(NewsNation) — Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX CEO whose crypto shenanigans have left maybe a million people out of billions of dollars, just did the seemingly impossible when talking about his own political donations. He blasted media for having a deep liberal bias and cut the knees out of a major conservative talking point about him at the same time.
Bankman-Fried went from a multibillionaire to what he says is less than $100,000 now by using client funds for another one of his businesses that failed. It started looking like he was running some sort of Ponzi scheme wrapped in crypto packaging, and he did so while investing heavily in elected officials and media companies.
Now, many are asking if that’s why he doesn’t have regulators all over him already. That’s for another day.
Bankman-Fried reported donating $40 million to Democrats in the past election. With Bankman-Fried doing the mainstream media rounds, the knives came out for him from the right.
He was one of the biggest midterm donors to Democrats, which is being used by some on the right to mock left leaning media coverage.
Imagine if he funded the GOP, some media outlets asked. Fair question. In an interview with the Coffeezilla podcast, he revealed this bombshell: “All my Republican donations were dark.”
Bankman-Fried says he gave basically the same amount of money to Democrats and Republicans. And his explanation for why he gave to Democrats in the open and covertly to Republicans says a heck of a lot about our media.
“And the reason was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters freak the [expletive] out if you donate to a Republican, because they’re all super liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight. So I made all the Republican ones dark,” Bankman-Fried said.
He’s basically admitting to donating equally to both parties, which undercuts the big conservative talking point that he just funded Democrats, but he also undermines the mainstream media nonsense that they don’t have a left-leaning bias.
Now, he may be continuing a con here, and maybe this isn’t even true. But if it is, this potential crook understood exactly how to play our politicians and media: Give the politicians and even upstart media companies money, but don’t give the left-leaning media a reason to come after you. And it sure seems to have worked.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not of NewsNation.
