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via realitycheck.radio: “Independent journalist James Corbett from The Corbett Report joins us to discuss CBDCs, Digital IDs, and more. You won’t want to miss this one!”

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ANNOUNCER: RCR with Paul Brennan, Reality Check Radio.

PAUL BRENNAN: James Corbett is an award-winning investigative journalist. He started The Corbett Report website in 2007, an outlet for independent critical analysis of politics, society, history and economics. Since then, he’s written, recorded and edited thousands of hours of audio and video media for the website—I know what that’s like—including a podcast and several regular online video series. If the name rings a bell, you’ve probably been following him. But if you were listening to RCR back in December—I think around the 11th of December—James was here giving his views on COP 28 and globalist influences driving policy and events. That was then. This is now. James is back with us. James, thanks for coming back on RCR. Great to have you again.

JAMES CORBETT: Thank you for having me here. I’m happy to talk to you.

BRENNAN: Okay, we’ve been talking a lot about CBDCs. There’s a feeling that it’s incoming. It’s imminent. Is that what you think?

CORBETT: I think it is inevitable. In fact, it’s already underway in a lot of important respects. The only thing that needs to be done, I think, at this point is to effectively sell them to the public—assuming we are talking about retail CBDCs. Because, as your audience may or may not know, there are at least two monetary circuits that are operating on the national level, one of which is the retail monetary circuit, which is the bank money that you and I and other people use in their daily transactions and that they keep at the bank. But where does the bank keep its money? Well, it keeps it in reserves at the National Bank. I don’t know the specifics of the New Zealand. . .

BRENNAN: We have a vault down the road from me, James. And it’s . . .

CORBETT: There you go . . .

BRENNAN: . . . under the building, and all the cash and gold’s in that.

CORBETT: But the interesting thing is, you, of course, don‘t have an account at the National Central Bank. You have an account at your local commercial bank. And those two separate streams are meant to be separate. And they are kept that way deliberately so that tinkering with the supply, the reserves that the banks keep—that the banks themselves keep at the National Central Bank—don’t cross the stream, as it were, into the retail circuit of the bank money that’s flowing around in the economy. Because if you did that, then when the government goes crazy and starts pumping in all these billions and billions of dollars, how do they actually do that?

Well, generally speaking, they’re creating reserve money at the bank, which doesn’t cross into the retail circuit and doesn’t create wild inflationary spending—unless, of course, they cross those streams, which is exactly what retail central bank digital currency would do. It would make it so that you personally have, if not an account, at least some way of hooking directly into central bank money. And that’s why it is not just a difference in the presentation or the way that you access money. It’s actually a different form of money itself.

BRENNAN: Retail banks have to be part of this in the end. And how can they earn interest?

How can they stay viable?

CORBETT: This is an incredibly important question. And, yes, once people understand about central bank digital currency and the idea of programmable money and the various threats that poses, of course, the initial reaction is to freak out and think that this is going to be imposed—that the central bank is going to issue you an account directly and you’re going to have a wallet with the central bank, etc.

And that is certainly one way it could play out. That would probably be the most dystopian, nightmarish version of this, because then literally the central bank will be able to see and potentially stop and otherwise manipulate every single transaction that you’re engaged in, in real time. It’s the ultimate panopticon.

But that isn’t necessarily the way it will play out. And in fact, at least in the Western developed liberal democracies, it’s unlikely to play out that way, precisely because, as you say, how are the retail banks going to get their cut of the pie if it’s sliced up this particular way? Then it’s the central bank and the customers directly—and you cut out the local retail bank middlemen. Well, they obviously won’t like that.

And since the entire system . . . Once you really look into it and look into its history—and I’ve done an entire documentary on the Federal Reserve specifically, called Century of Enslavement, that people can look up on my site—what these national central banks really are, at base, are essentially the consolidation of banking power into a type of oligopoly that is stewarded over by the banksters themselves. They are obviously the key beneficiaries of this system. So, it is unlikely that they’re going to cut themselves out of all of this and just hand all the power over to the central bank.

The way this is more likely to develop—and there are many, many, many different ways this could develop—but the most likely way would be for retail banks to get cut into this deal somehow, perhaps as middlemen, where you won’t have an account with the central bank directly, you’ll have an account with your retail bank, which will then have a way of accessing into that central bank money, so that there will be still that veneer of some sort of separation that will be stewarded over by these middlemen.

And when you start to look at that setup, then you can start to see the ways in which . . . not necessarily even commercial banks. It could be financial institutions of various kinds. Maybe they’ll give this to the Goldman Sachs of the world, or what have you, to be cut into this deal. But at any rate, some sort of officially accredited institution will act as the middleman between you and the central bank. That’s a very likely way that this will play out.

BRENNAN: But you’re still hooked in, ultimately, to whoever’s at the top.

CORBETT: Absolutely. And again, it’s always the veneer and the pretense of some sort of separation. “Oh, don’t worry. The government isn’t just willy nilly printing money directly. It’s done through this system where they have to issue bonds that are then bought by the central bank that then put reserves into the commercial banks that then can lend that out into . . . so they’re not creating money directly.” Or, in the same way, “No no no, the federal government can’t program your money. That’s not how it will work.”

But as we’ve seen, for example—again, I have various references from the American context—but one example from recent years was something called Operation Choke Point, where the US government, specifically the Obama administration, was able to lean on the banks using the regulatory powers of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the FDIC. They have regulatory powers over the banks. So they were able to lean on the banks in a wink-and-nudge way. There wasn’t a direct signed-into-law order, but they leaned on the banks to debank various banking customers that they weren’t happy with, including people in perfectly legal, if somewhat . . . “Ooh, I don’t know if I like those businesses, like ammo dealers, pornographic actresses, various payday money lenders, etc.—institutions that are on the fringes of society. We can use them as ‘the example.’”

And that happened. A lot of people lost their bank accounts because of that. Not because the government issued a direct order, but because they used their regulatory power to get the banks to do their dirty work for them. And can we imagine that, even if there is this banking middleman between us and the central bank, won’t they do exactly the same thing to program our money in whatever way they wish?

BRENNAN: Is it in the interest, then, of big financial institutions to see smaller banks dissolve and fade away?

CORBETT: Yes, of course. I think the logic of oligopoly is always . . . as Rockefeller has been quoted as saying, “Competition is a sin.” And I don’t think he meant that from any religious fervor. He meant that as “people who compete against us are sinning against our oligopoly.” And I think that’s the sense of this. So, yes, it’s always the effort to get competition pushed out of the way one way or another. And when you look at it from that perspective . . .

BRENNAN: Isn’t that already happening?

CORBETT: It certainly is. I was about to say, when you look at it from that perspective, you can see various events from that lens. For example, the 2008 global financial crisis, at the very least, was an opportunity for various banking institutions and financial institutions to get rid of some of their competition or to take it over—Bear Stearns, etc. There was a lot of consolidation that happened in that event that worked out to the benefit of those who remained. And there are many examples of that throughout history that we could point to.

BRENNAN: You mentioned, earlier on there, selling this. How do you sell this to people like me and the public? Well, I’ll get your comment on this. Recently, our reserve bank has changed their description of central bank digital currency to “digital cash.” That’s the term they’re using now. And to the average . . . and that’s me, but I’ve got this BS filter. I talk to a lot of people [who say,] “Oh, well, that just sounds like cash. That’s all right.” Is there something in that change of terminology, do you think?

CORBETT: There is, obviously. I think you’re right. I think the big con game here is trying to get the public to accept something that they otherwise would think twice about. So to the extent that they can frame this . . . as I say, it’s an entirely new form of money. To the extent that they can frame that as something that you’re familiar with but that’s going to be easy . . .  “Oh, digital cash. Oh, well, I already use Apple Pay and things like that. So it’s fine. It’s just another version of that.”

It really isn’t. And, of course, this is the type of euphemism that they love to use to sell things to the public. There is, I suppose, a sense in which they could argue for that terminology, specifically because cash is one of the few expressions of central bank liability that you do have direct access to. I don’t know. I’ve never been to New Zealand. I’ve never handled the money. But I’m going to bet on your currency. It actually says “Reserve Bank of New Zealand” or something like that on it, because that is who actually issues the cash.

So, in the CBDC situation, well, if it’s a central bank-issued currency, then it’s actually, well, a form of cash. And what form is it? It’s digital. So there you go. It’s digital cash.

BRENNAN: Yeah, but there’s no anonymity with the use of it, is there? Because every digital transaction is tracked. Whereas I can go out and pay for anything with cash and no one knows unless I tell them.

CORBETT: Exactly right. And, in fact, you don’t have to take my word for this. You don’t have to take your word for this. People can go and watch Augustin Carstens making this exact point in an IMF-hosted international webinar that was taking place in 2021. And I don’t have the exact reference to it, but I have referenced it many times on my website, where you can see Augustin Carstens, who’s the executive director of the Bank for International Settlements—the central bank of central banks there in Basel, Switzerland—positively gleeful, grinning with joy at the prospect of a central bank digital currency, precisely because, as he says, at this current time, there is no way for a central bank to keep track of its expressions of liability.

That $100 bill or whatever it is that you have in your pocket can go anywhere and the central bank doesn’t know about it until it lands somehow back in their pocket. They don’t know where it’s been and what hands it has crossed. But in the CBDC universe, as he says, you’ll be able to track every single transaction. And of course, tracking is, I think, in and of itself a problem. But it also brings with it that implied power of, “Well, if we can track every transaction, we can also create whatever rules we want of when and how you are allowed or not allowed to use this money.”

BRENNAN: So that drags in other things. There’s programmability that people talk about. Interoperability. Smart contracts are something we hear about. And other things. So we need to get used to these terms and understand what they mean. Programmability sounds pretty simple. It can be set up, like you just described, to control the account user’s use of the money, basically. Is that it?

CORBETT: Yes, essentially that’s right. It’s one of those concepts that’s so broad that it’s difficult to get your head around. I think some specific examples of what could be done in this paradigm are in order, for people who are still trying to wrap their heads around it. I note, for example, back in the darkest days of the scandemic lockdowns and the insanity that was was going on, that, in places—for example, in Australia—there were lockdowns, to the effect that you couldn’t travel more than five kilometers away from your home.

Well, in a CBDC universe, they could program the money so that it knows—since you have your smartphone slave tracking device with you at all times—it knows how far away you are from home at any given moment. And the wallet would then be able to allow or disallow any transaction because “Oh, you’ve traveled more than five kilometers from your home.” So, you literally wouldn’t be able to purchase anything because your wallet literally wouldn’t work. That’s one example.

But really, the sky’s the limit. There’s really no feasible way to even understand all of the different ways this could be used to program your money.

BRENNAN: Interoperable. Does that mean that they all operate together seamlessly across the globe, and one set of CBDCs talks to another? Or are they ultimately just the same thing, no matter where they are?

CORBETT: There are a number of programs underway, including one by the aforementioned BIS—Bank for International Settlements—that’s running a test, if memory serves, called [Project] mBridge, which is looking into the feasibility of how CBDCs from different countries will be able to talk to each other in settlements of foreign exchanges instantaneously through CBDC, et cetera. They’re already working on the logistics of this.

I would imagine that—at least certainly in the early introductory stages of this—it will be every single country has its own national flavor of CBDC, and it will require extra hoop-jumping in order to do international transactions and settlements. And you’ll probably need to go through some sort of financial institution middleman to do that. But I would imagine the long-term goal is essentially to bring this all together into one giant ledger, which is, of course, the dream of all world-government globalists since time immemorial.

BRENNAN: As good as it gets for them. What about the BRICS world? Do you think they’d buy in or they would set up their own?

CORBETT: Yes, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I certainly cannot report that the BRICS are going to be the saviors of the world and the valiant fighters against this New World Order. All of my research indicates that sometimes they come out with tough talk, “Oh, we’re going to have some sort of gold-backed currency.” Blah, blah, blah. Every single nation is working now towards the implementation of digital currency. And if you want to look at the BRICS specifically, why not look at the biggest BRICS of them all, China and Russia?

China is leading the world, really, in its implementation of digital currency, which is already tied into its digital ID system and its panopticon face camera, face-scanning system. So that, for example, if you jaywalk on some city street somewhere in China, the face-scanning facial recognition technology will know who you are and will be able to go into your account—which, in this case, is through, if not WeChat or one of those Chinese apps that are, of course, in bed with the Chinese communist government—will be able to go in and literally just fine you your jaywalking fee instantaneously, in real time.

So, yes, I think it’s quite obvious that the BRICS countries are going to be on board with this agenda precisely because every single power center or power-thirsty politician in the world is lusting after the type of control that this technology would provide over its citizens. And there are no exceptions to that rule. Only the most psychopathic and bloodthirsty individuals rise to the top of this psychopathic system that is being created. And that applies whether you’re in Brazil or Russia or India or China or South Africa or New Zealand or Japan or Canada or anywhere else on this globe.

BRENNAN: So, no bolt hole. Well, OK. I saw a video the other day of a Chinese gentleman trying to buy gas. I don’t know if it was for real. But the facial scanner on the gas pump scanned him and refused him gas. So I guess that’s what we’re talking about. What about digital IDs? Do CBDCs and digital IDs work together? Does one have to be there if the other is there? Is that another way of selling digital IDs?

CORBETT: Yes, it certainly is. I imagine it might be technically possible for them to set up a system whereby you might have a wallet that is completely and totally anonymized and has absolutely no connection to your real identity, so that the CBDC can actually function like cash, where there are transactions happening but they don’t know who it is and they’re not monitoring or tracking it at all. Having said that, that is almost certainly not how CBDCs will be implemented, assuming that they are implemented, at least at the retail level.

This is the perfect opportunity, of course, for your digital wallet to be tied into your digital identity, which will be tied into your national identity card, which will, of course, now be issued in digital form. It’s the perfect excuse for blending all of this into what Klaus Schwab talked about years ago. And he may be crazy in a number of respects, but I don’t think he’s crazy about this: the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the merging of our biological and digital identities. And that, I think, is really the goal of these schemers and technocratic tyrants.

This is the perfect opportunity to do that—to somehow enmesh your digital ID with your digital wallet so that the government will be able to track, control, surveil, database you and know where you are and who you’re talking to and what you’re buying, and everything else at all times.

BRENNAN: And then you overlay AI on top of that, I’m thinking, so it can monitor . . . I mean, you’d have to have armies of people looking at screens, I guess, otherwise. But you’ve got the power of AI that can just look at everything all the time. So that will be the computation power of it.

CORBETT: Exactly right. Of course, the idea of tracking, surveilling, databasing, cataloging people was scary, even to our grandparents’ generation. For example, I did a video a number of years ago in which I looked at the the Social Security card that was issued to American citizens back in the 1950s, which clearly stated right on the card: “This card is not for identification purposes.” Why was that on the card? It’s because people were absolutely convinced once you get this Social Security number and the government has a number through which they can track you, this is it. This is nightmare on the 1984 level that was being imagined back in 1948. You can’t give the government that type of power to track what you’re doing. And that was back pre-computer databases.

But yes, now everything is databased, so it will be remembered and recorded forever, or at least until the big Carrington Event. But, at any rate, they will be taking this information, cross-analyzing it in various ways against different databases, collecting this information and using it in ways that perhaps we can’t even imagine yet, but will be imagined sometime in the future.

For example, I note that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the United States, back in the early 2000s, was developing a system called the Sentient World Simulation, which purported to be essentially a model simulation Earth, which included data on every single person on the planet. Or at least that was their aim—to have a digital avatar of every person on the planet, which had all of the information that they were able to suck in from absolutely every source that they were able to suck it in so that they could then run tests.

Well, what if this happened? What would the result be in the population? This was being reported on in the early 2000s. And then it went silent. I’ve never seen a report about it again. So, who knows what on earth they are working on at this moment. But yes, one would imagine that the amount of data that they would have on every single person from something like a national digital ID tied into a central bank digital currency is mind-boggling and probably the end of free humanity as we’ve known it.

BRENNAN: I’m starting to think . . . and it’s a bit out there, but this sounds like the mark of the beast or something eventually. It really does.

CORBETT: What else could the mark of the beast be other than something along these lines—this system? Whatever way people can comprehend how incredibly serious and incredibly grave a threat this is, take that and magnify it by a thousand. Because, as I say, even as bad as it is today, whatever they dream up 10, 20, 30 years from now, with technologies we can’t even imagine yet, will undoubtedly be even more of a threat.

BRENNAN: It’s incredible that there are people out there who want to know everything about us, about everything that moves, even about . . . not even humans, about plants and anything natural they want to recreate or monitor. How do we explain this?

CORBETT: I suppose knowledge is power. There is certainly something to that phrase. And the more knowledge that you have about someone, about their habits, about their activities, about the way they think, about the people they talk to, about the things they buy, about the places they visit, the more power you have over that person, because you will be able to predict various things about their movements, about their thoughts, about the way they are. And in fact, it goes beyond merely predicting, as Jack Dorsey recently alluded to. And I will note this with some interest, because I think Jack Dorsey is probably one of those actually interesting Silicon Valley people who may have been authentically not handpicked to become one of these Big Tech billionaires, like an Elon Musk or something. I say that specifically because, since he left Twitter and isn’t involved in that anymore—he lives a kind of weird lifestyle, etc.—he has come up with some interesting things in recent years. One was that he admitted that Twitter was part of the problem of the internet as it has come to develop—namely, the centralization of identity and discovery in corporations.

He said it was a terrible wrong turn and the internet has suffered from that. And I fully agree with that. He also recently warned that what we are really facing with these algorithms and things that we can’t see into and we don’t know about  . . . It’s not about free speech. It’s about free will. It is about your ability to even think for yourself.

BRENNAN: Ah, now we’re getting to the nub of the issue, right?

CORBETT: Absolutely. Because there’s something really profound about that. For people who don’t know about this, I would suggest they look up something called Google’s Selfish Ledger. This was an internal Google video that leaked out several years ago that shows the idea of some of the Google programmers and engineers of what they will do with all of this data that they’re collecting from all of these billions of people typing their requests into the Google “oracle.” All of this information—what are they going to do with it?

And it is essentially about how you can start to manipulate and direct society, down to the individual, but society as a whole, and really shape the future course of human civilization with that information. What do you show someone when they search for this? How do you nudge them and direct them in this or that direction? Those little nudges, over time, can completely change the course of human history. Again, it’s an incredibly important issue that most people aren’t even thinking about.

BRENNAN: And maybe not what you would naturally do if you were unfettered by all of that. You would truly be using free will. Taking that away is . . . I’m looking for another word without going to a higher realm, that’s breaking everything down, isn’t it, in the end, for humanity, anyway?

CORBETT: Well, I don’t know. You know, if you really cornered me, it’d be difficult to really define what a human is. But I can tell you what a human isn’t. And these sort of cyborg monstrosities that are being created as this technocratic technology starts to be incorporated more and more, and eventually to break the skin barrier and we’re implanting brain chips inside of us. I mean, clearly, we are heading into some direction that is not human. I don’t know if we’ve crossed over that threshold yet, but we’re certainly at least at the cusp of that.

BRENNAN: Are we always . . . well, we, they, they’re always more ahead of the game than you’d think, we would assume, right? Because a lot of this stuff you would never let out anyway, you know. How far ahead of where we think we are, are we, do you think? I know you probably can’t answer that.

CORBETT: Yeah, unfortunately, anything I say about that would be pure speculation.

All I can say is that, yes, I think that the technology that is shown at the consumer level is, generally speaking, not going to be the most cutting-edge technology. As one example of that . . . I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, still the highest-flying, fastest jet ever invented was the SR-71 or whatever it was that they revealed to the public 50 years ago. Right? They’ve never surpassed that, honest guys, until eventually they reveal, “Oh, yeah, we’ve had this other space plane for however long, and we didn’t tell you about it.” So, again, all I know is we do not know the extent of the technology that is arrayed against us right now.

BRENNAN: Okay, I want to get quickly, in the time we’ve got left, any comments you might have on the recent World Health Assembly. We’ve had quite a bit of talk about that here at our radio station. We’ve heard two main takes. One, Meryl Nass, who thought it was a win. James Roguski had a different take. He thought the architecture for the . . . he described it as an OPEC cartel, but for the farmer, the pieces are still being put in place and there’s a lot of water to go under the bridge yet. Any comments to make about that?

CORBETT: Yes. Well, something that I don’t think either side of that debate would deny is that the process is still ongoing and still very much could be the threat that we’ve been worried about for the past few years. It isn’t over. In fact, explicitly, the WHO is going to continue meeting on the World Health Pandemic Agreement that they were trying to reach in Geneva earlier this month. They are still going to continue working on that. The next session is set for next month, and they are hoping to actually have a special World Health Assembly before the end of the year to actually rubber stamp whatever document they end up agreeing on. If not, they’ll just push it back to next World Health Assembly next year. But anyway, it’s still ongoing.

So certainly, at the very least . . . let’s put it this way: Yes, what happened earlier this month in Geneva could have been so much worse. And I think a very, very important reason why it wasn’t so much worse, why the WHO didn’t manage to get the ultimate coup and the knockout blow that they were undoubtedly hoping for, was precisely because over the past couple of years, an incredible movement has arisen of people who are now, at the very least, aware of the World Health Organization and the threat that it poses to at least national sovereignty, if not individual bodily autonomy, which is more the bottom line in my case.

At any rate, more people are aware of this threat. And the idea of “Exit the WHO” is now something that some people are at least thinking about. And you’re having rallies, for example, in Japan with tens of thousands of people. What on earth is going on? There is definitely a stirring going on, and that definitely had an effect in moving the dial and probably preventing them from rubber-stamping whatever draconian idea they were working on, cooking up.

But the threat isn’t over. And in fact, even the IHR amendments that did get passed still do contain ideas and phrases and clauses that are certainly not good. I’m not celebrating anything that took place there. To that extent, I think it’s still incumbent on everyone in the health freedom movement to continue working against the WHO and its agenda, including, at the very least, as a stop gap measure, to get individual governments—like in New Zealand, which I know has already floated this idea—of reserving against these new IHR amendments. You do not have to adopt them. Depending on what legal wrangling you’re listening to, it’s either 10 months or 18 months, something in that window, anyway, for governments to reserve against these amendments.

I would say that people, at the first level, should be working towards that—and also on deflecting this upcoming pandemic agreement. But beyond that, I think the #ExitTheWHO movement is much closer to the heart of the matter, because why does the WHO exist at all? It is a stupid and outdated idea for a bygone world in which there was no electronic communication. How could we possibly coordinate various quarantine procedures and things among countries? No, we need an international organization that will dictate to every single country in the world what they must and must not do.

Why? New Zealand can decide for itself what it wants to do with whatever bilateral trading partners it wants and travelers and what have you. It doesn’t require an international organization to tell them what to do. Once we get to that idea, once the Overton window has been opened on that conversation and #ExitTheWHO . . . but why stop there?  #ExitTheUN, et cetera, et cetera, until eventually people start to realize, “Why is the national government able to tell me what to do with my body? Why should we stop there? Why not devolve of it down more locally, so that I actually have some influence on this process?” And then more locally, until eventually we realize that we are individual, autonomous, free human beings created in the image of God and that no one can tell us what to do with our bodies. Once we get to that penny drop, I’ll say “Mission accomplished. We’ve won.”

BRENNAN: My fingers are crossed. Tell me, is there an intersection point between those health regulations and what they’re trying to to do with health passports, vaccine passports, et cetera, that regime and CBDCs? Because it seems that if you want to control people, one of the big parts of that is to control . . . I was going to say “their health,” but then I don’t think they’re really interested in their health. But again, it’s another element of fundamental human control, isn’t it? We talked about free will. This is what happens in your body. Are the two connected somehow, do you think?

CORBETT: I think they’re intimately connected, because I do see this as part of a singular agenda. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that every single person who is involved in pushing various aspects of this agenda is knowingly working towards the same end. But I think it’s the logic of the system itself [that] is pushing towards the centralization and consolidation of control. And that’s this technocratic idea that . . . of course, what is the way to impose order on the world? It is to make sure that you have managers who are able to see everything and control everything and tell people what to do. And that is the psychopathic mindset of control and the logic of the system in the way that it operates, so that whatever problem comes along, well, the only hammer I have is more consolidation of control.

So, if there’s some sort of terrorist event, that means that we need to give the intelligence agencies more money and more power in order to intervene more in our individual lives so that no one can ever plan a terrorist attack ever again. If there is some sort of financial collapse, it’s because, well, obviously, the government doesn’t have enough power to come in and tell industry how to operate and what to do, et cetera, et cetera. Every single problem is just a great opportunity for people who want more control to come along and claim, well, things went wrong because I don’t have the control.

I think all of this works in that coordinated fashion. And there is a technological underlying aspect to this. The best way to consolidate the most amount of control possible is to implement a digital identity system, whereby every single person becomes data nodes in this vast network that can then be calculated and tracked and ultimately nudged in one direction or another and all of that. And so, yes, the digital vaccine certificate or passport or whatever they were planning, which they haven’t gotten through yet—but they’re still working on the pandemic agreement, so who knows?—is essentially an easy backdoor into the digital ID conversation.

BRENNAN: Yeah.

CORBETT: Because once people have some sort of nexus into some sort of international database where they’re going to have to be able to prove their identity and their vaccination status, that is an easy way into a national identity registry of some sort. And we don’t have to speculate about that. In my Who Is Bill Gates? documentary, available at corbettreport.com/gates, I talk about Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, which for some reason suddenly pivoted towards digital identity and [asked], “Well, how are we going to know who’s had their vaccines and what vaccines they’ve had? Well, we’ve got to find ways of being able to digitally record and ultimately track all of these people in remote areas of the world, where they don’t have good recordkeeping. So, how are we going to do this? Oh, I know: Everyone carries their fingerprints and their eyeballs around with them! So, we’ll use biometric scanning to put them into these biometric national databases that we can then put their various health records on, and it will all be wonderful, and everyone will be able to access government services with their palm prints and their face scan.”

That’s the direction things are heading. There is a logic to it. It’s just a horrible psychopathic controlling logic, but it is a logic. And the only way to really refute that is to question the fundamental axiom that order can only be imposed top-down. That the only way humans can ever work together and live together in society—in some sort of community—is if there is a manager looking down, seeing everything, and telling everyone what to do.

But that is not true. If people are interested in the exact opposite vision of humanity and how that could operate, I would suggest typing the magic words “spontaneous order” into my search engine. You will find various things that I’ve done over the years talking about the real refutation to all of this psychopathic logic of control and the fact that, actually, human community not only can form but can thrive at its absolute peak when there is not some manager trying to direct every single person in the world.

BRENNAN: Well said. Just to wrap up, Trump said “no” to CBDC. I think you’ve got a few states—I can’t name them off the top of my head—that have already said, “No, we’re not doing that.” So Trump could be a big deal in all of this, could he?

CORBETT: No! [Laughter.] Absolutely not. Trump will stop CBDC in the exact way that he stopped the whole scandemic lockdowns and vacc . . . oh, wait, no, he pushed vaccines harder than anyone. And the best thing he ever did was Operation Warp Speed—warp-speeding those MAGA jabs right into everyone’s arms. Yay! And he not only doesn’t regret that, he still thinks of it as the greatest accomplishment of his first term. He is not your savior. He is not going to protect you from CBDCs.

BRENNAN: Okay, good to know. I want to get a comment from you on this story, which is, well, I’ve got it on LinkedIn, anyway: “Saudi Arabia’s decision to not renew the petrodollar agreement marks a significant shift in global trade dynamics, the growing importance of China’s trade with Saudi, and the politicization of global trade highlights the need for a neutral payment and settlement system.” And so it goes on. Is that in your big-picture thinking? How significant is that? Where does that leave the US hegemony?

CORBETT: It is incredibly significant insofar as the entire post-World War II monetary order was built around the Bretton Woods Agreement that was agreed to in Bretton Woods in 1944, towards the end of the war. How are we going to run the world after the war? It was this elaborate system whereby all these other currencies would be exchanged against the US dollar. The US dollar would be the capstone of this whole system, and it would be pegged at $35 an ounce of gold, or whatever it was pegged at, until, of course, 1971, when Kissinger—Kissinger, I misspeak, but maybe not by much—Nixon closed the gold window. And suddenly the entire system is bereft.

It was all based on this US dollar gold peg. Now what is it based on? Well, Kissinger went around behind the scenes and managed to sort out this petrodollar agreement with Saudi Arabia, whereby the Saudis would price the oil in dollars and thus basically the entire world oil markets would be priced in dollars, thus giving that type of intrinsic commodity value to underpinning the US dollar—which, by the way, Saudi would launder, or recycle, all of those dollars back through the US banking system. That was part of the agreement. So, yes, you’ve got the system whereby it’s the self-licking ice cream cone. Look, there’s a value to this. And the real underlying basis of that was the implied gun that the US government has to everyone’s head.

That was ultimately the order that resulted from that. And that essentially has persisted for the past half-century. But clearly that system is on its last legs. I don’t know specifically about whatever recent proclamation Saudi Arabia might have made. As far as I know, there isn’t a formal agreement that has been signed with regards to this. It’s more the understanding that involves an American umbrella of protection over Saudi militarily and all of these sorts of things.

At any rate, for several years Saudi has been moving more towards the BRICS-China nexus. The idea of a petroyuan is at least feasible at this point. And there is the yuan oil exchange that has oil-denominated contracts, etc., that have been set up in recent years. So, there is at least the beginnings of an infrastructure. I don’t think there is any currency that at this point could replace the US dollar and the US capital markets and the trillions of dollars that are in them and the liquidity of those markets. That’s not going to arise overnight. The yuan really isn’t a serious competitor for that at this moment.

But there is certainly the sense that there is a shift that’s happening. And that shift is of world historic significance. One way of looking at history and understanding history is the periods of transition of world reserve. World War I was one of those periods where suddenly we’re transitioning away from the gold standard system, with the pound at the head of the international currency order. By the end of World War II, the pound is replaced by the US dollar and the Bretton Woods system.

Often, when we have these types of changeover in world reserve currency, we’re talking about world historic times, massive geopolitical events, wars, you name it. I’m not looking forward to this. But I think we are heading into that period right now.

BRENNAN: Last question, James. You’ve been so gracious to stay with us this long. Last question. Distilling everything you’ve read, known, reported on, thought about, all those things. It does seem like some epic thing is kind of brewing, you know. How’s it going to go, do you think, ultimately?

CORBETT: For the last few years, I have been saying that what I think is happening is, in the short term, digital ID; in the medium term, CBDC; and in the long term, hot war— geopolitical World War III. And I still think that that is a reasonable assessment. I think that the digital ID is the linchpin, the cornerstone of the system that the CBDC and everything else will be built upon.

Unfortunately, I’ve been watching for the past few years as nation after nation has been implementing various forms of national digital identification that will be the basis for this. Obviously, I think every single country in the world right now is at the very least involved in a pilot project for CBDC. And we are starting to see the battle lines forming for what could be the next Great War—the last Great War, hopefully, or does that mean the end of humanity? I don’t know. But at any rate, Russia, Ukraine, China and various South Asia Pacific combatants. Obviously, Israel and Palestine. There are so many different touchstones and things that are going on right now that, unfortunately, I think I still stand by that assessment. I think that lays out the path towards 2030.

BRENNAN: If you change your mind, can you let us know?

CORBETT: Absolutely. [Laughter.] I certainly hope I’m wrong. I could not wish to be more wrong about this.

BRENNAN: Yeah. James Corbett of The Corbett Report. Thanks for coming back on our radio station, RCR, Reality Check Radio. It’s fascinating hearing what you had to say. Thanks again.

CORBETT: Thank you.