Michigan Republican Mike Rogers Sells Out To The Same Crypto-Cartel He Once Warned Us About

The Worst Congress Crypto Can Buy

Last cycle the crypto-cartel got behind wretched conservative Democrat Elissa Slotkin (MI) and spent over $10 million getting her into the Senate. She’s now the worst Democratic member of that body, worse than John Fetterman and worse than another cartel-owned Democrat, Ruben Gallego (AZ). The Republican whose aspirations they crushed in 2024 to get Slotkin the seat was former congressman/former Michigander Mike Rogers. This cycle, the cartel isn’t even waiting to see which Democrat wins the primary… they’re lining up behind Rogers. Then they’ll have one wretched Democrat and one wretched Republican occupying Michigan’s two Senate seats… and most Michigan voters will never be the wiser.

Yesterday, Max Cohen and Brendan Pedersen reported about how the cartel’s money is getting behind Rogers this time. “[W]ell before Rogers received a crypto PAC endorsement last month,” they wrote, “the Michigan Republican warned that cryptocurrency was a dangerous force. In a string of comments from 2017, Rogers repeatedly railed against Bitcoin as an unregulated facilitator for illegal activity. ‘I’m not a big fan of Bitcoin,’ Rogers said during a 2017 speech. ‘It’s primarily used in illicit trades… They use it in human trafficking. And every international organized crime event you can think of is using it.’ In a 2017 op-ed op-ed for the New York Daily News, Rogers laid out why Bitcoin is ‘so attractive to hackers, criminals and terrorists.’ Rogers’ crypto skepticism coincided with his post-House career as a cybersecurity expert. Rogers, one-time chair of the House Intelligence Committee, began hosting an online digital series delving into global cyber threats, including how Bitcoin could be exploited.”

Just like Trump, Rogers has turned around and— well, the hell with human trafficking; just like Trump, he wants the cartel’s cash. Cohen and Pedersen dubbed him “a crypto evangelist” and reported how he teamed up with one of the cartel’s biggest whores in Congress, Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), “to write a Coindesk op-ed in support of the GENIUS Act, which would regulate stablecoins. Rogers also traveled to the Bitcoin 2025 Conference alongside Lummis.”

The crypto cartel bought Emmer the GOP whip slot

It’s hard to overstate the danger of what’s unfolding here. The “crypto cartel” isn’t just a convenient phrase; it’s a rapidly metastasizing force in American politics, a moneyed clique of deregulation-obsessed financiers, libertarian tech bros, and shadowy offshore interests who are buying influence across party lines, whether Slotkin, Gallego, Kirsten Gillibrand, Adam Schiff, Shontel Brown, Ritchie Torres, Josh Gottheimer, Angie Craig, Donald Davis, Maxwell Frost… on Team Blue or Lummis, Tom Emmer, Ted Budd, Katie Britt, Jim Banks, Young Kim, David Valadao, Byron Donalds, Randy Fine on Team Red. Many of them have no foundational ideology beyond profit, no loyalty beyond their wallets and no concern for the democratic process—unless it can be bent, hacked or just plain purchased outright.

Slotkin sold out early. Rogers, went from “it’s a tool for terrorists and traffickers,” to an advocate. And that’s the point: this isn’t about crypto itself as much as it’s about power, access and impunity. Starting with Señor TACO— the fish rots from the head— the same people who once decried the dark web and ransomware attacks are now hosting parties with the very financiers who profited off those platforms. Their price? A Senate seat. Maybe a House majority. Eventually, the regulatory architecture of the entire federal government.

This is the future they want: one where elections are influenced by a flood of anonymous, untraceable money; where oversight is neutered by glossy op-eds and vacuous slogans about “innovation”; where laws are shaped not by the public interest but by a digital cabal that sees democracy as a hurdle to be gamed… or eliminated.

The crypto cartel doesn’t really care which party wins— only that they can buy them. Michigan’s two senators will be a matched pair: one red, one blue, both loyal to the same green. And the worst part is, this isn’t some fringe conspiracy— just like AIPAC, it’s happening in broad daylight, with bipartisan cheerleaders and a press corps that too often treats it as just another quirk of the campaign trail. Bankman-Fried got caught but that was just a bump in the road and the government is being auctioned off, pixel by pixel, to a digital oligarchy with no borders and no conscience. If we don’t draw a line soon, we’ll wake up to find the Constitution replaced by a blockchain— and our so-called leaders reduced to brand ambassadors for the next Ponzi in a hoodie— or is it too late already?