MRC Joined ConWeb Freakout Over Digital Currency

Much like WorldNetDaily and Newsmax, the Media Research Center has been fretting over federal discussions of a digital currency, and while that fretting is not as conspiratorially minded as WND, there are still touches of that. For instance, in a March 2022 post complaining that “President Joe Biden signed an executive order to ensure government oversight of cryptocurrency,” Alexander Hall noted: “The Federal reserve has also been mulling over launching its own digital currency. Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard explained in an interview that the Federal Reserve is ‘conducting research and experimentation related to distributed ledger technologies and their potential use case for digital currencies, including the potential for a CBDC (central bank digital currency).'” Jeffrey Clark ranted about digital currency in a June 2022 post:

Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell snuck in mention of a dystopian digital currency system during a speech at a June 17 conference.

“Rapid changes are taking place in the global monetary system that may affect the international role of the dollar in the future,” Powell said in welcoming remarks before the Inaugural Conference on the International Roles of the U.S. Dollar. “Most major economies already have, or are in the process of developing, instant 24-7 payments. Our own ‘FedNow’ service will be coming online in 2023. And in light of the tremendous growth in crypto assets and stable coins, we are examining whether a U.S. central bank digital currency would improve upon what is an already safe and efficient domestic payment system. As our white paper on this topic notes, a U.S. CBDC could also potentially help maintain the dollar’s international standing.” 

George Orwell is turning around in his grave.

Joseph Vazquez spent a July 2022 post melting down over Bill Gates advocating a more toward digital currency, or as Vazquez conspiratorially put it, “flexed his leftist bona fides by advocating for world governments to centralize control over digital payments”:

In a report that blew the lid off Gates’s phony virtue-posturing, Reclaim The Net stated that digital payment infrastructures would go far “[b]eyond simply keeping an ever watchful eye over what citizens are up to.” Disturbingly, “[G]overnments would also be able to decide on more radical and in immediate terms much more damaging moves, such as cutting people off from their money,” Reclaim The Net noted.

Canada’s recent throttling of the digital accounts associated with truckers protesting the country’s harsh COVID-19 mandates illustrated how blocking people’s access to their money was “perfectly doable even without centralized, government-issued digital money,” Reclaim The Net stated. [Emphasis added.]

Gates’s draconian sentiment on the matter of centralized digital payment systems is especially chilling given the Federal Reserve’s recent push to explore a government-managed digital currency. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in a statement just under two weeks before Gates’s comments that “we are examining whether a U.S. central bank digital currency would improve upon what is an already safe and efficient domestic payment system. As our white paper on this topic notes, a U.S. CBDC could also potentially help maintain the dollar’s international standing.”

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. 

The MRC published a May 2023 column by John Stossel hyping Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ opposition to digital currency and his musings that he can fight the federal government on it:

DeSantis is so upset about the Fed’s and Biden’s plan for a CBDC he just got Florida’s legislature to ban its use in their state.

I ask, “This will be a national issue. Why is it the business of a governor?”

“This is part of our role,” he responds, citing federalism. “There’s a back and forth between the federal government and the states. We’re pushing back about things we don’t think are good.”

DeSantis questions the CBDC’s legality. “The Federal Reserve has come out and said, We would only do it after ‘consulting with the legislative and executive branches. Ideally, we’d get specific congressional authorization.’ Wait a minute! It’s not ideal that you get Congress. That’s what the Constitution requires!”

[…]

“Cash is independence,” adds DeSantis. “You have the cash in your wallet … It’s not dependent on somebody else.”

In other words, cash is private. So is cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin. People can buy gas and guns without using government money at all.

Advocates of government digital money don’t like that.

Stossel approvingly quoted DeSantis claiming that the federal government wants “to displace all cryptocurrency because they can’t control that,” telling me, “the dangers so far outweigh any proposed benefits.” He made no attempt to fact-check anything DeSantis said. None of Stossel’s uncritical stenography, meanwhile, helped DeSantis get elected president.