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Season 2: The War on the Dollar

Dave Troy
5 min readApr 16, 2023

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Sometimes life happens all at once. That’s what it’s been like for me the last few months, and I’ve been amassing a backlog of research and new stories to tell.

That’s why I decided this was the right time to launch Season Two of my podcast “Dave Troy Presents.” This season, titled “The War on the Dollar,” will follow up on Season 1, “Oil, Gold, Crypto and Fascism: How We Got Here and How to Fix It.”

Episode one, which includes a bunch of wild audio clips gathered over the last few months, discusses the ongoing effort by Putin, Xi, Trump and the BRICS nations to undermine the dollar and usher in new asset-backed currencies. As always, don’t get distracted by whether this makes sense or will work. This is what they think they’re doing. And they can cause a lot of damage in the process. That potential for damage will be the focus of the next set of episodes. Please join us for more guests and thoughtful analysis!

Subscribe for free on the podcast platform of your choice to be notified when new episodes are available.

I’ve also written a series of related investigations and columns for The Washington Spectator. Read more here.

In January… I highlighted the concerted effort by prominent conservatives to push gold, specifically through a company called “Birch Gold” which has ties to sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. And I highlighted the need for a positive vision that can counter the geopolitical effects of Putin’s long-running war of attrition.

In February… I attended the Conscious Life Expo in Los Angeles, a hotbed of New Age and QAnon-related content that also happens to dovetail with Putin’s war effort. And I attended the “Rage Against the War Machine” rally in Washington, D.C., which shares some surprising overlaps with that New Age network. I have more coming on that topic soon, but I summarized the anti-war rally in my Wide Angle column.

And in March… I covered the surprising roots of the ongoing effort to crash the dollar by exploring the connections between the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and the circle of Russian economists that privatized Russia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is a key to understanding why Austrian School economics has become so engrained within the Putin regime, and part of the “anti-woke” war on the West.

And just last week… we dug into the new populist obsession: Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and the fear that they will become mechanisms of social control. (Spoiler alert: not any time soon in this country, at least not without the approval of Congress.) Still, this hasn’t stopped populists from taking the bait. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (who was encouraged to run for president as a Democrat by Steve Bannon) is pushing paranoid fantasies about how the Federal Reserve is going to lead us into authoritarian rule via its new payments service, FedNow. (Spoiler alert: this is nonsense.)

You can probably spot the pattern here: my current focus is on how financial manipulation (or, call it metaphysical warfare, or financial terrorism) is conjoined with Putin’s war on the West. This is such a deep topic, and it’s not getting the coverage it deserves. There are several overlapping goals:

  1. Run up the price of gold (and other metals) by pushing fear over the collapse of the dollar.
  2. Try to actually crash the dollar by creating a crisis of confidence, which is easier said than done.
  3. Blame political opponents for the economic turmoil they are instigating, because it happened “on their watch.”

This is equivalent to blowing up a building and then blaming your rivals for not sufficiently protecting it. And if it can be done with plausible deniability, it will work. They are counting on your not seeing this sleight of hand, or the broad arc of history and network analysis that would give this trick away. But it’s really easy to see, once you know to look for it.

And for those that haven’t already read it, my long-form piece from last year, “Paranoia On Parade” offers a full account of the backstory of this financial attack from 1933 to the present.

Stay tuned for more stories and podcast episodes. The next few months are critical. If we can get past the debt ceiling standoff without sparking a major crisis, that will be a significant accomplishment. That is doable, but we need to recognize the danger that presently exists.

The financial, information, political, and kinetic battle-spaces are seamlessly conjoined. The more we can start to think of them as a unified whole, the more able we’ll be to defeat the kinds of metaphysical attacks that undermine the existing order.

You can change the way the world actually works by convincing people it works that way. That’s what the adversary is doing. And we can counter it by dismantling that effort and spreading countering frames. Stay strong… nothing, not even this authoritarian attack, lasts forever.

Dave Troy is an investigative journalist addressing threats to democracy. You can follow his work on Twitter at @davetroy, on Mastodon at @davetroy@toad.social, and can find his monthly column “The Wide Angle” in The Washington Spectator.

For an even deeper dive, check out Dave’s other writing here on Medium, and his podcast series, “Dave Troy Presents,” wherever you get your podcasts.

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Dave Troy

Investigative journalist addressing threats to democracy. Public speaker, writer, podcaster. @davetroy on Twitter. See davetroy.com for contact info.