Authored by Michael Washburn via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and the worldwide outcry over the billions of dollars wiped off the platform, are likely to trigger a massive regulatory reaction that would further erode citizens’ economic freedoms without addressing the issues that fostered demand for an alternative to the fiat dollar, economists have told The Epoch Times.

An international scandal has embroiled FTX and its founder, 30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried, in the wake of the firm’s crash earlier this month precipitated by a run on the exchange. Since then, reports have emerged that Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund established by Bankman-Fried, was trading billions of dollars from FTX accounts without clients’ knowledge.

FTX has filed for bankruptcy protection, Bankman-Fried has stepped down from his role as CEO, and John J. Ray III, the former CEO of Enron, has taken over the insolvent company with a plan to sell it off if a successful restructuring is impossible. An estimated 1 million customers and other investors are facing total losses of billions of dollars.

FTX, in a recent court filing, said it owes $3.1 billion to its top 50 creditors, and its collapse has rocked the $839 billion global crypto market. On Nov. 22, the trading value of bitcoin tumbled to $15,480, a two-year low, before edging up slightly to $15,909.

Ray has claimed that subsidiaries of FTX in the United States and abroad “have solvent balance sheets, responsible management and valuable franchises,” but so far the shock and alarm over the exchange’s implosion have shown no sign of abating.

Meanwhile, a number of big names in sports and entertainment, such as comedian Larry David, NBA star Stephen Curry, and quarterback Tom Brady, have become the subject of a probe by the Texas State Securities Board over their public endorsements of FTX. The celebrities have also become the targets of class action lawsuits filed by disgruntled investors, with more expected in the days to come.

Madoff’s Heirs

Observers of the FTX blowup are extremely candid about the severity of the exchange’s mismanagement and the recent historical analogs for its unraveling.

Wayne Davis, a partner at the law firm Tannenbaum Halpern Syracuse & Hirschtritt in New York, drew a parallel with one of the most notorious cases of fraud in the history of finance, that of the Bernard L. Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme bilked some 4,800 clients of $64.8 billion. In both cases, clients were insufficiently attentive to the lack of internal controls, he suggested.

“Madoff comes to mind. Perhaps not the same criminal intent components, but there are certainly similarities as far as investor/customer enthusiasm notwithstanding signs of lax compliance and risk management engagement,” Tannenbaum told The Epoch Times.

Other observers see parallels in earlier events in the development of banking and currencies. Charles Steele, chair of the department of economics, business, and accounting at Hillsdale College in Michigan, said that the blow-up of FTX reminds him of the first stock market bubble and financial crisis to afflict the world, namely the collapse of France’s Banque Royale in 1720.

“Scotsman John Law set up a central bank for the French monarchy that began paying enormous returns on its shares and its sister Mississippi Company. It was heralded as a great triumph of new financial technology, a nearly miraculous breakthrough, but in fact, it was effectively what we now call a Ponzi scheme,” Steele told The Epoch Times.

“In the case of FTX, it appears that Samuel Bankman-Fried was heralded as a crypto genius, but was simply engaged in a lot of shady business disguised as ‘philanthropy,’ using other people’s money. He was apparently the second-largest donor to the Democrat Party campaigns in the 2022 elections, and also was positioning himself to be a major player in the design of federal regulations for cryptocurrency,” Steele added.

The Likely Reaction

The magnitude of the FTX scandal—the amounts of money involved and the number of people suffering possibly permanent financial harm—means that its ramifications are likely to continue to affect all players in the crypto space in coming weeks and months, said Jeffrey Guernsey, a professor of economics at Cedarville University in Ohio. The very lack of a fixed value that made crypto investing exciting for some people may also be among its singular vulnerabilities in the face of emboldened regulators, he suggested.

“While this thought does not originate with me, it is clear that crypto is not a currency, if one attribute of a currency is a stable value. The collapse of FTX certainly puts the entire asset class under review and question and may lead to calls for governmental regulation,” Guernsey said.

Given the priorities of the Biden administration, the notably harsher tone of federal guidance and rulemaking since he took office, and officials’ well-documented hostility to financial innovation and decentralization, the reaction from regulators is likely to be extremely draconian and may even cross lines that the regulators have hitherto respected, observers say. But whether the coming crackdown will address concerns of fiat currency that helped feed demand for alternative exchanges, platforms, and markets is a different question.

“I expect that this debacle will lead to greatly increased federal regulation of cryptocurrencies,” Steele said.

In Steele’s view, the fiasco is likely to speed up the crafting and implementation of central bank digital currencies (CBDC). Steele noted that the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is collaborating with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a joint study, Project Hamilton, whose objective is to devise a CBDC for the United States.

While ignored by many people, this is one of the most potentially concerning recent developments given the unprecedented powers that it stands to place in the hands of a central regulatory authority, he said. While some might initially welcome a CBDC, it could have unforeseen consequences and ultimately could help extend the role of government into people’s lives in ways to which they are so far unaccustomed.

“I think a CBDC is very dangerous, because it would enable a central bank or government to monitor, control, and record every exchange made with the currency. If, for example, a government decided it did not want citizens buying, say, firearms, or perhaps donating funds to a political candidate, the central bank could prevent the transaction. Alternatively, it could have a permanent record of a citizen’s purchases and use these to establish a social credit score for the person,” Steele said.

“In this way, a CBDC could become the ultimate tool of social engineering and tyranny. A true cryptocurrency keeps transactions anonymous, which is one of its great benefits. Governments tend to dislike tools that give citizens such privacy,” he added.

Legitimate Demand

The tragedy of the FTX scandal and the possible meltdown of other crypto entrepreneurs as more and more people panic and seek to redeem their assets is that such platforms arose partly in response to an understandable demand for alternatives to the fiat dollar, or a dollar whose value and use flow from government dictates and are unrelated to any external commodity or asset such as gold. The heavy-handed reaction expected in the coming months as a consequence of FTX’s blow-up is unlikely to take account of this truth.

That’s the view of Brian Domitrovic, a professor of economic history at Sam Houston State University, who sees negative long-term consequences to the country’s abandonment of the gold standard in 1971.

“I don’t think there’s any kind of broad popular support for a fiat dollar, a non-gold dollar. There hasn’t been since 1971. A lot of popular dissatisfaction with this has been very clearly expressed,” Domitrovic told The Epoch Times.

“The Federal Reserve is not a popular institution at all. I think there’s just a general sense on the part of the public that we should have something more like the classical monetary system that we used to have. And I think crypto has tapped into that more effectively than anything since the end of the gold standard,” he added.

The New Non-Fiat

From a certain standpoint, cryptocurrencies took over where gold left off following the shift away from the gold standard, Domitrovic said. Like gold, it is limited in supply and requires mining, though of course not the same kind of mining. In the case of the former commodity, the mining is a process of physical extraction of a substance from the earth, and in the latter, it is mathematical and theoretical in nature.

Despite the differences, both currencies have the effect of eroding centralized power and oversight by making institutions such as the Federal Reserve less integral to the functioning of the economy, Domitrovic said.

“Bitcoin aspires to mimic gold in many respects. This is what you had when money was not a creation of the Federal Reserve,” he added.

Much of today’s demand for bitcoin and kindred currencies flow from a widespread desire to go back to how things were before 1971, Domitrovic argued.

“Before 1971, the United States led the world in becoming the greatest economy ever, with hundreds of millions of people living at high levels of prosperity. There is a very strong reason why people associate the pre-1971 period with a magnificent achievement economically,” he added.

In this analysis, the federal government has sought to maintain centralized oversight over the economy and the level of prosperity attainable by citizens partly by not allowing crypto to compete with the fiat dollar.

“Even if there is fraud, I’m still going to lay a lot of the blame at the feet of the government and the official definition of policy, because they’re not taking crypto as seriously as they should. They consider it non-money,” he said.

Read more here…

European climate cultists upped the ante in their increasingly deranged war on fossil fuels on Thursday, bringing flight operations at Berlin Brandenburg Airport to a complete standstill for an hour and a half. 

Reuters reports that activists from the Letzte Generation (Last Generation) group entered the airport from both the north and south ends, with some glueing themselves to the tarmac. According to the group, others rode bikes around the taxiways. The trespass began just after 4 pm local time. 

“The plane is not a means of transport for ordinary people,” tweeted the group. “Most people – around 80% – have never flown. One affluent percent of the population is responsible for about half of all flight-related emissions.”

Letzte Generation demanded that the public stop using airplanes to travel, and tweeted video of its members entering the airport through a hole cut in a chain-link fence:

+++ Flugverkehr am BER eingestellt +++

Das Flugzeug ist kein Verkehrsmittel für Normalbürger:innen. Die meisten Menschen – etwa 80% – sind noch nie geflogen.
Ein wohlhabendes Prozent der Bevölkerung verursacht allein etwa die Hälfte der flugbedingten Emissionen. pic.twitter.com/Avfg5tDeqw

— Letzte Generation (@AufstandLastGen) November 24, 2022

Police detained the trespassers, but not before they caused misery for an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 travelers to and from Berlin’s primary commercial airport. In addition to those stuck in the airport or on airplanes awaiting takeoff 15 flights to Berlin were diverted to Düsseldorf, Leipzig/Halle and Dresden. 

The same group is behind many attention-seeking stunts across Europe in recent months, such as throwing food on famed works of art, disrupting a Hamburg orchestra concert by gluing themselves to the conductor’s podium, blocking road traffic, and vandalizing businesses and government buildings with orange paint. 

Letzte Generation activists have covered Monet’s Les Meules in mash potato.

The protestors then glued themselves to the floor at the Barberini Museum in Potsdam. It is unclear if the painting was damaged. https://t.co/Av2TSbR4iI pic.twitter.com/myup95RBtm

— Sky News (@SkyNews) October 23, 2022

Local authorities condemned the latest stunt: 

Brandenburg Interior Minister Michael Stübgen (CDU) described the action as a “dangerous intervention in air traffic.” It was “a serious crime” that “in the worst case even endangers human life. There’s no justification for that.” He called the activists criminals. — German broadcaster RBB

Berlin police said protestors showed “they are ready to commit crimes and that the democratic framework is of no importance to this organization.”

At least one passenger stuck on an airplane maintained his sense of humor: 

Ryanair have also kindly portrayed the harrowing effects of climate change by ensuring the heat on the plane resembles a Mediterranean summer in the year 2050.

— Neil Delaney (@neilpdelaney) November 24, 2022

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

A group of bipartisan senators is urging the Biden administration to provide Ukraine with advanced MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones that would give Kyiv longer-range capability.

The Biden administration has been hesitant to send the drones due to the risk of escalation with Russia and concerns that the sensitive technology in the drones could end up in the wrong hands.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Biden administration has decided not to provide the drones, although other reporting disputed that claim and said a final decision hadn’t been made.

In a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, 16 senators expressed “concern” over the reports that said the administration has declined to send the MQ-1C. The senators asked the administration to give “careful reconsideration” to the Ukrainian request.

The letter was led by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) and was signed by many members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including ranking member James Inhofe (R-OK).

The senators said the MQ-1C and other long-range capabilities would provide “Ukraine additional lethality needed to eject Russian forces and regain occupied territory.”

Providing MQ-1Cs would be a major escalation in US military aid to Kyiv as the drones can be armed with powerful hellfire missiles and can fly for up to 30 hours. The drones would give Ukraine the capability to strike targets inside Russian territory.

The US has provided other long-range arms under the condition they wouldn’t be used to target Russian territory, with the exception of Crimea.

Officials told CNN last week that the US was considering modifying the MQ-1Cs to change the technology of some components so it wouldn’t pose as much of a risk if they end up in Russia’s hands. The report said the effort was being led by the US Army, but any modifications would take time.

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Italians on unemployment benefits who turn down reasonable job offers will have their access to social security payments revoked in new laws expected to be introduced by Giorgia Meloni’s new administration.

In a pledge to clamp down on a relief scheme that Meloni claims rewards laziness and is widely abused, the new Italian prime minister vowed to amend the citizens’ income available across the country, making it conditional upon those who receive job offers while receiving the benefit to take the position.

The citizens’ income is an initiative first introduced by the left-wing Five Star Movement and sees over 3.5 million Italians receive a payment of €780 per month. Receipt of the benefit is widely skewed toward the poorer south of the country where 2.3 million of the recipients reside.

As Meloni announced her first budget on Tuesday, she claimed it was wrong “to put people who can work on the same level as those that can’t.”

“Faithful to our principles, we’ll keep helping those who can’t work. For the others it will be abolished,” she added.

The system is expected to undergo an overhaul at the beginning of 2024.

Meloni’s budget sought to stimulate the economy with €35 billion euros of increased spending or tax cuts.

It introduced tax cuts for the self-employed and employees, and hiked a windfall tax on energy companies from 25 percent to 35 percent, and cut VAT on essentials such as baby and sanitary products,

The new government also lowered the age at which citizens can draw on their pension from 64 to 62, providing they have paid in at least 41 years of contributions.

Two weeks ago Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a “10-point plan” for ending the war, which included the demand that Russian troops depart from all of sovereign Ukrainian territory. However, the recent Russian annexation votes for the absorption of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia territories make the likelihood of peace talks very distant at this point. 

On Thursday, Russia again sent a resounding message affirming it doesn’t plan to let go of these four eastern oblasts. Moscow confirmed it has issued over 80,000 Russian passports the residents of the territories which were declared part of the Russian federation in September. 

“Since the addition … of the four regions into the Russian Federation, and in accordance with the legislation, more than 80,000 people received passports as citizens of the Russian Federation,” Valentina Kazakova, a top Interior Ministry official said. 

Currently, as the invasion reaches the full nine-month mark, Russian forces do not yet have hold of 100% of any of the territories. In many areas pro-Kremlin troops have actually been pushed back amid the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive. 

The United Nations, as well as the Western allies, have consistently condemned the “attempted illegal annexation” of Ukrainian land. Further they have pressed all global nations “not to recognize any changes announced by Russia to borders.”

The European Union has also recently vowed to never recognize passports issued in the occupied territories, with Kyiv of course also condemning the ‘illegal and invalid’ passports. The European Council said earlier in the month: “This decision is a response to Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified military aggression against Ukraine and Russia’s practice of issuing Russian international passports to residents of the occupied regions.”

Meanwhile, a recent Washington Post report has admitted that in these regions, sympathies for Russia among the local Ukrainian population run deep and are more widespread than previously admitted, complicating matters in places like Kherson city, recently recaptured by Ukraine forces amid a broader Russian withdrawal: 

But in institutions across this regional capital, from the city council to hospitals and schools, newly restored leaders like Ivanovka are facing a double conundrum. How to rebuild without the thousands of Russia sympathizers who fled? And even more vexing, what to do with those who remain? Thousands in the city held an ambivalence toward the Russians, or even an affinity.

Further the report underscored that “Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in Kherson accepted Russian passports in the hope of receiving benefits. Many more accepted thick envelopes of Russian rubles on top of their pay as an inducement to stay in their jobs.”

Australian national broadcaster: Ukrainian civilians stripped, tied up and beaten by vigilantes in shocking videos

There have since emerged widespread reports of “revenge” and retribution attacks on suspected ‘Russia-sympathizers’ by reconquering Ukrainian forces. Likely this will continue especially in retaken areas where much of the citizenry accepted Russian passports and participated in the annexation referendum. 

Authored by Dan McKnight via The Libertarian Institute, 

As our government continues to bumble and stumble at full speed towards World War III, the concept of tripwires and the legal authority of Article 5 become required understanding for the vigilant citizen. Last week the American people received the then-breaking news that a missile had landed in Poland and killed two people. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said that this was a purposeful act of war by Russia, and that the West must respond with full kinetic retaliation.

He was joined by his amen corner here in the United States, that group of politicians, regime journalists, and paid lobbyists who have sold out their country for the requisite thirty pieces of silver. The War Party immediately jumped into action: this was what they’ve been waiting, praying for. A catalyst to launch the missiles, and sacrifice the world.

Poland, like the United States and nearly all of Europe, is a member of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. (Maybe we should wonder why countries like Poland, Estonia, and Romania are in an “Atlantic” alliance.)

A provision of NATO is Article 5, which popular conception treats as a mandatory obligation to go to war when a member of the alliance is attacked. It’s a one way pass into World War III.

There were just two things wrong with this narrative.

First, as was revealed within forty-eight hours and confirmed by both the Polish government and Biden White House, the missile was Ukrainian, not Russian.

Vladimir Putin had not attacked NATO—purposefully or accidentally. Instead, a Ukrainian air defense missile attempting to intercept a Russian strike went off trajectory killed two Poles across the border.

All of a sudden “collective security” was no longer threatened, and no one on cable news was talking about how this required NATO retaliation on Kiev. (Surprised?)

Secondly, even if it had been a Russian missile, and even if Vladimir Putin himself had aimed directly at that Polish farm, Article 5 obligates the United States to nothing.

The NATO Treaty also has an Article 11, which specifies that the provisions of the alliance will be carried out in accordance with the domestic constitutions and processes of the respective members.

That means a majority vote of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives on a formal declaration of war. Any member of Congress or news talking head saying Article 5 requires an immediate military response without a debate or vote is either lying or woefully uninformed.

And even if the NATO Treaty didn’t have that provision, we’d still rest our argument of Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, the supreme authority of our laws.

We are a sovereign nation, and the American people always have a choice on whether or not to go to war. Any international piece of paper trying to say otherwise be damned.

Unfortunately, the War Party doesn’t always make that choice easy. They bribe politicians with weapon contract profits, flood the corporate press with propaganda, and instruct the American people that they must either commit to endless war or lose their liberty. They manufacture themselves consent.

This crisis continues to demonstrate why we need Defend the Guard. This legislation would prohibit the deployment of a state’s National Guard units into active combat without a declaration of war by Congress.

It’s the best way to tell Washington DC that they can’t go to war without a debate and a vote by the people’s representatives. And if they try, they won’t have the manpower to fight such a conflict because patriotic state legislators won’t allow their National Guard, the backbone of the U.S. Armed Forces, to participate in an illegal war.

I have worked to introduce this bill in over twenty states in the past, and my team is already preparing for the 2023 legislative session. But to be successful I need your support. Visit DefendTheGuard.US to see if a bill has been sponsored in your state, or if you need to contact your representative and state senator. An American people, active and informed, will not be led into World War III by their irresponsible, stupid leaders.

* * *

Dan McKnight is a 13-year veteran of the military, including service in the United States Marine Corps, United States Army, and the Idaho Army National Guard. He is founder and chairman of Bring Our Troops Home. Follow him on Twitter @DanMcKnight30 and @TroopsHomeUS

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“All the time – such is the tragi-comedy of our situation – we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible… In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

There will come a time in the not-so-distant future when the very act of thinking for ourselves is not just outlawed but unthinkable.

We are being shunted down the road to that dystopian future right now, propelled along by politically correct forces that, while they may have started out with the best of intentions, have fallen prey to the authoritarian siren song of the Nanny State, which has promised to save the populace from evils that only a select few are wise enough to recognize as such.

As a result, we are being infantilized ad nauseum, dictated to incessantly, and forcefully insulated from “dangerous” sights and sounds and ideas that we are supposedly too fragile, too vulnerable, too susceptible, or too ignorant to be exposed to without protection from the so-called elite.

Having concluded that “we the people” cannot be trusted to think for ourselves, the powers-that-be have taken it upon themselves to re-order our world into one in which they do the thinking for us, and all we have to do is fall is line.

Those who do not fall in line with this government-sanctioned group think—who resist, who dare to think for themselves, who dare to adopt views that are different, or possibly wrong or hateful—are branded as extremists, belligerents, and deplorables, and shunned, censored and silenced.

The fallout is as one would expect.

Cancel culture – political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance – has shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies, and government watchdogs.

Everything is now fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.

In this way, the most controversial issues of our day—race, religion, sex, sexuality, politics, science, health, government corruption, police brutality, etc.—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom (of religion, speech, assembly, press, redress, privacy, bodily integrity, etc.) but only when it favors the views and positions they support.

The latest victim of this rigid re-ordering of the world into one in which vestiges of past mistakes are scrubbed from existence comes from the New York Department of Education, which has ordered schools to stop using Native American references in mascots, team names and logos by the end of the current school year or face penalties including a loss of state aid.

Citing concerns about racism and a need to comply with the state’s Dignity for All Students Act, which requires schools to create environments free of harassment or discrimination, New York officials are telling communities—many of which are named after Native American tribes—that longstanding cultural associations with their towns’ Indian namesakes are offensive and shameful.

More than 100 schools in 60 school districts across New York State have nicknames or mascots that reference Native Americans. The cost to divest their communities of such branded names and images will be significant. One school district estimates that the cost to remove its Indians imagery from the gym floor alone will be upwards of $60,000.

This drive to sanitize New York schools of “offensive” Native American logos and imagery comes on the heels of iconoclastic campaigns to rid the country of anything and anyone that may offend modern-day sensibilities.

Monuments have been torn down, schools and streets have been renamed, and the names of benefactors stripped from prominent signage in the quest for a more enlightened age.

These are not new tactics.

Since the days of the Byzantine Empire, when “Emperor Leo III ordered the destruction of all Christian images on the grounds that they represented idolatry and were heretical,” political movements have resorted to destroying monuments, statues and imagery of the day as a visual means of exerting their power and vanquishing their enemies.

We have been caught in this intolerant, self-righteous, destructive, mob-driven cycle of book-burning, statue-toppling, history-erasing iconoclasm ever since.

As art critic Alexander Adams explains:

“Iconoclasm is an activity evenly distributed between both left and right of the political spectrum, mainly at the extreme ends… The intolerant ideology, which refuses to accept the co-existence of alternative views, takes the stance that…the ideals within the art are no longer utterable or supportable: they are actually injurious and dangerous to the vulnerable… The political activist reserves to himself the right to retrospectively edit our history for his satisfaction by removing monuments, those fixtures of civic life, embedded in the memories of generations… Iconoclasm is an expression of domination and a demonstration of willingness to act—illegally and unethically—to impose the will of one group over an entire population. It asserts control over all aspects of society… The campaigner argues that public art, accumulated piecemeal over 1,000 years of history, must reflect our society and values today—even if that means altering or erasing stories of the values our past society expressed via its monuments, or suppressing evidence of how we arrived at our current situation… The iconoclast believes that it is only the values of today that count—that it is only her values that count. She takes it upon herself to correct history through monstrous acts of egotism. That correction, when it involves destruction, permanently alters the cultural legacy. It shrinks the breadth of human experience available to the generations which follow ours.”

In such a world, there can be no debate, no journey to understanding, no chance to learn from one’s mistakes or even make mistakes that are uniquely your own; there is only obedience and compliance to the government, its corporate overlords and the prevailing mob mindset.

Censorship, cancel culture, political correctness, woke-ism, hate speech, intolerance: whatever label you assign to this overzealous drive to sanitize the culture of anything that might be deemed offensive or disturbing or challenging, be assured they are sign posts on a one-way road to graver dangers marked by “suppression, persecution, expulsion and the massacring of people.”

Whether those smashing monuments and erasing history are doing so for noble purposes or more diabolical reasons, the end results are the same: criminalization, confiscation, imprisonment, exile and genocide.

“Look at mobs which gather to smash monuments,” says Adams. “These monuments may be the statues of deposed dictators who terrorized populations, causing untold death and suffering. They may be monuments to fallen soldiers who died defending causes that are no longer fashionable. The mob’s anger is the same. The viciousness and triumphant celebrations are the same. Only the causes differ in seriousness, topicality and justification.”

Adams continues:

“The Civil War statue destroyers think they are assaulting the posterity of slave owners, but they themselves are in the grip of ideological fervor. They are unaware that they are running a biological code, hardwired in their brains by evolution and activated by political extremists. The activists of today heedlessly erase history they haven’t yet learned to read. They act as the hammer that extremists use to deface the cathedrals and museums our ancestors built.”

What’s different about this present age, however, is the use of technology to censor, silence, delete, label as “hateful,” demonize and destroy those whose viewpoints run counter to the cultural elite.

“In the last few years,” writes Nina Powers for Art Review, “what is understood to be contentious has become increasingly broadly defined… The range of what counts as acceptable gets smaller and smaller… [W]e thus find ourselves… in the midst of a new culture war in which the freedom to think, feel and express ourselves comes at the risk of economic impoverishment, social ostracism and mob justice.”

Where this leads is the stuff of dystopian nightmares: societies that value conformity and group-think over individuality; a populace so adept at self-censorship and compliance that they are capable only of obeying the government’s dictates without the ability to parse out whether those dictates should be obeyed; and a language limited to government-speak.

This is what happens when the voices of the majority are allowed to eliminate those in the minority, and it is exactly why James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, fought for a First Amendment that protected the “minority” against the majority, ensuring that even in the face of overwhelming pressure, a minority of one—even one who espouses distasteful viewpoints—would still have the right to speak freely, pray freely, assemble freely, challenge the government freely, and broadcast his views in the press freely.

Freedom for those in the unpopular minority constitutes the ultimate tolerance in a free society.

The alternative, as depicted in Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem, is a world in which individuality and the ability to think for oneself independent of the government and the populace are eradicated, where even the word “I” has been eliminated from the vocabulary, replaced by the collective “we.”

As Anthem’s narrator Equality 7-2521 explains, “It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. . . . And well we know that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.”

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are not merely losing the ability to think critically for ourselves and, in turn, to govern our inner and outer worlds, we are also in danger of losing the right to do so.

The government’s war on thought crimes and truth-tellers is just the beginning.

Via SchiffGold.com,

We recently reported that the Federal Reserve plans to launch a 12-week pilot program in partnership with several large commercial banks to test the feasibility of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The US isn’t alone in experimenting with digital currency. India is working on developing a digital rupee and recently announced the second phase of testing.

After successfully running a pilot program to test its digital currency at the wholesale level, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced it will test the digital rupee in a retail setting.

According to the RBI, the central bank digital currency “is a legal tender issued by a central bank in a digital form. It is the same as a fiat currency and is exchangeable one-to-one with the fiat currency. Only its form is different.”

Digital currencies are similar to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. They exist as virtual banknotes or coins held in a digital wallet on your computer or smartphone. The difference between a government digital currency and bitcoin is the value of the digital currency is backed and controlled by the state, just like traditional fiat currency.

As the RBI put it, “Unlike cryptocurrencies, a CBDC isn’t a commodity or claims on commodities or digital assets. Cryptocurrencies have no issuer. They are not money (certainly not currency) as the word has come to be understood historically.”

According to a report in the Economic Times of India, the National Payments Corporation of India will host the platform for the digital rupee payment system during the testing phase. The Reserve Bank of India wants each commercial bank in the pilot to test retail use of the digital rupee with 10,000 to 50,000 users.

State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Yes Bank and IDFC First Bank will participate in the pilot program. If the pilot is successful, the RBI will roll out the program to the entire Indian banking system.

“The e-rupee will be stored in a wallet, the denominations will be available as per the customer’s request, just like you request cash from an ATM. Banks are launching this only in select cities,” a person involved in the program told the Times.

In a concept note, the RBI touted the benefits of digital currency.

It is believed that retail CBDC can provide access to safe money for payment and settlement as it is a direct liability of the central bank. Wholesale CBDC has the potential to transform settlement systems for financial transactions and make them more efficient and secure. Going by the potential offered by each of them, there may be merit in introducing both CBDC-W and CBDC-R.”

Government-issued digital currencies are sold on the promise of providing a safe, convenient, and more secure alternative to physical cash. We’re also told it will help stop dangerous criminals who like the intractability of cash. But there is a darker side – the promise of control.

At the root of the move toward government digital currency is “the war on cash.” The elimination of cash creates the potential for the government to track and even control consumer spending, and it would make it even easier for central banks to engage in manipulative monetary policies such as negative interest rates.

Imagine if there was no cash. It would be impossible to hide even the smallest transaction from government eyes. Something as simple as your morning trip to Starbucks wouldn’t be a secret from government officials. As Bloomberg put it in an article published when China launched its digital yuan pilot program, digital currency “offers China’s authorities a degree of control never possible with physical money.”

The government could even “turn off” an individual’s ability to make purchases. Bloomberg described just how much control a digital currency could give Chinese officials.

The PBOC has also indicated that it could put limits on the sizes of some transactions, or even require an appointment to make large ones. Some observers wonder whether payments could be linked to the emerging social-credit system, wherein citizens with exemplary behavior are ‘whitelisted’ for privileges, while those with criminal and other infractions find themselves left out. ‘China’s goal is not to make payments more convenient but to replace cash, so it can keep closer tabs on people than it already does,’ argues Aaron Brown, a crypto investor who writes for Bloomberg Opinion.”

China launched its digital yuan pilot program last year. The Chinese government-backed digital currency got a boost when the country’s biggest online retailer announced the first virtual platform to accept the Chinese digital currency.

Economist Thorsten Polleit outlined the potential for Big Brother-like government control with the advent of a digital euro in an article published by the Mises Wire. As he put it, “the path to becoming a surveillance state regime will accelerate considerably” if and when a digital currency is issued.

Governments around the world have quietly waged a war on cash for years. Back in 2017, the IMF published a creepy paper offering governments suggestions on how to move toward a cashless society even in the face of strong public opposition.

As with most things the government does, you should be wary of the digital dollar. It has a dark side that you can be sure the mainstream will mostly ignore.