Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said while speaking cat the Bitcoin 2023 conference on Friday that he would defend the digital currency as a check on centralized government power.
“I got sold on Bitcoin when I saw what happened to the truckers in Canada,” he explained, referencing when the Canadian government ordered banks to freeze the assets of Canadian truckers who were protesting against Prime Minister Just Trudeau’s vaccine mandates, last year. The banks obeyed the orders from the government, therefore leaving the truckers stranded without access to their finances. They couldn’t pay their bills, or even buy food for their family.
Kennedy asserted that with its decentralized structure, Bitcoin could essentially prevent the government from manipulating financial systems as a way to punish and suppress free speech.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr on #Bitcoin
1. Defend the right to self custody
2. Uphold the right to run a node
3. Neutral regulation of energy
4. Keep the US a global Bitcoin hub
5. Regulate Bitcoin as a commodity
6. Pardon Ross Ulbricht pic.twitter.com/kL88AStjpP— The ₿itcoin Therapist (@TheBTCTherapist) May 19, 2023
Breitbart reports:
Kennedy noted that the U.S. and other democracies had used the pandemic crisis as a pretext to suppress basic human liberties, including the freedom to travel and even the freedom of speech. “The Constitution has no pandemic exception,” he said, noting that the Framers of the Constitution were well aware of pandemics from their own experiences. “And yet the Framers … wrote the Constitution, not for easy times, but for hard times.”
He cautioned against the conviction, from either the right or the left, that “utopia will come through exercising perfect control over society.” He added: “That works well, as long as the good guys are in control, or your guys are in control.” But such power could easily be abused, he said.
“As president, I will make sure that your right to hold and use Bitcoin is inviolable,” Kennedy vowed, adding that he would do all he could to prevent the government’s greedy hands from gaining access to private digital currency wallets. .
“I will make sure that the United States remains the global hub of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies,” he added. “Bitcoin is not a security, and should not be regulated as such.”
