On June 18th, while the country was distracted with headlines about Trump and Iran, the U.S. Senate quietly advanced the GENIUS Act—a bill designed to "legitimize" stablecoins, but in reality, it paves the way for a permissioned, surveilled, and tightly controlled digital currency regime.

We predicted this.

Back in our piece titled "The Great CBDC Bait-and-Switch", we warned that stablecoins would be used as a Trojan horse to usher in the exact same kind of financial surveillance grid promised by central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). And now, here we are.

Framed as a regulatory win for innovation, the GENIUS Act does far more than set rules. It effectively mandates that all legal stablecoins be fully backed, regularly audited, and integrated into the surveillance machinery of the U.S. state. Only "permitted payment stablecoin issuers" may operate, and those issuers must comply with extensive oversight under the Bank Secrecy Act, including KYC, AML, and sanctions enforcement.

In other words: no privacy, no independence, and no dissent.

The Act even instructs the Treasury Department to evaluate new financial surveillance tech, including AI-powered monitoring systems and blockchain analysis tools. These technologies, we're told, will help "assess privacy risks" —as if privacy itself is the threat.

Let's be honest about what this really is: a nationalized control grid disguised as modernization.

The old CBDC fear? It just got a fresh coat of paint and a bipartisan smile. Republicans and Democrats alike are pushing the GENIUS Act, pretending it's a win for decentralization. But these stablecoins aren't free-market crypto. They're government-approved, heavily surveilled, and programmable currencies that can be frozen, tracked, and weaponized at any moment.

As we wrote before:

"The state doesn't need to build a CBDC from scratch when it can co-opt a private system that functions identically—just with a more palatable image for the freedom-loving crowd."