Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Issues Dire Warning over CBDC Adoption

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. warned that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) pave the way for an authoritarian government in America similar to the Chinese communist regime.

“The government used facial recognition systems and other intrusive technologies to identify the participants, all the truckers. They got their license plates, etc. And then they froze their bank accounts. So they couldn’t get diesel for their trucks, they couldn’t buy food for their kids, they couldn’t pay for their education, they couldn’t pay their mortgages.”

A trucker told Mr. Kennedy that he was going to jail for being unable to pay his alimony. “It occurred to me that transactional freedom is as important as freedom of the press. If you have freedom of speech in the First Amendment, and yet when you exercise that speech, the government doesn’t like it, they can starve you to death, they can throw you out of your home because you can’t pay your mortgage or your rent, then that is meaningless.”

Transactional freedom is “absolutely critical” for freedom of speech to exist, he said. “If we get a central bank digital currency, they’d do what they do in China.”

In China, people pay for groceries and gasoline using their “face,” he said, referring to facial recognition systems. The Communist regime keeps a social credit score on its citizens so that anyone found violating regulations will face penalties and restrictions, like potentially restricting an individual’s access to grocery stores within a certain radius of their house or workplace.

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“You can’t buy gas, you can’t buy an airplane ticket, you can’t buy anything else. So, you’re basically under home confinement. Like the truckers in Canada, they were never charged with a crime. They were certainly never convicted,” he said.

“As your president, I will never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency. Such a currency would give the federal government absolute control of your money,” he said. “This would be a dangerous threat to freedom and I will stop it from coming to America.”

Several key international figures admitted that CBDCs will allow for greater control over people’s finances.

During a seminar back in 2020, Agustin Carstens, general manager of the Bank for International Settlements, pointed out that “we don’t know who’s using a $100 bill today, and we don’t know who’s using a 1,000-peso bill today.”

The key difference with the CBDC is “the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that,” he explained.

He went on to explain that CBDCs can be used to control items like welfare money, food stamps, and consumption coupons.

“The CBDC would directly compete with bank deposits in the market for digital money. As a consequence, there are concerns that a CBDC could substantially crowd out bank deposits, which may undermine financial stability by raising the funding cost and reducing the profitability of the banking sector,” the paper said.

“The Biden administration salivates at the thought of infringing on our freedom and intruding on the privacy of citizens to surveil their personal spending habits, which is why Congress must clarify that the Federal Reserve has no authority to implement a CBDC,” Mr. Cruz said in a Feb, 26 statement.

“I’m proud to lead the fight in the Senate to restrict the Federal Reserve’s exploration of and attempt to introduce a CBDC to the American economy.”