Who is RFK Jr.?
Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (b. 1954) is the nephew of President John F. Kennedy and the son of Robert F. Kennedy Sr. His uncle was assassinated in 1963. His father was assassinated in 1968 while running for US president. RFK Jr. was 14 at the time..
RFK Jr studied law at the University of Virginia after doing his undergraduate at Harvard. He spent most of his career working on environment-related cases, frequently suing both private companies and government agencies for causing environmental harm to individuals—and especially poor communities.
Even though RFK Jr. had a high profile among those who follow the environmental movement closely, he was not well known to the general public until 2020.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the US government’s response was to lock down the economy, RFK Jr.’s voice was one of the loudest raised in protest.
During the entire two-year ordeal that the country endured, RFK Jr. was consistent in denouncing both the Trump and Biden administrations for exceeding their constitutional authority.
His was a leading voice in critiquing the narrative constructed by Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Big Pharma, and the media. The narrative’s many claims—now proven false—concerned the mRNA gene therapy that was advertised as a “vaccine,” the total reliance on the gene therapy to the exclusion of effective therapeutics, and the supposed source of the virus in a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, rather than in a nearby P4-level bioweapons research lab—among many other lies and distortions.
In 2021, RFK Jr. wrote a bestselling book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, laying out the evidence for the falseness of the government’s COVID narrative.
While RFK Jr. was “canceled” from all the major media outlets for his outspokenness, he nevertheless achieved a high public profile as a rational, evidence-based, and utterly fearless teller of inconvenient truths to power by giving countless interviews on social media venues.
RFK Jr.’s Run for the 2024 Democratic Party Presidential Nomination
Given that he bears the most widely known and immediately recognized brand name in American politics, it is only natural that RFK Jr. has thought about running for public office several times during the course of his life.
However, certain irregularities in his private life, including an arrest for heroin possession in 1983—when he was 29 years old—and his subsequent admission to a drug rehabilitation program, among other reasons, always dissuaded him from taking the plunge. His views on the connection between childhood vaccines and autism also made him unpopular in many circles.
But in early 2023, RFK Jr.’s new public visibility had reached a point that encouraged him to think about entering the political arena. On April 5, 2023, he announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the 2024 presidential election.
RFK Jr. has made it clear that the major theme of his campaign will be neither his long-standing environmentalism nor his opposition to the COVID so-called “vaccines” and lockdowns, for which he is undoubtedly best known to the general public, though he is willing to answer questions directed to him by media on those or any other subjects.
Interestingly—indeed shockingly, for an aspiring politician—he is perfectly willing to answer a question by saying that he does not know, is not sure, or will have to think about the matter further.
Instead of looking to the past, RFK Jr. is relentlessly looking to the future. The central theme of his campaign is the defense of Americans’ freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and economic freedom.
RFK Jr.’s Support for Crypto and Opposition to CBDC
Given the life trajectory that has brought RFK Jr. to this point, his embrace of freedom as the main theme of his campaign makes a lot of sense.
What is perhaps more surprising is his decision to throw in his lot with the cryptocurrency community and to raise the growing but still under-recognized specter of CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) as a major talking point of his campaign.
How to account for this striking political decision? RFK Jr. has given us a key to his thinking in a pathbreaking keynote address he delivered on May 20, 2023, to the Bitcoin 2023 conferenced sponsored by Bitcoin magazine.
In this speech, he recounts how someone asked him how he got “sold on Bitcoin.” Here is his extended answer:
I told him it happened to me in an instant when I saw what happened at the truckers’ strike in Ottawa…
I realized for the first time how free money is as important to freedom as free expression… A government that has the power to starve its citizens when they are disobedient will inevitably turn our entire country into serfs.[1]
[Note: For those who may not remember, hundreds of Canadian, long-haul truck drivers staged a mass protest in 2021 and 2022 against their government’s COVID lockdown restrictions by driving to Ottawa and parking their rigs in the streets of the nation’s capital. Canadian Premier Justin Trudeau finally broke the strike by implementing totalitarian controls over the truckers’ bank accounts and threatening them with crippling fines and even jail time for actions arguably protected by Canada’s constitution.]
In this same speech, RFK Jr. laid out in some detail the reasons for his support for cryptocurrencies.
Here are some of the highlights from this remarkable speech:
We live at a time now that technology has dangerously expanded the capacity for governments and corporations to control our lives…
The Constitution has no pandemic exception… The government established a new precedent: which is that if it has a good enough excuse the government can now take away all our freedoms. And guess what, there is always a good excuse.[2]
Next, since he was speaking at the Bitcoin 2023 conference, he turned his attention to Bitcoin itself:
Bitcoin is a bulwark against precisely this kind of government and corporate expansion and intrusion. As your President, I will make sure that your right to hold and use Bitcoin is inviolable. . . .
I am an ardent and lifelong defender of civil liberties, and Bitcoin is both an exercise and a guarantee of those freedoms.[3]
In what was truly a groundbreaking political stump speech, RFK Jr. even got down to the nitty-gritty, listing no fewer than six basic principles that he is committed to acting on as soon as he is sworn in as President:
Namely, he pledges to:
- [defend] the right of self-custody of Bitcoin and other digital assets. You should be able to own your own private keys, the same as you own the keys to your car or own your wallet.
- [defend] the right to run a node at home. KYC [“know your customer”] requirements should be applied at the level of banks and exchanges, not at the level of nodes.
- [defend] the use-oriented, industry-neutral regulation of energy. President Biden’s 30% tax on energy for Bitcoin miners requires an invasive surveillance apparatus to monitor what is happening in individual computers. It sets a terrible precedent.
- [ensure] the US remains the global hub of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. . . . Some of the best engineers and coders in the tech industry work in this field and we want to keep them here in America.
- [pass reasonable regulation] of the cryptocurrency industry . . . For starters, we must recognize that Bitcoin is not a security and should not be regulated as such. Bitcoin is in a class by itself.
- [consider] whether individuals like Ross Ulbricht were prosecuted for actual crimes or as a means to crack down on crypto. If they have been unjustly made an example, I will consider pardoning them and I will act very quickly to do so.[4]
Given these remarks at the Bitcoin 2023 conference, it is no surprise to find FRK Jr. extending the scope of his campaign to encompass the issue of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)—the widely discussed proposal to outlaw cash and force all American citizens to do their banking via an online entity directly under the government’s control.
In this context, RFK Jr.’s fiery denunciation of the new FedNow program as a step towards the implementation of an American CBDC comes as no surprise.
Here is what he recently had to say on this topic:
The claim that FedNow is not the first step toward a CBDC would be more easily digestible were we not aware of the Biden administration’s steady barrage of hostile broadsides against cryptocurrencies.
Between 2008–22, the Fed partnered with a handful of big banks to print $10 trillion—ten centuries of wealth in 15 years—a bonanza for the Banksters.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin give the public an escape route from the splatter zone when this bubble invariably bursts. So the White House is colluding with the Banksters to keep us all trapped in the bubble of profiteering and control.
In his Feb. 8 post on Pirate Wires, [Castle Island Ventures partner] Nic Carter describes how the White House has organized bankers to participate in a sophisticated, widespread crackdown to destroy the crypto industry. Carter describes 15 incidents where President Biden has weaponized FDIC, OCC + DOJ to force crypto-friendly banks to close their doors to crypto firms since Dec. 3. The recent crackdown on crypto blocks exit ramps, removes alternative rails, and strengthens government control over both the financial and political systems.
We should be wary since CBDCs are the ultimate mechanisms for social surveillance and control.[5]
Finally, in a podcast interview published this past May 5, RFK Jr. gave voice in rousing terms to his commitment to the free enterprise system.
Specifically, in that interview he spells out in detail a significant position—already alluded to in the April 10 tweet previously cited—which stands poised to become a central feature of his campaign.
Namely, he harshly, but wittily, condemns the Biden administration’s unparalleled fiscal profligacy as follows:
This country is acting like the alcoholic who is behind on his mortgage and who takes the milk money and goes into the bar and buys rounds for strangers.[6]
[Note: It is clear from the context (an earlier discussion of the war in Ukraine) that in his last remark he is referring to our aid to that country in excess of $75 billion so far.][7]
Whether RFK Jr. will be able during his campaign to break through the wall of “cancelation” the mainstream media have built around him remains to be seen.
Politics is a strange business and it is impossible to predict what may happen. It is certainly conceivable that as his subterranean social media–driven reputation grows, the wall of censorship surrounding RFK Jr. may begin to crumble.
If it does, then it will be very interesting—even for those uninvolved with the Democratic Party’s nominating process—to watch RFK Jr. as he attempts to raise the topics of crypto and CBDC to a higher level of public awareness and to encourage a process of serious, rational, public deliberation that is long overdue.
[1] Keynote address, Bitcoin 2023 conference, Miami Beach, Florida, Bitcoin magazine, May 20, 2023; accessible on youtube.com.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] RFK Jr. tweet, April 10, 2023; reported by Brian Quarmby, “Presidential hopefuls RFK Jr. and Ron DeSantis rail against FedNow,” cointelegraph.com, April 11, 2023.
[6] Interview, All-In podcast, Episode 127, May 5, 2023; accessible at youtube.com.
[7] See Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, “How Much Aid Has the U.S. Sent Ukraine? Here Are Six Charts,” Council on Foreign Relations, cfr.org, May 19, 2023.