RFK Jr. says the Canadian truckers convoy and China's facial-recognition payments showed him why transactional freedom matters. He backs Bitcoin and decentralized currencies as protection against governments freezing accounts and using digital money for surveillance.
Cryptocurrency, bitcoin. What are your thoughts on digital currency?
Yeah, I mean, I became a huge convert. I really didn't know anything about cryptocurrency. My kids all are entrepreneurial and are interested in business, and they're all in that space. They had bought and sold cryptocurrencies and talked a lot about it. But I was really just on the sideline listening to them. And then I saw what happened during the pandemic. What happened in Toronto or in Ottawa to the strikers. Children's Health Defense, which was the organization that I ran, started and ran, had embedded in the truckers convoy in Canada. We had a reporter embedded and we were helping them and we were sending money and publicizing what they were doing. And the truckers in Canada were angry at the mandates. And the truckers in Canada are a very, very diverse group. A lot of them are from African descent, a lot of them from Asian, Indian, Bangladesh, and then just white people from all over Canada. But it's a very, very diverse group. And they had started out in B.C. and Alberta and they had then done, collected and made a bigger and bigger convoy coming across the country. They wanted to meet with Justin Trudeau and talk to him about the impact of the mandates on their businesses and on their lives. And Prime Minister Trudeau would not meet with them. And instead, and it was. If you look at the videos of this protest in Ottawa, it looks like Woodstock. You know, they had cleanup crews that were picking up garbage. They had crews that were passing out bottled water to people that were feeding the homeless people and hungry people in Ottawa. And there was a feel, there was music and there was a lot of joy. There was nothing nasty or mean spirited about it. And it was portrayed that way by officials, government officials, and to a large extent by the mainstream media. But what they did in Canada is they used AI, they used facial recognition systems, and they got the identities of the people who are participating in the protest, and they froze their bank accounts. And this was shocking to me because none of them were charged with a crime. They also took $15 million that we had helped raise for them on PayPal, and they persuaded PayPal to shut off their money so they couldn't access it. And it occurred to me then that I talked to one of the strikers, the truckers. Now, they couldn't buy diesel for their trucks, they couldn't buy food for their kids, they couldn't pay their mortgages. I talked to one striker who said he was facing jail time because he had mandatory alimony payments. To his ex wife and he could not pay them. And it occurred to me then that transactional freedom is as important as freedom of expression. If you have freedom of expression under the first amendment, you can say anything you want about your government without consequence. The government then can shut off your capacity to pay your rent, to buy food, you know, put you essentially on the sidewalk and paralyze you. What does it matter if you have so called freedom of expression and they don't have to charge you with any crime? And I had actually, I had seen this happening. What was happening in China where they have what they call programmable currencies, which is, you know, in China now they use your face is your credit card. So that facial recognition is so ubiquitous and so refined and sophisticated that when you go to a store to pay, you don't use cash. In many places you don't use any credit card. You just use your face to pay. And you have a digital account. On your digital account is other information, including your medical information, including your social credit score. If you drop below a certain credit score, your capacity to use your accounts now ends. And for example, they have one system where, and I'll give you an example, if the government declared a mask day and you're walking around with your mask below your nostrils and you're seen on facial recognition system which knows everybody, you're going to now lose social credit points. Or if you're too close to your girlfriend on a social distance day, you're not even told about it, you're going to lose social credit. And if you drop below a certain point, at some point, your credit, your facial credit card stops working, except in grocery stores that are within a certain radius of your home. So you can't travel, you can't buy gas for your car, you can't buy an airplane ticket, you can't go to a hotel, you're essentially under house arrest. If the government has the capacity to do that to people, then it has the capacity. I mean, a government that can silence its critics has a license for any kind of atrocity. And it is the top of a very, very slippery slope or totalitarian rule. So I was again, I was struck at that point by how important it was that we have transactional freedom. And during that period, you may remember this, there were a lot of people in the federal government who were saying we got to get rid of paper currency. In fact, in many nations, like in Africa and Australia, et cetera, they were taking away ATM machines. They were doing that on the pretense that paper Currency passes germs. So we have to get rid of it. Well, if we go to total digital currency, every transaction that you have is not. Is visible to the government, the corporations. It's taxable. It's, you know, it can be monetized for profit by somebody. And you have no secrets in your life. If you, you know, if you wanted to buy cigarettes or pornography or liquor or whatever you want to do stuff that you don't want to share with the world, somebody's going to know about that. And that's a very, very dangerous thing in a democracy. And so I think it's really important that we keep paper currency. Number one, people have access to Bitcoin and other currencies and that we look very, very warily at central bank digital currencies, which they're putting in place right now. And that is how they did it in China. They. With the central bank digital currency. And then they expanded its reach to become an instrument for social control. And to me, that's very dangerous. Wow. Wow.
Thank you.
Okay.
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