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Comment by bdhe | Hacker News Reader

No, sadly there is a decidedly right-wing mind virus around how SBF is treated with kid gloves because he heavily donated to democrats.

Ignoring that he also donated to Republicans. This is all part of that narrative - substantiated or otherwise.

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And of course there can't be a mind virus around the mind virus that he heavily donated to democrats on the part of idiot republicans and that only a free-minded savant on HN would know that he also donated to republicans.

People are angry and they aren't seeing the immediate consequences they want. It's not just an SBF thing though, I suspect that various police dramas have given people a very skewed view.

You’re right, but the political angle reinforces this. Note the posting history of the people who’ve been most consistently performing outrage about this — they’re pretty reliably cued by whatever the right-wing media is currently pushing, and right now that’s emphasizing his donations to Democrats and the idea that he bought leniency. I’m sure the emotion is genuine but it’s being stoked by a party eager to go back on the attack after the scandal-plagued Trump years.

There's a lot of outrage performers invested in crypto who want to make this about _anything besides crypto_.

So instead of people taking a close look at the crypto space and saying "wait, maybe a lot of these other projects are flawed", their anger gets focused on the press and the regulators. It's pretty ridiculous when you think about it -- is the NYTimes really responsible for FTX because the tone of their pieces wasn't sufficiently harsh? I'm skeptical.

Yes — I'd especially want people to point to their own past warnings about projects before they failed. The kind of stuff coming out about FTX means basically anyone who worked there could have blown the whistle but did not, and I'd be shocked if other people in the field didn't have some idea that things were not as solid as advertised.

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