👁️ The "Pronatalist" White Power Couple Were Abuse Victims First

Also: Falun Gong Tax Fraud; and Glue on the AI Pizza

Welcome to the weekly Dark Markets news roundup. This week is a bit of a catch up, because a few *really* juicy tidbits got squeezed out by last week’s impromptu investigation of several issues at the New York Times.

Also in case you missed it, this weekend I published Resurrecting Focus Part 3 - The Research Agenda. This is part of my effort to share some lessons from the writing of the SBF book, and should be of interest to anyone with their own desire to write a book, or just get deep into a subject or research project.

Highlights:

• Tax fraud in the Falun Gong empire

• The dark backstory of the “hipster eugenics” couple

• Google’s AI nightmare says it all

“We’ll gladly hit our infant children in the face if that’s what it takes to save humanity!”

Right-Wing Nutjobs Love Doing Unemployment Fraud

Bill Guan, the Chief Financial officer of the Epoch Times, a far-right newspaper believed to be linked with the Falun Gong movement, has been indicted on charges related to tax fraud and money laundering. According to DOJ, between 2020 and 2024, Epoch Times staffers abroad were involved in buying illegal unemployment benefits at 70 to 80 cents on the dollar. Those $67 million in proceeds were then laundered into Epoch Times accounts using stolen personal information to open bank accounts, crypto accounts, and prepaid debit cards (a major vector for money laundering).

The obvious irony is that the Epoch Times is one of the most frothing crime-hype outlets in the United States, and perhaps the most shamelessly pro-Trump. The double irony is that, insofar as it is linked to Falun Gong, the Epoch Times is a project of the U.S. intelligence community, through cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy.

Of the many takeaways here, the distorting effects of clandestine influence operations on the ideological and criminal landscape are foremost in my mind. The U.S. government has a serious knack, it seems, for getting in bed with the absolute worst people in the world.

The Missing Cryptoqueen Returns

The podcast, that is. Ruja Ignatova, the face of OneCoin, still hasn’t resurfaced, and might be dead. But the BBC’s Jamie Bartlett continues the excellent audio chronicle of her fate in the first new episode in 18 months - including her strange life after (maybe) death.

Google’s AI Answers Are The Edge Case Nightmare

404 Media reports on the spate of hilarious and sometimes dangerous AI-powered answers appearing from Google’s new AI-powered … thing? They include advising readers to use glue to get cheese to stay on pizza, and to smoke while pregnant.

This is very funny and illustrates a few things, I think mostly at the same time. First, that Google was essentially bullied into releasing an AI product before it was fully functional, which is far from the first time that has happened. Here’s comment to that effect from former Google Scott Jensen, a sentiment echoed in this recent really good episode of Slate Money.

But the deeper questions are: First, whether these probabilistic machines can actually ever be designed to eliminate absurd, nonsensical edge cases. And second, as the smoking-while-pregnant example above highlights, whether the perhaps-inevitable lingering screwups in the machines might represent serious social and, more important, liability risks.

The “Pronatalist” White Supremacists Have a Dark Backstory

The story of “pro-natalist” poster couple Malcolm and Simone Collins continues to get stranger. Jenny Kleeman at The Guardian reignited public distaste for the Peter Thiel-tied Silicon Valley right-wingers by reporting an incident of Malcolm Collins slapping one of their children, in the face, in public, for accidentally kicking a table. Much like pro-lifers, Kleeman got the sense that the Collinses like “having children” as an abstract concept more than they like actually having children.

Their political sentiments aren’t obscure - they openly call themselves “hipster eugenicists”, which as is typical with these types, reveals a deep tactical stupidity however you might feel about their agenda. More generally, they’re clearly part of the eugenics-rooted TESCREAL futurist movement, and link their baby-making directly to the idea of (white people) colonizing space. (I’ll be writing about Timnit Gebru and Emille Torres excellent new TESCREAL analysis paper very soon.)

But it was still surprising when the Collinses called criticism of their child abuse unfair, because Black people hit their kids all the time. This is viciously racist on multiple levels at once, a kind of hypercube of racism.

There are details about Malcolm and Simone Collins that haven’t been widely disseminated, and that help explain at least some of their intense and repulsive weirdness. Malcolm, according to this 2022 writeup, came from a wealthy family but “rebelled when his parents divorced and was sent to various youth prisons,” where he was badly mistreated and even wound up homeless for a time. More specifically, Malcolm was sent to wilderness programs for troubled teens, an entire industry which emerged out of cults and became hotbeds of serious abuse. I highly recommend the TrueAnon series on the Troubled Teen Industry.

Reading between the lines, being sent away by his family strongly implies Malcolm’s upbringing was abusive, emotionally or otherwise, helping explain his obviously very strange relationship to kids and parenting. Simone Collins, meanwhile, had such a severe bout with depression and eating disorders that as an adult, she reportedly can’t have children naturally.

In other words, these are people with deep-seated psychological and emotional problems, fueled in Malcolm’s case by seemingly significant mistreatment as a child. They have embraced eugenics and racist authoritarianism as a bulwark against their own uncentered selves, out of a misguided hope to create children more well-adjusted than they themselves are. But in practice, they’re continuing that cycle of mistreatment, abuse, and mental instability, shielded from their own grim reality by their manic commitment to bizarre politics. Many such cases.

There was very mild corporal punishment in my family, and I feel like I’m a better person for it, so it seems worth distinguishing that from what Malcolm Collins seems to think is okay. I was spanked maybe ten times during my childhood, always for serious stuff that endangered myself and others. There was a grim ceremony to it every time - it was explained to me what I had done wrong, I was put over an adult’s knee, and given two or three slow, barely-painful whaps with a hand or a paddle. In fact, it was almost entirely ceremonial, and the real punishment was the disappointment my elders were expressing in me.

Getting slapped in the face, with no warning, so loud it shows up on a reporter’s audio tape, is not even within the bounds of a reasonable defense of corporal punishment for children. The Collinses are just another example (not unlike Sam Bankman-Fried …) of how privilege can lead you to some very, very dark corners of the soul.