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Oct. 24, 2022 - The Dan Bongino Show

49:12

The Globalist Push For Digital ID With Michael Rectenwald (Ep 1879)

In this episode, I address the growing threat of digital ID and digital currency with author Michael Rectenwald. News Picks: Mastercard just outlined its digital ID push. Find Michael Rectenwald's books at Michaelrectenwald.com Copyright Bongino Inc All Rights Reserved Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Get ready to hear the truth about America on a show that's not immune to the facts with your host, Dan Bongino.
	Welcome to the Dan Bongino show on this fine Monday.
	You know, we love the Monday show because we've got a lot to catch up on.
	It is a bevy of material, but today I want to do something special.
	You know, I've been deeply concerned about the growing threat of digital IDs and digital currency.
	This is a way for the government to keep tabs on us, to surveil us, and in many cases to delete us from digital life altogether.
	In my humble opinion, it is one of the two or three largest threats to liberty and freedom out there today.
	Folks, we've got a lot to talk about today with author Michael Rechtenwald, who is an expert on this subject.
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	As I said, welcome to the Dan Bongino Show.
	Michael Rechtenwald knows an enormous amount about the growing pernicious and dangerous threat of big tech and government combining in this digital ID endeavor.
	We're going to get to him in this really incredibly informative Must listen to interview in a second.
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	Folks, I'm really excited about this next guest.
	He is the author of a book I've really come to enjoy.
	Google Archipelago, obviously a play on Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
	Sadly, we're back there.
	And the forthcoming book available at michaelrechtenwald.com.
	It's called The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty.
	I want to welcome to the show, Michael Rechtenwald.
	Michael, thanks for spending some time with us.
	It's great to be here, Dan.
	Thanks for having me.
	So I've come across your work, given my fascination with digital currencies, digital IDs, and the threat to liberty and freedom.
	Your work is just incredible on this.
	I've read a lot of your pieces and outlets.
	First, describe to us digital ID.
	You know, what is it?
	It's become kind of one of these catch-all terms.
	What does it mean to you?
	Well, I think it refers to a collection of data.
	That purportedly will define who we are as persons, including what we do both online and offline, and also a means by which we can be identified, of course, but also tracked, trailed, surveilled, etc.
	And it could also use predictive algorithms to anticipate what we might do, not only what we do.
	So this has a lot of potential functionality that is very alarming, frankly.
	I mean, this sounds like the kind of thing they're doing in China with this social credit score.
	I read something about an app they had done over there, the CCP, that would enable you at a crosswalk to see if the person standing next to you was in debt, was a debtor.
	And this sounds, I mean, really, I mean, axiomatically Orwellian by nature.
	I mean, these were the warnings.
	So it's kind of a composite.
	But but when we say the digital ideas, it's some kind of when people talk about is going to be some kind of QR code on your phone.
	How exactly these totalitarians want to implement this thing?
	It could actually be QR codes, but it might not be a QR code on your on your phone.
	It could actually be a QR code on your skin.
	And that's not an exaggeration.
	Such that other people with phones would be able to scan your QR code and then your identity would pop up to them.
	They would have data on just about everything you do, including vaccine statuses and so forth.
	So I mean, there's many ways it could go, and there are many different projects rolling this out.
	It could.
	It could evolve in various ways, and the real question is how they're going to close the circle on this, because.
	It could creep up on us.
	So there's this thing called function creep, whereby you have identity at first, identification at first, and then new components keep getting added, such that it also entails more and more functions.
	And before you know it, you're utterly hemmed in.
	That's the thing that we have to be concerned about.
	So if I may, and if this example is off base, let me know.
	So it starts, say, as a microchip, say, implanted underneath the webbed area between your index finger and your thumb, and you think it's working like a driver's license, right?
	You get pulled over, you get scanned, no big deal.
	You get on a plane, you get scanned.
	But you said the functionality, this could turn into some kind of way to track your spending, some way to track what vaccines you may have taken.
	I mean, this is the kind of thing that could scale up To a really dramatic level of surveillance we've never seen in human history.
	Exactly.
	It could include things like your carbon footprint allowance and your usage.
	In other words, it would effectively give you a personal ESG score, an environmental, social and governance score, which, you know, of course, is being levied on corporations right now, but it could become individual very easily.
	So yeah, there are a number of functions that could keep accruing to this thing, such that it gets completely out of control.
	And we have to watch for this kind of function creep as we move along.
	And we have to resist the duping that they're going to use, suggestive of the idea that without it, you can't participate in society.
	And with it, you'll have all this convenience and inclusion, and so on and so forth.
	All of these things are real misnomers.
	They are, at best, euphemisms, at worst, complete doublespeak.
	Talking to Michael Rechtenwald, author again of the book, Google Archipelago, and the forthcoming book, The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty, available at michaelrechtenwald.com.
	Put it down on the Chiron.
	Please visit.
	Please check out the books.
	Michael, this has horrified me for a long time.
	I am not a historian by any stretch, but I'm fascinated by history.
	And when you look back at the history of human nature and authoritarianism and totalitarianism, key tenants of it, they build this house of tyranny on, are obviously the ability to surveil.
	I've used the analogy of, you know, when you, you have this personal and public self in a constitutional republic.
	When your garage door closes behind your car, as long as you're not breaking any laws in your house and you'd have to go judge to get a warrant, You can be relatively confident that what happens behind that garage closed door is your personal self.
	You know, whatever you and your wife want to do, it's your business.
	It's not mine or significant other.
	But you know, having traveled the world as a young secret service agent, and you know very well, That's the exception, that's not the rule.
	There are many countries now around the world, these communist regimes, where everything's considered public because you're always being surveilled, either by your neighbors or you're being incentivized to be surveilled upon.
	That's what I find to be the biggest chasm between a republic, a representative democracy, and a totalitarian regime.
	And this breaks this all down, digital ID.
	Yes, it does.
	And the thing is that, you know, they're going to try to bypass legislation in order to implement it.
	In other words, you have these corporate partners and this is the big this is the big rhetoric that's always paraded around the private public partnerships.
	I'm sorry, public private partnerships, which is these corporations in conjunction with the state enacting various technologies and really getting around legislation.
	So we can expect this to first be introduced with reference to commercial uses, and then it'll metastasize beyond that.
	This is where they're going to try to basically insert it, and then as the functions continue to be added, it'll be adopted by states as necessary for, you know, your registration of this, that, and the other thing.
	Car registration, birth registration to begin with for infants, and onward from there.
	So that means no escape from digital surveillance afforded by digital identity.
	And, you know, if the way these totalitarians have operated in the past on social media and elsewhere and search functions like Google, we can expect that they're going to treat behavior as they do social media.
	That is, they're going to apply the same sort of censorship, surveillance, Uh, but also, you know, complete control of, uh, speech and expression.
	And, uh, basically the possibility of digital deletion is even on the table.
	Explain that Michael.
	I I've, I've seen you expound on that a bit.
	This idea of digital deletion is just terrifying.
	Explain what you mean by that.
	Well, I mean, you know, just as, just as social media, uh, outlets delete you from their platforms, by the way, I was just deleted from Twitter.
	This could happen to you in a digital identity, and this means that you don't exist in effect.
	If you have no digital identity in a world in which digital identity is a requirement, where are you without one?
	And so you could have all kinds of censorship and control, but also utter deletion by virtue of the fact of just making you a non-person.
	And this is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union with dissidents, and it could be used like that to treat anyone who's considered a dissident from the regime in the same manner as, you know, social media is treating us today and as dissidents were treated in the Soviet Union and in China.
	So I'm imagining a future and we'll get to how big tech fits into this in a second and more specifically, but like you said, introduced for commercial use, kind of like, Hey, it's just like an easy pass in New York.
	It's just convenient.
	You don't have to pay cash.
	But then.
	It becomes integrated into a legal framework and all of a sudden you find yourself in 10 years, you don't have it, you can't get on a plane, you can't access credit.
	So yeah, I mean, I guess you could get a money order from the post office to pay your rent if you're allowed to access your apartment without the digital ID.
	But it's really the kind of thing that they circumvent the constitution by saying you don't have to get it.
	It's kind of like the old mob approach, Michael, right?
	Be a real shame if your place burned down.
	It's that kind of a threat, isn't it?
	Exactly.
	It's that kind of threat.
	And so what they'll do is make it basically something that you can't exist without.
	And they'll sell this with a lot of bait.
	There'll be a lot of lures here that'll make it seem appealing.
	And this is the real danger.
	There'll be a bait and switch, really, is what's going to happen.
	How does big tech fit in this picture?
	Obviously, there's a financial incentive.
	We know that.
	A lot of the architecture and infrastructure is probably a boatload of government contracts.
	I could see this becoming mandatory for people who enter our military.
	It's kind of like a beta test there.
	But big tech stands to profit from this, but they also stand to profit on the data side as well, Michael.
	You know, someone told me once, I'm sure you've heard this, when a product is free, you're the product.
	They're selling you.
	Nothing's free.
	Milton Friedman wasn't lying when he told you that.
	So your thoughts on the big tech picture in this?
	Well, they stand a lot to gain and, you know, they'll have contracts with the state and governmental organizations, and then they're going to have, you know, they'll stand to make massive amount of money on these contracts.
	But they're also being incorporated into the state and they're becoming state apparatuses in effect.
	We see this operating already today with, you know, the Biden administration asking Facebook to censor and downrank and delete, you know, people and posts.
	So they'll have the same kind of interlocking relationship with the state that they're enjoying today, and they'll stand to benefit.
	And also, they're effectively gaining state power.
	So they have favored corporate status with the state.
	They get a kind of monopoly, a shared monopoly, in effect.
	And in return, they give the state these powers of coercion.
	So this kind of a very unholy alliance of state and corporate actors really amounts to fascism.
	This is exactly what fascism is.
	It's this kind of merging of corporate and state functions.
	Yeah, I absolutely agree with you.
	And one of the reasons I find your work fascinating, folks, please again, check out the books, Google Archipelago and The Great Reset and The Struggle for Liberty coming soon.
	Pick it up at michaelrechtenwald.com.
	Is having lived through this with the parlor experience, Where after January 6th, there were a lot of people who said a lot of dumb things on social media platforms everywhere.
	Matter of fact, Facebook, I think it came out in an FBI investigation, had large swaths of this stuff too.
	It wasn't unique to this parlor site, a parlor where I was an equity stakeholder at the time.
	Parler became associated with what the media would call right-wing politics, what we really just called free speech at the site.
	That's all it was about.
	We didn't censor liberals over there.
	It was a free speech platform.
	The fact that conservatives found a home there was irrelevant to the mission, right?
	But you had people like AOC and Ro Khanna after January 6th, you know, hey, AWS, it'd be a real shame if, you know, you didn't do something about this parlor thing.
	And, you know, this is what our founding fathers feared most of all.
	I mean, there's a reason the Bill of Rights, you know, right there in the First Amendment, freedom of speech and the government's, you know, granting of negative liberties to the government, what it can't do to you, it was included right there that you can't infringe on these things.
	And yet this symbiosis with government and big tech effectively deputizing them.
	I mean, they wiped this company out, Michael, like that.
	They were lucky to ever get back.
	That's exactly the right word, is they're deputizing these companies as state apparatuses or state agents.
	So they have the authority of the state.
	And this adds tremendous power to the state.
	It augments state power, gives it greater precision than it ever had before.
	With 5G and AI and data mining, etc.
	It makes the state grow in power and to unprecedented degrees while feeding these corporations effective, you know, tax money.
	It'll come down to basically we'll be paying for our own surveillance, for our own cage, in effect.
	A digital cage in this case.
	Flowery chains.
	I mean, it's not like we haven't been warned about this by philosophers in the business.
	Go back and read.
	So Michael, one of the things that concerns me about it is, you know, when I was a young agent out there doing surveillance, you could get a subpoena from companies and you could, the technology to geolocate someone using their phone was primitive.
	But if you were to have some kind of subcutaneous chip implanted, the technology now is extraordinary through geolocation and geofencing.
	You know, you could get an FBI agent who, I mean, sadly, I'm not indicting everyone there, but we've seen a lot of people with malicious intentions through the whole spying operation on Donald Trump and others.
	You could get an FBI agent or an FBI supervisor with malicious intentions with some political motive to get a subpoena for a search warrant, effectively just follow someone around to within a couple feet, everywhere they go.
	Exactly.
	And they could also use this geofencing to effectively tie you to any local crime.
	There's the possibility of issuing warrants on the basis of geolocation.
	So if you happen to be within, say, a one mile perimeter from a crime, and you are also someone targeted by the regime as a dissident or an otherwise obstreperous person that the state doesn't like, that is the regime in power, That is likely a leftist totalitarian regime, then you could be pinned with crimes that you had nothing to do with.
	And this is a serious problem.
	And there's also the possibility that, you know, geolocation will just be used indiscriminately to corral various people and associate them with various crimes, whether they have anything to do with them at all.
	And these are some of the the most dangerous manifestations of all this, but there are many others too.
	I mean, vaccine issue, the carbon footprint tracking, basically linking you biometrically to this digital ID, such that you're tracked and traced, and your biometrics are stored in this ID, so they have a confirmed identity established that can be used in many ways.
	I've got so much more I wanna get to.
	We're gonna take a quick break.
	We're here with author Michael Rechtenwald.
	The website, michaelrechtenwald.com.
	The books are incredible.
	Google Archipelago, you can get now.
	I strongly encourage you to do it.
	And you can pre-order now The Great Reset and The Struggle for Liberty.
	Pick that up.
	We'll be back.
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	Welcome back, Michael Rechtenwald.
	Michael, I wanted to go through a couple of these things you've mentioned in the first part of our interview here, one by one.
	Obviously, it appears to most observers who are dispassionate and reasonable about this thing that the vaccine mandate had little to do with the vaccine.
	They had no longitudinal data on its efficacy at stopping transmission.
	I mean, again, that's just tautological.
	It was new.
	But they went just incredibly overboard with this.
	You had mandates, people got fired.
	Long story, we've all been through it.
	But I've said to my audience repeatedly that this was never about the vaccine, it was about the mandate.
	That this never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste, Rahm Emanuel-type attitude.
	When you're a totalitarian, you'll never blow an opportunity to soften up, be a body blows, people for this coming surveillance future, which every totalitarian wants.
	Your thoughts on that, how the vaccine mandate was like kind of a body blow to freedom and a prep course for this digital ID future.
	Right, exactly.
	One of the things to keep in mind, and it's a very simple idea.
	When you're dealing with totalitarians, the means are the ends.
	Whatever they're saying that you need to do to achieve a particular end, like mitigating climate change, like, you know, trying to mitigate the effects of a virus, The means that are being introduced are the very ends that are being sought.
	And that's what's happening with vaccine.
	There's no question about it.
	It's also what's happening with terms of climate change, catastrophism, whatever actions that are being enacted in order to make you change your behavior.
	This is the objective on the table.
	It is not the ends, the punitive ends that are given.
	Yeah, and it seems so obvious from, again, people who've separated themselves and looked at it objectively.
	It seems so transparent.
	You mentioned another thing as well.
	The use of these digital IDs in conjunction with a carbon footprint.
	I've seen and read some horror stories about The potential in the future of, say, you've driven your allotted miles per month and the ESG, Green New Deal, Great Reset crowd you cover in your next book, that's it.
	You've got 100 miles a week.
	You've surpassed your miles.
	Your digital ID in conjunction with a digital currency doesn't work at the gas pump anymore.
	I mean, these are things these people have really thought about.
	This isn't hyperbolic exaggeration for effect nonsense.
	Exactly.
	In fact, at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in May, The CEO or president of Alibaba Group introduced this idea of personal carbon footprint tracking.
	And this is tracking that tracks your every carbon use and your allowance of carbon use.
	So that's not only gas and other forms of energy, but also consumption, your food consumption, including meat consumption.
	And, you know, not so ironically, Alibaba Group is one of the major purveyors of China's social credit score system.
	They are actually running the social credit scoring system in conjunction with the state in China.
	So we see a public-private partnership in operation.
	And so that's the same kind of thing they're trying to roll out here.
	Google has on the table a personal carbon footprint tracking technology.
	Many other companies are also vying for, you know, connection with the state with reference to this.
	This is the kind of thing we're going to see more of.
	And you mentioned the connection to CBDCs and the way that the digital identity will be connected to that will make it impossible to purchase things if, in fact, a carbon footprint allowance is dictated.
	Yeah, I definitely want to get into the central bank digital currencies in a moment.
	That to me, that's been something I've been harping on for about seven years now on my podcast.
	I'm so terrified by it.
	But when I think about this digital ID, and you look back at the history of the Soviet Union, the early Chinese Communist Party, one of their great failures in implementation of central planning, in addition to an obvious ideological one, Um, was the inability to surveil on a mass scale, uh, kind of in a granular way.
	I mean, you can tell the farmer all you want.
	You're going to, you know, uh, plot this many hectares of corn, but the hard reality is you just don't have enough police state actors to watch everything.
	But if you have a CBDC, a digital currency combined with a digital ID, and you tell a neighborhood, Martin County, where I live, you have this many residents.
	Therefore, you'd be allotted this amount of wheat and beef and gasoline.
	I mean, through this, you can effectively use the technology to surveil everyone like an eye in the sky 24 hours a day.
	Absolutely.
	This gives powers that, you know, Mao and Stalin could only dream of, really.
	This would give us kind of precision.
	The scope and the penetration of surveillance I've never seen before.
	And this is really the setup for a complete total totalitarian system.
	And so we have to do everything we can to resist it.
	Yeah, it's really shocking to me that more people don't see this.
	I mean, I understand the ones that tactically want it and are hiding their intentions, but I see it as probably the greatest threat to liberty in our time.
	You mentioned also political rallies.
	This sounds like a great way to politically target people.
	I mean, if you can geofence, I mean, we already saw what happened with January 6th.
	You had some bad actors and you had some people who showed up to exercise their First Amendment right to go to a rally.
	You're allowed to say you think an election was stolen or whatever, as long as you don't break the law.
	You can say whatever you want.
	There's specific laws about this stuff.
	But what better way to shut down a political rally than to kind of wink and nod again with the, be a real shame if your place burned down.
	Hey, you know, you guys go to that rally, you know, there's digital IDs, everybody's going to know you.
	God forbid you lost your job.
	I mean, if that information leaked, it'd be really terrible, wouldn't it?
	Absolutely.
	I mean, so this is how they're using it in China.
	And basically the geofencing and the use of the digital ID and the social credit score, they all go hand in hand.
	So you can't travel even outside of a certain perimeter if you don't have the proper social credit score, for example.
	So they use the geofence to set off alarms.
	In effect, if a person, you know, transgresses a periphery, For example, there, you know, the alarm goes off and in effect, it sends data to the state and then they act on it if necessary.
	So this would be a way of putting people, you know, establishing like a political profile, a sociopolitical credit score, really, when it comes down to it.
	It's a sociopolitical credit score that's on the table here.
	So you have this profile about somebody, a political profile.
	And therefore, you can then identify them and know about their whereabouts, their connection to any kind of political movement, like a rally or something else.
	And already we've seen how people being, you know, attending Trump rallies are deemed fascists and Nazis.
	So, I mean, this could be used as a way to, you know, further characterize people and profile them and then use the profile to prohibit certain behavior or to Elicit some sort of suspicion about their their intentions, even politically.
	So you're looking at pre-crime surveillance, pre-crime, pre-crime regime, and even the possibility of pre-crime arrests where people's behavior isn't or anticipated.
	And as such, they're used to basically arrest people before they even act.
	Yeah, sadly, we've already seen, maybe not specifically, but allusions to that with some of the videos I played on my show in recent months.
	I know in your next book, The Great Reset and Struggle for Liberty, you cover this World Economic Forum, globalists, World Health Organization, Great Reset crowd.
	Describe for us, what is the Great Reset?
	And how does it tie in with digital IDs and these globalists who are pushing to advance this insane digital idea?
	Yeah, that's a great question.
	So the Gray Reset is a multi-pronged project.
	It includes an economic project.
	There's a kind of economy that it's trying to establish, which they're calling stakeholder capitalism.
	And it really comes down to a kind of corporate state hybrid on top and an effect of actually existing socialism on the ground.
	These corporate state hybrid monopolists in control And individuals basically relegated to a static economic condition in which there's no upward mobility and so forth.
	That's the economic element.
	And then the technological element is incorporating all of the technologies of what they're calling the fourth industrial revolution.
	And that includes all of these digital technologies that we're talking about.
	Digital identity, CBDCs, the metaverse is another one.
	Uh, so the carbon footprint tracking, all of these things are then used.
	Once you have these people in place and you have the agenda rolling out, now you have the technology to actually enforce the regime that you're putting in place.
	And that's what the, that's where the technological element comes in.
	Uh, so this, this is why you'll see Klaus Schwab in the world economic forum touting this fourth industrial revolution and writing books about it by that title, in fact.
	And, uh, You know, heralding this as a great future, as a great accomplishment, and a great accession to human capability, when in fact it's nothing of the sort.
	It'll be used by these totalitarians to enforce the kind of regime that they're attempting to establish.
	Yeah, Michael, they're not hiding this either.
	I mean, Schwab wrote a book called The Great Reset.
	You know, I always get a kick out of these fact checkers.
	You know, they're really opinion checkers.
	The book's called The Great Reset.
	I mean, that's not figurative.
	They're not hiding it.
	I mean, these guys are openly advertising what their goals are.
	In fact, it's called COVID-19, The Great Reset.
	And in the book, you know, Schwab and Terry Malloret, his co-author, they say point blank.
	That COVID represents a great opportunity.
	They say this like 17 times, that it's an opportunity that must be seized to bring about the great reset of capitalism.
	And this is the capitalism that they have in mind.
	It's not capitalism at all.
	This is either corporate socialism, or you can call it economic fascism.
	I also call it capitalism with Chinese characteristics as a play on the socialism with Chinese characteristics of the of the Chinese Communist Party's nomenclature.
	So this is effectively a kind of whole system.
	And they have, if you look at all the parts and you read the text and read, you know, you don't even have to read between the lines.
	All you have to do is reasonably project what they have in mind and what it will accomplish.
	And this is really what it comes down to.
	This kind of a feudalistic, neo-socialist, economic fascist An economic system under which people are under total surveillance and control.
	And I have to say, without sounding like a loon, there's also population control issues involved.
	These people have been Malthusians from the outset.
	That is, they are very much intent on controlling population.
	It goes back to their history.
	The WEF and all their partners have been involved with population ethics, as they would call it.
	It really is about controlling the human population.
	Yeah, that doesn't, no, that's not, that's like, that's, again, that's tautological.
	They openly do it.
	I mean, I get really excited talking about this topic because I'm fascinated by how people fell in this Paul Ehrlich Malthusian trap as if human beings are some net negative, but cattle on a farm are a net positive.
	It's just the most bizarre idea.
	That we have an overpopulation problem.
	I mean, you do even the simple math, and then you have the Chinese Communist Party with their one-child policy, which turned into a demographic disaster.
	I mean, that's not a loon at all.
	You're speaking the truth on this.
	Let's tie this into others, though.
	It's not just...
	It's not just the Klaus Schwab's, WHO, WEF types, these globalists.
	It's also the Bill Gates types and others that seem to have fallen in love with this idea.
	And if you would, Michael, I'd like you to address the fraudulent nature of this whole thing with the kleptocrats out there.
	Because you have these American business executives right now that have gone woke, they say.
	And they'll sit there and they'll cancel a guy like you on Twitter for stating an obvious fact about population control, which is happening, but then they'll go over to China and kiss the butt.
	There's a, there's a, I was reading this piece in the journal, sorry, I'm being long-winded here.
	There was this piece in a journal about a conference going on and the Chinese security chief, one of them is going to be over there, primarily responsible for the imprisonment of the Uyghurs, and these tech executives are speaking at this conference with this guy while cancelling people like you and me for questioning the science behind vaccines or masks.
	It's just so fraudulent and outrageous.
	It's outrageous, and you know, I think it could be looked at this way, birds of a feather stick together.
	These people actually are modeling the system after China.
	I mean, this goes back to Marie Strong, the first director of UNEP, or UN Environmental Program, and he said basically China is the model for this.
	So they've been looking at China as the model to introduce to the West for some time.
	China with its You know, it has this for profit element, but those companies are effectively controlled to an extent by the state and vice versa.
	So really, China's always been what they've had in mind.
	So and they've had this population ethics so-called in place.
	You know, the U.N.
	has recommended, you know, forced sterilizations and forced abortions going back to the 70s.
	So population is very much on the agenda.
	And they also have this Big desideratum to reduce the consumption of the Western world.
	They see Westerners, particularly in the United States, as a scourge on the planet and they must get our consumption reduced.
	So in order to do it, they call for transfers of wealth from the West to the developing world.
	And this is, in fact, a way of bribing the developing world not to develop while robbing the West of its resources.
	Yeah.
	Michael, that ties in nicely to the topic I want to address with you on its own, this digital currency threat.
	Now it ties into digital ID.
	If you marry these two cancers together, you have a metastasizing rot to freedom.
	Digital currencies concern me for a number of reasons I'd like you to address.
	Number one is the idea of negative interest rates.
	Obviously, you know, all debts are paid, as Milton Friedman said, either by the debtor or the creditor.
	So profligate governments, both swampy Republicans and profligate Democrats, it seems like integral to their ideology, they love to spend money they don't have.
	Well, you got to get it from somewhere.
	So one of the ways to do that is just to print more and drive up inflation.
	But one of the ideas they've come up with in some of these other countries and tried is the idea of a negative interest rate.
	It's a de facto tax on the population.
	You put your money in a bank, every day you lose money, unlike a positive interest rate.
	But it's hard to do that because it's very good for one thing, Michael, the safe industry.
	Because people pull their money out of the bank and go and stick it in a safe.
	Not possible with the digital currency though and a digital idea.
	Genius level way to tax people.
	It's incredible.
	So effectively, the central bank digital currency really amounts to having an account with the Fed in the United States.
	You'll have an account with the Fed.
	That means they'll have complete knowledge of all of your transactions, spending, savings and debt.
	And they will be able to, you know, it'll be completely transparent to them.
	Even the Bank of International Settlements says There's no way they can do this while giving people any kind of privacy over their finances.
	It has to be transparent.
	It will definitely be transparent.
	And you're right, this negative interest rate is one thing.
	They could also make money expire such that it disappears if you don't spend it at the right rate.
	And this is especially true With state-granted money, state-infused money into your account.
	So if something like the UBI, Universal Basic Income, is introduced, or even unemployment or Social Security, any of these things could expire if they intend to make it expire so that you just don't have it.
	There's no way to save this money.
	Under your bed or to keep it in your wallet, this is all in their control.
	So they'll have complete control of your finances, in effect.
	And they can infuse cash to particular players at will.
	This will change monetary policy, making it even worse than it is now, where they can, in real time, infuse money to particular players.
	Of course, they don't pay the high interest rates.
	That gets passed along to us.
	And that increases basically inflation overall.
	This is all what's part of the CBDC regime.
	It's unbelievable.
	And the capacity, Michael, for end-arounds around constitutional provisions, like the Second Amendment, with this are amazing.
	I mean, you could say something like, well, you know, we're going to do a one-time stimulus, but you're not going to remember Operation Choke Point, where they went after payday lenders and gun dealers.
	You could say something like, you don't have to take the money, it's optional, but if you do, it's not eligible to be spent here, there, payday lenders.
	I mean, and then that spirals into Gun dealers and FFL saying, oh my gosh, you know, are we going to be shut out altogether out of this digital economy?
	Yeah, I mean, I think PayPal's recent threat to charge their users $2,500 for spreading misinformation really is a precursor, quite a hint about how they'll use CBDCs.
	If you do something that they don't like or say something they don't like, This could be used as a way to, you know, to reduce your incomes, take monies directly off of you, uh, tax you, uh, real time taxation, uh, you know, like, uh, such that, you know, when you get an income, it's taxed immediately and goes to the, uh, to the federal reserve.
	So all of this is on the table with CBDCs.
	Um, and, uh, it's again, it's going to be probably use when, uh, when this, Economy, which is already in free fall as I see it, when it gets worse, it'll be heralded as the way to bail us out from it.
	And that's how it'll be inserted and introduced.
	So I think we have to resist CBDCs with everything we have because I think they're the end of freedom financially and even individually.
	You just flowed seamlessly into my next question, which was going to be about taxes.
	If you follow taxation over time, you'll see that the way our system is structured here without a VAT, that the largest sums of money are raised in around the 20 to 24% of GDP level.
	Really, any more than that, it's almost impossible, because in the system we have now, Michael, You know, tax evasion is a crime, but tax avoidance is a national pastime.
	It's just true.
	That's why accountants can get very rich.
	Not a knock on accountants.
	Love them.
	I have a great one myself.
	But tax avoidance is.
	It's a national pastime.
	So they figured out Hauser's law, which, you know, Hauser's always surmised that when people can see the amount of money being taken out, at about 20 percent is where they start to say, it's about enough.
	One fifth of the time I'm working to pay these people.
	Any more, I'm not giving you any more.
	But that's the benefit of a VAT, a value added tax.
	You can hide it in layers of taxation.
	VATs can raise a fortune.
	When you're talking about a digital ID tied to a universal digital currency, all those, how you could throw Hauser's law right out the way, they'll take whatever they want when they want to.
	Anytime.
	And so tax, taxing in real time, uh, basically would be just almost inevitable.
	So any income and we see hints of this already with the Biden administration suggesting that any transaction of six hundred dollars or more is going to be reported to to the to the to the Fed.
	I mean, to the IRS.
	So we're looking at all kinds of ways that can hem us in to make it impossible to to to operate with any kinds of autonomy and effectively to make Uh, to establish this profile using the digital identity connected to CBCs, even possibly even starving off people, shutting them out from the economy entirely, making it impossible for them to buy anything, uh, or to make money.
	This is another thing they could have vendors that just aren't allowed to have transfers made to them.
	And if cash is outmoded entirely, this would mean people will starve to death.
	Michael, I know I said last question, but just one final thought on this.
	There's still time to fight back against this stuff.
	I mean, we are still a constitutional republic.
	We're struggling, but we still have a voice.
	You have representatives and senators and even people at the assembly and delegate and state and city level as well.
	We should all vocalize to them our disapproval of any path that leads down to this digital ID, correct?
	There's still a way to stop this.
	Absolutely.
	And in fact, I've said in my book, The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty, I have a nine point plan to stop the whole Great Reset.
	But digital identity and refusing digital identity, refusing CBDCs, refusing the ESG scored corporations and banks, all of these things all go together to ward this whole thing off.
	We still have time.
	Absolutely.
	And I'm like you.
	I have a long view here.
	I think that we can save the U.S.
	from tyranny, and it's very possible to do so.
	Amen.
	I say it on my show all the time.
	I'm purchasing a whole bunch of call options on the United States.
	I'm longing that God touch this place with something special.
	Michael, let me get another plugin for your books.
	Folks, please pick them up.
	A Google archipelago you can get right now.
	It's really incredible.
	You want to talk about an eye-opener, about what big tech is up to.
	And pre-order, please, today.
	The Great Reset and The Struggle for Liberty.
	The website again is michaelrechtenwald.com.
	michaelrechtenwald.com.
	And Michael, after the book comes out, We'll have you on the radio show and the TV show again to make sure people get that nine point plan they're gonna need it.
	Thanks for your time today.
	It was a really frightening, but informative interview and knowledge is power.
	Thanks a lot.
	Thanks so much, Dan.
	Thanks for having me.
	I appreciate it.
	You got it.
	Folks, I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as I did.
	Please spread it around.
	The growing threat of digital ID is a threat to freedom and liberty like we haven't seen in a long time.
	Imagine this government that we barely trust now, knowing each and everything you do and being able to watch you.
	I'm not having it.
	Thanks for tuning in.
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