Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – a presidential hopeful and known bitcoin fan – has serious qualms with how the Freedom Convoy was treated last year in Canada.
Robert Kennedy on the Freedom Convoy Last Year
The Freedom Convoy was comprised of truckers who were protesting the region’s sudden pro-COVID vaccine laws. The idea was that to work as a trucker, one now had to be injected with a vaccine that hadn’t been fully proven and was swirling with controversy.
As a result, many of them took to the streets, but the Canadian government – led by its cowardly and far-left prime minister Justin Trudeau – took issue with this and cut off their bank accounts and all access to standard fiat products and services.
This led many people to begin donating crypto to the Convoy, hoping to help them in their plight against injustice. Kennedy commented that to cut off their bank accounts like that and to take such action against the members goes against everything that modern democracy stands for, and he’s not happy such an incident occurred. He mentioned in a recent interview:
They did something that was, to me, unimaginable. They used facial recognition, license plate identification, and [several] other technologies to determine the identities of the truckers, and then they froze their bank accounts and their credit cards.
He said his opinion of Canada really changed following this moment. He stated:
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. It occurred to me at that point that freedom of transaction was at least as important as freedom of expression.
Recently, Kennedy stirred further controversy by saying that should he win the White House later next year, he’ll do all he can to ensure USD is backed by bitcoin and other commodities. He said:
My proposal is to make a small number of T-bills backed by a basket of hard assets, including gold, silver, platinum, and bitcoin. We are looking at how that kind of commodity-based asset might put a little bit of discipline into the Fed and the practice of just printing money arbitrarily with no control and no backstop at all.
No More Capital Gains Taxes?
He’s also said he wants to do away with capital gains for bitcoin and USD-related transactions. He stated:
I’ve talked about some kind of suspension of the capital gains taxes for conversion of bitcoin. One of the dangers we want to avoid is creating huge windfalls for BlackRock and for Goldman, but there may be evidence that we may be able to do that with a million-dollar cap, so small investors who are into bitcoin would not have to pay the capital gains taxes, but super large holding companies like BlackRock and Goldman would.