Trump and Musk: Financial surveillance. Digital currency. Social credit system.
When they weren’t busy trying to distract you with the release of the JFK files and “terrorist” attacks on Tesla dealerships, Donald Trump was expanding government’s financial surveillance power to spy on your bank accounts and pushing his digital currency scheme while Elon Musk secured a “God’s view” of government that gives him power to usher in a social credit system.
We begin with Donald Trump and how the PATRIOT Act laid the foundation for his push to expand government’s financial surveillance power over our bank accounts.
One of the little known and often overlooked provisions in the PATRIOT Act is the change made to the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act. This change established new standards for banks to identify customers, maintain records — requiring them to report cash transactions over $10,000. Allegedly, this change was intended to prevent the funding of terrorist activities. In reality, it has resulted in a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process.
But the government isn’t just after power; it’s after absolute power, which is why Donald Trump’s Treasury Department just announced a radical change to $10,000 requirement (via CATO.org):
More than one million Americans are about to face a new level of financial surveillance. The Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) announced that the threshold for currency transaction reports has been lowered from $10,000 to $200 for Americans living in 30 zip codes in California and Texas.
FinCEN officially announced the temporary policy change as an effort “to further combat the illicit activities and money laundering of Mexico-based cartels and other criminal actors along the southwest border of the United States.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “As part of a whole-of-government approach to combatting the threat, [the] Treasury remains focused on leveraging all our available tools and authorities to better identify and counter these criminal activities.”
While this announcement is disappointing, it is not surprising. Alex Nowrasteh, the Cato Institute’s vice president for economic and social policy studies, warned people in February that President Trump’s decision to designate cartels as terrorists could have repercussions for civil liberties and the economy at large. Specifically, Nowrasteh noted that the designation would allow the government to freeze assets, enact secondary sanctions, and take greater control of the financial system generally. (Emphasis mine)
Freeze assets? Enact sanctions? Take greater control of the financial system? Like I said… ABSOLUTE POWER!
How exactly would government actually seize such power? We find the answer from an article I wrote a few years ago when Joe Biden pushed for the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that, in the end, would give government complete control over every dollar made or spent by every American. To quote Ron Paul at the time:
First and foremost, a CBDC could be used as a tool for surveillance and control of the American public. … Even more insidious is the prospect that Americans’ “digital dollars” might one day be frozen or seized for any number of pretexts. We are already past the point where political actors are comfortable labeling political speech “violence” and those who speak in their opposition “terrorists.” (Emphasis mine)
Under a Central Bank Digital Currency, government would have the ability to:
- Automatically withdraw taxes from your account
- Dispense funds based on political ideology (Want to buy a gun? Look out)
- Dispense funds based on health records (Diabetic? No sugar for you!)
- Withhold funds if the nanny state doesn’t approve of your spending habits
When you combine the PATRIOT Act with new legislation promoting digital currency, government has two of the three pieces of the puzzle for full control. That’s what Biden tried to do, and that’s what Trump is trying to do as well with his expansion of financial surveillance and his push for “private” digital currency.
Trump has signed an executive order allegedly banning CBDCs, but the order also established a presidential working group to create a federal regulatory framework governing digital assets (including stablecoins) and evaluate the creation of a strategic national digital assets stockpile. In other words, government will control digital currency instead of the Federal Reserve. The tyranny is the same, only the name is different.
Bank surveillance expanded? Check. Digital currency well on the way to becoming a reality? Check. Now we come to the third piece of the puzzle: a social credit system and Elon Musk’s “God view” of government. We begin with this tidbit from RawStory.com:
Elon Musk wants to position himself above the federal government in an unprecedented way, according to veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO bought himself a powerful perch in the White House by giving more than a quarter billion dollars to Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, and he has set about eliminating thousands of government jobs and entire federal agencies, but Swisher told “CNN This Morning” that Musk is scooping up sensitive data to give him a “god’s view” of the entire government.
“The more of a god’s view you have, the better, in technology,” Swisher said.
The Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency has accessed heavily secured databases that store the private health data, financial records, work history and other sensitive personal information for millions of Americans, and Swisher is starting to get a sense of his intentions. (Emphasis mine)
All you have to do is connect the dots to understand Musk’s intentions; he wants to gather all of the information needed to provide Donald Trump with the final piece of the government-control puzzle: a social credit system.
A practical example of how this all works together comes to us courtesy of China’s CBDC (Digital Yuan), a digital currency completely tied to the country’s vaccine passport and social credit systems. Experts in the tech industry tell us that the digital platform used to create vaccine passports is the same platform used in China’s “social credit system.” Some of the areas tracked in real time by China’s “social credit system” are (via New Horizons):
- Medical history
- Social media posts and internet search history
- Bank accounts and credit cards
- Residence, employment, and criminal history
- Relationships and religious activities
- Political activity
This information gets fed to a central database in real time to create a “social credit score” used to reward or punish citizens. Those with a high score are allowed to participate freely in society while those with a low score are prohibited from traveling, borrowing money, keeping a job, or even getting their children into school.
China not only tracks the spending habits of its citizens, but it can also control them, which is only made possible by the expansion of government power via financial surveillance and a digital currency.
Donald Trump has expanded government’s financial surveillance power to spy on your bank accounts, and he’s been pimping his digital currency scheme. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is securing a “God’s view” of government that will ultimately usher in a social credit system.
I’m sure glad America voted for the lesser of two evils.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative and the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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