Tokens for Sale: The Tokenization of Principles, Morality, and Influence
Influence isn’t earned anymore—it’s bought. All you need is a coin.
Inspiration Credit
This essay was sparked by Alex Kesin’s sharp breakdown of Hims. His piece pulled back the curtain on the modern snake oil aesthetic—and this is my extended take on the grift’s full evolution. From fake pills to policy for sale, the system is cold, heartless steel—wielded with precision to cut the warm, beating heart from the person, from the people.
The Snake Oil Kings - I remember staying home from school as a kid, half-sick and half-hoping to watch something more interesting than algebra. Between episodes of Days of Our Lives, I’d see two commercials on repeat—each one haunting in its own way. One featured a pair of hands reaching out from the shadows, breaking open a capsule like a magic trick. Red, yellow, and white beads spilled out in slow motion. I couldn’t tell if it was medicine or a science fiction weapon, but it promised transformation. I think it was Dexatrim—or maybe something like it. A pill to melt the fat off the “old you” so the real, more lovable version could finally emerge.
The second ad was quieter but no less disturbing: Dianetics, by L. Ron Hubbard. A volcano exploded across the screen as a deep voice promised healing—not for the body, but for the mind. I didn’t understand what it was selling, but I remember the tone. Certainty. Authority. Control. That if you were suffering, it was because you hadn’t unlocked the right knowledge—or bought the right book.
Looking back, I realize these weren’t just ads. They were the two arms of the American snake oil tradition—one selling salvation for the body, the other for the soul. Dexatrim. Dianetics. Diet pills. Cult logic. Two sides of the same coin: shame converted into product, desperation into profit.
Section 1: Hims Didn't Invent the Grift
Hims is just the latest—and most advanced—iteration. What used to be peddled from wagons or sold on daytime TV is now filtered through algorithms and pushed via Instagram. They didn’t invent the grift—they digitized it, scaled it, and gave it a UX team. Their offering is sleek: erectile dysfunction meds, weight-loss injections, hair restoration pills—all bundled in clean design and recurring billing. But under the surface, it’s still the same emotional blackmail: you are not good enough, but we can help. For $79 a month.
What’s grotesque isn’t just the scam—it’s the performance of compassion. Hims simulates empathy while functioning like a slot machine. Minimal human contact. Automated approvals. Chinese-made compounds masquerading as personalized care. And when you try to cancel? Good luck. The same psychological tactics used to keep you ashamed of your body are now used to keep your subscription active. It’s not health care—it’s predation with branding.
And if you still believe the system protects you from bad actors, ask what happened to ephedra. It was one of the few supplements that actually worked—dangerous if abused, yes, but effective and cheap. When one athlete reportedly died with it in their system, the FDA sprang into action, banning the compound nationwide. Compare that to the sluggish silence surrounding Vioxx, or the decades-long death march of opioids—approved, distributed, and pushed with full FDA backing while bodies piled high enough to spark lawsuits but never reform. The lesson is simple: danger isn’t what triggers action—disruption does. Ephedra wasn’t pulled for killing people. It was pulled for killing a market. The FDA protects revenue, not lives. That’s why Hims flourishes while anything truly affordable or effective is either buried in red tape or labeled a threat.
Section 2: The False Shepherds
The FDA presents itself as a guardian of public health, but it behaves more like a crooked doorman—granting access to the highest bidder while slamming the gate shut on anything that threatens the house cut. It’s not a neutral regulator; it’s a filtering system designed to protect the flow of pharmaceutical profits under the guise of safety. The crackdown on ephedra happened not because it was uniquely dangerous, but because it was dangerously effective outside the reach of Big Pharma. The real crime wasn’t harm—it was competition. Meanwhile, the same FDA approved opioids with manipulated data, looked the other way on addictive benzos, and greenlit drugs like Vioxx, which caused tens of thousands of deaths before they were quietly withdrawn. They claim vigilance, but act only when delay is no longer defensible.
The compounding loopholes exploited by companies like Hims didn’t blindside the FDA. They were built into the foundation. Originally created to allow for specialized, patient-specific treatments—like liquid suspensions for children or allergy-safe formulations—the compounding exemptions were drafted in good faith, then immediately converted into mass production shields for patent dodgers. The FDA didn’t stop it because stopping it would mean confronting the broader reality: that its own regulatory framework is now a marketplace. Enforcement is selective. Oversight is postured. “Safety” is just the language used to consolidate control.
The corruption isn't just structural—it's personal. There is a well-worn path between FDA leadership and the corporate entities they pretend to regulate. Executives bounce from government positions into boardrooms, bringing insider knowledge and political cover with them. Take Curtis Wright IV, the FDA official who oversaw the original approval of OxyContin in 1995—then left the agency less than two years later to join Purdue Pharma as its Director of Medical Research, earning a first-year compensation package of around $400,000. What begins as “public service” ends with private equity stock options and consulting retainers. The regulators become the regulated, and then back again—creating an ecosystem where no one bites the hand that will soon feed them. Drug approvals, safety standards, warning delays—it all begins to look less like oversight and more like onboarding. These aren’t safeguards. They’re auditions.
And make no mistake—this isn't incompetence. It’s policy. The FDA has perfected a kind of slow-motion complicity: delaying action long enough for corporate stakeholders to extract value, then staging reactive outrage once the damage is done. It did it with tobacco. With opioids. With hormone therapy. With weight loss drugs. It’s doing it again now with compounded GLP-1s, peptide cocktails, and half-tested stimulant stacks. The watchdog is not asleep—it’s well-fed and voluntarily facing the wrong direction.
We’re not dealing with a broken system. We’re dealing with an inverted one—where the appearance of regulation masks its actual function: to legitimize profit, launder risk, and neutralize alternatives. The FDA’s role is no longer to protect the public from snake oil. It’s to credential the next generation of it—so long as the right players are making money.
Hims isn’t a glitch in the system—it’s the product of an architecture that was never designed to protect you. The FDA, like so many institutions, wears the mask of restraint while functioning as an enabler. What looks like regulatory failure is actually strategic permission—rules designed not to prevent harm, but to centralize control and credential profit. The microcosm of Hims—tech-washed predation wrapped in concern—isn’t a sign that the system’s breaking. It’s a sign that it’s working perfectly, just not for you. And that same architecture—the incentives, the loopholes, the performance of legitimacy—is now being exported to every branch of power, including the highest office in the land.
Section 3: The Ringmaster President
We used to sell snake oil from wagons. Now we sell access to the Oval Office through meme coins. The grift hasn’t infiltrated the system—it is the system. And the main stage of that traveling medicine show is now the White House itself. The President is no longer a public servant—he’s a carnival barker with a crypto wallet, offering front-row seats to anyone with the cash to play. We’re not talking about shady backdoor deals anymore. We’re talking about a public-facing marketplace where influence is tokenized, access is auctioned, and proximity to power has a dollar value down to the cent.
In January 2025, Trump launched the $TRUMP meme coin. Within days, it exploded to a $29 billion valuation. His team personally netted an estimated $350 million in gains. Then in May, he hosted a dinner at Mar-a-Lago for the top 220 coin holders—with the top 25 promised a White House tour if he wins the election. Not a metaphor. Not a deep-state fantasy. A literal transaction: buy enough crypto, meet the President. The emoluments clause wasn’t rewritten—it was ignored. Ethics didn’t erode. They were bypassed with a laugh and a signature.
Welcome to the Circus Tent Presidency:
Lions: Megacorps with blood-soaked balance sheets and logo rebrands.
Tigers: Foreign billionaires—like Justin Sun—dropping millions to shape U.S. policy.
Elephants: The FDA and other legacy institutions stomping out truth beneath their institutional weight.
Monkeys: VC-backed “disruptors” juggling buzzwords and semi-lethal products on LinkedIn.
And in the center ring? The President himself, selling executive attention like it’s backstage passes to a washed-up rock concert.
Behind the spectacle, four key mechanisms quietly remap American power:
Mechanism → What It Does
Meme Coin Dinners → Buy your way into the President’s personal circle—literal tokenized influence.
Foreign Investments → UAE billionaires and crypto founders like Justin Sun use wealth to steer policy.
Institutional Capture → Crypto Czar David Sacks writes White House policy while holding private interests.
Regulatory Erosion → Executive Orders strip protections, block oversight, and redefine legitimacy.
This is no longer a representative democracy. It’s an “influence arcade”, and the joystick is for sale.
Section 4: Foreign Buyers + Executive Order 14178
(The Oval Office isn’t just for sale—it’s accepting foreign currency.)
While the media obsessed over the meme coin’s absurdity, the real danger slid quietly under the radar: foreign buyers weren’t just buying crypto—they were buying influence. The $TRUMP ecosystem quickly attracted a flood of international participants—UAE-linked wealth funds, offshore exchanges, and crypto billionaires with vested interests in American policy. Changpeng Zhao (Binance), though no longer publicly active due to legal issues, helped build the international infrastructure that made these financial maneuvers possible. The Winklevoss twins, founders of Gemini, contributed heavily to political PACs aligned with deregulation, while Kraken co-founder Jesse Powell funneled capital into pro-crypto legislation. Even Nayib “Bukkake Face” Bukele, President of El Salvador and Bitcoin’s global mascot, offered vocal support—elevating the spectacle into a quasi-diplomatic trade of influence between nation-states.
And it worked.
On January 23, 2025, Trump issued Executive Order 14178, a document that reads like it was ghostwritten by crypto lobbyists. It did three things:
Established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve—tying the federal government’s credibility to an asset held by many of his top contributors.
Dismantled federal efforts to launch a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)—undermining regulatory modernization in favor of unregulated speculation.
Installed David Sacks, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and early PayPal executive, as White House Crypto Czar—a direct channel between capital and executive authority.
This isn’t populism. This is feudalism, updated. You don’t get heard unless you’re a donor. You don’t shape policy unless you bought the key. You don’t enter the White House unless you’ve paid your toll in tokens.
Where the Constitution imagined citizens, this system rewards speculators. Where it envisioned representation, it now delivers returns on investment. Executive policy is no longer the result of deliberation or national interest—it’s the prize at the end of a high-stakes pay-to-play tournament.
Section 5: Collapse of the Trinity
The Executive isn’t the first branch of government to be sold—it’s just the last to stop pretending otherwise. The truth is, the entire American trinity—Legislative, Judicial, Executive—has already been bought and leveraged. The only difference now is the transaction is public.
Congress was the first to fall. Lobbying became formalized bribery decades ago, with billion-dollar industries carving out legislative carve-outs, tax loopholes, and regulatory exemptions like they were placing orders off a menu. PACs, super PACs, and dark money networks made sure no vote ever had to be bought directly—only pre-funded. Gerrymandering locked in districts, making representatives accountable not to voters, but to donors. The public can still write letters. Corporations write laws.
The American Legislative Exchange Council, a quiet behemoth of corporate influence, mass-produces model legislation—then hands it directly to lawmakers like IKEA instruction manuals for deregulation. Voter ID laws, anti-protest bills, union suppression—all pre-written, pre-lobbied, and pre-approved by industry sponsors. If Congress is a marketplace, ALEC is the warehouse.
The courts were next. Judicial appointments became partisan weapons, with judges selected not for wisdom or restraint, but for ideological obedience. Cases like Citizens United and Dobbs v. Jackson weren’t rulings—they were blueprints for power consolidation. Conservative networks like the Federalist Society, coordinated by powerbrokers such as Leonard Leo, funneled over $250 million in dark money to tilt the judiciary. In 2022 alone, Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust received a $1.6 billion donation, instantly becoming one of the largest political war chests in American history.
Meanwhile, the prison-industrial complex plays its part. Companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic spend millions each year lobbying lawmakers and donating to campaigns aligned with authoritarian policies. These aren't contributions—they're investments in policy outcomes. Lavish gifts, ideological tests, and corporate obedience are the new prerequisites for justice. The judiciary doesn’t interpret the Constitution anymore. It interprets how much power can be granted without breaking the illusion of legitimacy.
And now the Executive Branch joins the parade, but with a twist: no shame, no disguise, no back room. Just open auction. Buy a coin. Get a dinner. Buy enough? Tour the White House. Influence foreign policy. Bend regulatory frameworks. Appoint your friends. Cancel your enemies. All perfectly legal—because the people writing the laws, interpreting the laws, and enforcing the laws are the same people benefiting from the collapse.
This isn’t a crisis—it’s a completed system. Fully wired. Fully monetized. Fully infected. Every layer of governance now kneels before the same master: Capital, held like a whip in the hand of Greed.
The worst part? The criminals are already inside the firewall. The cabinet, advisory circles, and unofficial power brokers are filled with individuals either under investigation, recently charged, or known bad actors in their industries. Billionaires facing SEC scrutiny are now dictating digital asset policy. Elon Musk, while publicly pumping and joking about DOGE, is simultaneously shaping infrastructure policy through SpaceX and energy policy through Tesla. He’s not on the ballot, but he’s inside the secure perimeter. David Sacks, the so-called Crypto Czar, maintains active stakes in the very technologies he's meant to regulate. Others, like Peter Thiel, have funded candidates, platforms, and judicial appointments while backing corporations that profit from the regulatory chaos they helped create. This isn’t just corruption—it’s credentialed corruption. These aren’t outsiders storming the gates. They’re insiders with keys, writing the access codes as they go.
Section 6: The Last Layer
This was never just about pills, policies, or presidents. It was always about access. Who gets it. Who sells it. And now, who owns it. We’ve reached the final stage—not of collapse, but of conversion. The government didn’t get hijacked. It got repurposed. Not toppled, just quietly reprogrammed to serve a different master. Greed isn’t a bug in the system. It’s the operating system.
We used to fear external threats—bad actors, foreign hackers, the breach from outside. But the truth is darker and more familiar. The greatest threat has always been the insider: the system administrator with God credentials. The one you trust. The one who knows where the logs are kept and how to erase them. That’s who’s running the country now. Cabinet members, appointees, billionaire advisors—they don’t need to break in. They’re logged in. Root access. No audit trail. No MFA. Just unrestricted power behind smiling faces and crypto coin logos.
What we’re living through is a root-level compromise of the American experiment. The firewall’s been bypassed. The antivirus was privatized. The kill switch was sold as an NFT. And while the public scrolls past the circus on their phones, the architecture of their future is being rewritten by people who think morality is a punchline and democracy is a business model.
And here’s the final truth:
It’s going to get worse. Not because no one sees it, but because too many people are now invested in the grift continuing. The Trinity has fallen. The firewall is gone. The insiders have taken the controls. And the only people who can stop it are the ones too exhausted, too atomized, or too broke to believe they still have power.
Section 7: What We Have Left
What do we have left?
We don’t have clarity. We have confusion disguised as content. Over 54% of American adults read at or below a 6th-grade level. That’s not a warning—it’s a death sentence for critical thought. This isn’t just a literacy problem. It’s intellectual amputation, carried out quietly, generation after generation, until complex language became elitist and clear thinking became conspiratorial. We’ve raised a population that can barely parse a headline, let alone deconstruct a lie.
We don’t have memory. We have feeds. History’s been outsourced to influencers and filtered through political mood swings. In this version of America, slaves are called immigrants, the Civil War was about crops, and Churchill is the villain of World War II—not Hitler and his death machine that exterminated over 12 million people. This isn’t radical thought—it’s revised guilt avoidance, served to a population that stopped reading and started scrolling. We didn’t just lose the past. We reassigned it based on emotional convenience.
We don’t have voice. Dissent has been rebranded as threat behavior. If you speak too loud, protest too hard, or question too directly, you’re not a citizen—you are un-Patriotic. Expression has been wrapped in trigger warnings and tagged for moderation. Every tool we once used to cry out has been stuffed into a TOS violation.
And we don’t have fire. The Democrats are a cold corpse, frozen in procedural cowardice, while the public shivers under blankets of seed oil, screen fatigue, and algorithmic sedation. The American fire didn’t go out overnight—it dimmed in the glow of smartphone screens. What used to roar in the hearts of citizens is now pixelated, medicated, and monetized.
So what do we have left?
Your answer is as good as mine. We’ve been trained to no longer seek agreement. We don’t meet in the middle—we mock the middle. Compromise is for the weak. The comments section of our 2015 feeds has become the dominant form of discourse—loud, shallow, tribal. Talking points with no roots. Opinions untethered from fact. Ideology wrapped in a red hat or a blue state badge, not built on reason or uncorrupted principle.
What do we have left?
From my point of view—all we have is the will to seek.
We must seek the literacy that lets us sift through the bullshit.
We must seek the stillness, the woo, the cracked mirror version of truth hiding beneath the noise.
We must seek our brothers and sisters—the real ones—and begin to rebuild the bridges greed and fear burned down.
We must seek the parts of ourselves that haven’t been branded, monetized, or harvested.
We must seek our fire—not the flicker sold to us in content, but the heat that starts in the gut and radiates outward.
We must seek a victory for humanity inside a machine designed to strip us of warmth—and make us mirror our captors.
What can we do?
Our first responsibility is to relearn how to identify—and agree on—the truth. Until we repair our ability to share a perspective, however imperfect, all progress moves in reverse <—. I’m committed to moving forward —> —with you, across whatever lines divide us.
<— I’m committed to moving forward —>
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