theft with Harvard University and many of its professors developing Ponzi schemes together, often around the futurist technology that Epstein was apparently discussed with these professors.
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For our main course, PayPal disclosed almost $1 billion of crypto on its balance sheet on Tuesday, a 53% increase over the previous quarter. I suppose the popular wisdom would be that PayPal believes in the value of crypto as an asset, which is also why they allow buying and selling of crypto on their platform. But this theory holds that PayPal is doing exactly what Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX did right in front of us, and that its inevitable collapse was the plan all along.
What’s PayPal’s role in this story so far?
First, it was founded by several graduates of Stanford, which helped birth fraudulent companies Clinkle, FTX and Theranos, as discussed in Part 2 (If you’d like more evidence of the Stanford crime factory, check out the top all-time post in the school’s subreddit).
Second, those founders include Peter Thiel, whose venture capital firm played an integral role in the development of the global cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme, as discussed in Part 4, along with the SVB bank run. Several of PayPal’s founders used a tax loophole to stash billions in Roth IRAs; Thiel learned this from Stanford professor Joseph Bankman, father of crypto criminal Sam Bankman-Fried.
Another PayPal founder you may know is Elon Musk; though I haven’t explored Musk’s role in all of this deeply, it’s worth noting that he is an incessant crypto shill; the Boring Company looked a whole lot like a Ponzi scheme; and his comically poor handling of Twitter would be the perfect cover to destroy one of the largest communication platforms in the world.
Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn guy who visited Epstein’s island, was one of PayPal’s founding board members. If you’re getting the hang of this story, you will be unsurprised to learn that he went to Stanford University and is a partner at Greylock Partners, a crypto venture capital firm.
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Let’s have a look at PayPal’s stock chart over the last few years. Even if you’re not familiar with stock charts, does anything stick out to you?
Is it that 300% rise and even faster fall from 2020 to 2022?
Or maybe you’re looking at the trading volume in blue and see that it suddenly more than doubled in late 2021 just as the price fell off a cliff, echoing the bitcoin volume spikes in Part 4? As you might surmise, these are not typical trading patterns.
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Here is another chart for you: This is the price of Bitcoin since 2020, which increased over 500% at its peak, with a couple dates highlighted:
That first date, the last sharp pump before the top, was when financial services company Affirm Holdings announced they would allow crypto trading.
What does Affirm have to do with PayPal and this story more broadly? It was founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin in 2012, later partnering with Theranos mega-investor Walmart and NYU mega-donor Jeff Bezos. They also partnered with payment processor Stripe, which has investments from Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and crypto VCs Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
In 2020, it had a staggering list of investors that included several tech VCs, Stanford grads, and random billionaires, much like Clinkle in Part 1.
And much like PayPal, Affirm has a very suspicious stock chart; with this one’s high-frequency trading kicking into gear just before the announcement:
So the first day on the previous Bitcoin chart is Affirm pumping the crypto market with their news. The second day, which is the third highest Bitcoin price of all time, was the exact day PayPal started their high-frequency trading frenzy. A nice little inter-company pump-and-dump.
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What are we to make of this?
First, a quick recap of how Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX’s Ponzi scheme worked. Victims would buy crypto in cash through the FTX trading firm. FTX would then move that cash into their investment firm, Alameda Research, replacing the cash with their worthless crypto token. Eventually, the exchange runs out of money and the Ponzi scheme is exposed, the cash long disappeared through a network of offshore banks and shell companies.
PayPal, it turns out, is doing the exact same thing. The 2020 stock surge was PayPal collecting its cut from the crypto Ponzi scheme, likely directly through its partnerships with crypto exchanges.
After the affiliated company Affirm gives the crypto market a big pump, PayPal starts funneling out the cash and replacing it with worthless crypto, just like FTX.
When the crypto market collapses and PayPal goes insolvent, we’ll learn that they’ve replaced a whole lot more of their stolen cash with crypto, another bad investment from the people who somehow just keep getting richer and more all-encompassingly powerful.
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There is a counterargument to the above that may have occurred to you: Sure, that PayPal chart isn’t normal, but that was during COVID! The entire tech sector was out of control when we were all locked inside buying Pelotons and stuff. If PayPal’s rise and fall was because they were bloating the company with stolen crypto money before draining it, then why did all those other companies surge as well?
Though I haven’t explored any of these companies in the detail I’ve covered PayPal, let’s gather some fast facts on just a handful of them:
Zoom stock increased 800% before falling back to pre-COVID levels. Their first ever customer was Stanford University in 2012. In 2017, they raised $100 million from major crypto VC Sequoia Capital.
Peloton saw a similar 800% increase before falling to a fraction of its 2019 levels. Their biggest investor is Bullish, which recently released a report out of the Cayman Islands about the rise and staying power of cryptocurrency. Their second biggest is Tiger Global Management, which has made massive investments in blockchain technology, and had a $38 million stake in FTX.
Snap, Inc., the owner of Snapchat, had a 700% rise and fall. Their investors include Lightspeed Ventures, Spark Capital, and Fidelity Investments, all of whom invested in Affirm, along with Tiger Management spinoff Coatue.
Stock trading platform Robinhood began offering their stock publicly in late 2021 and has since fallen to roughly one-tenth of its peak. It was founded by two students out of Stanford and was invested in by Affirm investors Ribbit, Sequoia, Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz. But their crypto connections are best shown through a screenshot of their Crunchbase investor page:
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In Part 4, we discussed some of the technical workings of cryptocurrency as a new type of decentralized Ponzi scheme, allowing exchanges on opposite sides of the planet to participate in the scam together.
It appears that the COVID tech bubble is just another part of the decentralized Ponzi scheme. In the past, publicly listed Ponzi schemes would involve one company that cash was invested into and funneled out of. Now, this criminal network has such expansive holdings in the industry and has developed a Ponzi scheme of such astronomical size, that it seems they have funneled the criminal profits through all of these well-known companies.
But if these companies have been used largely to collect their Ponzi profits and funnel them away, then these companies will need to justify massive layoffs or even bankruptcy like Clinkle and the Metaverse did. They could all just replace their cash with Bitcoin and then pull the crypto rug, but that probably makes less sense for Opendoor and Rivian than it does for PayPal, which buys and sells crypto. Plus, it might look awfully suspicious if half of Silicon Valley goes under because they’ve got crypto on the books.
So what’s the exit strategy? How do they complete the scheme once they’ve drained these companies? This is just speculation, but let’s call it a strong hunch based on everything I’ve learned about these people. Did you hear about this week’s revelations that Congressional super-fraud George Santos has surprisingly strong ties to FTX? Tough to explain, right?
But we know that Sam Bankman-Fried and Peter Thiel have donated massive sums to American politicians in both parties. And the cryptocurrency media apparatus has been working overtime to sow fear about the economy since they collapsed five banks this year.
Well what happens if the U.S. doesn’t reach an agreement on the debt ceiling and the U.S. defaults on its debt? It’s hard to know for sure, but as the Brookings Institute notes: “Even in a best-case scenario where the impasse is short-lived, the economy is likely to suffer sustained—and completely avoidable—damage.” If that kind of damage is hitting the entire economy, surely you’d expect some tech companies that got a little too big for their britches to fail, right? The perfect cover.
But could they pull it off? Of the 100 senators voting on raising the debt ceiling, imagine they’ve got just four senators in on the scheme; two in each party. If these four secretly sowed fear, uncertainty, and doubt among their parties and kept each other updated on the other side’s plans, could they pull it off? In this hauntingly partisan political climate? Seems possible.
Then remember that Donald Trump is the quintessential celebrity billionaire salesman, and that his son-in-law Jared Kushner is directly implicated in this scheme of celebrity billionaire salesmen.
And remember that Bill Clinton shilled for Elizabeth Holmes, shared the stage with Bankman-Fried at Crypto Bahamas, and flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane at least 26 times.
So, yeah. I think it’s more than four senators.
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If you’re just tuning in to this series, I was suspicious of the narrative behind the string of bank failures in March and did some internet sleuthing. Then it got weird. Then it got scary. I’ve got links at the bottom, but just jump in here; it’s a rabbit hole, but this post may be all you need. If you only read one of these, this is the one I’d recommend.
A month ago, I thought the villain at the end of this would be Peter Thiel. Then I thought it was Mark Zuckerberg. Then a president I’ll be naming shortly. Then Jeffrey Epstein.
But it revealed itself to be something much more twisted: a global network of criminal enterprise; a dystopian shadow government; a fraudulent cancer harnessing network technology to grow to unimaginable size.
Looking back, I desperately wanted somebody to corroborate a story that should sound so implausible but only looked more like the truth the further I researched.
As it turns out, my corroborating witness was found dead in a hotel bathtub in 1991.
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We start with the Inslaw Affair:
Inslaw was a software company in the early 1980s that allowed for unprecedented new databases of information on individuals, connecting many of the government’s disparate data sources in a searchable interface. It was a quantum leap in surveillance for governments and police departments at the time.
Inslaw received a $10 million dollar contract from the Department of Justice that led to a bitter dispute and a lawsuit against the DOJ. Inslaw made some serious claims, including that the DOJ tried to bankrupt them and stole their software and sold it to an Israeli for-profit company. A D.C. Bankruptcy Court judge sided with Inslaw, noting that the DOJ "took, converted, stole, INSLAW's enhanced PROMIS [software] by trickery, fraud, and deceit."
According to the affidavit of Michael Riconosciuto, an engineer who worked on the software, the government had installed spyware so they could sell it to other countries and see all of their activity. Riconosciuto also alleged a secret agreement between President Ronald Reagan and Iran where Iran kept their American hostages intentionally until the election to boost Reagan’s odds (the October Surprise), the collapse of a money laundering bank in Luxembourg, and a host of other wild geopolitical claims.
Danny Casolaro was a journalist who took the affidavit seriously, getting sucked into a maddening investigation of an international criminal shadow network that he called “the Octopus,” with deep ties to the C.I.A. and the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations.
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I became convinced that my own theories in this series are true because the more evidence I gathered, the more it explained everything I found, despite how outlandish it sounded.
We don’t know if the U.S. government stole Inslaw in order to hide their scheme to spy on other countries, or if any of Riconosciuto’s claims are true. But would it help explain things?
The judge who sided with Inslaw was denied their reappointment months later. The judge sued the D.C. Court of Appeals, alleging that this was politically motivated.
The new judge reversed the decision against the DOJ.
Riconosciuto was charged with cooking meth eight days after his affidavit, and ultimately convicted.
Danny Casolaro went to West Virginia to meet a source who said they could provide important information on the case. He was found dead in his hotel bathtub, his wrists slit a dozen times.
Although the Inslaw Affair is known in some conspiracy circles, I was unfamiliar until last week. In a showing of the outsize power that’s possible when one person tells another about something important, /u/brother_beer pointed me to the podcast Ghost Stories for the End of the World, which covers Inslaw and the broader conspiracy of the Octopus in immense, incredibly researched detail in their 13-part-series.
After hearing about complex technological theft involving several people and organizations I’ve found in my own research, I realized my story was a sequel, and the Inslaw Affair is likely true near its most conspiracy-minded. Casolaro started with software theft and espionage in 1986, I started with a bank run and Ponzi schemes in 2023, but we both found the Octopus: a vile global network of theft, blackmail, drug smuggling, sex trafficking and Ponzi schemes entrenched in some of the world’s most powerful institutions, with some of the same players at the heart of it.
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I’ve wanted to spill out the scheme I’ve uncovered since part one, but I recognized that it was far too wild and broad to sound reasonable and would be too easily written off as nonsense. If you’ve been following along, I hope I’ve established enough trust and credibility in my research to do so now.
I’ve provided a great deal of evidence for some of these claims and will provide a great deal more for the rest as the series continues. To be clear, this didn’t come from tea leaves or dreams, but from SEC filings, court cases, industry interviews, stock prices, press releases, and so on.
Let me say up front that these are all just allegations. Not because I fear a libel case (these are not things any of these people want to discuss in court) but because I don’t want to give websites any extra ammunition to take this down.
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We are awash in Ponzi schemes. These actors take many forms, but a common public facing one is the wealthy titan of industry, which is used to deflect from inquiries into their fraudulent investments and lure in victims. Household names who have built their careers expressly, intentionally, and criminally engaging in these schemes include Ross Perot, Mark Cuban, Richard Branson, and Carl Icahn (who’s had a rough week).
In the 1980s, some of these players (Perot, Cuban) invested in network technology to replicate and grow Ponzi schemes, and digital currency to allow for more controllable, stealable and launderable assets. PayPal was founded with the express criminal intent to create a digital currency Ponzi scheme but turned into a massive conduit for cash into, out of, and through a global web of criminal networks instead. This includes Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, and some or most (or all) of the PayPal Mafia.
The digital currency Ponzi scheme became cryptocurrency, which was created for this purpose: Stanford University Professors Bob Joss and Joseph Bankman helped design a complex network of offshore exchanges that used a tax loophole to keep cryptocurrency unregulated and move it around the world. Venture capital firms such as Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Marc Andreessen’s a16z invested in and helped develop technology expressly and criminally so they could hide and steal crypto assets and launder them around the globe, allowing what became a global decentralized Ponzi scheme, with help from Goldman Sachs’ high frequency trading architect Greg Tusar. This was expressly, intentionally, and criminally participated in by all major cryptocurrency exchanges, including Coinbase, FTX, Chanpeng Zhao’s Binance, and the Winklevoss Twins’ Gemini.
Stanford University supported multiple start-ups as fronts for their wealthy and powerful associates to embezzle money into this and related global criminal enterprise. One example was Clinkle, which had express, intentional, criminal investments from Richard Branson, Peter Thiel, Bob Joss, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Intuit, Intel Capital, and Stanford itself (to name a few).
Another example was Theranos, which was created with the express purpose of embezzling funds into international criminal schemes. This includes knowing criminal investments from Henry Kissinger, the Walton Family, Rupert Murdoch and Betsy DeVos.
A later avenue for embezzling funds into this criminal network is Max Levchin’s Affirm Holdings, which they’ve been moving into the scheme the last year. Knowing criminal investors include Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman, Senator Bill Bradley, oil heiress Stacy H. Schusterman, and George Soros’ fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller.
To get a sense of just how massive this enterprise has grown, you can find many of the knowing criminal investors in the tech world in Israel’s Starkware Industries, which includes the fullest list of tech VCs in this scheme, along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian (Das Kapital Capital, LLC) and Mark Cuban (Radical Israel, LLC).
Multinational institutions were established specifically to move money into these schemes around the world. This includes the NYU President’s Global Council, conceived for this criminal purpose by board chair and Grammy nominee Chandrika Tandon. The song’s quality suggests the nomination was political. Knowing criminal investors include hedge fund billionaire John Paulson (a donation NYU kept secret for ten years), Chandrika and her Ponzi scheme financier husband Ranjan Tandon, and former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Another criminal organization operating in a similar manner; accepting massive donations and funneling money into the same criminal networks in the same places; hiding behind non-profit status and goodwill, was the Clinton Global Initiative, intentionally, criminally conceived for this purpose by Bill Clinton, Doug Band, and Jeffrey Epstein. Major co-conspirators include John Podesta, and later Chelsea and Hillary Clinton.
Pizzagate was either created or massively promoted in social and traditional media (often just by covering it) to make sure search results and social media get clogged up with a whole bunch of disinformation when people go looking for (yes, this means that Pizzagate was actually a Clinton op all along). My best guess would be that they leaked Podesta’s emails themselves for this purpose via a bogus “phishing attack.”
Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton’s repeated travel around the world makes much more sense in this context: they weren’t (just?) pedophile chums, they were architects of the same international criminal operation. Although Epstein is typically first thought of as a pedophile, he was running an international blackmail ring involving some of the most powerful people on the planet (which should have been a deeply obvious fact were it not for a media apparatus that didn’t believe this was an angle worth exploring).
Less well recognized was Epstein’s role as criminal financier at Bear Stearns, which collapsed intentionally after they funneled all of the money out of it (this is precisely what happened to First Republic Bank this week, among others). Epstein’s close ties to professors at Ivy League universities wasn’t because he was an eccentric science nerd, but because many of these universities and many of their professors were co-conspirators in the same international criminal enterprise.
Let’s balance the political scales in our curiously partisan times, lest this sound like a right-wing attack on the Clintons. As mentioned above, one of the investors in this scheme is Trump’s nephew-in-law Josh Kushner. He ran a little social media Ponzi scheme while he was a student at Harvard and hasn’t stopped following his father’s criminal footsteps since. His budget health insurance start-up Oscar Health is largely a Ponzi scheme, promoting networks of doctors that they are not actually establishing and never had any intention of establishing. Victims struggle to get in-person appointments and chalk it up to the poor state of health insurance generally, not realizing this was Kushner’s plan all along.
Josh and his brother Jared Kushner (Donald Trump’s son-in-law) then founded Cadre, an app where you can loan them money at a crappy return, which was yet another conduit for funneling liquidity into these criminal networks in secret.
All of this year’s bank failures were a direct result of this scheme. Silvergate and Signature were criminal banks that knowingly offered services for hundreds of fraudulent cryptocurrency companies to embezzle cash out of the banks and replace it with entirely worthless cryptocurrency.
The run on Silicon Valley Bank was intentional and planned years in advance, carried out by the venture capital firms named above (among others). The trigger for the bank run was the inevitable insolvency of Silvergate (since they were taking all the money out of it); at this point, Silicon Valley Bank expressly, intentionally and criminally released bad financial data in order to justify the planned bank run, kicked off when Founders Fund and others told their customers to pull out of the bank.
This provided multiple benefits: The cryptocurrency industry had spent years positioning itself as a good, safe alternative to traditional banking in poor economic conditions (likely expressly because they knew their massive theft was causing poor economic conditions). This kept victims from withdrawing money from the scheme and brought new money in, with the price of Bitcoin going up over 40% in the ten days following the SVB failure. Founders Fund’s Napoleon Ta got a seat on the Rippling board for this purpose: When the payment processor’s customers were at risk of missing payroll, $2 billion in liquidity flowed right into Brex and back into the Ponzi scheme, which was established and invested in for this purpose (and may have been dumped into Oscar Health on March 28th).
Nicola Sturgeon was an express, knowing, criminal participant in this part of the scheme, suddenly resigning as Scotland’s Prime Minister in service of it.
Forbes, which is now 95% owned by cryptocurrency exchange Binance, operates in full support of this vast criminal scheme. Though I can’t state that every person on the Forbes Midas List is a criminal co-conspirator, I can state that it includes dozens of criminals.
Growing in tandem with these Ponzi schemes was the evolution of surveillance software like that in the Inslaw affair. Facebook was either established expressly to become a controlled virtual space and a data mining surveillance tool, or did so by the time several of the named co-conspirators invested in this scheme (Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, former Walmart board member Jim Breyer). Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel expressly, knowingly, and criminally worked with Cambridge Analytica for this purpose. Facebook also intentionally allowed and supported political disinformation not because they wanted a particular candidate to win, but because they wanted to pollute our social media so thoroughly with bullshit that their criminal scheme would not be exposed.
Several at Facebook have further aimed to bury the truth by gutting journalistic outlets. It is well known that Facebook investor Peter Thiel bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker after Gawker outed Thiel. While this is all true, it obscures the fact that Gawker was investigating Thiel’s criminal business interests as well, which likely had much more to do with his decision to support the hulkster.
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes bought progressive magazine The New Republic in 2012, attempting to kill the progressive angle before the staff ran him off. It’s no coincidence that the magazine provides some of the only critical investigative research into cryptocurrency that I can find.
Just this week, Andreessen Horowitz cashed in on their $50 million investment in Buzzfeed, shuttering Buzzfeed News, which wrote about how Peter Thiel secretly bankrolled an “anti-woke” film festival last year.
Facebook Chief Technology Officer Adam D’Angelo founded Quora to further control online narratives, providing answers that protect the co-conspirators under the guise of organic, crowdsourced information.
These criminals deploy a vast network of trolls to monitor social media and promote narratives in service of the scheme. While certain accounts can be confirmed upon close examination, the power of this strategy is that it ultimately does not matter; when enough bad-faith actors promote a narrative - consistently and repeatedly through all avenues of communication - good-faith actors promote it as well.
When Meta (Facebook) established their cryptocurrency and The Libra Association (since rebranded as Diem and sold to Silvergate Bank last year), it was for the express criminal purpose of funding this criminal network via the last of March’s bank collapses, Credit Suisse.
Libra was established in Geneva, Switzerland, bringing on multiple executives from Credit Suisse. They raised investments from several high-profile companies, Libra announced they couldn’t get the banking regulations they needed, and the companies pulled out. All of the investors in the Libra Association did so with knowing criminal intent to secretly invest in criminal enterprise (like Clinkle and Theranos), including Uber, Lyft, Stripe, eBay, Kiva and Heifer International (the last of which owned the ranch where Clinton and Epstein associate Mark Middleton was found shot and hanged last year, incidentally).
When Josh Kushner met with Saudi Arabian leaders in 2017, it could have been about any number of criminal concerns. But given that Thrive Capital was embezzling money into Credit Suisse via the Libra Association, and Saudi Arabia was embezzling money through Credit Suisse via their sovereign wealth fund, it stands to reason that Credit Suisse may have been on the docket.
I’m sure I’m missing a billionaire or two from my notes, but you get the idea. Oh, Shark Tank is fake. They already own that cheap garbage, they just want you watching their infomercials.
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You may think this all sounds farfetched, and I certainly wouldn’t blame you. But let’s pretend for a minute that it’s all true; that there is a vast criminal enterprise. What would that world look like?
Well, we’d probably see economic circumstances continually get worse as civic and economic institutions grow more parasitic.
We’d see governments wholly incapable of improving the circumstances of the people despite having immense power and resources to do so, or prosecuting the criminal networks that have grown within them.
We’d see an erosion of trust as the co-conspirators leverage their positions of power in the government, business, and media to create and circulate misinformation and sow division.
We’d see schools and universities go from institutes of knowledge to propaganda mills that shackle students with years of debt, funnel their time and energy directly into building and improving upon this massive theft.
And we’d see a world where each new advance in technology would be co-opted to best surveil or extract value from the populace, countless empty promises of improving material conditions never coming to fruition.
And we’d see a rise in deaths of despair: more suicides as the criminal networks dismantle safety nets and social cohesion; more drug overdoses pushed on the people by a predatory pharmaceutical industry; more binge drinking and substance abuse as people try to escape a society that has become fully extractive.
And we’d see a world where violence becomes accepted as inevitable, from the random acts of violence of a population growing desperate to the militarization of policing against the populace it ostensibly serves to ongoing wars for ravenous profit that the system becomes incapable of stopping.
We would see a violent suppression of any movements that act in service of the public over the criminal enterprise, with an increasing global movement toward fascism.
Hell, we might see the blatant murder of an international pedophile blackmail artist billionaire criminal financier with suspiciously close ties to presidents and espionage agencies and then a government that refuses to provide any information at all, gaslighting the public into believing that the retched fraud that has overtaken our world is inescapable.
If all that were true, we’d be living in a global kleptocracy.
Impossible, right?
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Part 1: Clinkle and the Snooker document
Part 2: Summer Highlands Ltd. and Stanford
Part 3: The scheme laid out in full. Richard Branson
Part 4: Crypto technical deep dive
Part 5: Go Zuck yourself
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This series explores my findings on the largest criminal enterprise in history.
If you’re new to the series, you can jump in right here, plus I have links to the backlog down below.
It started by exploring the role of crypto in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, but then revealed a diverse list of billionaires who’ve been growing a decades-long network of Ponzi schemes with Jeffrey Epstein’s blackmail network holding it all together.
And I don’t mean “Everything is a Ponzi scheme in capitalism;” I mean we’ve been actively, criminally defrauded by many of the most powerful people on the planet to the tune of several trillion dollars as they collapse banks and build entire industries to sell us snake oil and lie to us about it.
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Let’s stitch together some of what we’ve gathered in a timeline:
- 2010:
o Summer Highlands Ltd. and a bunch of other companies are created in the British Virgin Islands to make a series of unregistered stock exchanges.o Stanford Professor and WestPac Bank CEO Robert Joss writes his case study looking for participants in a multi-currency offshore banking scheme.
- 2013:
o A mysterious payments processing app called Clinkle posts the highest seed funding round in Silicon Valley history, with a big list of famous investors. This includes Peter Thiel, who started a bank run last month; and Richard Branson, who appears to have been running Ponzi schemes for decades. It also includes several people and funds associated with Stanford University, which has suspiciously strong ties to Theranos and FTX.
- 2014:
o Some of the biggest names in tech venture capital get together to invest in Polychain, which looks to develop three new technologies in the crypto space. These technologies would allow them to develop an untraceable global liquidity pool in support of a decentralized Ponzi scheme.
- 2019:
o Bitcoin trading volume goes through the roof, providing evidence of the global liquidity pool being developed and used.
There is quite a lot more to cover, especially in that 2014 to 2019 gap, but that is another deep technical slog, much like Part 4. For now, I’ll give the very short form receipts for Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund’s continued investment and involvement in building the decentralized dark pool tools that Polychain (a company Thiel backed previously) worked on previously:
Greenhouse v. Polychain presents a brazen theft of Bitcoin derivatives (SAFTs) by Polychain management, which coincides perfectly with a seed round of SAFT funding for Orchid Labs LLC, backed by the same big crypto venture capital investors.
Polychain v. Pantera gives more detail on the vague and powerful investors behind the operation, which aligns well with the language in Summer Highlands Ltd.’s SEC registration
Founders Fund’s Napoleon Ta was a director for Tagomi Systems (also backed by Founders Fund), which brought on Greg Tusar from Goldman Sachs to build cryptocurrency’s first high-frequency trading network. An interview with the Tagomi president reveals that the company was created as an offshoot of Polychain.
Tagomi was founded at the same address as BlockFi in Jersey City, a later Founders Fund cryptocurrency venture. BlockFi appears to be Tagomi 2.0, with the two of them directly responsible for the two Bitcoin volume anomalies in Part 4.
Thiel and BlockFi held substantial exposure to FTX via West Realm Shires (many of Thiel’s companies have Lord of the Rings references in the name). This, along with the substantial crypto infrastructure investments made by Founders Fund and Coinbase in Chicago in recent years (where FTX.US was located) give further support to the theory that these actors were all colluding on the same decentralized Ponzi scheme that FTX was a part of.
During this time, we see many, many new investors into the scheme and a tidal wave of new money around cryptocurrency, replicating the operations that Polychain pioneered.
The Winklevoss twins, for instance, created the Gemini crypto exchange in 2014, and have since spawned several crypto startups that appear to reproduce and improve upon the high-frequency trading and zero-knowledge proof technology.
But they were just one of many investors: Follow any of the tentacles of money that pass through Polychain and you’ll find similar operations for many big tech venture capital players, building whole networks of operations around the globe.
You can see all the different start-ups acting in service of this scheme on Multicoin’s job postings here. If you read past the vague feel-good tones of an “open” currency that’s found in much of the companies’ marketing, you’ll find that it includes the same specific technologies Polychain had invested in, presumably to create a global Ponzi scheme (see Part 4):
Movement across blockchains:
o Algorand: “…an extraordinary commitment to interoperability…”o Kadena: “…a hybrid blockchain platform…”o Nervos Network: “It allows any crypto-asset to be stored with the security, immutability and permissionless nature of Bitcoin while enabling smart contracts, layer 2 scaling…” In other words, “The crypto is hidden and we can move it”
High frequency trading:
o SKALE Labs: “…A high-speed, seamless experience…without latency.” “…A 100% decentralized network.” “…A unique pooled security model…”o Textile: “…to accelerate the exchange of information on the internet…”
Secure, hidden crypto storage:
Decentralized, global infrastructure:
o Dfinity (which Polychain supported by name)o Helium:“…a paradigm shift for decentralized wireless infrastructure…”o NEAR Foundation : …[a] decentralized storage and compute platform that is secure enough to manage high-value assets like money or identity”.
Much like my exploration into Richard Branson’s remarkably Ponzi-like investments in Part 3, this isn’t cherry picking from a deep trove; every company on that job board seems to be either actively building this technology of vast new theft, or operating in service of it (like mobile payments apps and cryptocurrency derivative assets).
As it turns out, Multicoin sums it up in nicely on their thesis page:
“Crypto will create the largest one time shift in wealth in the history of the internet”
Do you get it? That “one time shift in wealth” is them and their co-conspirators stealing trillions of dollars, and the really large text on their website is them having a hell of a laugh about it.
If you need more evidence, just slog through Part 4 and then read the rest of the text on that webpage: You’ll find the exact same fraudulent thesis that Polychain had proposed: the three keys to the kingdom.
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But if, as the mounting evidence is starting to suggest, all of these people were actively engaging in a global Ponzi scheme on which the entire cryptocurrency industry was built, that would raise a whole host of new questions:
It would require billions and billions of dollars in technical investments worldwide, right?
And it would require expert knowledge of international banking regulations to stay ahead of authorities, right?
And it would require building political capital with foreign governments to let you set up shop in their countries, right?
And it would require lobbying for political influence to get regulations that could crack down on the operation, right?
And it would require an array of co-conspirators in international banking to help launder and move the money, right?
And it would require global institutions whose main purpose is to secretly provide liquidity to the dark pool at the heart of the Ponzi scheme, right?
And it would require actively promoting the scheme in print, television, radio, and internet media, right?
And it would require front companies to justify dark pool tech hubs worldwide, right?
And it would require various means of control to ensure that the enormous scheme wouldn’t be revealed, right?
So, how did they do all those things? Are we to believe that Sam Bankman-Fried and his trust fund polycule pulled all that off on their own?
Or is it infinitely more likely that such an operation would require economic, social and political power that extends well beyond cryptocurrency and takes root in our daily lives: in our apps and on our TVs; in our bank accounts and ballot boxes?
If you’re wondering where this series is headed, it’s developing rich, well-researched, well-sourced explanations to all of those questions. It was never about crypto - that was just the path that led us down the rabbit hole.
It wasn’t about crypto for the scammers either; they would have done the same thing with Theranos-style biomed Ponzis if there were that much money in it. But nothing lent itself to the scam quite like an unregulated, decentralized digital currency.
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Let’s revisit three tech venture capital firms from our story: Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Jim Breyer’s Accel Partners, and Marc Andreessen’s Andreessen Horowitz (also known as “a16z”).
To recap, Thiel and Breyer made big bets on Clinkle, while Thiel and Andreessen were some of Polychain’s biggest backers.
If you’ve been paying close attention or you know too much about the tech world, you’ll note that all three are investors in Facebook. Not just any investors: they’re some of the most important, influential investors in Facebook’s history (this article from 2008 provides a great overview and some ominous foresight, though it makes the common mistake of investigating Thiel’s words more than his actions, just as he would hope):
Thiel made the first outside investment in the company in 2004, buying a 10% stake for $500,000. He held a seat on Facebook’s board until 2022.
Breyer has been on the boards of Wal-Mart and Blackstone. He invested $12.5 million in Facebook in 2005 when they had 10 employees: this was the first big, established venture capital money backing Facebook.
Andreessen, a former Netscape Navigator exec, is the longest active member on Facebook’s board, having a seat since 2008.
And they’re not making small investments in cryptocurrency either: Last time, we saw potentially $3 billion that Founders Fund dumped into the crypto dark pool, and their direct investments in all of these and related companies are in the billions outside of that. Andreessen sits on Coinbase’s board, while Breyer Labs is a crypto fund.
And we just had the Winklevoss twins starting a cryptocurrency exchange and an ecosystem around it. They’re the Harvard students who sued Zuckerberg, saying he ripped off their social media site idea in 2004. They were very early on cryptocurrency, in fact; reportedly holding 1% of all Bitcoin back in 2012.
With all this big Facebook money also making big financial and material investments in cryptocurrency for most of the time since, it raises the question: What about Zuckerberg and Facebook itself?
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Mark Zuckerberg’s crypto ventures tell a curious story about one of last month’s bank failures.
In May 2018, reports first surface of a Facebook cryptocurrency, which launched as Libra (since rebranded as “Diem”). Not only that, they established the Libra Association, backed by an “international consortium of companies” that included PayPal, eBay, and Stripe (to name a few), with each investor putting in at least $10 million.
After Libra struggled to find regulators, those companies all pulled out in October 2019. Thiel-backed crypto high-frequency trading platform Tagomi joins the Libra Association in February 2020 (which is notable for how not notable they are next to companies like PayPal). Later that year, Libra announces a scaled down vision and the rebrand to Diem. In January 2022, they liquidated their assets to Silvergate Bank, as the letter from the CEO on their home page makes clear.
(You may think that sounds like a Ponzi scheme, but hold that thought)
Now, that’s an okay bank failure connection: Liquidating $200 million in assets to the crypto bank that imploded. But Silvergate did banking for over 1,600 crypto companies; I’m sure virtually every crypto company I named above banked at Silvergate. It’s not revelatory, even if the $200 million liquidation is sizable.
But let’s do a better one.
While Libra was looking for the right (lack of) regulations, they set up shop in Geneva, Switzerland after other countries said Facebook was trying to establish a shadow bank.
In the face of public outcry around lack of regulation, they brought in a new Chief Compliance Officer who came directly from his role as Global Head of Financial Crime Compliance at Credit Suisse.
Months later, they brought on new general counsel (that means corporate lawyer) who came directly from her role as Global Head of Regulatory Affairs (and Group Head of Data Protection) at Credit Suisse.
Let’s have a look at Credit Suisse’s stock price over the years (the peak is in 2007):
Source TradingView.com
Do you see those last fifteen years where it just keeps going toward zero? Companies you know aren’t supposed to look like that, certainly not international banks. Texas rare earth mining corporations that bilk a few million dollars before closing shop have stock charts that look like that. Ponzi schemes look like that.
But money laundering looks like that too.
I’ve mentioned both, but this is worth clarifying: Ponzi schemes and certain types of money laundering fronts can look very similar because they both need to justify the movement of funds out of the company (like Libra’s “it failed because we couldn’t find a good regulatory environment”).
The functional difference is often just whether the investors are in on the scheme or not. If they’re not and you’re stealing their money, that’s a Ponzi scheme. But sometimes they are in on it, and they’re just trying to move that money into something less legal. The money goes where it needs to without the company investing anything into the pretend business. That’s money laundering.
I’ll contend that this one looks like money laundering, mainly due to the numerous connections to all these crypto investors in Libra Association members PayPal, eBay, Stripe and Tagomi, and of course the Facebook investors themselves. They all put their clean money in, Libra gives it to a Swiss bank, and out it goes.
And that chart makes it look like Credit Suisse may have been more of a money laundering institution than a bank in the traditional sense: A “legitimate” bank that you can plug your good clean money into, then Swiss privacy laws hide the movement of those funds elsewhere, which is why the stock has trended toward zero (because the purpose is to move the money out of it, not keep it in there).
To be clear, a strong gust of wind could have killed Credit Suisse when it did, but if it turned out that Zuckerberg intentionally set up Libra in Geneva so he could pipe his business partners’ money into Credit Suisse, funnel it elsewhere via Tagomi’s high-frequency trading, and then close up shop.
That (along with any other crypto-adjacent cash Zuckerberg and associates may have been piping into this dark pool) could have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for Credit Suisse once Silvergate went under.
Do I know that that has occurred? No, not even close.
Would it explain all of the above? Better than any explanation we’ve been given.
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Next time on Ponzi Papers: Buzzfeed News, killed with purpose
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