During the Bitcoin Conference 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered remarks on Bitcoin growth.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Now, I want to say a couple of words about Bitcoin today, which I consider myself part of.
00:11Despite their different viewpoints, I found the most striking feature of Bitcoin today
00:18is its unquestionable, just juxtaposition, marked by fierce visions on several minor issues.
00:28Bitcoin has a sense of unity with the larger Bitcoin ecosystem.
00:35The Bitcoin community reminds me of how American politics ought to be.
00:40Fiercely diverse, but ultimately united in our aspirations, in our belief, and in our belief that America is worth fighting.
00:52And in the end, we all come back together, united in our belief that Bitcoin is a technology for freedom,
01:01for optimism, for empathy, for democracy and transparency.
01:07It is the currency of hope.
01:10It is the perfect currency.
01:20It is an elegant, poetic, beautiful, pure species that aligns perfectly
01:28with the highest ideals and aspirations represented by the American experiment with self-governance.
01:36It is incorruptible.
01:39It has integrity.
01:41It has self-sufficiency.
01:44It promotes personal responsibility and accountability.
01:51It is decentralized and democratic.
01:56It is small in government and large on personal freedom.
02:00Bitcoin is anti-war.
02:03It is a fierce, merciless, and insurmountable foe of government corruption.
02:16Now, as you know, I owned Bitcoin on a conversion.
02:23I knew from my children about Bitcoin, but it was a...
02:29It seemed almost to me something like a fad or novelty.
02:36And then I saw it happening all the time.
02:38I was running a Dutch financial health class, which was the premier avenue for medical freedom in our country.
02:45And we had embedded with the...
02:53We had embedded with the strike truckers in Canada, a reporter for our newsletter.
03:01And she was traveling with the truckers from Alberta all the way to Ottawa.
03:06And the truckers were the first candidate.
03:09They're Asian.
03:10They're black.
03:11They're white.
03:13The truckers were doing something that all of us in our community hate.
03:18It was a fad.
03:20They were assembling a petition in their government about something that they thought was important,
03:27which was about the impact, the financial impact of the mandates on their businesses.
03:33And if you look at the videos, as a matter of fact, it was like Woodstock,
03:39where people were giving out water bottles, and they were picking up trash,
03:43and they were playing music, and they were being kind to each other.
03:46But it was portrayed by the Canadian government as a right-wing, extremist, violent, power organization.
03:57And then the government began using facial recognition systems and other forms of surveillance
04:04to learn the identity of truckers, looking at their license plates, et cetera.
04:09And it grows their bank accounts.
04:12And it grows their total income account.
04:16And when Canada did that, the premier template box in the world size of the United States,
04:25it occurred to me immediately that transactional freedom
04:30was as important as freedom of expression of first amendment.
04:43Because if the government has money, truckers were charged with much less than they did.
04:51And yet the government was able to shut down their bank accounts.
04:54It couldn't pay their mortgages.
04:55It couldn't buy diesel for their trucks.
04:58It couldn't buy food for their children.
05:00One trucker told me that he was going to jail.
05:03Because it couldn't make mandatory alimony payments.
05:07And if the government is able to starve you, if you see our deficit, if you criticize our policies,
05:19then we are on the road to totalitarianism and slavery.
05:23And I began at that time looking seriously for alternatives.
05:28And it was that incentive that led me immediately to grasp the potential of this technology
05:35to provide transactional freedom and self-sufficiency.
05:40Last year at this conference, I proposed that as your president,
05:46I would fight to ensure the right to self-custody Bitcoin from no federal homes
05:53to stop the federal government from reserving the first amendment rights to open source privacy-enhancing technologies.
06:01I'd let government officials from adopting CBDCs, which would inevitably morph into what we saw in Canada,
06:11become a levelling tool for surveillance and control.
06:14Most importantly, I promised to secure the United States' position as the global hub of crypto-piracy,
06:24invasion, monotony, infestation, and technology.