Moneyed interests have always jockeyed for power, but earlier they were held somewhat in check by Congress which had to listen somewhat to voters. With Citizens united in 2010 and corporate media driving polarization to new heights, big money has been able to drown out ordinary voters at at unprecedented scale.
No wonder, the 1% have never had it so good, when they can literally buy the govt they want. Looks like we're headed back to the gilded age and robber barons.
It came out when Crypto guy gave an interview and mentioned it not realising the consequences.
The party leader first claimed it was for security.
Then it was determined he had bought property with it.
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-nigel-fara...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6xwy015ngo
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-58711151
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/dec/04/lord-evans-...
"Crypto guy" is understating Christopher Harbone's (alias Chakrit Sakunkrit) reach. He was big in Asian aviation back in the day and is a relatively large player in the British DefenseTech space via QinetiQ. He was also one of the earlier investors in Tether.
He also previously bankrolled Boris Johnson and was his Ukraine advisor [0].
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/oct/10/the-1m-man-...
After he donated £1m to The Office of Boris Johnson, £270k to the Conservative Party, and the Conservative government gave QinetiQ an £80m defence contract. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Harborne#Political...
Hint: you might be buddies with the big fascist now, but this can change at any moment. And then you're just fodder for his _other_ cronies. Oh, and don't forget that even if you think that you're adept at court intrigue and covert ops, your _children_ might not be so skilled. Will they retain your fortune when the big fascist suddenly decides to... reallocate... some of their wealth?
Libertarianism is when you can buy your way out of criminal convictions?
Did you think "your values are fucked" is actually persuasive at garnering votes?
It is not my nor anyone else's job, including Kamala's for that matter, to coddle your sweet little fee fees about wanting your fake power-wasting money to work. It is especially not anyone's job to tolerate socially corrosive viewpoints like fascism to indulge your ponzi scheme. Full stop.
It's also well documented that fascists will happily enable and cosign the efforts of whatever their chosen right people are to steal money on industrial scales from everyone else, so they were always going to support crypto. Completely foregone conclusion and to be honest, I'd bet money that a notable amount of crypto figures did in fact know that and voted accordingly for the party that was prepared to let them get away with financial crimes, as they have done before, here and elsewhere.
If you're so offended at the notion of someone saying your values are fucked, respectfully, un-fuck your values and then I won't have to say it anymore.
The non-fascists message to prospective voters:
>[we won't] coddle your sweet little fee fees
>your values are fucked
> I don't want their fucking vote. I'm not interested in their opinion about anything, especially this.
... and there we have it. You've answered the question as to why those people didn't support you -- you straight up asked them not to vote for you, and surprise, the fascists won. Repeat this ad nauseum smugly belittling other interest groups the non-fascist could have tried to capture but instead defaulted to whatever fascist was willing to show up and offer something, and surprise -- the predictable loss happened!
I couldn't have summarized it better myself of how much of even much of working class middle America ended up where they did, you managed to blurt out loud pretty much all the stuff we get accused of lying about when we point out their vote got alienated to the point they were easily captured by the most smooth talking fascist that could show up and exploit that weakness.
But hey, at least your "fee fees" feel good about your smug moral superiority over the power-wasting money. You may have lost the power and defaulted the vote of people you explicitly asked not to vote for you to the guys putting people in foreign gulags but at least you got to flex on ignorant crypto power wasters and others by not lowering yourself to solicit their vote!
I asked no such question. You said:
> It's not hard to figure out, the fascists have been more explicitly welcoming to crypto freedom or at least put themselves out there to solicit that vote even if you claim their underlying policies aren't.
To which I said:
> If you back fascists to promote crypto, your values are fucked.
This is not a statement wondering why they didn't. I know why they didn't, even if I didn't directly say it. I'm saying here if your support for proper policies or candidates is contingent on their supporting your stupid shitcoins, then your values are fucked and I'm not interested in your conclusions as a result. Or to be more specific, if you're prepared to give Fascists power because you think it'll be better for your coinbase account, your values are fucked.
And while there is certainly a cost to having principles, to say that Kamala didn't win because she refused to court crypto is just ridiculously out-of-touch. That's a big question with a lot of variables, but I assure you things like:
1) Her being a woman
2) Her being non-white
3) Her being yet another pro-corpo do-nothing Democrat, with a back story including being a PROSECUTOR of all things
Had a shitload, a metric assload, an utter container-ship load more to do with her defeat than anything even tangentially related to your weird secondary finance system, and on that point I would bet a lot of REAL, not crypto, currency.
And here's the part you're missing about Trump and his ilk "showing up": that offer means nothing. Fascist regimes don't keep promises to their useful idiots, they keep them right up until they're not useful anymore. They'll feed your crypto conartists to the same wolves they'll feed me to, because nobody wins long-term under fascism, including the fascists who aren't currently holding the leash. Ross Ulbricht's pardon doesn't tell you Trump loves crypto freedom, it tells you Trump knows how to make a low-cost gesture to a bloc he needs this cycle. And frankly it tracks well that crypto holders were targeted by the Trump admin anyway, you're a self-selecting bloc of marks, ready and eager to hold ANOTHER bag to go with the one you've statistically speaking, already got.
But far more importantly: Fascists are not shy about the Fascist shit they aim to do, namely to harm people at scale. If you cosign that for bitcoin, I'm not here to persuade you or win your heart: that is not a position that a reasonable person takes, and so I see no purpose in attempting to reason with you.
I thought that offering ‘not Trump’ would be enough. I was very wrong.
We could argue over the definition of fascism and which politicians fit it which might be more productive than accusing posters of being depressed.
For the people currently active in politics who espouse heinous policies sometimes (and sometimes not) reminiscent of fascism, then advocate against those policies directly. Using such a vague umbrella term, and one interpreted by many as a distinct cultural shibboleth, isn’t likely to win over the people you need in order to prevail.
Professor Jason Stanley who has written two books about the topic calls the current US administration fascist. Similar with professor Timothy Snyder and I think several other respected historians.
Another is we discuss actual policy positions rather than using presumed pejoratives to brand everyone who doesn't agree with us as "literally Hitler!".
Moldbug (Yarvin), who is intellectually upstream of the tech-authoritarian movement, explicitly claimed the term reactionary and spent so many words strawmanning concerns about fascism he de facto claimed that term as well. And either term is a hell of a lot more accurate than "conservative", which [unfortunately] continues to be in use as an emotional fig leaf over what is actually a radical agenda of destruction.
Because that kind of kleptocracy runs on constantly fighting factions and incentives and selfishness. The core belief is selling someone else down the river because you can.
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-grea...
I wonder if an incoming next president can order those three to be jailed in an undisclosed offshore prison for "obvious corruption and abuse of power" and claim presidential immunity in the lawsuit that would follow, as it was clearly an official act of the presidency for which the illegal order was given.
They have given that power to the president, it seems?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Leo
Look him up and his connections to Opus Dei.
It cost money to print copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers. The New York Times gets into politics quite a bit and is published by a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Where in the Constitution is that activity protected from the government but the First Amendment?
> More than one-third of all corporate money contributed to this year's November elections, and primary elections leading up to them, has come from the crypto industry, making it the top corporate political spender, the group said.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/23/crypto-companies-are-pouring...
I'd read a donation with "from the oil industry" and "from The Organization Of Stealing All Copper from Public Spaces" as different types of "bad", even if I'd prefer that the oil industry also not buy politicians.
For the avoidance of doubt, blockchain people are the copper thieves.
1- The largest donor, a16z is certainly invested in Crypto, but that's a venture capital firm, not crypto firm.
2- Fairshake PAC is basically a Crypto PAC, so it's obvious that Crypto firms are funding that PAC, right. I quote Wikipedia:
> Fairshake is a Super PAC funded by the cryptocurrency industry that supported pro-cryptocurrency candidates in the 2024 United States elections.[2][3][4][5] Major contributors include Coinbase, Ripple, and Andreessen Horowitz.[6] Fairshake spent nearly twice as much on Republican candidates than on Democratic candidates.[7]
That PAC doesn't look like they are ideologically oriented, they just care about whether a candidate is pro crypto or not, whether it's dems or reps.
3- Leading the Future is not even a Crypto PAC at all, it's an AI PAC
Surely the more disturbing thing is that they're spending money at all.
In the olden days a CEO would ring up a politician and say something like "if you vote for this bill, my 50,000 employees in your state will not be happy" — a sizable voting bloc gave those execs power.
Now the crypto companies say "if you vote for this bill, my 1,000 employees in your state will not be happy..." — less compelling, voting-bloc wise — "...and also I will donate millions to your opponent in the primary"
Partly, because I am not from US, but largely because I have no interests to lobby!
Are elections that run on donations can be considered truly democratic?
Tech Influence Watch site: https://influence.citationneeded.news/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632474)
Blog post: https://www.citationneeded.news/tech-influence-watch/
Fairshake has received $82 million in contributions this cycle
Crypto, AI, big tech and online betting firms have spent $294 million combined on 2026 elections
June 30 (Reuters) - Cryptocurrency companies have spent $189 million so far to influence the 2026 U.S. midterm elections, outpacing their spending for the previous election cycle, according to a new report, opens new tab from Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization. More than one-third of all corporate money contributed to this year's November elections, and primary elections leading up to them, has come from the crypto industry, making it the top corporate political spender, the group said.
The Reuters Daily Briefing newsletter provides all the news you need to start your day. Sign up here. Crypto was also the top corporate donor in the 2024 election cycle, when it contributed $170 million and many of the congressional candidates it boosted won their races.
Companies in the artificial intelligence, big tech and online betting sectors have also contributed heavily. Combined with crypto, they have spent $294 million on the 2026 elections so far. In November, the full House of Representatives will be up for reelection, along with roughly a third of the Senate.
"The big takeaway is that corporate money is playing a bigger role than ever in our elections, and it's only expanding," said Rick Claypool, a research director at Public Citizen and the author of the report.
It's a shame the crypto industry is so scummy it makes people avoid real improvements on the monetary system made by Monero.
Banks hold your funds, lock you out of accounts, file reports on you, share every transaction with the government, scam you in interest, ask you what your using your money for, require invasive services to use their apps, require invasive biometrics, hoard your identity data and sell it, target ads to you, close your account if you're deemed to be high risk, implement atrocious security.
What are the other errors in my critique of banks?
Will you explain how Monero is worse than banks?
>crypto in general is a big improvment on banks
I responded to your claim. If you feel you can defend your claim, go ahead. If your only response is to change the subject, ok. That's your call.
That was a stated goal for them, and they got what they paid for. So good ROI on that.
They've gotten PAAAAH-LENTY for their money.
Did they get their pet asset to go up in price? No. But they managed to buy "crime is legal now". The shitcoin rugpull industry is making BANK, and the DOJ has been paid off to look the other way.
Investigations have been shut down, and mobsters have been freed. They are not the losers. Society is.