The Media Research Center joined the ConWeb freakout over discussions of a federal digital currency — never mind there have only been discussions, not implementation or even plans for implementation — and those freakouts have continued into this year. Tom Olohan wrote in a Jan. 11 post:
GOP presidential candidate and successful businessman Vivek Ramaswamy sounded the alarm on an impending threat to American’s liberty, a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
Ramaswamy addressed CBDC while answering a question about the Federal Reserve during a Jan. 10 appearance on “Timcast IRL” with podcast host Tim Pool and The Daily Wire host Candace Owens. Ramaswamy told his audience that the digital currency “is a backdoor way of ensuring the government surveillance system of being able to wipe you out for doing something the government didn’t approve of.” He attributed CBDC’s existence to a Federal Reserve bureaucracy with too many staff members with not enough things to do. The candidate promised a “90 percent headcount reduction” at the Federal Reserve to do “that narrow function of pegging the dollar.”
Ramaswamy noted that the Chinse-Communist government has already adopted a CBDC and ripped apart the argument that the U.S. needs a CBDC to compete technologically. Ramaswamy warned that those who make that argument ignore the whole point of China’s CBDC. The communist Chinese government “want[s] to actually be able to exert monitoring and control and discipline of their own citizens. Its the ultimate manifestation of a social credit system,” he said.
According to Ramaswamy, the purpose of a CBDC in the West is primarily censorship. Ramaswamy compared the potential abuse of a CBDC to the Canadian government’s “weaponization of the financial system” against protesting truckers.
As we noted, the bank accounts of protesters were frozen because they were used to help fund the increasingly unruly protests — the truckers were calling for civil war in a right-wing temper tantrum over COVID lockdowns — and most of those accounts were unfrozen after the protest ended.
Olohan also failed to mention Owens’ anti-Semitic leanings, though that’s something that the MRC has been censoring for a while now. Instead he hyped that “Vivek finished by promising to ‘put the Kabosh on the CBDC’ by executive action in the first month of his presidency.” That didn’t exactly age well, did it?
Catherine Salgado used a Feb. 2 post to note musings on the subject by Donald Trump, who is much closer than Ramaswamy to possibly doing such things:
Bartiromo asked Trump about the dangers of central bank digital currency (CBDC), a type of government-tracked digital form of exchange many governments have aimed to implement. Even the Biden administration has issued an executive order to explore the “infrastructure and capacity needs” for the “potential” development of a U.S. CBDC. In China, digital currency enables the government to track and enforce financial censorship via a social credit system. “Very dangerous. It’s very dangerous. One day you don’t have any money in your account. It can be a very dangerous thing,” Trump described CBDCs. He has pledged to reject a CBDC if elected.
Never mind that, again, there are no plans to do any such thing in the U.S. or any evidence that it would reflect China is doing even if it were to be implemented. But invoking China as a fearmongering tool is a staple in right-wing media, and the MRC is happy to lazily invoke it.