Charlie Angus, author, musician and NDP MP for Timmins–James Bay from 2004 to 2025, is an advocate for Indigenous rights, social justice and Northern communities. After leaving Parliament, he founded “The Resistance” to warn Canadians about rising fascism. He reaches audiences through his Resistance Tour, Meidas Canada commentary and Facebook page, which has over 170,000 followers.

Klepto-criminality has become acceptable to almost 100 million adult Americans. Democracy is severely threatened.

Charlie’s latest Substack post is below the separator.

The cryptocurrency market on Binance has suffered the largest heist in history. Hackers made off with an estimated $6.3 billion — more than four times the amount stolen from the Bybit site in February 2025.

The money was looted in record time using “never-seen-before” AI patterns that allowed the hacker team to take control of the network and steal the funds even as the site scrambled to shut them down.

The money is in North Korea. Just 20 minutes of hacking gave the country 75% of its annual GDP. Good luck getting it back.

Binance is trying to reassure investors that their investments are secure and that all is well. And to show you there is no solidarity amongst thieves, Elon Musk took to ridiculing his fellow tech-bro lords for their immense bad luck.

Pox on all their houses.

The Binance theft is the latest in the crash, hack and scam world of Bitcoin / Crypto. Selling crypto and so-called meme coins has never made financial sense.

Some small-level investors treat it like buying a lottery ticket, hoping it will magically take off to the stratosphere. Or crash and sink without a trace.

But crypto makes total sense for tech gazillionaires. They have been willing to weather the constant hacks and market crashes because they are determined to create an alternate system to shift staggering amounts of dark money.

Crypto’s real innovation is that it has created a pipeline of corruption.

That pipeline goes all the way to the White House, where the president and his family use the crypto hustle to get paid off by those hoping to win favours.

Which brings us back to the Binance hack.

Binance is the brainchild of CEO Changpeng Zhao, who was convicted of money laundering in 2023. To get Zhao sprung from jail, company lobbyists went to work on the Trump family, offering to help Don Jr. make a fortune.

Donald Sr. had initially been opposed to bitcoin and crypto, but then Donald Trump Jr. set up a crypto investment firm, World Liberty.

It would have been just another name on the investment board if it didn’t come with a Trump White House connection.

Lo and behold, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who has been called a “spymaster” and the dark lord of Middle Eastern deals, made a secret $500 million investment in Don Jr.’s scheme.

He locked in with Don Jr., and the money flowed into the Trump coffers. The Sheikh was soon at the president’s side, cutting some sweet deals with the White House.

Binance saw this as their pathway to help their felon boss. They pushed Trump to pardon Zhao. Trump signed the pardon, and mega money flowed.

Binance drove Trump’s stablecoin crypto scheme from $127 million to $2.1 billion. By September 2025, the Wall Street Journal wrote that the Trump family had made over $5 billion through this deal with World Liberty.

As for the investors who jumped in to get their share of the hustle?

They have been less impressed by the fact that the company has frozen their funds while extracting hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump gang.

In the world of the Trumps, suckers are suckers.

Gil Duran, in his book Nerd Reich, writes that cryptocurrency has become the prime means for bribery and covert influence in the American political system.

“With Trump back in power, his family crypto company attracted massive investment from those seeking to curry the president’s favour… [it] was an orgy of unprecedented corruption so staggering that made all previous bribery scandals look like penny-ante grift.”

Cryptocurrency is also driving criminal, drug and extremist politics.

David Golumba, in his book The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, writes that cryptocurrencies are designed to challenge government authority by competing with it and undermining the accountability mechanisms in place.

The notion of crypto as a means of undermining Canada’s central bank was a rallying cry for the Maple MAGA conservatives. Pierre Poilievre fanned the rage of the conspiracy mob who were angry that Canada’s banking mechanisms were able to stop the flood of foreign money during the Ottawa occupation.

Poilievre presented himself as Canada’s crypto champion — even carrying out a stunt of purchasing a meal from a shawarma with crypto. Ever the camp follower, Poilievre hoped to entice voters to jump down the right-wing rabbit hole of equating crypto with “freedom”.

It didn’t work.

The fact is, the real freedom isn’t for those buying a shawarma but for those who engage with drug lords and terrorists.

In the fentanyl underworld, crypto is key.

Libertarian Ross Ulbricht established Silk Road as a digital marketplace for illegal drugs and other trades. He called himself “Dread Pirate Roberts”. He relied on crypto to avoid tracing. But when he began shifting money to a supposed Hells Angels hit squad, the FBI took him down.

Ulbricht should have been public enemy number one to Donald Trump, who vowed to give the death sentence to fentanyl dealers. Trump even threatened Canada with invasion over non-existent claims about fentanyl dealing.

But Ulbricht, who received two life sentences, became a martyr for the far right/crypto ideologues because he presented his dark web site as a hub of free market initiative. He promoted his dark web crimes as freedom from the crushing hand of government.

On Trump’s second day in office, Ulbricht was given a full pardon.

We are dealing with a culture of crooks, corruption, and favouritism that is amped up to unprecedented levels. Trump has replicated the Russian “mafia state” system of government which was created by the oligarchs following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Thanks to the Kremlin and the White House, klepto-criminality has gone global.

Rather than working with international agencies to rein in crypto, the Trump crime family are focused on getting their piece of the action. This poses a serious threat as hacking tools, like other AI assets, are becoming increasingly sophisticated and will require unprecedented international co-operation to counter them.

Ilya Lichtenstein, who was convicted of a $4.5 billion money-laundering scheme from a crypto heist, states that advances in AI are dramatically changing the criminal landscape. In an interview with CNN, he warned,

“The rate of advancement of AI has been incredible… the security capabilities of models have grown tremendously. [You will soon] have open-source models that anyone can download that are better at hacking than the best hackers in the world…

Within months, the same hacking technology that enables something like this could be in the hands of a kid in their basement who is bored.”

When that happens, the hacking of crypto lords won’t seem so distant or even funny because they will be stealing from the savings accounts of ordinary people and stripping banks bare.