News/Commentary

Former investment banker warns China’s social credit system is ‘already here’ and ‘it threatens all of your freedom’

August 4, 2023 | | Print Article

Author and former investment banker Carol Roth warns that “China’s scary spying system” has already “invaded” the United States and is threatening “all of your freedoms.”

In an essay adapted for Fox News from her book, “You Will Own Nothing: Your War with a New Financial World Order and How to Fight Back,” Roth points to an alarming video that is circulating on social media that allegedly shows “the latest tactic in China’s formalized system to control its population — social credit.”

When a person with a low financial credit rating calls you, an alarm, different from your ringtone, sounds and you are “kindly” asked to tell the caller to pay their debts.


“Do you think that could never happen in America, that only a communist party would use technology, coercion and social pressure to conform behaviors and even take away your wealth building opportunities?” Roth asks. “Well, think again. This Chinese-style social credit system has already landed in America.”

Roth explains that there “is an evolution to social credit, which starts with cancel culture, moves to an informal state-adjacent system and eventually becomes a full-blown state-run system like the Chinese are building out.”

“These social credit initiatives come for your freedoms, including your wealth,” she writes. “They attack your social standing and access, aka the opportunities for you to create wealth. They come after your livelihood, aka your path to wealth. And, most directly, they even come after your assets, which is your literal wealth, as well as your legacy and your family’s future.”

The New York Times bestselling author recalled the oppressive measures taken during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as proof that America has already seen its share of “social-credit-enabled attacks.”

“If you didn’t take the vaccine or you didn’t wear a mask, you may have found yourself ridiculed on social media,” Roth explains. “Your family was told not to include you in Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations. You weren’t allowed to enter a restaurant (once those were allowed to open by mandate) and participate in society.”

“It may not have had a siren accompany it,” she states, “but the objective was clear: labeling you as socially unacceptable.”

First responders who were “branded heroes and essential workers just months earlier” suddenly found themselves out of a job for refusing to submit to vaccine orders, thanks to an executive order issued by the Biden administration.

“If you had thoughts that conflicted from the anointed narrative and were in a field like science and medicine,” Roth writes, “the masses tried to cancel your credibility and your job.”

She points to the collusion between the government and social media platforms such as Twitter and Meta/Facebook and says, “the state tried to silence you as well.”

“If you didn’t comply,” Roth says, “social credit was coming for you.”

At the state and local levels, small businesses were forced to shut down while “their larger competitors, as well as weed and liquor stores, in many cases never closed for a day” she reminds readers. “To the north, the truckers participating in the Freedom Convoy found their bank accounts frozen and the U.S.-based tech platform that was used to raise money for them complied with the Canadian government’s wishes and removed the fundraiser from its platform.”

Users of alternate crowd-sourcing platforms who donated to the truckers were doxxed after the site was hacked, “a clear effort to shame and harass you,” according to Roth.

“Outside of COVID-related issues, many individuals, whether based in the U.S. or elsewhere, have found themselves deplatformed from a wide variety of platforms, from social media to payment processors, for not having the appropriate social credit,” she continues.

It is a path, she argues, that will inevitably lead to “social compliance and social credit at the state/government level.”

“The formalization of this state social credit system requires two steps. The first is information-gathering on individuals. The second is those in power using the information without being challenged,” she explains. “When both of those become easy to do at scale, tyranny quickly follows.”

In a chilling conclusion, Roth writes;

Today, both of those components are here. Technology enables easy, scalable information collection, storage, and analytical capabilities. People voluntarily shun privacy for convenience, ego and other purposes, and so the information is available for such collection.

The social devolution where people are widely judged not in a court of law but rather a court of public approval sets up the second part — the creep of government and other powers being able to use information for compliance and to subjugate individual rights.

 

“And so, today, we lie just a fraction of a millimeter away from a true state social credit system, the ultimate tyrannical control,” she cautions readers.  “We are remarkably close to a place where by acting outside the preferred narrative, not agreeing with the mob, having a bad day, or engaging in wrongthink like not complying with government directives, criticizing the president, or being a gun owner, the government can penalize you.”

Melissa Fine
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