Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is April 16th, 2024, and I'm making a video to talk about a topic that is near and dear to all of our hearts as firebrands and revolutionaries: the difference between a true hero and a fake one, a true carrier of the torch of a movement and someone who is not.
As many of you know, in the cryptocurrency industry, a lot of us are big advocates for liberty, freedom, and human rights—freedom of association, freedom of commerce, and freedom of expression. I’ve had the luxury to travel around the world; I’ve been to more than 70 countries—73, to be precise—and I’ve met some incredibly impressive people who have endured a lot of hardship as a direct consequence of their beliefs.
Being an American, I was raised on stories—sometimes apocryphal and sometimes true—about the great heroism of the American Revolution and where we came from. It’s an undeniable fact that when our nation was founded, the Founding Fathers put their names on a document that, if the revolution failed, was essentially their execution warrant. When they signed the Declaration of Independence and mailed it to the King of England, there was no way to pardon their way out of that; they were traitors according to the English, and if we lost the revolution, they would be treated as such.
This is where we started. Our first president, George Washington, led from the front, right in the field, with holes in his uniform and cannonballs blasting around him. Regardless of the enormous personal risk, he was willing to show up for something that was right, regardless of how cold it was outside or whether people had shoes. He was right there with his men. That’s what we were founded upon.
Now, we weren’t perfect when we were founded. In the 19th century, we had to confront the original sin of our founding, which was slavery. Let’s talk about a few heroes from that age. For example, Elijah Lovejoy was a Presbyterian minister and journalist who wrote newspapers and was a staunch abolitionist. He was murdered by a lynch mob after being repeatedly warned to stop, but he wouldn’t because he knew it was wrong and accepted the personal risk and consequences.
Then you have people like Charles Torrey, who was an abolitionist that set up an underground railroad and died in prison for his beliefs. There’s also John Brown, as radical as you can get, who tried to arm slaves because he believed this was the crime of our time and that they needed the right to defend themselves against the brutality they endured. He was executed by hanging.
That is an example of bravery: believing in something so much that you don’t flee somewhere else; you stay and fight, accepting the fact that the odds are you’re going to be one of those guys instead of George Washington or the Founders. The harsh truth of being a whistleblower and a revolutionary is that the vast majority of them don’t live to see the fruits of their labors. They get imprisoned, tarnished, and admonished, while the next generation usually enjoys the fruits of their labors. That’s a human reality you have to see.
It’s not exclusively an American thing. For example, there’s Alexei Navalny. In August 2020, Navalny was hospitalized in serious condition after being poisoned with a nerve agent. He was medically evacuated to Berlin and discharged a month later. He accused Putin of being responsible for his poisoning, and an investigation implicated agents of the Federal Security Service.
Here’s the interesting thing: he was in Berlin and, in January 2021, he returned to Russia and was immediately detained, knowing full well that he was risking his life. He knew how Putin operates; Putin had just tried to kill him. There was probably some wiggle room for him to become a political agent of the United States, a good opposition propaganda guy. There’s an asylum case there, but he returned knowing the consequences.
You have figures like Nelson Mandela, who, regardless of whether you agree with their politics, you have to acknowledge their bravery. He was arrested in 1962 and served 27 years in prison as a political prisoner before becoming president. Again, it’s not about his politics; it’s about him fighting for what he believed in.
When you get a security clearance in the United States, you swear an oath. You’re highly vetted, and in the case of Snowden, you undergo a Single Scope Background Investigation (SSBI) and are trusted at the highest level. What happens is that when you get that clearance, you start seeing things that are deeply uncomfortable and incredibly disturbing.
For example, there was Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire at Fort Meade, where the NSA headquarters is located. Given his rank and where he was posted, he likely had a top-secret clearance and was probably seeing drone footage related to what was happening in Israel and Gaza. Something he saw disturbed him so much that he decided to go in front of the embassy and set himself on fire. I’m not saying he’s a hero or that I agree with his actions, but this is the reality of whistleblowing and the reality of courage. People have choices to make in life about how far they’re willing to go for their beliefs.
Here’s what Edward Snowden did: he took an oath to the United States, didn’t like what he saw, took intelligence, left the United States, and went shopping. He went to China, and when they didn’t bite, he ended up in Russia. While in Russia, he decided to become a citizen of that country and swore an oath of allegiance to it. Here’s what he said: “I, Edward Snowden, voluntarily and consciously accepting citizenship of the Russian Federation, swear to observe the Constitution and legislation of the Russian Federation, respect its history, culture, and traditions, protect the freedom and independence of the Russian Federation, be loyal to Russia, and respect and preserve its language, traditions, and culture. I will conscientiously fulfill my duties as a citizen of the Russian Federation for the benefit of the state and society and protect the interests of the Russian Federation and serve to strengthen its power and prosperity.”
Snowden apologists might say he had to do that, but is he a great hero? Does this help the argument for privacy or hinder it? If he had been one of the people I just mentioned, here’s what would have happened: he would have gone to D.C. or somewhere like it, staged a press conference, revealed PRISM and all these things, and been arrested. He would be a political prisoner in a U.S. prison, and every presidential cycle, we’d be talking about it—talking about the injustice, talking about the problem. Just like Mandela, he might have sat there and eventually received reform and a pardon. Every privacy expert would say he’s a political prisoner and an American hero.
Instead, he went to our enemies, swore an oath of allegiance to them to save his own skin, traded our intelligence for it, and violated his prior oath. So to the Russians, this guy can’t really be trusted, can he? He sits from abroad throwing hand grenades at the United States, saying we’re a panopticon as a country. It’s absolutely true that we do have a spy state, and let’s pretend for a moment that China doesn’t have one, that it doesn’t exist in the Middle East, or that it doesn’t exist in Russia. Every modern economy has a spy state, and yes, it’s a problem. We should chip away at it, and it’s a combination of legislation, technology, economics, and constitutional changes. It’s a hard fight, a long fight, and it’s the injustice of our time.
But you don’t fight that from abroad with our enemies any more than George Washington should have moved to France and then sent strongly worded letters to England about the injustices of taxation without representation, saying he’d return to the colonies when the English pardoned him and changed the policy. It’s cowardice. It’s absolute cowardice. It disregards 200 years of U.S. history of every revolutionary who fought for what they believed in.
Our current internet culture is one that doesn’t want to live with the realities of life and pain. Change requires pain; change is hard. It’s hard to fight for things, and you have to be honest about how far you’re willing to go. But what you don’t do is make heroes out of cowards, and you don’t make heroes out of people who aren’t heroes. There are plenty of people willing to fight the fight and walk the walk. We see them every day; we meet them, we read about them. They are often demonized by the press, and we ignore them, yet we build up people who don’t have these attributes.
This is why I’ve always taken this position about Snowden and others like him: he’s a coward and a traitor. He violated his oath here, fled to our enemies, and took an oath for one of our enemies. Maybe they will be a friend one day, but right now we’re in a cold war with them and a hot war in Ukraine. By the way, that nation-state has killed 100 million of its own people in the 20th century. That nation-state invented the KGB and the modern spy state, and it’s currently led by a dictator who has no respect for human rights. Yet he took an oath to protect the interests of that leader, and you’re going to tell me to look him in the face and say he’s our hero?
We should tell our kids to look up to Martin Luther King, to the abolitionists, to the people in America who fight for privacy, to the political prisoners currently sitting in jail cells in the United States because they stood up to the government and its insanity. Don’t look to people who fled the country and took oaths to people who aren’t our friends, then judge us by all the things we do.
I was at Consensus two years ago, and I guess he was a guest speaker dialing in. He gets to talk about privacy, and he’s apparently invited to our industry at every conference. We’re all supposed to look up to him and say, “Oh, how brave he is.” I’m sorry; I’m just not going to play that game. I’m really not, especially after traveling throughout the world and seeing real heroes—seeing people who are willing to fight for the things they believe in.
I really do believe in privacy. Personally, if push came to shove, I hope I would have the courage to give everything up. I hope I never have to get to that point, and that’s why I have so much respect for the people who are willing to do such things. I look up to those people and venerate them because it’s one of those things you never think you’ll have the capability to do. Every now and then, they do.
As we look to the 21st century, this is the age of social credit, the age of CBDCs, the age of mandatory ESG and DEI in every aspect of society. This is the age where freedom of speech is now removed because of hate speech and other such things. This is the age where we accept we have no privacy; we even lose our cognitive liberty. There are people writing books right now about how LLMs are being trained to read what your thoughts mean. That’s the invasiveness we’re facing right now.
We’re all going to need some courage, and we all fight in our way. Right now, it’s comfortable to fight, but like any real fight, it eventually gets deeply uncomfortable. That’s going to tell the difference between the real and the fake heroes. We should at least have the wherewithal to spot them, point to them, and know which ones are real today because we know the requirements of what we believe in and where they go.
For my part, I try to build as much technology as possible and release it into the commons so that everybody can enjoy it and use it. The real heroes can use that in their fight. I don’t know if I can be among them; many can’t. The vast majority of people can’t because it takes so much courage. You have to understand it’s not a fair trade. The vast majority of the time, you end up dead. The vast majority of the time, your name is not remembered, and you’re forgotten in a prison. The vast majority of the time, they don’t fight fair. Not only do they punish you, but they punish your family and loved ones. They take from you all the things you care about.
That’s why totalitarianism is so pernicious and evil at its core. It’s not just about you and your beliefs; it’s about all the things you care about and how to punish them to hurt you as a warning to others not to stand up and speak out. That’s why when you see a real hero who is willing to do that and somehow manages to affect change, we remember them in the long run because of how incredibly difficult and brutal such a journey is. Never allow them to be substituted for the fake ones. Thank you.
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