Executive Summary
Ed Dowd has a way of cutting through the noise. The former Wall Street portfolio manager, who was among the first to sound the alarm on excess deaths after the COVID shots rolled out, came back to the show this week, and he did not hold back.
We started with the fight over the future of money itself. On one side, what Ed calls "Mr. Global" wants a central bank digital currency or tightly controlled stablecoins sitting in the middle of every transaction we make. On the other, he sees a faction that wants stablecoins mainly to keep financing U.S. debt. Either way, the surveillance infrastructure keeps getting built: Flock cameras, AI data centers, and Larry Fink's push to "tokenize" everything onto a ledger.
From there we went straight at accountability. Ed says the evidence now shows that the people pushing the shots knew they were killing and injuring people, and went ahead anyway. He believes the issue is so big that both 2024 campaigns stayed silent on it. He also walked through why he thinks DOGE slowed down, how settlement money from the 2008 crisis found its way into the NGO world, and why Soros-style NGOs work as a model for regime change.
We covered Event 201, the "immunity badge" pitch a Federal Reserve banker made on television in April 2020, the forgotten push to separate the unvaccinated in late 2022, and the Maui fire victims who were left behind. Ed closed with a blunt read on the midterms: real wages were minus 2% going into 2024, and that number has not improved much.
This is a conversation about following the money, and about what We the People do once we see where it goes.
Scroll to the bottom for Key Takeaways.
The Battle Over the Future of Money: CBDCs, Stablecoins and the Third-Party Lock
Right now, when we pay with cash, it is a deal between two people. Nobody else gets a vote.
Ed's point is that a CBDC changes that. It inserts what he calls "a third-party lock" into every transaction. Add AI and social credit scoring to that system and the implications become very real, very fast. If you're labeled a dissident, your money can be turned off.
He gave an example that should make every one of us stop. Imagine the climate crowd gets control and decides to cap how much beef each of us can buy. The quota reaches all the way down to the cash register. You've hit your limit, and the cashier tells you the purchase can't be approved.
Ed was careful to say we are not there yet. But he was just as clear that this is the goal: control down to the micro-financial level.
The Canadian Trucker Warning Shot
We already saw a preview. During the trucker protests in Canada, the government went after people's bank accounts.
Here's the part Ed says most people missed. The system wasn't ready, and the dirty little secret is that it triggered a quiet run on Canadian banks. People realized their money could be locked down, and they started moving it. So the government backed off.
That's the lesson. A system like this only works if it's global and nobody can escape it. And Ed believes we are nowhere near that yet.
Tokenization Is Just Another Word for a Ledger
When Larry Fink talks about tokenizing everything, I asked Ed whether that was just stablecoins under a new name.
His answer was simple. It's putting everything on a ledger so they can see it. And once it's on a ledger, they can stop any transaction they want. Want to sell your house? Not today.
It's another part of the control grid.
The AI Control Grid: Is Catherine Austin Fitts Right?
Ed has talked with Catherine Austin Fitts about her view that a full control grid is being built. He told her he puts it at about a 70% probability that she's correct.
What would seal it for him? If the AI industry goes bankrupt, which he suspects it will, and the government steps in to buy the infrastructure for pennies on the dollar through so-called public-private partnerships. That nationalization would wipe out current investors, and it would hand the state the data centers, the cameras and the systems.
Why the race to build all of this so fast? That's the question we should all be asking.
COVID Accountability: Why Is Nobody Being Held Responsible?
This is the part of the conversation that hit hardest for me, and I know it does for so many of you.
Ed says there has been no COVID accountability, just "kabuki theater." And he's now asking a question he wants answered out loud. In his words, it has come out that Israel knew, the CDC knew, Fauci knew, and Pfizer knew that the shots were killing people and causing massive injuries. They went ahead anyway.
So why was it so imperative to get a shot into the arm of everyone on the planet?
The Silence of Both Campaigns
Ed pointed out something I hadn't fully put together. In 2024, neither the Trump campaign nor the Harris campaign talked about COVID or the shots.
He thinks there was an implicit agreement behind the scenes. Or someone on high said: you can run, but you don't touch that. In August 2024, before the election, Ed wrote a viral post warning that a Trump win would bring the risk of infiltration, because the fastest way to steer MAGA is through the man at the top.
Lockdowns, Event 201 and the Question of Why
The Brownstone Institute has argued that the lockdowns kept natural immunity from doing its work so the shots could reach everyone. Ed says the Fauci material that has come out points the same way.
Then there's Event 201, the pandemic simulation held in the fall of 2019 with Johns Hopkins, the Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and others. Ed calls its timing very suspicious, because it predicted what happened "almost to the T."
Ed is careful here. He says plainly that he wasn't in the room and doesn't have proof. But he is increasingly of the opinion that COVID was released to create a market for a vaccine.
He also shared his own experience. He lives on Maui, and in the fall of 2019 a nasty flu was going around that people couldn't shake for two weeks. Nobody panicked, because nobody had been told to panic. He says he barely knew anyone who got COVID in 2020. It was after the shots rolled out in 2021 that he saw people getting sick and dying, and his team's data on excess deaths and disabilities backs that up.
Immunity Badges and the Camps Nobody Remembers
Two memories every one of us should hold onto.
In April 2020, well before any vaccine, a Federal Reserve banker went on national television and talked about reopening the economy using "wonderful" new surveillance technology, testing and immunity badges. Ed says that's when he knew it was about control: digital ID, vaccine passports, and then a CBDC.
And in late 2022, he says, there was a real push in mainstream media to separate the unvaccinated into camps. It wasn't a joke. Then Omicron swept through, the vaccinated got COVID too, and the booster push collapsed.
Ed's summary: their plans were thwarted by Mother Nature.
The NGO Money Machine and the DOGE Slowdown
I asked Ed why the money flowing into America through NGOs still isn't being stopped. Scott Bessent has said they'll look at ActBlue and the Singham network. So when?
Ed was optimistic at the start of 2025. DOGE was up and running, and the NGOs were being investigated. Then it all slowed down. His theory? They "opened the kimono," looked inside, and found the fraud is so big that shutting it all off at once would tank the economy.
How the NGO Scam Works
Ed described the model. Someone like Soros starts an NGO with $10 million of his own money, the government adds $90 million, and suddenly there's a $100 million operation employing friends in "Mickey Mouse jobs." He suspects a lot of that money ends up goosing the stock market instead of sitting in safe instruments.
Then he told a story I want every one of you to hear. After the 2008 financial crisis, no bankers went to jail. Instead, banks paid billions in settlements over the following years. According to Ed, that money went into consumer protection funds, which then found their way into Obama-linked NGOs.
That, he says, is when the NGO scam went "on steroids."
Regime Change, Then and Now
Ed also said USAID was basically a CIA front, and that Soros used NGOs, with the CIA's help, in the toppling of Ukraine's government.
I see the same playbook the Dulles brothers used to overthrow regimes in the 1950s, turned on America in 2016. That's why I keep saying we need accountability at the top, for the people who designed the system, not just the small-time fraudsters caught running it.
The Midterms Come Down to the Economy
Many of you have told me you're thinking about sitting out the midterms because you haven't seen accountability. I asked Ed what he says to that.
His first answer: vote. Get out there.
Then his analysis. The real swing vote that put Trump back in office was the economy. Going into 2024, real wages were minus 2%. Ed notes that same stat took out Carter in 1980 and Bush in 1992. He says it hasn't improved much, and roughly 30% of Trump's coalition voted on the economy alone. That's the problem going into November.
He also warned about the youth. Young men who can't find work or start families are disaffected, and many are turning toward socialism. That is a real threat, and one we have to meet with real answers, not slogans.
The AI Hype Cycle and Hollywood's Collapse
Ed made a point I loved. We're told AI is powerful enough to end humanity, yet somehow it can't root out government fraud. If it could kill us, it could find the fraud in ten seconds.
His view is that AI is a real technology caught in a classic bubble, like the railroads, the electric utilities of the 1920s and the fiber build-out of the dot-com era. The bubble will pop, and we'll still end up with the technology. As for the "AI safety" fear campaign, he says it's all about money: the frontier labs are losing ground to open-source competitors and want regulations that lock in a duopoly.
And Hollywood? Having worked there for 22 years, I asked Ed what's happening. His answer: the money is gone. Theater, DVD, cable, all those revenue streams have collapsed into streaming. That's why we get formula movies. Cable news is in the same boat, surviving on boomers and pharmaceutical ads.
What We the People Do Now
None of this is meant to leave us hopeless. Ed's own story proves the point. He and so many of us were called crazy for asking questions in 2021. Today, as he says, we're "less crazy as time rolls on."
That's how it works. We stay informed, we follow the money, and we refuse to look away.
Ready to work a Step? Here are three things you can do:
- Keep using cash where you can, and talk to your family about why a two-party transaction matters.
- Follow independent researchers like Ed Dowd, and share the data, not just the outrage.
- Show up in November, and bring three people with you.
Key Takeaways
- A CBDC inserts a "third-party lock" into transactions that today are just between two people.
- Freezing Canadian truckers' bank accounts triggered a quiet bank run, which is why the effort was dropped.
- Ed Dowd puts a 70% probability on Catherine Austin Fitts being right about the AI control grid.
- Ed says the CDC, Fauci, Pfizer and Israel knew the shots were causing deaths and injuries and went ahead anyway.
- Neither 2024 campaign talked about COVID or the shots.
- Ed says settlement money from the 2008 crisis flowed through consumer protection funds into Obama-linked NGOs.
- Real wages were minus 2% going into 2024, and Ed says that's still the midterm problem.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a CBDC really stop me from buying something?
That's exactly the design concern Ed raised. A CBDC puts a third party in the middle of every transaction, and paired with AI and social credit scoring, it could block a purchase, like beef over a climate quota, at the register. We're not there yet, which is why now is the time to push back.
Why hasn't anyone been held accountable for the COVID shots?
Ed believes the issue is so big that it's been placed off-limits, which is why neither 2024 campaign touched it. He calls what we've seen so far "kabuki theater." That's why we have to keep demanding answers ourselves.
What happened to DOGE?
Ed's view is that once they looked inside, the fraud was so large that shutting it off all at once would have tanked the economy, so the work slowed down. We should be asking why it isn't a permanent, expected audit of our money.
Is AI actually a threat to humanity?
Ed doesn't think it's an existential threat. He sees a real technology inside a classic investment bubble, and he says the "AI safety" fear campaign is about protecting the big labs' profits from open-source competition.
Where can I follow Ed Dowd?
Ed writes "Beyond the Narrative" on Substack, posts on X at @DowdEdward, and his firm's research, including the excess-death data, is at Phinance Technologies.
Watch the full episode on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v7g1g9u-mel-k-and-ed-dowd-straight-talk-the-truth-has-no-agenda-9-26-26.html
For my readers – Yes, we used AI to turn this episode into something readable for you. My team reviews everything first and does their best to sound like me. If it doesn't, that's fair, the robots aren't perfect…yet. If you want the real thing – unscripted, unfiltered, and exactly how I said it – that's what the full episode is for. You can always find it here [https://rumble.com/v7g1g9u-mel-k-and-ed-dowd-straight-talk-the-truth-has-no-agenda-9-26-26.html]