(Brownstone Institute) The past two weeks have been nothing short of surreal. If you’ve been following my journey over the last two and a half years, you know I’ve devoted my entire life to warning about the impending threat of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and the government’s growing crackdown on cryptocurrency. So, when President Trump took three steps that seemed like a direct answer to everything I’ve been fighting for — pardoning Ross Ulbricht, banning any pursuit of a US CBDC, and rescinding Biden’s Executive Order (EO)14067 — you’d think I’d be on top of the world.
I’ve been grappling with why I reacted that way. At first, I chalked it up to having fought (and lost) so many battles with the government that I might be in shock or dealing with a sort of PTSD. I’ve known dark times — divorce, years of lawfare — and I’ve learned that recovery often involves facing hard truths, forgiving the people who hurt you, and then, hardest of all, forgiving yourself. Eventually, you replace anger or sadness with acceptance, and the pain recedes, leaving you wiser.
However, this isn’t so simple or straightforward because while Trump’s move to rescind EO 14067 was a huge step, the brutal “lawfare” unleashed by that order continues. Dozens of companies and individuals in the crypto community are bleeding out over legal fees and business losses, and some even face life-altering prison sentences. It’s hard to celebrate when so many are still trapped under the very machinery we were all fighting.
I believe that if the public — and President Trump — truly understood the devastation this crackdown has caused, they’d demand real justice. Until that happens, I can’t fully let myself believe that “This time it’s different.” Real change means freeing the people still caught in the crosshairs of a war that should never have been waged in the first place.
In 2009, I watched my second company — a thriving healthcare venture — collapse under the weight of federal policies like Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and Attorney General Eric Holder’s prosecutorial overreach. I wasn’t singled out for destruction; I was just a speck of “collateral damage” in the government’s relentless expansion. For years, I’d been told, “The pendulum always swings,” but I never saw it swing back. Instead, the debt kept ballooning, the dollar kept losing value, and the perpetual wars continued. The biggest disappointment came from Republicans who not only refused to repeal Obamacare but actually expanded it through Medicaid on the state level.
Desperate to spark change, I became a political activist. I ran organizations that recruited liberty-minded candidates for state and federal races and even threw my own hat into the ring. By 2018, though, I’d lost all faith in traditional politics — it never seemed to slow the growth of government. So I turned my gaze to what I believed could actually tip the balance for individual freedom: cryptocurrency and blockchain. Since first hearing about Bitcoin in 2012, I’ve seen how decentralized money could undermine central bank tyranny and fuel economic liberty worldwide. The more I studied, the more I realized that this technology could weed out useless middlemen in everything from stock trades to supply chains to real estate titles.
