It's a tale of two crackdowns - and two cultures.

While Beijing scrambles to stamp out immaturity and laziness among its males, Washington is terrified of... wait for it... cryptocurrency.   

Gary Gensler, Joe Biden's deeply establishmentarian SEC head, has dropped a bomb on the crypto community with his sudden attack on Coinbase, the leading crypto platform. Perhaps it was naïve for some in the space to have imagined Gensler, once the co-chief of global finance for Goldman Sachs, to be a promising appointee because he spent time teaching and studying crypto at MIT. 

But it wasn't until China crushed out their booming crypto economy that American policymakers faced the decision that seems to have led to Gensler's rash and punitive move. 

Beijing's successful anti-crypto turn flowed logically from their statecraft model: crush alternate sources of power and authority for intimately Chinese reasons, then spin it in ways that pressure America to behave counter to national interest. In this instance, ridding China of crypto holdings and mining meant strangling a rival to the Party's social credit system in its crib. For the Chinese leadership, crypto is just another destabilizing Western innovation, upsetting cosmic harmony—not to mention regime stability—by taking an excessively instrumental view of the power of technology.

But for Western audiences, a crypto crackdown can be marketed and propagandized as a heroically ethical defense against eco-unfriendliness and social inequity. And that's just how it has been portrayed. That's despite bitcoin consuming less energy than fossil fuels, the petrodollar, or, say, China, even without taking into account how long a way even a little nuclear power could go toward reducing emissions for miners as well as the rest of us.