Crypto Is Buying Your Democracy

Molly White breaks down meme coins, stablecoins, Bitcoins, the shadow financial system, and the $200 million campaign to gut your consumer protections

I have been saying for years that cryptocurrency has the structure of a multi-level marketing scheme: a small number of people at the top make enormous sums, while large numbers of ordinary people are recruited to invest, almost always lose money, and then recruit more people. What I did not fully grasp until recently was the scale of the political operation running underneath it. I learned about Molly White’s crypto expertise on my friend Dave Troy Presents’ Podcast. I was so impressed, I invited her to Cults, Culture & Coercion to help everyone better understand it. She delivered one of the most illuminating conversations I have had on the show.

Molly is an independent researcher and writer who covers cryptocurrency and the broader technology industry. She writes the newsletter Citation Needed (citationneeded.news), runs the ongoing tracker Web3 Is Going Just Great, and operates influence.citationneeded.news, which is being relaunched as Tech Influence Watch to cover both crypto and AI campaign spending. She came to this work from a software background, driven by what she saw as a systematic failure of media coverage to report the harms happening daily inside the crypto sector while amplifying every promise. Her expertise is precise and her conclusions are well-sourced. I encourage you to follow her work.

What Cryptocurrency Actually Is

Molly started with the basics, because most people engaging with cryptocurrency, whether through a sports arena sponsorship, a television ad, or a family member’s enthusiasm, do not actually understand what they are being sold.

Cryptocurrency is a digital asset, a token you can buy and sell, something like a stock. Unlike a stock, there is no company behind it, no revenue being generated, no business. It is a digital representation of something people collectively believe has value. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana are all variations on this idea. People buy them hoping the price goes up. They are speculative assets, not functioning currencies, despite the name.

From that starting point, the sector has ballooned into what Molly calls a shadow version of the traditional financial system. Stablecoins are tokens meant to function like a dollar but backed by the issuer’s promise rather than government guarantee. Meme coins are even more stripped down: there is nothing behind them beyond a name and collective belief, which is how Donald Trump was able to issue a coin called Trump shortly before his inauguration and earn hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters who bought it. As Molly noted, virtually everyone who bought the Trump token has since lost money on it. His family, including his sons, has made well over a billion dollars from various cryptocurrency ventures (figures reported across multiple financial news outlets). The people who lost money were not the people running the scheme.

Ransomware, sanctions evasion, and other financial crimes now run almost entirely on cryptocurrency. Molly explained the reason clearly: blockchain transactions are public and technically traceable, but they are pseudonymous. No one looking at the blockchain can tell from the data alone that a specific wallet belongs to a specific person. If you can maintain that anonymity, crypto is very difficult to trace. If law enforcement can link a wallet to an identity, it becomes very traceable. The technology is simultaneously open and opaque, which is why it attracts both legitimate users and bad actors.

The Political Operation Most People Missed

This is the part of the conversation I want every reader to sit with.

The crypto industry emerged as a serious political force starting around 2024. Fairshake, the largest cryptocurrency super PAC, raised over $200 million in the 2024 election cycle, making it the top-funded super PAC in the country, surpassing even the MAGA super PAC (OpenSecrets data, via multiple sources including Axios and CoinDesk). As of early 2026, Fairshake has $193 million in cash on hand for the 2026 midterms. The industry’s goal was explicit: remove legislators viewed as threats to crypto interests, install legislators who would promote them. Over a dozen enforcement actions against cryptocurrency companies were dropped almost immediately after the 2024 election.

Molly was direct about the result: the SEC, which had been bringing serious enforcement cases against crypto companies, was effectively gutted. Pro-crypto commissioners were installed who reversed course on enforcement. That gutting now affects areas far beyond crypto. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has since made its public offering. The SEC has neither the capacity nor the interest to enforce its own rules. The deregulation purchased by the crypto industry has created openings for much broader financial misconduct.

There is also the question of foreign money. Stablecoins and crypto ventures have allowed people who are not US nationals, and therefore cannot legally contribute to political campaigns, to send money directly to Trump through personal cryptocurrency projects. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have put billions into Trump-related cryptocurrency ventures (reporting from multiple outlets). Those investments were followed by policy decisions: access to advanced AI chips for the UAE, a 15% stake in TikTok for parties involved in those discussions, and agreements on F-35 fighter jets for Saudi Arabia. Molly made clear she was drawing a correlation, not proving a legal case, but the pattern is visible and documented.

The Cult Dynamics of Crypto Belief

One of the most useful moments in our conversation came when Molly described what she sees among devoted cryptocurrency believers. She called it a cultish or almost religious belief system, where people are genuinely unwilling to examine their investment objectively. They see their chosen cryptocurrency less as a financial instrument and more as a cause, and the person running the project as something close to a savior. Criticism registers not as useful information but as betrayal or persecution.

I recognize this pattern exactly. It is what the BITE Model of Authoritarian Control™ identifies as Emotion manipulation to do Thought control: the installation of a belief system that filters all incoming information through the group’s framework, so that facts which should prompt reconsideration instead trigger defensiveness. In MLM communities, critics are called dream stealers. In crypto communities, they call skeptical information FUD, short for fear, uncertainty, and doubt, a term designed to dismiss any factual challenge before it can be evaluated. The mechanism is identical.

Molly noted that crypto’s boom-and-bust cycles are well-documented: 2017, 2020, 2022, 2024. Every time, it is not the executives or celebrities promoting the asset who absorb the losses. It is everyday people who were told this was their path to financial “freedom.” That framing, get out of the nine-to-five grind, be your own boss, achieve financial independence, is lifted word for word from the MLM playbook. When I heard her describe it that way, I told her: I know this playbook. I have spent decades helping people reality-test and reclaim their personal power.

What Is Coming Next

The AI industry is now running the same political operation that crypto ran in 2022 and 2024. Molly’s followthecrypto.org is relaunching as Tech Influence Watch precisely because AI companies are pouring tens of millions of dollars into campaign spending to preempt state-level consumer protections, write their own federal legislation, and lock in a regulatory environment favorable to them before any meaningful oversight is established. The goal is to make those changes permanent, so that even a future Congress or administration cannot easily reverse them.

The risk to ordinary people who never touch crypto is real. In 2022, when FTX collapsed, people who had no cryptocurrency and no account at FTX were unaffected. Molly’s concern, and I share it, is that this is no longer the case as crypto becomes embedded in index funds, retirement vehicles, and major financial institutions. She compared it to 2008: you did not need to be trading mortgage-backed securities to feel the consequences of that collapse. The more crypto is woven into the traditional financial system, the more a serious crypto downturn becomes everyone’s problem.

What You Can Do

Molly offered a straightforward answer: the primary tool right now is awareness. Most people do not know this is happening. A poll conducted by a crypto media outlet found that while most Americans said they disliked the idea of elected officials having personal financial stakes in the crypto sector, a majority also had no idea that Trump held those stakes. Knowing is the precondition for acting.

She also pointed to what happens when people do know. In the Illinois Senate Democratic primary, the crypto industry spent $10 million against Juliana Stratton. She named the spending campaign publicly, explained who was behind the attack ads, and won anyway. Information, when it reaches people, changes outcomes.

I want to add one thing from my own work. The undue influence tactics being used in the crypto space, the false urgency, the promise of exclusive insider knowledge, the framing of any skepticism as an attack on your freedom, are the same tactics I have documented in high-control groups for decades. The Influence Continuum© is very useful framework to discriminate healthy vs. unethical influence. When an industry spends $200 million to control who sits in Congress, removes regulators who enforce consumer protection laws, and deploys sophisticated psychological techniques to keep believers invested despite consistent losses, that is not a financial sector operating in good faith. It is a system designed to extract wealth from ordinary people and concentrate it at the top.

Follow Molly’s work at citationneeded.news. Check whether candidates in your district are funded by Fairshake or affiliated PACs at Tech Influence Watch. And share this conversation with anyone in your life who has been approached about cryptocurrency, because the first and most important protection is knowing what you are actually being sold.

Further Reading:

Talking MLMs with Douglas Brooks

Crypto Cults Are Scamming The Life Savings You Worked Years For

Why the Manosphere Sounds So Reasonable at First Andrew Tate pushes crypto

LuLaRoe and the World of Commercial Cults — A deep look at how MLM tactics, many of which Molly White identified in the crypto sector, are used to keep people invested despite mounting losses.

Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion — Harvard and MIT Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein on the cult-like belief systems forming around technology, including crypto, AI, and the broader tech billionaire ideology.

Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America With Christopher Leonard — The longer history of corporate money reshaping American politics, providing essential context for the crypto industry’s current playbook.

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present — The Rising Tide of Online Authoritarian Influence With Ruth Ben-Ghiat — Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat on how authoritarian leaders use financial systems, media, and loyalty networks to consolidate power, a pattern directly relevant to what Molly White documents in the crypto-political complex.