Tess Hollis: Lila — long week, but I found the most clarifying contradiction and now I can't stop thinking about it.
Lila Soto: Oh yeah? What's the contradiction?
Tess Hollis: Ben McKenzie in December 2022, Senate Banking Committee, testimony on the FTX collapse: forty million Americans were sold a bill of goods, crypto is structurally a Ponzi scheme. Ben McKenzie on July 14th, 2026: at a Capitol Hill press conference asking Democrats to vote no on crypto regulation.
Lila Soto: Wait — voting no on regulation? Not on deregulation?
Tess Hollis: On the CLARITY Act — the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. And his stated reason, standing next to Chris Murphy and Jeff Merkley and Chris Van Hollen, is that the bill doesn't include a provision blocking Trump from profiting off crypto while regulating it. Trump disclosed $1.4 billion from his memecoin and World Liberty Financial in 2025 alone, so — okay, that's a real conflict of interest. But McKenzie's underlying position hasn't moved. He still thinks crypto is fraud. He's just found an argument that politically lands in July 2026.
Lila Soto: So the ethics objection is doing different work than it appears to be doing.
Tess Hollis: That's what I think. The ethics argument is a costume. The abolitionist is still underneath it — and I want to know if that's actually cynical or if it's just smart.
Lila Soto: Hm. I'm not sure those are different things in a filibuster fight.
Tess Hollis: Wait — but that framing, the cynical-versus-smart thing, actually I want to push on it. Because it assumes he's just a guy with a take. He's not only that.
Lila Soto: That's kind of the whole thing I want to ground. Like — he has an economics degree from the University of Virginia. He co-wrote a book with journalist Jacob Silverman, Easy Money, came out July 2023, landed on the NYT bestseller list. Then his documentary, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, premiered at SXSW London in June 2025. That's not a celebrity strolling into a hearing room. That's — mm — actually, that's an architecture. He built something.
Tess Hollis: Okay. So what's the analogy here?
Lila Soto: Think of a food-safety inspector who spent four years documenting that a restaurant kitchen was filthy — wrote the book, made the documentary, testified to Congress. Now he's not saying shut it down. He's saying at least stop letting the owner eat there for free while he writes the health code. That's a narrower ask. But it's not a random ask. It comes from the same four years of documentation.
Tess Hollis: Huh. That actually lands.
Lila Soto: Yeah — and the 2022 testimony, that was a structural claim. Crypto as a system. The FTX hearing. He said forty million Americans were sold a bill of goods, and that was about the whole industry's architecture, not specifically about Trump. The 2026 position is an ethics amendment. So the question isn't whether he's cynical — it's whether those two things can come from the same honest place. And I think they actually can.
Tess Hollis: Okay, but — here's where I get stuck. His underlying belief hasn't moved, right? He still thinks the kitchen is filthy. So the ethics amendment, does it actually protect anyone, or does it just — I mean, it makes the bill harder to pass. Which is what he wanted anyway.
Lila Soto: Yeah, and I don't think that's fully resolvable. What I'd say is — the credential matters for why senators take the meeting. The UVA degree, Easy Money with Silverman, the SXSW premiere — that's the thing that gets him standing next to Chris Murphy on July 14th. Whether the ask is principled or tactical, he earned the room. Those aren't the same question.
Tess Hollis: Right — but the part that doesn't fit is that he earned the room and then used it to make the bill harder to pass. That's the tell. The floor vote is expected July 20th. They need eight Democratic votes to break the filibuster. And from what we can tell, the bill already has them.
Lila Soto: Oh — eight votes, and they have them?
Tess Hollis: That's the implication. So picture someone watching the July 14th press conference — not a senator. A progressive donor in Chicago, livestreaming it on her phone during lunch. She sees McKenzie, Murphy, Van Hollen, Merkley, Indivisible, Americans for Financial Reform. She feels like the party is finally fighting the Trump corruption angle. That press conference is doing real work for her. Just — not the work of moving the count.
Lila Soto: It's a signal. To her, not to wavering senators.
Tess Hollis: Which means — wait, actually — was an ethics carveout ever actually on offer? Like, did anyone at that press conference have a real negotiation in front of them, or was blocking the bill always the point dressed up as a reform demand?
Lila Soto: Mm, and I don't think we actually know that. I genuinely don't. Elizabeth Warren's separately calling it Trump's 'brazen financial corruption' — that's a harder line than 'please add an ethics clause.' That language doesn't sound like someone who wants the bill amended. It sounds like someone who wants it gone.
Tess Hollis: No, that's fair. We don't know. But — the inference is allowed to breathe a little, right? If the votes are already there, the ethics carveout demand costs nothing to make and everything to grant. It's the perfect ask.
Lila Soto: Yeah. A demand designed to be refused.
Tess Hollis: And that's where McKenzie's credibility actually closes the loop — the NYT bestseller, the SXSW documentary, the 2022 FTX testimony. None of it moves eight votes. But it makes the refusal feel principled instead of obstructionist. Although — the part that comes next is actually worse for McKenzie personally, because his whole 2022 argument was about protecting retail investors, and now he's in a position of arguing no regulation beats imperfect regulation for those same people.
Lila Soto: And that's the hole nobody filled on July 14th. Like — the 2022 testimony was specifically about the FTX collapse leaving retail investors with nothing. No recourse, no framework, no floor. And McKenzie's 2026 position, taken at face value, says those same people are better off in that same limbo than under a bill that lets Trump's World Liberty Financial keep operating without an ethics carveout.
Tess Hollis: Which is — wait, that's a genuinely strange claim to make.
Lila Soto: It is. Because the FTX failure — that's exactly what a regulatory vacuum looks like when it collapses on people. McKenzie testified to that. And now the argument is, essentially, regulatory vacuum beats imperfect regulation. Those two things don't sit together easily.
Tess Hollis: Okay, but — to be fair, 'bad bill is worse than no bill' is a real position. We don't actually have McKenzie on record explaining why this specific bill harms retail investors more than it helps them.
Lila Soto: Yeah, and I want to hold that. We should. But the CLARITY Act — the industry frames it as consumer protection. That's the framing. So if you're blocking it, you need to say what the consumer gets instead. And nobody at that press conference said it.
Tess Hollis: No answer to 'so what happens to them if this fails.'
Lila Soto: Right — and once the July 20th vote happens, actually, that becomes answerable. If the bill passes without the ethics amendment, you can ask: did McKenzie ever actually want it amended, or was the consumer protection frame always covering something else?
Tess Hollis: So the calibrated version is — the ethics objection is real, the $1.4 billion and World Liberty Financial are real, but the consumer protection logic has a gap in it that nobody closed.
Lila Soto: That's where I land. The irony survives scrutiny. McKenzie hasn't publicly squared the 40 million people he testified for in 2022 with the position he's holding in 2026. Maybe he has a full answer. We just don't have it on record.
Tess Hollis: Okay, fine — maybe he's not in a costume. Maybe the abolitionist just learned to dress for a Senate hallway. I can half-concede that.
Lila Soto: Yeah. And the outfit might be sincere. I genuinely think it might. But — July 20th lands, the CLARITY Act passes without the ethics amendment, and McKenzie moves on to the next thing... that's the answer, right? The question was never really about crypto.
Tess Hollis: It was about who gets to decide what protecting people looks like.
Lila Soto: And forty million Americans sold a bill of goods in 2022 still don't have a clean answer to that. Neither do we, honestly. Good one to sit with.
