Welcome to the weekly Dark Markets Tuesday edition. Today we’re doing something slightly different: after a week when the fascism of the U.S. government became nakedly clear, it’s time to talk about why fraudsters are so often authoritarians.
I can’t resist highlighting one bit of news, though - former NYC Mayor Eric Adams is alleged to have “rug pulled” his new anti-semitism memecoin for about $2.3 million.
Yes, really.
Come see me talk with Adam Lowenstein, who reviewed “Stealing the Future” for The American Prospect. There will be books available for signing!
Codex Books is located at 1 Bleecker St, New York, NY 10012.
Yeah, believe it or not, I started a TikTok. As a dry run, I tried to explain the significance of Trump’s Fed bullying in 60 seconds. I’ll get better, I promise.
Dark Markets is a reader-supported publication. To receive every update, consider becoming a supporter.
Subscribe
The past week has seen the complete and unambiguous revelation of Donald Trump and his movement as genuinely and unambiguously fascistic, from the shooting of a civilian by ICE gestapo to the banana republic bullying of Fed Chair Jerome Powell. It is similarly unambiguous that the two Trump administrations have attracted and supported financial fraudsters of many stripes, from Trump himself to Medicaid scam artist Rick Scott to MLM scion Betsy DeVoss to crypto scammer Justin Sun to Trevor Milton, the pardoned mastermind of the $20 billion Nikola fraud.
·
April 2, 2025
·
September 15, 2025
This is not coincidental. Over more than ten years studying scam artists, and an entire life trying to comprehend the forces of authoritarianism that work under the surface of the supposedly democratic American mind, I’ve found that they share numerous tactics for manipulating adherents and reinforcing their false beliefs to the benefit of the masterminds.
Below, I’ve dug into a few key commonalities between the con of fascism, and a plain old rug-pull:
The Myth of the Heroic Genius
The Desire of the Other
Empowerment of the Worst
Appeal to the Disempowered
The Cruelty of Hope
My work over the last ten years has been substantially focused not on the Trumpist far right, but on Silicon Valley technology frauds, from Sam Bankman-Fried to Elizabeth Holmes to Elon Musk to Sam Altman. Largely, this sort of figure until recently professed vaguely ‘liberal’ ideas, but their actual, mostly utilitarian beliefs have been unmasked as deeply authoritarian and anti-human.
·
January 7, 2024
We’ve seen over the past three years, at a scale of global impacts, how that utilitarian engineers’ mindset itself feeds authoritarianism by fostering the worship of a few rare “geniuses,” fundamentally different from other people, and crucially, able to deliver a flawless utopia - just one of many resonances between these left-coasters and Trump himself. This is just a modern, technocratic iteration of the hero, the enticing figure who, as Ernest Becker explores in The Denial of Death, deceives us by promising to take responsibility for that which we don’t feel able to accomplish ourselves. The hero, Becker argues, may be the most dangerous social and political figure of all.
·
April 27, 2025
Yudkowsky’s “Rationalist” ideology is the gold standard of lib-coded authoritarianism, with his own relentless, laughable claims to heroism having spawned multiple charismatic cults with plans to violently overthrow the U.S. government and replace it with elite technocrats. He is perhaps the ultimate subject who knows not what he does: after 20 years as part of an elaborate financial fraud to boost “artificial intelligence,” Yudkowsky has constructed an impenetrable veil of ignorance around the implications of his own beliefs.
·
June 23, 2024
These authoritarians have been my focus because they are more subtle and devious than the far stupider people now directly in control of the U.S. government, like Stephen Miller, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. But whatever their affect or aesthetic, they are all at root technology fraudsters, grown fat off unfalsifiable claims about the future they promise to build.
There is a deep and causative cycle between the utopian promise and the inevitable authoritarian crackdown that inevitably follows - as surely as Sam Bankman-Fried turned rightward after finding himself in prison.
·
February 25, 2025
My book Stealing the Future draws substantially on the work of Jacques Lacan, a psychoanalyst interested in the ways that people deceive themselves. This is the key of both financial fraud and fascism: ultimately, victims are tricked because they want to be tricked. In some cases this is a matter of desperation, but more often, victims of financial fraud are blinded by greed.
In a very similar way, adherents swayed to fascistic thinking are motivated by their sense that someone else, or some other group, is enjoying something they have been denied. This is not the typical popular understanding - most theorizing patly blames racial and ethnic hatred for things like the current lawless ICE purges. But that hatred is not a cause, but an effect - an externalizing mollification for the disappointments of a life lived poorly. The pathetic incompetence of ICE agents - 1/3rd of whom struggled to do 15 sit-ups - reflects the cold truth that, as Matt Christman put it recently, this is a crusade of the unemployable against the employed.
Now, that is not simply a character judgment - the structure of the U.S. economy, and particularly Clintonite outsourcing and free trade policies of the 1990s, is to blame for much of that unemployability. But not all of it: fascists tend to be people who feel entitled, nominally by skin color but ultimately by a purer sociopathic narcissism, to the fruits of the world, while being frustrated by the personal limitations that prevent them from gaining them.
The word “fascism” comes from a Roman term for sticks bound together to increase their strength, and it continues to stand for a union of weak people seeking strength through compliance.
Both in financial frauds and political movements, this sense of entitlement, forced by personal weakness to adhere to a group, can be manipulated by invoking what Lacan calls “The Big Other” - usually some group, different from the target audience, who can be imagined, not to be inferior, but primarily to have more. More authority, more money, even more happiness. The Ur-text of modern fascism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, imagines an all-powerful Jewish cabal who have already stolen prosperity from all the good Germans. In financial scams, the Other is often the purported source of secrets, cheats, and tricks that the scammer promises the victim to help overcome and circumvent.
·
April 14, 2024
My fascination with frauds of all types is centered almost entirely on the frequency with which fraudsters seem to truly believe the con they are selling. Obviously Sam Bankman-Fried is my North Star of Delusion, whose autistic commitment to the lie of his own innocence has preoccupied me for years now. Hayden Davis admitting to insider trading while denying he did anything wrong is another sterling example.
·
March 13, 2025
I have an emerging theory of how this works. The most successful fraudsters are committed purely to power and money, from the very beginning. Power and money are their definition of the success of their own mission.
At the same time, as we see clearly with Bankman-Fried, Davis, Donald Trump, Curtis Yarvin, et al., both fraudsters and fascist leaders, as groups, aren’t actually good at the things they publicly claim to be doing. Sam Bankman-Fried was terrible at running a hedge fund and crypto exchange; Donald Trump is an inept and floundering leader even by his own standards; the “philosopher” Curtis Yarvin is as deep as a puddle.
But they never become conscious of their own incompetence, because their real goals were not stewardship, leadership, or serious thought - only personal aggrandizement. If they are succeeding, how they did it simply disappears from the minds of these sociopathic manipulators. They are able to confidently lie because their definition of “success” is exactly their ability to steal from people.
And of course, when this behavior goes unpunished or even rewarded - as it did for Trump for decades - it both affirms the perpetrator’s deluded self-image, and leaves them free to accumulate actual power. An equally sterling example is Elon Musk, who for nearly a decade has lied incessantly about vaporware like Full Self-Driving and the Las Vegas tunnel.
He has failed again and again in these objective goals, but because he has never been punished for those failures - because, in fact, he has been rewarded for lying - he has convinced himself, and his followers, of his own success.
Subscribe
The secret of success for Amway back in the 1950s was targeting housewives, and convincing them they could be “businesswomen” - a story unpacked in an excellent podcast called The Dream. Housewives, Amway founder Rich DeVoss figured out, simply didn’t have much to do, or much control over their lives, in an era when divorce was nearly unthinkable.
So when Amway came along to help them “start a business,” they weren’t exclusively looking for profit - they were also buying meaning and identity. Over time, when the profit never emerged - even when they lost huge sums - Amway managed to keep many of its sellers hooked with those social benefits.
·
January 28, 2025
In the big picture, whether they made or lost money didn’t matter to a lot of Amway participants - until, at some point, it inevitably came to matter, in the form of dire, final grim consequences, like divorce. At that point, the women who had experienced a brief surge of empowerment felt even worse about themselves after being ripped off by Rich DeVoss.
Getting ripped off can have counterintuitive effects on victims, simultaneously making them feel worse about themselves, and in many cases, more loyal to the person who victimized them. They are also generally unlikely to discuss their experience as a fraud victim publicly or openly, given the embarrassment attached to it. Being the victim of fraud appears to seriously harm people’s faith in their own abilities.
This undermining of victims’ sense of their own competence makes them more vulnerable fascistic thinking. It leaves partisans distrustful of themselves and subordinate to the Dear Leader.
Subscribe
The saddest part of covering frauds, from BitConnect to FTX, is the cruelty of the hope these scammers inspire.
The targeting of the most vulnerable doesn’t just make marks easier to trick because they’re less worldly or educated. Desperate people are already in the thrall of a desire for escape, a desire that can be briefly satisfied even by their own fantasies.
·
August 31, 2025
A charismatic figurehead willing to shamelessly pander to those fantasies with false promises of coming greatness will find easy targets. For financial frauds, there’s the promise of a grand payout, often tied up in a sense of group belonging - the worst period of crypto scamming, remember, was set to the tune of Randi Zuckerberg’s “We’re All Gonna Make It.”
The implicit promise of a truly great scam is of such scope and depth that it is nothing less than a disguised promise of Revelation and the End Times, when the chosen will enter Heaven and the unbelievers will be left behind. The best scammers, like Trump, always promise a final balancing of the scales, a correction of the great injustice that has left huddled masses unjustly scorned, impoverished, and alone.
Of course, this hope is never fulfilled. Worse, fraudsters use well-worn techniques to quietly “cool off” marks from their overheated optimism, often by promising that things will surely work out next time.
With Trumpist fascism, the “cool off” has become almost comically obvious: instead of the Epstein files and prosperity, you get jackbooted thugs who are at least brutalizing people you are being told not to like.
That’s plenty to keep the marks in line and content.
For now.
Subscribe
Welcome to the weekly Dark Markets Tuesday edition. Today we’re doing something slightly different: after a week when the fascism of the U.S. government became nakedly clear, it’s time to talk about why fraudsters are so often authoritarians.
I can’t resist highlighting one bit of news, though - former NYC Mayor Eric Adams is alleged to have “rug pulled” his new anti-semitism memecoin for about $2.3 million.
Yes, really.
Come see me talk with Adam Lowenstein, who reviewed “Stealing the Future” for The American Prospect. There will be books available for signing!
Codex Books is located at 1 Bleecker St, New York, NY 10012.
Yeah, believe it or not, I started a TikTok. As a dry run, I tried to explain the significance of Trump’s Fed bullying in 60 seconds. I’ll get better, I promise.
Dark Markets is a reader-supported publication. To receive every update, consider becoming a supporter.
Subscribe
The past week has seen the complete and unambiguous revelation of Donald Trump and his movement as genuinely and unambiguously fascistic, from the shooting of a civilian by ICE gestapo to the banana republic bullying of Fed Chair Jerome Powell. It is similarly unambiguous that the two Trump administrations have attracted and supported financial fraudsters of many stripes, from Trump himself to Medicaid scam artist Rick Scott to MLM scion Betsy DeVoss to crypto scammer Justin Sun to Trevor Milton, the pardoned mastermind of the $20 billion Nikola fraud.
·
April 2, 2025
·
September 15, 2025
This is not coincidental. Over more than ten years studying scam artists, and an entire life trying to comprehend the forces of authoritarianism that work under the surface of the supposedly democratic American mind, I’ve found that they share numerous tactics for manipulating adherents and reinforcing their false beliefs to the benefit of the masterminds.
Below, I’ve dug into a few key commonalities between the con of fascism, and a plain old rug-pull:
The Myth of the Heroic Genius
The Desire of the Other
Empowerment of the Worst
Appeal to the Disempowered
The Cruelty of Hope
My work over the last ten years has been substantially focused not on the Trumpist far right, but on Silicon Valley technology frauds, from Sam Bankman-Fried to Elizabeth Holmes to Elon Musk to Sam Altman. Largely, this sort of figure until recently professed vaguely ‘liberal’ ideas, but their actual, mostly utilitarian beliefs have been unmasked as deeply authoritarian and anti-human.
·
January 7, 2024
We’ve seen over the past three years, at a scale of global impacts, how that utilitarian engineers’ mindset itself feeds authoritarianism by fostering the worship of a few rare “geniuses,” fundamentally different from other people, and crucially, able to deliver a flawless utopia - just one of many resonances between these left-coasters and Trump himself. This is just a modern, technocratic iteration of the hero, the enticing figure who, as Ernest Becker explores in The Denial of Death, deceives us by promising to take responsibility for that which we don’t feel able to accomplish ourselves. The hero, Becker argues, may be the most dangerous social and political figure of all.
·
April 27, 2025
Yudkowsky’s “Rationalist” ideology is the gold standard of lib-coded authoritarianism, with his own relentless, laughable claims to heroism having spawned multiple charismatic cults with plans to violently overthrow the U.S. government and replace it with elite technocrats. He is perhaps the ultimate subject who knows not what he does: after 20 years as part of an elaborate financial fraud to boost “artificial intelligence,” Yudkowsky has constructed an impenetrable veil of ignorance around the implications of his own beliefs.
·
June 23, 2024
These authoritarians have been my focus because they are more subtle and devious than the far stupider people now directly in control of the U.S. government, like Stephen Miller, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. But whatever their affect or aesthetic, they are all at root technology fraudsters, grown fat off unfalsifiable claims about the future they promise to build.
There is a deep and causative cycle between the utopian promise and the inevitable authoritarian crackdown that inevitably follows - as surely as Sam Bankman-Fried turned rightward after finding himself in prison.
·
February 25, 2025
My book Stealing the Future draws substantially on the work of Jacques Lacan, a psychoanalyst interested in the ways that people deceive themselves. This is the key of both financial fraud and fascism: ultimately, victims are tricked because they want to be tricked. In some cases this is a matter of desperation, but more often, victims of financial fraud are blinded by greed.
In a very similar way, adherents swayed to fascistic thinking are motivated by their sense that someone else, or some other group, is enjoying something they have been denied. This is not the typical popular understanding - most theorizing patly blames racial and ethnic hatred for things like the current lawless ICE purges. But that hatred is not a cause, but an effect - an externalizing mollification for the disappointments of a life lived poorly. The pathetic incompetence of ICE agents - 1/3rd of whom struggled to do 15 sit-ups - reflects the cold truth that, as Matt Christman put it recently, this is a crusade of the unemployable against the employed.
Now, that is not simply a character judgment - the structure of the U.S. economy, and particularly Clintonite outsourcing and free trade policies of the 1990s, is to blame for much of that unemployability. But not all of it: fascists tend to be people who feel entitled, nominally by skin color but ultimately by a purer sociopathic narcissism, to the fruits of the world, while being frustrated by the personal limitations that prevent them from gaining them.
The word “fascism” comes from a Roman term for sticks bound together to increase their strength, and it continues to stand for a union of weak people seeking strength through compliance.
Both in financial frauds and political movements, this sense of entitlement, forced by personal weakness to adhere to a group, can be manipulated by invoking what Lacan calls “The Big Other” - usually some group, different from the target audience, who can be imagined, not to be inferior, but primarily to have more. More authority, more money, even more happiness. The Ur-text of modern fascism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, imagines an all-powerful Jewish cabal who have already stolen prosperity from all the good Germans. In financial scams, the Other is often the purported source of secrets, cheats, and tricks that the scammer promises the victim to help overcome and circumvent.
·
April 14, 2024
My fascination with frauds of all types is centered almost entirely on the frequency with which fraudsters seem to truly believe the con they are selling. Obviously Sam Bankman-Fried is my North Star of Delusion, whose autistic commitment to the lie of his own innocence has preoccupied me for years now. Hayden Davis admitting to insider trading while denying he did anything wrong is another sterling example.
·
March 13, 2025
I have an emerging theory of how this works. The most successful fraudsters are committed purely to power and money, from the very beginning. Power and money are their definition of the success of their own mission.
At the same time, as we see clearly with Bankman-Fried, Davis, Donald Trump, Curtis Yarvin, et al., both fraudsters and fascist leaders, as groups, aren’t actually good at the things they publicly claim to be doing. Sam Bankman-Fried was terrible at running a hedge fund and crypto exchange; Donald Trump is an inept and floundering leader even by his own standards; the “philosopher” Curtis Yarvin is as deep as a puddle.
But they never become conscious of their own incompetence, because their real goals were not stewardship, leadership, or serious thought - only personal aggrandizement. If they are succeeding, how they did it simply disappears from the minds of these sociopathic manipulators. They are able to confidently lie because their definition of “success” is exactly their ability to steal from people.
And of course, when this behavior goes unpunished or even rewarded - as it did for Trump for decades - it both affirms the perpetrator’s deluded self-image, and leaves them free to accumulate actual power. An equally sterling example is Elon Musk, who for nearly a decade has lied incessantly about vaporware like Full Self-Driving and the Las Vegas tunnel.
He has failed again and again in these objective goals, but because he has never been punished for those failures - because, in fact, he has been rewarded for lying - he has convinced himself, and his followers, of his own success.
Subscribe
The secret of success for Amway back in the 1950s was targeting housewives, and convincing them they could be “businesswomen” - a story unpacked in an excellent podcast called The Dream. Housewives, Amway founder Rich DeVoss figured out, simply didn’t have much to do, or much control over their lives, in an era when divorce was nearly unthinkable.
So when Amway came along to help them “start a business,” they weren’t exclusively looking for profit - they were also buying meaning and identity. Over time, when the profit never emerged - even when they lost huge sums - Amway managed to keep many of its sellers hooked with those social benefits.
·
January 28, 2025
In the big picture, whether they made or lost money didn’t matter to a lot of Amway participants - until, at some point, it inevitably came to matter, in the form of dire, final grim consequences, like divorce. At that point, the women who had experienced a brief surge of empowerment felt even worse about themselves after being ripped off by Rich DeVoss.
Getting ripped off can have counterintuitive effects on victims, simultaneously making them feel worse about themselves, and in many cases, more loyal to the person who victimized them. They are also generally unlikely to discuss their experience as a fraud victim publicly or openly, given the embarrassment attached to it. Being the victim of fraud appears to seriously harm people’s faith in their own abilities.
This undermining of victims’ sense of their own competence makes them more vulnerable fascistic thinking. It leaves partisans distrustful of themselves and subordinate to the Dear Leader.
Subscribe
The saddest part of covering frauds, from BitConnect to FTX, is the cruelty of the hope these scammers inspire.
The targeting of the most vulnerable doesn’t just make marks easier to trick because they’re less worldly or educated. Desperate people are already in the thrall of a desire for escape, a desire that can be briefly satisfied even by their own fantasies.
·
August 31, 2025
A charismatic figurehead willing to shamelessly pander to those fantasies with false promises of coming greatness will find easy targets. For financial frauds, there’s the promise of a grand payout, often tied up in a sense of group belonging - the worst period of crypto scamming, remember, was set to the tune of Randi Zuckerberg’s “We’re All Gonna Make It.”
The implicit promise of a truly great scam is of such scope and depth that it is nothing less than a disguised promise of Revelation and the End Times, when the chosen will enter Heaven and the unbelievers will be left behind. The best scammers, like Trump, always promise a final balancing of the scales, a correction of the great injustice that has left huddled masses unjustly scorned, impoverished, and alone.
Of course, this hope is never fulfilled. Worse, fraudsters use well-worn techniques to quietly “cool off” marks from their overheated optimism, often by promising that things will surely work out next time.
With Trumpist fascism, the “cool off” has become almost comically obvious: instead of the Epstein files and prosperity, you get jackbooted thugs who are at least brutalizing people you are being told not to like.
That’s plenty to keep the marks in line and content.
For now.
Subscribe
Subscribe to Dark Markets
Subscribe to Dark Markets
Dark Markets👁️ Bullish and EOS: “A Fraud in Plain Sight”
The team behind Bullish brutally rugpulled their earliest investors. They'll do the same to public markets.
Dark Markets👁️ The Metaverse is On Its Last Legs
Say goodbye to the Previous Thing. Also: Salesforce gets f*cked by AI, Tesla's Roadster scam, and more.
Dark Markets👁️Not Even Past: Bullish and Ethereum's Shared Origin at Bitcoin Miami 2014
Ages and ages and ages thence
Dark Markets👁️ Bullish and EOS: “A Fraud in Plain Sight”
The team behind Bullish brutally rugpulled their earliest investors. They'll do the same to public markets.
Dark Markets👁️ The Metaverse is On Its Last Legs
Say goodbye to the Previous Thing. Also: Salesforce gets f*cked by AI, Tesla's Roadster scam, and more.
Dark Markets👁️Not Even Past: Bullish and Ethereum's Shared Origin at Bitcoin Miami 2014
Ages and ages and ages thence
<100 subscribers
<100 subscribers
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Dark Markets
Dark Markets
No comments yet