Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.

Federally controlled digital currencies would mean having a bank account tied to the Federal Reserve and could “signal the end of liberty” by giving the federal government “complete surveillance” over people, according to Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda.”

The Biden administration wants to accelerate the development in the U.S. of government-backed digital currencies issued by a central bank — known as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) — by having the Fed issue and track digital monetary flow, Rectenwald told political commentator Kim Iversen in a recent episode of “The Kim Iversen Show.”

Rectenwald told Iversen he has “serious misgivings” about CBDCs, which he said could mean “the closing of a totalitarian circle.”

Rectenwald said CBDCs are dangerous because they would allow governments to “rush monies into various sectors of the economy under so-called emergency situations like they did with COVID.”

CBDCs also could enable “real-time taxation” by having taxes deducted instantly from one’s accounts based on receipts.

“This could also lead to such things as barring various kinds of transactions or spending on particular items that are deemed ‘unessential’ or even ‘unsustainable,’” Rectenwald said.

“So there’s a lot of issues at stake here,” Rectenwald said.

Iversen agreed, noting the Fed is owned by private global banks that support the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) “Great Reset” agenda — so this kind of control could be used to financially shut down those who oppose the government or the WEF’s agenda, she said.

It would be easy to say to somebody, “Well, we’re going to cut you off because you’re speaking out against the government … we deem you a terrorist,” she said.

“We saw them already do this with the [Canadian] trucking convoy,” Iversen said.

With more than 11,000 truckers, the Canadian trucking convoy made a 93-mile-long protest against the COVID-19 vaccine mandates and was later thwarted when the Canadian government canceled the credit cards of its leaders.

CBDCs are being piloted around the world, Rectenwald said, but logistical challenges may derail them, Rectenwald said.

Rectenwald and Iversen discussed how CBDCs dovetail with creating a global digital ID system.

They also discussed how the WEF and world governments use “catastrophisms” — the threat of catastrophe — to justify the authoritarian interventions they want to undertake to control people’s behavior.

But the pretext of the catastrophe they use to scare people keeps changing over time, Rectenwald said.

Watch here: