Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is July 15, 2024, and I wanted to make a quick video to congratulate JD Vance on being selected as the vice presidential candidate on the Republican ticket with Donald Trump. As many of you know, Trump has been vetting a whole bunch of people, and this campaign has been hard-fought. He was recently almost assassinated this weekend, so it’s been a tough go of things.
JD is a very interesting character. He served in the Marine Corps and was deployed to Iraq, I believe. He also attended Ohio State and later Yale Law School. After briefly serving as a lawyer, he entered the venture capital world with Peter Thiel. He worked his way to the Senate and is currently the only person running as VP on a major party ticket, Democrat or Republican, to have ever held Bitcoin. I believe he has over six Bitcoin in personal holdings, as noted in his financial disclosures. He has been a good friend to the cryptocurrency industry, voting on the repeal of SA21, pro-crypto legislation, and has spoken out on numerous occasions about the overreach by Chairman Gensler and the SEC. Overall, he’s a good pick for our industry as a whole and hopefully someone who can advise Trump, should he win, on crypto policy in a way that benefits the industry and the American people.
That said, I am still an avid supporter of RFK. I believe he is the best person to be the president of the United States. Kennedy is the remedy, and I think it’s going to be a hard-fought and tough election. There are my personal political beliefs and then the beliefs that I feel are good for the industry. Whether Trump wins or Kennedy, I feel that both candidates are well-placed to help the cryptocurrency industry as a whole. I continue to believe that the Biden Administration would be an unmitigated disaster if their regime continues to persist, as we’ve seen with Operation Choke Point 2.0, regulation through enforcement, and the anti-clarity brought through the vetoes on pro-crypto legislation.
Every single action of the Biden Administration has been to harm or hurt our industry or to provide no clarity to it. They have the audacity to say things like "come and register" when they know it’s not actually possible. When people like Coinbase tried to do so, they were unable to, even though they actually have broker-dealer licenses. This is the world we live in, and I hope that in four months' time, this administration is rewarded for their policies with a loss.
The reason I’ve endorsed Kennedy is that I believe America has tremendous divisions. If Trump were to win, I do not believe those divisions will be healed. This selection of a vice president is red meat to the Republican base, but it’s not going to do much to unify people. I was really hoping for something like a Trump-Kennedy or Trump-Gabbard ticket because I felt that would offer a fig leaf to the other side politically. It doesn’t do us any service if all we do is listen to one political side of the spectrum. Believe it or not, there are some good ideas that come from the left. If you’re on the right, it’s not a good idea to do nothing but demonize them. Yes, woke ideology has enormous downsides, forcing people into groups and making them hate each other solely based on the group they belong to. But that doesn’t mean that everything people on the left are fighting for is wrong or bad. Quite the contrary, you’ll find many things that unify us, especially in the cryptocurrency industry, where we fight to treat everyone equally. Our means, methods, and philosophies may be a little different, but I think that which divides us is much smaller than that which unifies us.
The reason I’ve endorsed Kennedy is that he is the only presidential candidate running who actually focuses on unity and healing and does not embrace divisive rhetoric. Instead, he tries to find a middle ground. If it were a fair process, every single person would look at this and say it’s probably the best of the three choices. But it’s not a fair process. He has been systematically excluded from debates, systematically excluded from ballots, and has faced an uphill battle that Republicans and Democrats frankly don’t have to face. It will cost tens of millions of dollars to get on the ballot in all 50 states. Many people who watched the real debate—the debate between Trump and Biden—saw Biden struggle to give a coherent sentence. The highlight for me was when they were discussing their golf handicaps. Meanwhile, Kennedy was able to find a way to include himself despite being excluded and gave coherent, significantly deep, and interesting answers to the debate questions posed by John Stelter.
It’s extraordinary that we in America claim to be a democracy or constitutional republic, depending on which party you ask, and yet we systematically exclude any voice other than the Republicans or the Democrats. The reason there’s so much loyalty to Trump is that he at least appears to be, and in many ways is, different from a normal Republican. Had he not run, we’d likely be staring at a Nikki Haley nomination, and the substance between the two parties would be basically identical. They would use wedge issues to divide people, but we would still have endless wars, massive deficits, an ever-increasing federal bureaucracy, and absolutely no constraint on the corporatism of the United States, where large multinational, multi-trillion dollar globalist organizations continue to control every aspect of our lives.
At some point, if you don’t believe me, ask yourself who controls the FCC policy. Is it you, the people, or Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile? Who controls the FDA? Is it you, the people, or Pfizer and GSK? Who controls the EPA? Is it we the people, or is it Monsanto and all the other large multinational companies? Yes, occasionally we see some regulation here and there that people complain about, but things aren’t getting better. In many ways, they’re getting worse. You can see that by the health and character of the nation as a whole. More than half of America suffers from some sort of chronic illness or mental illness. We have an obesity epidemic, a cancer epidemic, especially among the young, and now the latest chemical killing us is microplastics, which is probably one of the reasons why our fertility rates have plummeted so dramatically over the last 50 years. People aren’t getting healthier or happier; instead, it’s quite the opposite, and people aren’t getting richer.
At the core of many of these issues is the doctrine of sound money, which is why I endorsed Ron Paul and fought so hard for him back in 2008. Sound money is simply put as money that gets more valuable over time, not less, and money that’s hard to counterfeit—money that you can trust. Every great society has a foundation of sound money; it’s the basis of everything we do. Every failed society trades its money soundness for the short-term convenience of the political class. There are no exceptions to this. The United States used to have some of the strongest money you could buy. We traded that in the '40s and '70s and created arrangements and agreements that set us on a path to decline. In the time of my grandfather, he purchased his first home for $5,000, a year’s worth of wages. Now, many people can’t even buy a home, regardless of whether they have a college education and a six-figure income. It wasn’t that long ago that generations touched each other.
That’s why we do what we do in the cryptocurrency space. We’ve lost confidence in the political process to change things, so we’ve picked up the shovels, started digging, and begun fixing. We’re working on our own economic, political, and social systems. Any politician, regardless of their political affiliations, that enables and allows us as an industry to continue to grow, thrive, and integrate our technology into society, we view that as a net good because ultimately that can restore our human dignity. I welcome, regardless of whether it’s the Trump or Kennedy administration, policies that they would endow to heal all of us.
I happen to agree with Kennedy on more than just the crypto stuff. I believe there are things happening in our environment and in our healthcare system that are beyond egregious. For example, as I’ve mentioned before, chronic ailments are getting worse, not better. The forced vaccinations, which should have never occurred in 2021 and beyond, threatened people with job loss if they didn’t get a jab. The complete abandonment of the protocols and procedures that the FDA has used for decades—never vaccinating a control group immediately after the experiment ends—was basic science. That’s the trust in science that we all used to follow until 2019, but we recklessly abandoned it, using a pandemic as an excuse. Anyone who speaks to the contrary is labeled an idiot, anti-science, or a conspiracy theorist. There are thousands of examples of this where greed was always put before good science and good practice in public health. We all know it. Why weren’t the vaccines nationalized and given away as a public good? Why were private companies with no risk given billions of dollars to do something and then allowed to collect tens of billions of dollars in profit from you, me, and everyone else? Why were you told that if you disagreed with this, you would become a pariah? Your children couldn’t go to school, you couldn’t travel, you couldn’t go to restaurants, and you’d lose your job. These are examples of the wedge points of liberty—there are hundreds of them, and that’s just one of the most current examples.
One of the reasons I endorse Kennedy is that he’s lived a very long life and has seen all of these things from the front row. The people who asked for change, like his father and his uncle, paid the highest price to a deep state that’s completely unaccountable and, at the end of the day, does not care about you or me. It only cares about its own power and profit. Trump got a taste of that this weekend; it was a terrible, bitter one, and we all saw it. What was most extraordinary to me was waking up here in Colorado and seeing on the front page of the Denver Post a headline that didn’t care at all. They couldn’t even give Trump the dignity of his injury. Apparently, he claimed to have his ear shot, but we don’t know; we have to confirm it. Those media fact-checkers have to come. At some point, you have to call these things what they are: evil. The people who are currently running our government, the deep state, are not good people; they’re evil people because they don’t care about your health or the state of the world. They kill people, whether it be with the Iraq War or proxy wars, targeted assassinations, interference in the political process, or the removal of all autonomy you have over your body and the food that goes into it. You’re told to sit down and shut up again and again.
Our industry has always been political, and it never won’t be. For those who say it’s not political, you have to take a step back and ask yourself: what is more political than your money in your pocket, your voice, and your identity itself? Why in God’s name would you surrender these things to people you’ve never met and, frankly speaking, don’t care about you? That’s the truth of the matter. We’ve done that, and we have to get it back one way or the other. I believe that the political process in the United States has gotten to a point where no matter who gets elected president, they’re not going to change much. They might be able to slow it down; they might at least let us be aware of the truth and who the enemies are in the deep state. But the political process has been built in a way where the deep state is so deeply entrenched that only through a constitutional convention and the embracing of blockchain technology do I think we’re actually going to make meaningful and significant change. We can restore integrity to the system; we can restore honesty to the system.
So, it’s going to be a rocky and bumpy four months. No matter who wins, there’s going to be a lot of anger, division, and hate. But to quote Richard Nixon, only when you’ve been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain. That’s where we’re at right now. We’re in a pretty deep, dark valley as a nation, but the American people are pretty special. We’re made up of people from every country in the world, whether it be North Korea, Israel, Iran, China, or Russia. You can’t find a country that didn’t make an American. They come here, no matter what they have on their backs—millions of dollars or just the shirt, like my great-grandparents did when they came from Italy, or what my great-grandparents on the other side did when they came from Norway. They came with nothing and made a great-grandson who’s a billionaire. That’s the American spirit at the end of the day. That’s who we are. You never count us out; we fight.
We’re in a valley. The political process is pretty bad, and it’s gotten to the point where you can shoot at a former president who may be the next president, and half of America not only doesn’t care, but some of them actually say, “Why did he miss?” We have to get beyond that; we have to heal. So, whoever you vote for, vote crypto. And whoever you vote for, ask the person who wins to heal us instead of divide us. Ask the person who wins to have the courage to stand up to the people who don’t care about us. We have to make a lot of changes, and you know what? We’re just getting started. I’m young, and a lot of you listening are young too. JD Vance is pretty young as well; he’s not even 40 years old—the youngest VP since probably Teddy Roosevelt or Nixon. That means these people aren’t going away. Vivek Ramaswamy is not going away. There are thousands now who have woken up and have the means, resources, and microphones, thanks to things like X and the cryptocurrency industry, to keep pushing forward and get rid of the evil people.
We have to do this, if not for ourselves, then for our kids and for the future. It’s a complicated thing growing up in the 21st century. It’s a complicated thing looking at systems that are so radically broken. That’s okay; every generation has its challenges. My grandfather fought in the Korean War; family members fought in World War II before that, and some fought in World War I. They endured horrible things for us, and we inherited what they gave us. Those of you listening who are not from America can point to family members or yourselves who fought in wars too. You endured crises too. A lot of people listening endured the Soviet Union and its collapse and then the resurgence of Putin. That wasn’t easy either, was it? Many of you listening grew up in Africa in different countries like Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, or Zaire. Was that easy? Some of you listening grew up in South America, places like Brazil and Argentina, and experienced hyperinflation and uncertainty. The older people listening remember coups; they remember purges, hiding for fear that troops would show up and murder you. There’s a shared humanity in all these things. When you think about it, it’s the powerful praying upon the weak and leveraging broken systems to ensure that they stay in power.
The challenge of the 21st century is that it’s the first one where, because of the internet and the technology we have, everybody for the first time ever can see the truth, as horrible, dystopian, and bad as it may be. The first step in healing is admitting the truth. What are we going to do about it? Our generation is the one that gets to decide. Elections are important weighing mechanisms and benchmarks, but the real thing is going to be the tireless pursuit of new economic, political, and social systems. We have just begun to fight. We’re not going to stop; we’re going to keep going, and we won’t reach the mountaintop until every single person gets there with us. We have a right not to be lied to. We have a right to have autonomy over our finances, our identity, and our bodies. At the end of the day, we have a right to be human. We’re not cattle.
So, congratulations to JD, and I wish him well. I can’t wish him luck because the horse I’m backing is Robert Kennedy, but we’ll see what happens come November. No matter what, I do believe the American people this time around are going to make a pretty good choice. Whoever wins, we look forward to working with them, if we can, to continue the movement here in the cryptocurrency space. I have always been an optimist. I’ve always believed that good will triumph over evil, and I think this is the challenge of our time. So, let’s get together, let’s heal, and let’s start fixing some things instead of complaining about the things that are broken. Thanks, everyone.
1:07:35
26:05
26:19