Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Democratic presidential hopeful, recently spoke out about the trucker protests in Canada’s capital of Ottawa last year. During a 90-minute Twitter Spaces event on Wednesday, Kennedy said that the Canadian government suddenly morphed into a monster. He also revealed that he had recently bought two bitcoins (BTC) for each of his seven children, calling it a currency of freedom.
The Emergencies Act was invoked for the first time in Canada’s history during the protests, giving Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government additional powers to help quash the demonstrations. Kennedy said that the government used facial recognition, license plate identification, and other technologies to identify the truckers and freeze their bank accounts and credit cards.
This government of Canada, which I think most people like me had considered a role model for Western liberal democracy, suddenly morphed into this monster, Kennedy said. He went on to explain that this was his Damascus moment and that freedom of transaction was at least as important as freedom of expression.
Kennedy has become the de facto political darling of the Bitcoin community, delivering a keynote speech at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami this past May. His comments have also been echoed by Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and one of Trudeau’s harshest critics.
Kennedy proposed making a small number of T-bills backed by a basket of hard assets, including gold, silver, platinum, and bitcoin. He also suggested suspending capital gains taxes for conversion of bitcoin, with a million-dollar cap to avoid creating windfalls for large holding companies.
Bitcoiners are a different breed, Kennedy said. They are ideologically based. They are people who love freedom.