Canada freezing Freedom Convoy truckers' bank accounts showed importance of cryptocurrency: Kennedy
While Donald Trump's appearance at the Bitcoin Conference 2024 is capturing major headlines, another U.S. presidential contender also delivered a speech at the cryptocurrency event in Nashville, Tennesse.
Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. discussed how he first became interested in Bitcoin, the world's leading cryptocurrency. At first, he said, he thought it was something of a fad.
But things changed during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa, when truckers, spurred on by a cross-border vaccine mandate, led a protest against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and public health measures.
During the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government took extreme actions invoking the anti-terror and war-time powers through the Emergencies Act and freezing protesting Canadians' bank accounts.
“When Canada did that, the premiere template of democracy in the world besides the United States, it occurred to me immediately that transactional freedom was as important as freedom of expression and the First Amendment,” Kennedy told the crowd at Bitcoin Conference 2024.
“None of these truckers were charged with a crime, much less convicted,” he continued. “And yet the government was able to shut down their bank accounts; they couldn't pay their mortgages, they couldn't buy diesel for their trucks, they couldn't buy food for their children.”
These types of extreme measures Kennedy warned, are the “road to totalitarianism and slavery.”
“It was that instant that led me immediately grasp the potential of this technology to provide transactional freedom and self-sovereignty,” Kennedy said.

