Mandrake, have you ever hear of Central Bank Digital Currency?
That CRT-killin’ Mouse-foe, Florida Gov. Wokety-woke DeWoke, decided he was not fringy enough to appeal to the QAnon-fueled, pedophile-fightin’, MAGA primary voter. He’s rooted out another Deep State enemy with which to scare the bejeezus out of them. It got lost in the Trump indictment fallout this week until the other day.
Catherine Rampell noticed it, though:
In a speech this past weekend in Pennsylvania, DeSantis suggested that the real reason to fear the Fed is that central bankers are “colluding” with other (unnamed, presumably evil) communist-style elites to block your ability to buy gasoline and guns.
“They want the Fed to control a digital dollar,” he said. “Guess what’ll happen? They’re going to try to impose an ESG agenda through that. You go and use too much gas, they’re going to stop it. They’re not going to honor the transaction because you’ve already bought more than what they think. You wanna go buy a rifle, they’re going to say no, you have too many, too many of those, you can’t do it. So it’s ceding the power of our financial freedom to a central bank which does not have our interest at heart.”
DeSantis adds ESG (environmental, social, and governance) to CRT and DEI (diversity equity and inclusion) in his list of plots by the woke left to undermine Real Americans’ ™ personal freedoms.
But wait. Here comes CBDC:
You almost need an Alex Jones-style decoder ring to understand what DeSantis is talking about here. Let me attempt to translate.
DeSantis is referring to ongoing Fed discussions about whether to create a central bank digital currency, which would be an alternative means for conducting financial transactions that might complement cash and other forms of payment (so that those without bank accounts could still buy things online, for example). It’s a complicated and thorny set of issues, and ultimately the Fed hasn’t decided whether to issue a digital dollar, or what its parameters would even look like.
“Unlike, say, Bitcoin, this digital currency would be backed by the government, so it would not pose the same safety risks,” writes Timothy Noah at The New Republic. “DeSantis frames his opposition to sound like he opposes cryptocurrency, but CBDC is actually an effort to displace cryptocurrency with something more stable.”
There are upsides and downside, Noah explains. Besides being more stable, CBDC would be more traceable (bad for terrorists and criminals) and less exposed to bank runs (good for banks and you). But there are privacy worries. This is where DeSantis veers into Ripperland:
The Fed scheme DeSantis described in his remarks is sheer fantasy. He imagines that the Fed would use CBDCs to steer purchases in the direction of environmental protection, social justice, and corporate governance. There’s nothing in the CBDC plan that would enable the government to do that. Nor could it limit gasoline purchases or prevent anybody from buying a gun. We have entered the realm of John Birch Society–grade nuttery, akin to the Birchers’ claim in the 1950s that water fluoridation was a Communist plot to control American minds. Even Barry Goldwater tried to distance himself from the Birchers (unpersuasively) when he ran for president.
In the political culture that predated Donald Trump, a comment like DeSantis’s would end a presidential campaign for a few reasons. First, this rant is paranoid and unhinged. Second, bankers, who have a stake in this proposal receiving reasonable consideration, are a Republican constituency sitting on huge piles of cash. They may not be as Republican as they used to be, but Republicanism is still the prevailing religion in that sector, and these comments will hurt DeSantis with them. Third, in emitting this bizarre screed against CBDC, DeSantis is effectively running interference for the cryptocurrency industry, as disreputable a bunch as can be found in the financial marketplace. (See Bankman-Fried, Sam.) Fourth, it makes DeSantis sound like, well, General Jack D. Ripper expounding on fluoridation in Dr. Strangelove.
Florida’s white-rubber-booted answer to Barney Fife plans to nip this CBDC thing in the bud. DeSantis means to ban it in his state despite having no authority over what constitutes U.S. legal tender.
“DeSantis’s conspiratorial babble about the Fed was no rhetorical slip,” writes Noah, “and he isn’t going to get shut down by the Republican mainstream because there isn’t one anymore.”
That warhead has left the bomb bay.