The Indian Coal Mine That Razed a Village and Shrank a Forest - A company run by Asia’s richest man, Gautam Adani, is strip-mining tribal lands for fossil fuels. Forest-dwellers are fighting back. - link
Why Jerome Powell Could Be the Most Important Person in Washington Between Now and 2024 - With gridlock looming in Congress, the task of stabilizing the economy will fall largely on the Fed chair. - link
When Election Deniers Concede - In the midterms, voters rejected Stop the Steal candidates in critical swing states. Is the democracy crisis over? - link
The Toughness of Nancy Pelosi - She helped save Obamacare and other transformative legislation, and made it clear when the nonsense had to stop. - link
The Dark Side of the World Cup - Heidi Blake on FIFA’s dirty business, and how Qatar came to host the games. Plus, Stephania Taladrid on Latino voters in the midterms; and Susan Orlean on the queen of the tiger mothers. - link
From Vox
The Federalist Society controls the federal judiciary, so why can’t they stop whining? -
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas speaks during a conference of The Federalist Society in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, on January 31, 2020. | Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
All they do is win, win, win, no matter what. So why are America’s most powerful lawyers so unhappy?
On Thursday, Pryor gave the opening speech at the annual conference of the most powerful legal organization in the United States. But the bulk of the judge’s remarks to the Federalist Society was a Bill O’Reilly-style barrage of insult comedy, largely directed at left-leaning journalists who cover the federal judiciary. Sample joke: “No less an authority than [Slate’s Supreme Court reporter] Mark Joseph Stern — and really, is there less an authority?”
Chief Judge Pryor: “No less an authority than Mark Joseph Stern—and really, is there less an authority?—has explained: ‘FedSoc judges tend to hire FedSoc clerks … the radicalization machine produces an endless line of young lawyers even more extreme than their predecessors.’” pic.twitter.com/l1LrQtqcmC
It’s hard to imagine an event that better symbolizes the mix of power and pathos that underlies the Federalist Society than Pryor’s foray into insult comedy. Here is this eminence of the legal profession — a lifetime appointee speaking to an organization whose members dominate the federal judiciary, and especially the nation’s highest Court. And yet he can’t help but obsess over a handful of powerless scribes who write disparagingly about his friends in the society.
Ideas that begin with the Federalist Society frequently become Supreme Court opinions in just a few years. In the past, the society’s annual gathering has foreshadowed the destruction of US gun laws; the strangulation of the federal administrative state; and, in one of its increasingly rare high-profile failures, the attempted death of Obamacare. The five most conservative Supreme Court justices, four of whom attended the society’s annual black-tie dinner this year, are all enthusiastic supporters of the Federalist Society. I try to attend the Federalist Society’s conference every year, largely so that I’ll know what Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch will say in their future judicial opinions.
Yet this year was different. Indeed, it often felt like two conferences, neither of which offered much insight into the kind of world the Federalist Society’s most powerful acolytes will build for us in the coming years.
The first conference was largely a retrospective, looking back upon the impressive array of victories the conservative legal movement chalked up in the Supreme Court’s last term. Panels celebrated the death of Roe v. Wade and the gaping hole the Federalist Society’s justices tore into the wall separating church and state. The first day of the conference included threedifferentpanels touting the so-called “major questions doctrine,” a judicially created doctrine that gives the Court and its current Republican-appointed majority a virtually limitless veto power over federal regulations that they do not like.
As several conference attendees told me, the fact that so much of the conference was backward-looking — cheering past victories rather than planning for new ones — is hardly a sign that the society’s power is diminished. After a round of generational victories, it’s normal to pause for a moment and regroup before beginning a new offensive. For the moment, however, the conference offered only the narrowest window into where the Supreme Court might go next.
The second conference-within-a-conference emphasized the conservative legal movement’s cultural grievances. All four of the conference’s “showcase” panels — large sessions that were scheduled alongside no other events so that everyone could attend them — were a part of this. These four showcase panels emphasized complaints that Federalist Society conservatives often feel out of place at law schools, at large law firms, inside bar associations, and in the legal profession more broadly.
But the thing about these sorts of grievances — which frequently mirror broader conservative complaints about a so-called “cancel culture” — is that, even if you agree that such cultural complaints cry out for a solution, these are rarely the sort of problems that lawyers are capable of solving.
A conservative law student who is unpopular with their classmates cannot seek an injunction requiring their fellow students to like them. Nor should a conservative lawyer be able to successfully sue their colleagues for ostracizing them. The First Amendment places strict limits on the law’s ability to shape culture, and it simply isn’t possible for the government to force people to change their minds about anything.
There is also a very real tension between these two conferences, though the Federalist Society itself does not seem aware of it. If members of the Federalist Society feel isolated in their jobs or at their schools, they should consider that the policy victories their organization touted in its first conference drive many lawyers and law students to resent Federalist Society colleagues who celebrate those victories.
It is asking a lot, for example, for members of the society to expect to be welcomed with enthusiasm by their women colleagues — after the society’s justices just seized control of those women’s uteruses.
The Federalist Society craves acceptance from elite institutions
The Federalist Society knows how to hold a grudge.
In 1987, in a bipartisan 58-42 vote, the Senate voted to reject conservative Judge Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Thirty-five years later, the Federalist Society is still bitter. Indeed, this year’s convention concluded with an hourlong “Hon. Robert H. Bork Memorial Lecture,” in which federal appellate Judge A. Raymond Randolph compared Bork to Albert Einstein.
“One of the Democrats’ main attacks was that Judge Bork was out of the legal mainstream,” Randolph lamented, before claiming that attack “has no intellectual content,” that it “tells us nothing about truth,” and proclaiming that Einstein “was out of the scientific mainstream, and thank God he was.”
Randolph’s rage centered on the fact that Bork was judged not on the basis of his exceptional intellectual accomplishments, but instead on how his far-right political views would lead him to reshape the law (among many other things, Bork wrote in 1963 that federal legislation banning whites-only lunch counters is rooted in a “principle of unsurpassed ugliness”).
When Bork was up for confirmation, Randolph decried, “it didn’t matter that the Supreme Court had never reversed any of Bob’s judicial opinions.” Or that The Antitrust Paradox, a book authored by Bork, “had by that time defined the mainstream of antitrust law.”
Randolph’s defense of Bork was echoed by other Federalist Society speakers, including Northwestern University law professor John McGinnis, who railed against opponents of Bork’s confirmation who deemed the judge unfit for the Supreme Court despite the fact that he “had been Solicitor General of the United States, a professor at Yale Law School, and author of the most influential book on antitrust law in the history of the subject.”
Bork was, indeed, one of the conservative legal movement’s greatest intellects. He was one of the most significant — quite possibly the most significant — antitrust scholars in American history. The conservative legal movement sent America its best mind, and the Senate took one look at his conservatism and said “no thanks.”
The fact that the Federalist Society still seethes over this lost political fight, more than three decades later, is a microcosm for the need for respect and acceptance from elite institutions that animates so much of the society’s rhetoric.
In a showcase panel about “The Mission of Law Schools,” for example, Northwestern law professor Joshua Kleinfeld claimed that “cancellations” on law school campuses are “just the tip of a very, very, very big iceberg.” “Something momentous is happening,” Kleinfeld warned, which has destroyed law schools’ commitment to “open inquiry based on argument and evidence.”
And this culture has spread past law schools, at least according to the Federalist Society panel on the culture of large law firms. There, panelists complained that, as Supreme Court advocate Kannon Shanmugam put it, “there are two types of law firms: liberal and more liberal in terms of the makeup of the lawyers who work there.”
One frustrating thing about the conference, at least for an observer who does not share the society’s viewpoint, is that many of the speakers on these panels seemed to just assume that forces like “cancel culture” are serious problems and that there was no need to justify that claim. So it was often difficult to pin down what, exactly, had been done to these lawyers to spark their indignation, and what problem, exactly, they might want to solve. And when a few panelists did try to provide evidence for their broad claims, the evidence was quite thin.
Kleinfeld, for example, offered only two anecdotes to support his warnings of a giant iceberg, one of which didn’t even involve a law school. Specifically, he claimed that a single college freshman on an unnamed campus was harassed and stalked by his classmates after he expressed the view that women tend to have different career preferences than men for genetic reasons. And he also told a tale about an unnamed law professor at an unnamed law school, who allegedly was pressured to take early retirement after students falsely accused him of making racist statements in class.
Meanwhile, the task of quantifying large law firms’ excessive liberalism fell to former Solicitor General Paul Clement, who argued that, at least in the most high-profile, most politically charged cases heard by the Supreme Court, the nation’s largest law firms are reluctant to file amicus briefs on behalf of conservative political causes.
Clement researched the Supreme Court’s recent anti-abortion case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization(2022) and found that 24 of the nation’s 100 largest law firms filed amicus briefs on the pro-abortion side, while none of the 100 filed anti-abortion briefs. Similarly, in West Virginia v. EPA (2022), the case striking down part of the EPA’s ability to regulate power generation, Clement claimed that four of the nation’s largest firms filed a brief on the Biden administration’s side, while none supported the conservative movement’s position.
It’s worth acknowledging that large law firms are hardly the sort of employers where economically conservative lawyers — as opposed to socially conservative lawyers — will feel unwelcome. These firms, which typically charge hundreds of dollars an hour for even their most junior lawyers’ time, overwhelmingly serve wealthy individuals and corporations who do not want to be sued, taxed, or regulated. And an enormous amount of the work at these firms focuses on keeping these clients happy.
That said, I have little doubt that Kleinfeld, Shanmugam, and Clement are describing something real when they argue that cultural conservatives are in the minority within elite legal institutions. The reasons why, however, are hardly nefarious. They are largely driven by market forces, and by the political preferences of university students.
Young people overwhelmingly reject the Federalist Society’s values
In CNN’s exit polls of the 2022 election, voters with college degrees preferred Democrats over Republicans by 10 points. Voters under age 30 preferred Democrats by nearly 30 points. Admittedly, exit polls are often imperfect measures of public preferences, but various polls have shown that young people strongly favor Democrats since at least 2008. And one other indicator backs up the claim that college-educated young people are especially liberal: On many university campuses, Democrats ran up truly astounding margins in the most recent election.
I’ve been going through some of the college campus precincts this morning. This one at University of Michigan is indicative of why the work of youth organizing is so incredibly important. 93% voted for the Dem ticket. pic.twitter.com/iEJRdDSyai
So, while Kleinfeld’s vague anecdotes about a single bullied student and a single retired professor tell us absolutely nothing about the culture of universities writ large, it is entirely believable that Kleinfeld and other conservatives on university campuses feel like they are part of an increasingly small minority.
And these trends impact employers no less than law schools.
The large law firms that Shanmugam and Clement spoke of at their panel are the sorts of firms that pay young associates outlandish amounts of money to work punishing hours for demanding clients. Many recent graduates enter these firms intending to leave as soon as their student loans are paid off. Others seek a few years of on-the-job training before moving on to more desirable work. At the most prestigious firms, only a tiny percentage of incoming associates make partner, and the rest are often pushed out the door if they do not leave voluntarily.
These firms’ business models, in other words, depend on a constant churn of young lawyers, recruited from an overwhelmingly left-leaning cohort of recent law graduates. To sustain this model, the biggest firms must compete with each other to build a work culture that will attract highly educated young people — a demographic that is heavily Democratic.
So there is a name for the force that is driving Big Law’s culture to the left — and the name of that force is “capitalism.” Successful employers build workplace cultures that will allow them to hire talented people and retain employees who perform well.
What, exactly, does the Federalist Society plan to do about its cultural grievances?
For all of the society’s fears that they are unwelcome in elite legal institutions, they had few ideas that are likely to quell these fears. Sometimes they were quite open about this fact. At the end of his presentation about large law firms, for example, Clement conceded that “I think the problem is pretty glaring,” but “the solutions are much harder to find.”
He’s certainly not wrong about that. What, exactly, would a policy solution to the supposed problem that Clement identifies look like? Should lawyers at large firms be forced to represent clients they find abhorrent, and to make arguments that they believe would deeply harm their country? Should state bar regulators impose quotas on these firms, and mandate that a certain percentage of their partners must have voted for Donald Trump? These are the kinds of solutions that, even if they survived scrutiny under the First Amendment, could only spark even deeper resentment against conservatives.
Similarly, what, exactly, should be done to change law schools? Should professors who teach from a left-leaning perspective be sanctioned or stripped of tenure? Or perhaps, fresh off the Supreme Court’s likely decision ending race-conscious affirmative action programs in university admissions, the Court could then mandate that law schools admit a critical mass of Republicans?
Changing culture is not easy, and people across the political spectrum who wish to shape an institution’s culture often struggle to make headway. The evidence on the effectiveness of the sort of workplace diversity trainings sometimes advocated by liberals, for example, is mixed at best. Universities and education policymakers have struggled for years to rein in the culture of sexual assault that exists on many campuses.
That said, there are definitely some figures within the Federalist Society who favor draconian measures to try to shift culture. At last year’s Federalist Society conference, speakers proposed an array of far-right solutions to what they described as the problem of “wokeness” in society — ranging from repealing the ban on discrimination on the basis of “race, sex, religion, and national origin,” to enacting laws requiring social media companies to publish speech they deem offensive, to a vague-but-ominous proposal to “wield in state legislative chambers some degree of power to punish our enemies within the confines of the rule of law.”
Meanwhile, a few of the Federalist Society’s most powerful supporters openly embrace the kind of censorship and intimidation of liberal voices that our First Amendment forbids. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a frequent speaker at the society’s events, recently signed legislation imposing a speech code on public university professors. As a federal judge described the law in a decision striking it down, it “bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints” on various subjects relating to race, gender, and nationality.
New York Times overturned a $500,000 verdict (just under $5 million in today’s dollars) that an Alabama court awarded to a Jim Crow official, ostensibly because the Times published a pro-civil rights advertisement that contained some minor factual errors. More broadly, New York Times ensured that public officials may not use malicious libel suits to target media outlets that criticize the government. Or who criticize officials like, say, Judge William Pryor.
So the Federalist Society’s most powerful figures have some tools which they could use to force liberal institutions to show more outward respect to conservative ideas. It is certainly possible for an authoritarian government to twist culture into the conservative movement’s preferred shape, and Thomas and Gorsuch have laid out the first step toward doing so: strip the media of its First Amendment protections. After that, maybe they could do the same to law schools and law firms as well.
But if the Federalist Society embraces some of these more aggressive policies, its members should not be surprised that the rest of the legal profession might resent them for it. Nor should they be surprised that so many lawyers, law professors, and law students resent them for what they have already done to American law.
Democrats’ quietly effective strategy for defeating election deniers -
Newly elected Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes gives a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, on November 14. Fontes defeated Republican candidate Mark Finchem, who has claimed widespread election fraud in the state. | Jon Cherry/Getty Images
Inside the strategy that carried Democratic secretary of state candidates to victory.
Secretary of state races are normally dull affairs. Frequently buoyed to victory by whichever party wins at the top of the ticket, candidates for the posts that oversee the administration of elections traditionally haven’t been household names.
That all changed after 2020. Once Donald Trump began questioning the integrity of the presidential election — and then turned his fire on individual states’ electoral processes after he lost — it became clear that electoral administration was crucial to ensure a peaceful transfer of power.
“The 2020 election cycle really set at the center secretaries of state as the defenders of democracy,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told me. “And voters were paying attention.”
Then came 2022. As record numbers of election deniers and conspiracy theorists began to run for key posts around the country this year, the urgency of electing sane, normal candidates was now existential. Threats to democracy began to take center stage in polling, in Congress’s investigation into the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, and in President Joe Biden’s pitch to voters ahead of the midterm elections.
But Griswold — and the small team at the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, which she chairs — were already developing a strategy to fight back, one they’d amplify through strong fundraising, and by outspending right-wing opponents. They believed voter education, as well as plain and convincing messages that cast election-denying candidates as the extremists they were, would make it easier for moderate and independent voters to vote for Democrats, even if they didn’t vote Democratic up and down the ballot.
And they were right. DASS-backed candidates won every election in which they competed this year, including in key battleground states like Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, and Minnesota. Those wins happened as voters rejected all but one of the candidates aligned with the America First Secretary of State Coalition, a conspiracy theory-minded conservative group trying to win posts that would enable them to oversee elections in 2024.
Much of this stunning collapse of election deniers nationwide can be attributed to the work of Griswold, DASS, and the Democratic candidates. But, ultimately, the defeat of election deniers this year was up to the voters who turned out, and who surprised much of the political world with nuanced choices in these battleground states.
How candidate messaging helped lay out clear stakes
With a sour national mood and persistently high inflation, Democratic candidates in secretary of state races faced a challenge that other statewide candidates didn’t have. While gubernatorial and Senate hopefuls could talk about those kitchen-table issues and present their own plans to address them, secretaries of state have no power over taxes, crime, and immigration, limiting the platform they could run on.
National headwinds added an additional layer of danger: Candidates had to overcome any negative associations the electorate might have with Democrats in a midterm year that was supposed to punish incumbents and the party in power. These candidates also had to define themselves clearly against their opponents while other statewide candidates were already swamping the airwaves with their own messages about democracy and voting rights, and in many cases, explain what the office even did to less engaged voters.
“The one core message across all of the races was partly just explaining what a secretary of state is, the role of a secretary of state in elections, and raising awareness about this position in general,” Kim Rogers, the executive director of DASS, told me. Once voters had a better understanding of why the office mattered, the answer seemed simple to them.
Democratic candidates also found ways to connect the office to the greater frustration voters had with the status quo, like with inflation and the economy. Cisco Aguilar, the Democratic secretary of state-elect for the office in Nevada, told me that while he often spent time “literally being a civics teacher,” it was necessary to have those in-the-weeds conversations.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Cisco Aguilar speaks at an SEIU union worker Election Day rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, on November 8.
“Once you educate them, you can say, ‘I understand your top issues are the education of your kids, your job, your small business, the safety of your community, and this is how the secretary of state’s office is responsible for making sure you have a voice in these issues.’”
Aguilar also said he spent much of the 18-month campaign casting himself as the candidate of steadiness, and his opponent, Jim Marchant, the leader of the election denier coalition, as the candidate of chaos. He explained to voters how Nevada, and its elections, would have an impact on who the next president might be in 2024, and that an election conspiracist in charge of that process could lead to not just their disenfranchisement, but worsening conditions in their state and the nation.
“All communities, strong communities, are built by having people’s say, by making sure you have the greatest participation of the members of that community, and making sure people understood that their voices need to be heard,” he said. “Chaos is not good for any community. Chaos leads to turmoil. And when you have turmoil, it impacts the economy. It impacts people’s jobs. It impacts the education of kids.”
Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state-elect in Arizona, set out the stakes of his election in similar terms to voters. Facing the outspoken election denier and conspiracist Mark Finchem, Fontes went further in defining just how extreme his opponent was. During a DASS news conference earlier this week, Fontes described Finchem as being something worse than an election denier.
“We need to stop calling them election deniers, and start calling them authoritarians,” he said. “There’s a word in Spanish called negacionistas, which I think really describes them very, very well. These are people who negate the reality that exists out there. These are folks who do not believe in democracy, they do not believe in the American voter, and the power of the consent of the governed.”
I asked Fontes a bit more about why he uses this term, and how it helped him reach critical Latino voters, when we chatted earlier this week.
“My authentic self does not suffer bullshit very kindly,” he told me. “You’ve got to be truthful, you’ve got to be direct, and you’ve got to be honest; you owe it to the people to whom you are talking to be clear, and being clear sometimes means that you might bend somebody’s feelings a little bit.”
By using the term election denier, Fontes felt that he was not “doing justice to our side of the fight,” because “by calling someone who is an authoritarian an election denier, that seems like a very politically correct way to get around conflict, to get around a direct attack against the anti-American sentiment.”
That imperative also led him to fine-tune his campaign pitch to Latino and Hispanic voters in Arizona, who make up 25 percent of the state’s electorate, by recognizing that a patriotic message aimed at English speakers wouldn’t translate easily to a cohort of citizens who have different shared experiences from Latin America.
In television and social media ads, he talked in Spanish in a collective sense about Arizonans knowing the importance of having a “voice and vote” because “we know just how easy it is to lose it” — “sabemos que tan facil es perderlo.”
“Hispanic Americans have a collective memory, and [that] includes the political tumult that Latin American nations have experienced over the last several decades, and over the last several generations. We know what it is to lose democracy, because we can identify with Venezuela, we can identify with Central American countries,” Fontes said.
Bringing all of these various messages to voters were the tens of millions of dollars the candidates, and groups like End Citizens United, iVote, and a DASS-affiliated PAC spent on television ads and face-to-face campaigning. DASS itself went from raising $4.5 million in all of 2021 (already $2 million more than what it had available in 2020) to over $25 million in the 2022 cycle. By October, Democratic secretary of state candidates and aligned outside groups were outspending Republicans 57 to 1 in TV ads; in third-quarter fundraising, the New York Times reported, Marchant in Nevada had raised $89,000, when Aguilar had raised $1.1 million.
Nick Hagen/Washington Post via Getty Images
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson points at the crowd at the Michigan Democrats post-midterms party in Detroit on November 8.
All this messaging worked — in Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and Michigan, Democratic secretary of state candidates ran even with other statewide candidates, or overperformed. They won many races by larger margins than other Democrats in down-ballot contests. And most surprising — early exit polling in Arizona and Nevada, and across the country, showed that they were able to garner support from a large share of Republicans and independents.
Independents sealed Democratic victories
That crossover support was crucial to victory.
Both Arizona and Nevada are states where nonpartisan, independent voters make up just as large a share of voters, if not larger, than Republicans and Democrats alone. Victory in a statewide contest requires Democrats to not just hold their base, but win independent voters and some Republican support. Because economic concerns were top of mind for most of these voters, many politicians, strategists, pundits, and journalists questioned in the final days of the campaign whether a closing message focused on democracy and the “extreme” agenda of Republican candidates in swing states would resonate.
Exit polls, and surveys of voters, suggest that it did — especially in down-ballot races like secretary of state contests. In a new report on focus groups conducted in the weeks before the election, the progressive group Navigator Research found that among Democrats and independents, fear of Republican threats to democracy was a strong motivator: participants in their focus groups said they were voting “to stop Republicans” and feared Republicans “being batshit crazy.”
Aguilar told me he knew that these underlying fears of Republican positions might be especially helpful in Nevada, where his opponent was advocating against the very popular early voting period and mail-in voting options that most Nevadans use to vote. He won by a bigger margin than either Catherine Cortez Masto, the Democratic senator who won reelection, or Joe Lombardo, the Republican challenger who won the governor’s race — and won Washoe County, the state’s more educated, more independent, and more purple swing district, by a wider margin than both Cortez Masto and Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak, who lost reelection.
Fontes had similar results in Arizona, winning more votes than either Democratic candidate for governor or Senate in the state’s biggest swing county, Maricopa. Meanwhile Griswold, in Colorado, wasn’t running against an election denier, but still won by more this year than when she ran for her first term in 2018, a “blue wave” year.
“The big headline from Colorado is voters were very concerned about democracy. They showed up. They rejected extremism, both in the primary and in the general. And we saw overwhelming support that we really have not seen,” she said.
Now these candidates have to show those independents and Republicans they won this time that they will live up to their word. They’ll have their chance come 2024; for candidates like Griswold, that will simply mean continuing to run elections as they always have.
The spectacular ongoing implosion of crypto’s biggest star, explained -
Dion Lee/Vox, Getty Images
FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried have experienced a shocking downfall.
Before that, he said he might spend as much as $1 billion on politics in 2024. He said he had a lot of ideas for policing the crypto industry and using his crypto-fueled fortune for good. He said he’d be fine bailing out some crypto companies in trouble as crypto winter hit over the summer. All of these claims are now in limbo thanks to another thing he said on November 7: that his crypto exchange, FTX, was “fine.” It was not. Instead, the next day, the exchange imploded. By November 11, the company had filed for bankruptcy, and Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO. The company’s balance sheet has been revealed to be a disaster. FTX’s new CEO — who helped manage Enron after its 2001 collapse — said that he has never in his career “seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such complete absence of trustworthy financial information.” The situation, again, coming from the guy who dealt with the Enron fallout, is “unprecedented.”
“It’s incredible how quickly these things can spiral out of control,” Molly White, a software engineer and prominent crypto critic behind the website Web3 is Going Just Great, told me.
Whether or not you’re a crypto person, chances are you’ve come into some sort of contact with FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried — better known as SBF — in some fashion. He’s partnered with big names, such as soon-to-be-divorced couple Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen, to spread the crypto gospel. He co-hosted Crypto Bahamas with medium name Anthony Scaramucci; figures such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair attended. (Disclosure: This August, Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Vox’s Future Perfect a grant for a 2023 reporting project. That project is now on pause.)
FTX ran a memorable ad featuring Larry David during the Super Bowl encouraging people to jump into crypto, even if they didn’t really get it. He bought the naming rights to the Miami Heat’s arena; whether that name will soon have to change is uncertain. Bankman-Fried was a major donor to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and again in the 2022 midterms, largely in primaries. He slowed political spending down in the election cycle’s final weeks. He had positioned himself as the “acceptable” face of crypto to Washington, DC, policymakers, and the public.
In a matter of days, his empire has exploded in a rather spectacular fashion. Thanks to a leak about the financial health of a trading firm he founded, Alameda Research, and some savvy maneuvers from a competing exchange, Binance, investors began to pull their money out of FTX en masse. FTT, a token the company issues, plunged in value. FTX was forced to seek a bailout.
John J. Ray III, the aforementioned new CEO of FTX, said in a statement on November 11 that Chapter 11 is “appropriate to provide FTX Group the opportunity to assess its situation and develop a process to maximize recoveries for stakeholders.” Bankman-Fried, who has said he’s intent on finding ways to help customers who can’t get their money out of the exchange, was to remain on in the transition, though the company has sought to distance itself from him. Atweet on November 16 says he has “no ongoing role” at FTX, FTX US, or Alameda, and “does not speak on their behalf.”
That came after Vox published a series of DMs with reporter Kelsey Piper. During that conversation, among other things, he claimed regulators — who he was previously courting — “make everything worse,” acknowledged a lot of his talk about ethics was a front, and said “each individual decision” he made “seemed fine and I didn’t realize how big their sum was until the end.”
He also claimed he would have been able to make customers fully whole within a month had FTX not filed for bankruptcy (without offering up any explanation how), and seemed to be holding on to some sort of hope he would still be able to turn things around. “A month ago I was one of the world’s greatest fundraisers,” he wrote in the DM. “Now I’m the fallen wreckage of one but there’s a thing about being fallen — there are people who know what it’s like, and who want to do for someone else what nobody did for them.”
Despite Bankman-Fried’s borderline delusional beliefs about a turnaround, it’shard to see this ending well. Some 130 entities, including FTX, FTX US, and Alameda Research, are involved in the bankruptcyproceedings.
In a series of tweets on November 11, Bankman-Fried reiterated that he was sorry. “I’m piecing together all of the details, but I was shocked to see things unravel the way they did earlier this week,” he wrote. The picture coming together of how his operations were run reveals the unraveling was perhaps not so shocking after all.
Crypto has seen a series of blowups over the past decade, and this is among the biggest — the industry’s Bear Stearns moment, in a way.
“Sam went from being the darling of the regulators to suddenly being a pariah, and it happened in a matter of what? Three days?” said Douglas Borthwick, chief business officer at INX, a crypto trading platform. “Astounding.”
FTX’s shocking implosion, explained-ish
In some ways, the story of what happened here is a bit of a classic one — one competitor (Binance) saw the opportunity to try to kill off another (FTX), so it did.
“This is two crypto exchange founders doing economic warfare, and one clearly won and one clearly lost,” said David Hoffman, the co-owner of Bankless, a podcast and newsletter in the crypto space.
How it was able to do so is a little complicated to unpack.
Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese-born entrepreneur with Canadian citizenship who is more commonly referred to as CZ, launched Binance in 2017 and has since grown it to be the biggest crypto exchange in the world. Bankman-Fried launched Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm focused on digital assets, in 2017, and then FTX, an exchange, in 2019. Bankman-Fried stepped away from running the day-to-day at Alameda, but the two entities remained very much connected.
On November 2, Ian Allison at CoinDesk published a leak revealing that much of Alameda’s $14.6 billion in assets were parked in a digital token created by FTX, called FTT. (In crypto, tokens are digital assets built on a blockchain.) Among other perks, FTT tokens give holders a discount on FTX trading fees. But the tokens were, like a lot of crypto tokens, kind of a made-up thing where their value was derived in believing there was value. “They printed this token out of thin air, endowed it with some valuation, and then Alameda used it as collateral,” said Nic Carter, partner at venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures.
Bloomberg’s Tracy Alloway used the example of a Beanie Baby you buy for $5 and then sell for $20 because you make a price guide saying that’s what he’s worth. In this case, FTX was making the Beanie Baby itself — as in issuing the FTT token for free — then buying some of the tokens back for whatever amount. It was then able to say the token was worth that amount and do business with it, by, for example, using it as collateral for a loan.
The CoinDesk leak and revelations that it had so much money in FTT prompted questions about Alameda’s financial health and concerns that a fall in the token’s value could cause real problems for both the trading firm and FTX.
Days later, on November 6, Zhao said on Twitter that Binance would be liquidating its FTT holdings, which it received after exiting its stake in FTX last year. (Binance was an investor in FTX, with Zhao buying a 20 percent stake in the exchange soon after its launch, according to Reuters.) He said Binance received $2 billion in tokens, including some in the FTX token, at the time, but due to “recent revelations that have come to light,” they were offloading the FTT.
The whole thing sort of spiraled from there. Alameda’s CEO, Caroline Ellison, insisted Alameda was fine and offered to buy Binance’s FTT at $22 a token, around where it was at the time. (Ellison is an interesting character, and Forbes has a good profile of her here.)Bankman-Fried claimed FTX’s assets were fine. Investors didn’t believe them.
FTT’s value plunged and is now under $2,holders made a mad dash to sell, and customers started trying to pull their money out of FTX altogether. The exchange suffered from a liquidity crunch, meaning it ran out of money. By November 8, it became clear that this was all sort of the “this is fine” meme but the fire had engulfed the building and everyone in it. Bankman-Fried announced that FTX had reached a “strategic transaction” to hand FTX over to Binance (but not FTX US). Zhao said Binance had signed a non-binding letter of intent to buy FTX, pending due diligence. The non-binding part wound up being important as reports soon began to emerge that Binance might back out, which it eventually did.
“As a result of corporate due diligence, as well as the latest news reports regarding mishandled customer funds and alleged US agency investigations, we have decided that we will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX.com,” Binance said in a series of tweets. “In the beginning, our hope was to be able to support FTX’s customers to provide liquidity, but the issues are beyond our control or ability to help.”
In a November 8 letter to investors, which include SoftBank, Tiger Global, and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Bankman-Fried said he was “sorry” he’d been hard to contact amid all the drama and that the “details are still being hashed out” in the Binance deal — a deal that he noted was non-binding and, ultimately, would soon be defunct. “Our first priority is to protect customers and the industry; that’s been guiding what we do,” he wrote.
On the morning of November 9, Zhao tweeted out a note he’d sent to the Binance team saying he “did not master plan this or anything related to it” and that he had “very little knowledge of the internal state of things at FTX” before Bankman-Fried called asking for help. (To be sure, his tweet earlier in the week indicated he had a hunch otherwise.) Semafor reported on November 8 that FTX had tried to get a bailout from Silicon Valley and Wall Street investors before resorting to Binance; many of FTX’s investors reportedly say they were blindsided by the deal.
“Binance saw something at FTX, they realized there was a vulnerability — we don’t know what it was yet — and realized they could take them out, which they did. It was really an incredible strategic move,” Carter said. “For Sam to sell to his literally biggest competitor, it definitely is a tough pill to swallow, so clearly something was very awry.”
This wasn’t the beginning of Zhao’s and Bankman-Fried’s simmering rivalry — the former didn’t love the latter’s policy outreach in the US — but it was the first time it had boiled over in such a big way. The potential deal signaled a detente, but now, it appears the hostilities remain. “At some point I might have more to say about a particular sparring partner, so to speak,” Bankman-Fried tweeted on November 10 in an apparent reference to Zhao. “But you know, glass houses. So for now, all I’ll say is: well played; you won.”
There are still some unknowns here, though the knowns are pretty wild
In a call with investors on November 9,first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Bankman-Fried told them he needed $8 billion to cover all of the requests customers were making to withdraw their money. Several of FTX’s investors have written down their investments in FTX to $0, meaning they think it’s worthless.
Since things began to fall apart in early November, there’s been quite a bit of speculation as to what happened. Many people I spoke with openly wondered where the original leak to CoinDesk had come from. Reuters reported on November 10that Bankman-Fried had transferred at least $4 billion in funds to Alameda to prop the firm up after it had suffered losses, a portion of which were customer deposits. He reportedly didn’t tell other FTX executives about it because he was nervous it would leak.
The long and short of it is that when you give your money to a crypto exchange, you are supposed to be able to get it back when you want to. That means “a client fund needs to be segregated, whether that’s dollars or whether that’s crypto,” Borthwick said. And if the exchange isn’t holding onto the client funds but is instead lending them or trading them (as Matt Levine at Bloomberg points out, banks, for example, lend customer deposits), then it runs the risk of not having the money to hand back to clients, especially when the clients come asking for the money all at once. In a tweet on November 10, Bankman-Fried insisted that FTX has a “total market value of assets/collateral higher than client deposits,” but that’s not the same as liquidity — he’s saying FTX still has that customer money, they just can’t get it out of the things it’s in.
On November 12, the Financial Times published a copy of FTX’s balance sheet dated two days earlier that was, to put it plainly, bonkers. It revealed that much of FTX’s assets were in venture capital investments that weren’t liquid and crypto tokens that were, as FT noted, not widely traded and that, as Bloomberg’s Levine explained, were sort of “magic beans” that FTX had made up. The balance sheet also listed a negative $8 billion entry labeled “hidden, poorly internally labeled ‘@fiat’ account” and a $7 million holding called “TRUMPLOSE.”
Bankman-Fried has tried to offer up some explanations, though he hasacknowledged he is still “fleshing out every detail” of what happened and that he believes he “fucked up twice,” including “poor internal labeling of bank-related accounts.” It’s also unclear how many of his claims can be believed at this point.
“In a very real way, SBF did this to himself, and its impacts will be felt across the ecosystem even by those trying to make a real difference,” said Scott Moore, the co-founder of Gitcoin, a project for building and funding Web3 open source infrastructure, referring to other projects in the space around areas like decentralized finance and public works.
Alex Svanevik, CEO of blockchain analytics platform Nansen, said that whatever the case, it’s clear FTX was not as transparent as it should have been about what it was doing with assets and deposits. “At some point, because of the situation with the FTT price [falling] and the information that Alameda had these positions that were collateralized with the FTT token and all of these things, it translated to a bank run on FTX,” Svanevik said, referring to the colloquial term for when a critical mass of customers removes their money from a financial institution over solvency fears. “The great irony is that of course SBF was the guy who was in Washington trying to engage with regulators, and it looks like he didn’t have his own house in order.”
What happened is not entirely different from what transpired when crypto lender Celsius filed for bankruptcy earlier this year or when crypto broker Voyager or another crypto lender, BlockFi, went under.
“People park money with these different entities and then trust these entities with having control over the funds, and on the back end, these entities are doing frankly irresponsible things with customers’ deposits,” Svanevik said. It causes problems because crypto’s very volatile, so valuations can fluctuate quickly and make it riskier than more traditional assets.
Compounding everything is that when some crypto entities fell apart earlier this year, Bankman-Fried offered to step in to try to save some of them. Now, he’s the one that needs help, and it’s not clear what will happen with any of the deals he made to help out others when things were still supposedly good at FTX. “I think it’s actually possible that none of those deals are consummated,” Carter said.
“The last several months, FTX was coming out as the savior of the industry and trying to help others,” said Reena Aggarwal, a professor of finance at Georgetown. “Could there be another white knight that shows up to help FTX? Who knows.” It appears no new white knight is in sight.
“If it was a regulated bank, the Fed would have stepped in, but it’s not,” Borthwick, whose own exchange runs entirely within the lines of US securities laws, said.
Zhao has sort of taken Bankman-Fried’s place as the voice of crypto and the industry’s savior. He has said the sector “will be fine” and is trying to set up a recovery fund to help people in the arena. Still, it seems unlikely he’s interested in giving Bankman-Fried a hand.
Semafor — in which Bankman-Fried was an initial investor — reported on November 9that all of FTX’s legal and compliance staff have quit. Alameda Research’s website is now private, and Bankman-Fried said on November 10 that the fund was winding down trading. According to Bloomberg, regulators in the US are looking into whether FTX mishandled customer funds and the relationships among FTX, FTX US, and Alameda.
Whether this was a Bear Stearns situation, a Bernie Madoff scenario, a combination, or something else entirely, for customers holding money on the exchange, it doesn’t really matter what the mechanism was if they don’t get that money back, which it seems increasingly unlikely they will. Not to mention the investors who backed FTX and will very likely not be seeing a return on that investment and will lose most or all of their capital.
“It doesn’t matter what the scheme was on the back end if you can’t get your money out,” Svanevik said. “They exercised poor risk management and they jeopardized customers’ deposits, which they shouldn’t do.”
The story has all sorts of twists and turns and open questions, the answers to which are still unfolding. Hundreds of millions of dollars appeared to have been hacked from FTX last week; the Securities Commission of the Bahamas now appears to have been behind the removal of the funds. The company apparently hired an in-house psychiatrist who talked to the New York Times about prescribing stimulants to employees. The Times and other outlets have also reported that many of the employees lived together and were romantically involved, including Bankman-Fried and Ellison. Some of the products Alameda was advertising — including high-yield loans with “no downside” — look sketchy as hell.
Crypto is still a roller coaster you might want to stay off of
FTX’s implosion has been nothing short of spectacular. While many people I spoke with noted they’d had some hesitation about FTX and Alameda intermingling in the past and potential conflicts of interest, most acknowledged they really did not expect this to happen this fast and in this way.
“[FTX] was so intent on legitimizing themselves and getting in the DC policy orbit,” Carter said.
Bankman-Fried’s power has evaporated. He had really positioned himself as the face of crypto and certainly of FTX (the company literally ran ads featuring him), and there’s some real reputational damage here. His regulatory and political investments, at least for the time being, are quite worthless, as is his weight in the crypto policy arena.
“The bill that Sam was working on is dead in the water, crypto loses some of its luster among these politicians that FTX was cozying up to,” Carter said. “There’s a renewed sense that this industry is just totally unregulated and run by crooks and fraudsters.”
“A key pillar of FTX’s marketing strategy has been to elevate the personal brand of SBF, and that’s where a situation like this becomes, frankly, quite embarrassing,” Svanevik said. “It just makes it look like a charade or something, like he was fooling people.”
Bloomberg estimates that Bankman-Fried’s personal wealth has been wiped out; his net worth had been pegged at nearly $16 billion at the start of the week, and is believed to have peaked at $26 billion in March. He is a major player in philanthropy and, specifically, the effective altruism movement, where adherents — including some like Bankman-Fried who are or aim to become ultra-wealthy — give away money to try to do the most good for the most people. His plunging net worth means significantly fewer funds for the causes he cares about — including pandemic prevention — and the effective altruism community has acknowledged the potential impact. The movement is now undergoing a moment of reckoning of its own. The team behind Future Fund, his philanthropic collective, has resigned. In a letter announcing their resignation, the team said it “looks likely that there are many committed grants” that the fund will not be able to honor, leaving many organizations that thought they were getting money from the fund in the lurch.
The entire episode draws attention to a consistent theme in crypto: It remains very much the Wild West. Even the best-known billionaire (who probably is a billionaire no longer) advancing this new technological and financial paradigm can wind up in a house-of-cards, smoke-and-mirrors scenario. Bankman-Fried’s “FTX is fine” declaration is reminiscent of a message another prominent crypto figure, Do Kwon, sent over the summer when his operation collapsed, telling his customers, “steady lads.”
“It’s remarkable, again and again, how crypto personalities like SBF will claim that everything is fine up until the very second they have to admit it isn’t,” White said. Much of crypto hinges on the belief that everything is fine and that coins and tokens have value … unless and until that belief dissipates.
The prices of many cryptocurrencies have declined in the wake of the FTX revelations. Binance, which has previously come under regulatory scrutiny of its own, has highlighted its own “commitment to transparency” in an effort to shore up confidence it won’t wind up like FTX. The share prices of Coinbase and Robinhood have fallen. Even people in the crypto space who don’t particularly love Bankman-Fried — including Zhao — acknowledge FTX’s troubles are bad for the industry. “Do not view it as a ‘win for us,’” Zhao wrote. “User confidence is severely shaken. Regulators will scrutinize exchanges even more.”
The regulatory waters around crypto remain murky, and it’s not clear what consequences there will be for FTX or for the broader crypto industry. Every time there’s a blow-up like this, there are calls for greater scrutiny on the arena overall, but many regulators and policymakers remain behind the curve. It’s worth noting that up to now, a lot of them were listening to Bankman-Fried, too. (I interviewed Bankman-Fried about meme investing and regulations in 2021, when he told me, “Some things are clearly legitimate and some things are clearly bullshit, and there’s also this long tail of things that are a little bit confusing.”)
“SBF was just spending a lot of time in DC schmoozing with lawmakers and giving recommendations on possible crypto regulation, acting as the ‘adult in the room’ and the liaison from the crypto industry,” White said. “If I was those legislators, I would be questioning a lot of his suggestions.”
“Everyone wants to go bankless until they get punched in the face, and after they get punched in the face they say, ‘Hold on, where are the regulators?’” Borthwick said. But, he noted, this saga is very much still unfolding. “This isn’t the end of it.”
Update, November 11, 10:45 am: This story was originally published on November 10 and has been updated to reflect FTX’s bankruptcy filing, Bankman-Fried’s resignation as CEO, and developments at his Future Fund.
Update, November 16: This piece has been updated with additional information about the status of Future Perfect’s grant from the Building a Stronger Future foundation.
Update, November 18, 4 pm ET: This piece has been updated throughout with further fallout from Bankman-Fried’s dealings, statements, and Twitter DMs.
From The Hindu: Sports
Kerala Premier League to begin on November 24 - Kerala Blasters and FC Kerala return through qualifying route
Aradhya, Maaya clinch a double each - Sports Bureau
FIFA chief blasts ‘hypocrisy’ of Western nations on eve of World Cup - Gianni Infantino said that the Western critics of Qatar's human rights record making a passionate defence of the World Cup in the Gulf state
Kriish Tyagi wins the title - Sports Bureau
Steely Smith sees Australia to series win against England - Both sides rested their captains, with Moeen Ali deputising for Joss Butler, while Josh Hazelwood was the surprise pick to lead Australia with Pat Cummins sitting out
From The Hindu: National News
House set on fire, three suffer burn injuries -
Heightened vigil helps police net 20 drug pushers in three months in Kozhikode - Synthetic drugs worth ₹25 lakh seized after launch of intensified flash inspections covering suspected locations in city
New police chief assumes charge in Alappuzha -
18 from Eluru district in A.P. injured as bus overturns near Pathanamthitta in Kerala - Except two, all the other injured are out of danger, says Eluru Collector
Will questioning attracts attacks: Sanjay asks - Visits Arvind house, condemns attack by TRS activists
From BBC: Europe
Leave if you can to save energy - Ukraine power boss - Reducing electricity use is crucial, head of Ukraine’s biggest private energy firm tells the BBC.
Ukraine war: Were Russian soldiers shot after surrendering? - Video has emerged that Russia says shows the killing of their troops in eastern Ukraine.
A journey to the site of the Nord Stream explosions - As Sweden says the gas lines were blown up deliberately, our Europe editor reports from the scene.
MH17: Australia asks Russia to hand over three who downed airliner - Australia’s demand comes after the men are found guilty of shooting down MH17 over eastern Ukraine.
French mystery over Normandy murder without victim’s body - Police are convinced a woman has been murdered: the problem is no-one has been reported missing.
From Ars Technica
The road to low-carbon concrete - Humanity’s love affair with cement and concrete results in massive CO2 emissions. - link
New Meta AI demo writes racist and inaccurate scientific literature, gets pulled - Galactica language model generated convincing text about fact and nonsense alike. - link
Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11.25 years in prison for Theranos fraud - Holmes is expected to appeal. - link
ID.me lied to IRS about unemployment fraud, average wait times, House Dems say - ID.me said $414 billion was lost—10 times higher than feds’ estimate. - link
Researchers build a working camera out of atomically thin semiconductors - Sheet of atoms works similarly to silicon but has some unique properties. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
A politician dies -
So a politician dies and ends up standing in front of the pearly gates. Saint Peter looks at him for a second, flicks through his book, and finds his name.
“So, you’re a politician…” “Well, yes, is that a problem?” “Oh no, no problem. But we’ve recently adopted a new system for people in your line of work, and unfortunately you will have to spend a day in Hell. After that however, you’re free to choose where you want to spend eternity!”
“Wait, I have to spend a day in Hell??” says the politician. “Them’s the rules” Says St Peter, clicks his fingers, and WOOMPH, the guy dissapears…
And awakes, curled up with his hands over his eyes, knowing he’s in Hell. Cautiously, he listens for the screams, sniffs the air for brimstone, and finds… Nothing. Just the smell of, is that fabric softener? And cut grass, this can’t be right?
“Open your eyes!” says a voice. “C’mon, wakey wakey, we’ve only got 24 hours!”. Nervously, he uncovers his eyes, looks around, and sees he’s in a hotel room. A nice one too. Wait, this is a penthouse suite… And there’s a smiling man in a suit, holding a martini. “Who are you??” The politician asks. “Well, I’m Satan!” says the man, handing him the drink and helping him to his feet. “Welcome to Hell!” “Wait, this is Hell? But… Where’s all the pain and suffering?” he asks. Satan throws him a wink. “Oh, we’ve been a bit mis-represented over the years, it’s a long story. Anyway, this is your room! The minibar is of course free, as is the room service, there’s extra towels next to the hot-tub, and if you need anything, just call reception. But enough of this! It’s a beautiful day, and if you’d care to look outside…” Slightly stunned by the opulent surroundings, the man wanders over to the floor-to-ceiling windows through which the sun is glowing, looks far down, and sees a group of people cheering and waving at him from a golf course. “It’s one of 5 pro-level courses on site, and there’s another 6 just a few minutes drive out past the beach and harbour!” says Satan, answering his unasked question. So they head down in the lift, walk out through the glittering lobby where everyone waves and welcomes the man, as Satan signs autographs and cherrily talks shop with the laughing staff. And as he walks out, he sees the group on the golf course are made up of every one of his old friends, people he’s admired for years but never met or worked with, and people whose work he’s admired but died long before his career started. And out of the middle of this group walks his wife, with a massive smile and the body she had when she was 20, who throws her arms around him and plants a delicate kiss on his cheek. Everyone cheers and applauds, and as they slap him on the back and trade jokes, his worst enemy arrives, as a 2 foot tall goblin-esque caddy. He spends the day in the bright sunshine on the course, having the time of his life laughing at jokes and carrying important discussions, putting the world to rights with his friends while holding his delighted wife next to him as she gazes lovingly at him. Later, they return to the hotel for dinner and have an enormous meal, perfectly cooked, which descends into a food-fight when someone accidentally throws a bread roll at the next table (where Ghandi is having a game of truth-or-dare with Marylin Monroe). As everyone is falling about laughing and flinging breadsticks at each other, his wife whispers in his ear… And they return to their penthouse suite, and spend the rest of the night making love like they did on their honeymoon. After 6 hours of intense passion, the man falls deep into the 100% Egyptian cotton pillows, and falls into a deep and happy sleep…
And is woken up by St Peter. “So, that was Hell. Wasn’t what you were expecting, I bet?” “No sir!” says the man. “So then” says St Peter “you can make your choice. It’s Hell, which you saw, or Heaven, which has choral singing, talking to God, white robes, and so on”. “Well… I know this sounds strange, but on balance, I think I’d prefer Hell” says the politician. “Not a problem, we totally understand! Enjoy!” Says St Peter, and clicks his fingers again.
The man wakes up in total darkness, the stench of ammonia filling the air and distant screams the only noise. As he adjusts, he can see the only light is from belches of flame far away, illuminating the ragged remains of people being tortured or burning in a sulphurous ocean. A sudden bolt of lightning reveals Satan next to him, wearing the same suit as before and grinning, holding a soldering iron in one hand and a coil of razor-wire in the other. “What’s this??” He cries. “Where’s the hotel?? Where’s my wife??? Where’s the minibar, the golf-courses, the pool, the restaurant, the free drinks and the sunshine???”
“Ah”, says Satan. “You see, yesterday, we were campaigning. But today, you voted…”
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Mario Tama/Getty Images
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Nick Hagen/Washington Post via Getty Images
