(LifeSiteNews) — Florida governor and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis criticized central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and took aim at both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump for supporting them.
“Both the Trump and Biden administrations have pursued a Central Bank Digital Currency. I will not; in fact, I will ban it – just as I did in Florida,” he wrote on X.
“A CBDC is a massive threat to American liberty,” he said. “It would allow the federal government to surveil all your purchases and control your accounts. It would pave the way to a CCP-style social credit system. That’s why when I am president, a CBDC is DOA.”
Financial magazine Forbes reported that both Biden and Trump were “favorable” to CBDCs. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner worked behind the scenes to push the Treasury Department to explore the idea.
DeSantis, however, signed a law that “says we do not recognize CBDC in the State of Florida, and I think other states are probably going to follow suit.”
“That will jam their ability to do it through executive action,” he previously told Tucker Carlson.
“They want to get rid of cash, they want no cryptocurrency, and they want this to be the sole form of legal tender. And they have said this publicly at Davos,” DeSantis warned.
A press release from his office in March 2023 explained the problems further.
“A federally controlled Central Bank Digital Currency is the most recent way the Davos elites are attempting to backdoor woke ideology like Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) into the United States financial system, threatening individual privacy and economic freedom,” his office stated. “Unlike a decentralized digital currency, a CBDC is directly controlled and issued by the government to consumers, giving government bureaucrats the ability to see all consumer activity and the power to cut off access to goods and services for consumers.”
“Additionally, a federally sanctioned CBDC as proposed by the Biden administration would diminish the role of community banks and credit unions in our financial system as CBDC currency would be a direct liability of the Federal government, rather than of a chartered financial institution, shrinking market lending power,” the governor’s office warned.
A March 9, 2022, executive order from Biden “placed the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC.”
A former investment banker and official in the Department of Housing and Urban Development has warned that digital currencies, which could theoretically be used to control purchasing options or turned off if people do not take the right actions as deemed by the government, are set up for “control.”
“It’s a financial transaction control grid,” Catherine Fitts warned.
“The reality as the financial system gets more controlling and more invasive… central bank digital currencies and vaccine passports or digital IDs are sort of the last shutting of the gate,” Fitts told Tucker Carlson.