Nobody Like Us Could Be Bad

Another day, another puff piece about a bunch of likely criminals. Behind the New Yorker paywall, but a sample.

But Bankman-Fried stood out from other young billionaires for his commitment to the effective-altruism movement, some of whose adherents believe in trying to earn as much as possible in order to maximize what they can give away. By the time of his arrest, he had become a major contributor to public-health and other causes, and one of the biggest personal donors in American electoral politics.

...

For years, Bankman and Fried have hosted lively Sunday-night dinner parties at their home, during which discussions range from the global crisis of democracy to movies and campus gossip.

They had dinner parties! They talking about smart things!

I asked whether she had ever felt compelled to ask her son if he’d done any of the things he’d been charged with. She replied no—she didn’t need to ask. Her son was incapable of dishonesty or stealing, she said. “Sam will never speak an untruth,” she went on. “It’s just not in him.”

He's the best little boy! (That Sam is a regular liar is well-documented at this point).

Fried is a leading scholar of legal ethics. Her best-known book, “The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire,” is a study of capitalism and the coercive aspects of free markets. “She’s a brilliant critic,” Debra Satz, the dean of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences, said, “and the book really picks apart these debates about freedom and equality.” This year, her intellectual rigor has been applied to her son’s media strategy, which she considered integral to his defense—so integral that she and her husband hired a high-powered P.R. consultant, Risa Heller, to assist them. The couple embarked on a campaign to spread their perspective: that the press, unfairly assuming that their son is guilty, has failed to examine weaknesses in the government’s case and the role of FTX’s lawyers in the company’s downfall.

I guess we know how this New Yorker article was placed!

Robert Gordon, a Stanford Law School colleague, described Fried as one of the most “ethically fastidious” people he knows. “She seems so sure,” he said of her faith in her son, “and the way that she thinks through ethical problems is just so careful. This, of course, is the big mystery at the heart of all this.”

She thinks about ethics! There's no one more ethical!!!

It just goes on and on and on like this. This really is just the magazine of elites making sure we understand that no one like them could POSSIBLY BE A BAD PERSON. Certainly not SCUM LIKE YOU!!!

Lol, the writer of the piece:

Before becoming a journalist, she worked as an analyst at two hedge funds in New York City.

No solidarity like upper class solidarity!