(LifeSiteNews) — An author and political activist speculated that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which would enable government tyranny, could be rolled out in the U.S. before the 2024 election under the pretext of combating money laundering and terrorism.
Aaron Day, author of the 2023 book The Final Countdown that warns of the “imminent” threat of CBDCs, pointed out in an interview on The David Knight Show that the Biden administration’s efforts to develop a CBDC are already well underway.
“Biden passed Executive Order 14067, which contemplates both pursuing a CBDC and also regulating all of the other digital assets. And they’ve been following through on that,” Day told Knight, explaining that U.S. banks have already participated in three recent CBDC pilot programs, two of which are ongoing.
The completed Project Hamilton explored the “technical feasibility” of a functioning CBDC, while Project Cedar is studying cross-country and bank-to-bank CBDC transactions, and the Regulated Liability Network (RLN) is exploring, disturbingly, the assignment of digital tokens for all value assets so that all transactions can be centrally tracked and settled by the government and other parties.
“The technology is sitting there waiting to be deployed,” Day told Knight in reference to the pilots.
Meanwhile, the infrastructure for a U.S. CBDC is already being quietly developed in the form of a digital instant payments service called FedNow. The service, launched in July 2023, allows “24/7 settlement… that happens instantly from bank to bank.” According to Day, this “could enable the rapid deployment of CBDCs in the U.S.”
Day explained that while “Congress is required in order to put through a new currency but there’s nothing that says that banks can’t regulate how the existing currency is sent back and forth. So you can get… de facto all of the negative aspects of a CBDC by regulating the way money is transmitted through the FedNow system.”
Day said that with Biden’s potential military action in the Middle East in mind, “You can imagine a situation where if there’s a terrorist attack on American soil you will get bipartisan support for a CBDC on the basis of stopping money laundering and terrorism.”
He cited precedents for such a type of emergency legislation, including the Patriot Act, that “was passed 45 days after 9/11,” TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), which “passed 18 days after Lehman Brothers collapsed,” and the $2.2 trillion CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act, which “was passed 15 days after COVID was officially declared a pandemic on a voice vote.”
“Many people in Congress have voted for all three of those things. So the idea that they wouldn’t usher in CBDCs in an emergency… I think there’s a high probability that they could,” said Day.
He added that his conversations with Ted Cruz and others in Congress indicate that the “votes are not there” to stop the implementation of a CBDC before the 2024 election.
The WND News Center recently hypothesized that cyberattacks could be used as a pretext to implement a CBDC, considering that the World Economic Forum (WEF) “wants every nation to adopt a CBDC,” and that many nations besides the U.S. are making progress toward CBDC implementation.
“The director of the FBI recently went before Congress to warn that Chinese computer hackers are preparing to soon ‘wreak havoc and cause real-world damage” to our “water treatment plants, electric grid, and gas pipelines,’” WND News Center noted.
In addition, “in November 2020, the WEF and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace co-produced a report that warned that the global financial system was increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks.”
“That same report called for the merging of Wall Street banks, their regulators and intelligence agencies (like the CIA) as necessary to confront an allegedly imminent cyberattack that will collapse the existing financial system,” WND News Center noted.