The Debanking of VDARE and Other Dissidents

Exactly as we surmised from internal evidence when we suspended VDARE, it turns the Biden Regime WAS behind debanking of political oppenents, which in our case meant denial of payment processors. “Government documents unsealed at the end of 2020 proved that the federal government used its regulatory authority over financial markets to attack political opponents.” — Peter Brimelow

How Democrats ‘debanked’ political opponents in shocking attack on American freedoms

By

E. J. Antoni

Published Dec. 6, 2024, 3:23 p.m. ET

U.S. President Joe Biden boards Air Force One as he departs for Luanda, Angola, from Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., December 1, 2024. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
Debanking is a method of fiscal blacklisting. REUTERS

President Biden has overseen nearly four years of a two-tiered justice system, as his pardoning of Hunter Biden and the political persecutions of then-candidate Donald Trump make all too clear.

But there have been quieter attacks on justice, like “debanking” — and few people realize they could be the next victims because they are a “politically exposed person,” that is someone who disagrees with the liberal status quo.

Debanking is a kind of financial blackballing that has appeared within just the last 20 years.

It started under then-President Barack Obama as a war to punish those seen as political enemies, like firearm manufacturers. Government documents unsealed at the end of 2020 proved that the federal government used its regulatory authority over financial markets to attack political opponents.

Government regulators essentially make it impossible for certain people or businesses to make online transactions, or to have a bank account or a credit card.

Dr. Joseph Mercola, a critic of the COVID vaccine, found his business accounts shut down by JP Morgan Chase, a move his chief financial officer claimed was at the same time Mercola spoke out against the Food and Drug Administration.

Biden admin brought unprecedented climate change prosecution against man for ‘smuggling greenhouse gases’ by transporting refrigerants

In her new memoir, Melania Trump says her bank account was terminated after the riots of Jan. 6, 2021, and her son Barron was unable to open his own account. She called it “political discrimination.”

In the modern world, exclusion from electronic financial services is an economic death sentence.

Regulators will claim that they’re not technically forbidding a private bank from doing business with an individual, and that the bank is freely choosing not to have that person as a customer.

But the reality is very different — because of the undue influence and control in the hands of today’s bloated administrative state.

A bureaucrat can make someone’s life so difficult that the victim is forced to comply — the government strong-arming a private individual or institution into doing what the government itself cannot do by law.

It’s like when the Biden administration pressured social-media companies into deplatforming anyone who questioned political talking points about the COVID pandemic.

The debanking scourge under President Biden has hit the crypto world particularly hard. The Securities and Exchange Commission has unleashed a plague of investigations, some real and some merely threatened, to force innovators and investors out of that space.

Dozens of tech and crypto founders have been debanked under Biden, and their inventions smothered.

On Joe Rogan‘s podcast, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen blamed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a group set up at the behest of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to go after crypto firms in particular.

“Basically every crypto founder, every crypto startup, either got debanked personally and forced out of the industry, or their company got debanked,” Andreessen said.

Andreessen added that others, like Kanye West, have been debanked, “For having the wrong politics. For saying unacceptable things. Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there’s now a category called a politically exposed person, PEP. And if you are a PEP, you are required by financial regulators to kick them off, to kick them out of your bank.”

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, has pointed out that many Democrats have been on an anti-crypto crusade as they attempt to wash off the stink of FTX and Sam Bankman Fried — the crypto scammer and fraud who gave massive campaign donations to Democratic politicians.

The problem goes far beyond crypto or the tech industry, however. And it’s bigger than just the Biden administration, which uses surrogates like the Southern Poverty Law Center to fallaciously label any conservative institution a “hate group.” Doing business with a group that engages in “hate” can get a financial institution dinged by regulators for increased “reputational risk.”

What do you think? Post a comment.

What does that have to do with a creditor’s ability to repay a loan or the solvency of a bank or the worth of an individual’s assets? Nothing. The radical left’s push to debank anyone with whom they disagree has nothing to do with sound financial principles — it’s all politics.

Anyone who appreciates freedom and the rule of law should be supremely grateful that the incoming president has put the bureaucrats on notice: Their days of covertly forcing political compliance are numbered.

E.J. Antoni, a public-finance economist, is the Richard F. Aster fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

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When politicians oppose free speech — except their own

J.D. Tuccille: When politicians oppose free speech — except their own

Power-hungry legislators are exactly who the U.S. Constitution was intended to thwart

Author of the article:

J.D. Tuccille

(National Post Oct 12, 2024)

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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump
Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris worried in 2019 that social media sites are “directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.” Presidential rival Donald Trump, on the other hand, thinks that people who criticize judges should be jailed, along with anyone who burns an American flag. Photo by The Associated Press

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The U.S. political system is peculiar. While it’s wandered far from its origins, it’s a government based on the principle that people who seek power can’t be trusted, and it’s a democracy rooted in the belief that majorities can be as tyrannical as dictators. Not everybody agrees, of course, including members of the political class who propose to “save the republic” from rivals while rejecting restraints on power.

Last month, former Secretary of State and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry complained that the competing voices of social media make it difficult “in terms of building consensus around any issue” because “people self-select where they go for their news or for their information.”

He fretted that if people prefer a news source that “is sick and has an agenda … our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just hammer it out of existence.” His hope was to overcome this impediment by “winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.”

The same month, 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Americans are spreading what she calls “Kremlin propaganda” and should be “civilly or even in some cases criminally charged” for their speech. Last week she complained “we lose total control” if online discussions aren’t heavily regulated.

Current presidential hopeful Kamala Harris worried in 2019 that social media sites are “directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.” Harris is vice-president in an administration that tried just that through back channels, leading Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to tell Congress “senior officials from the Biden administration … repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor” discussions about COVID-19 and Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, wrongly claims ”there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” Robert Reich, the Clinton-era secretary of labour, wants Elon Musk arrested “if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) threatened “to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets” after Amazon slapped back at her over tax policy.

This flurry of threats to speech protected by the First Amendment comes from a rogues’ gallery of Democrats who will respond that Donald Trump did it first and that they need to save democracy from his threat. They’re right the GOP presidential hopeful also has a taste for abusing power, though who started it is a judgment call, as is the question of who poses the greatest threat to the republic.

“Burning the American flag, I want to get a law passed … you burn an American flag, you go to jail for one year,” Trump harrumphed in August. It wasn’t the first time he’s called for jailing protesters who use flags as fiery props. He made the same call in July and floated the idea when he was in the White House, even though flag-burning is protected by the First Amendment.

Trump also thinks people who criticize judges and Supreme Court justices “should be put in jail,” as he commented last month (he might want to be careful about that, given his own criticism of the bench).

Also worthy of legal attention, says the former and potential future president, are “lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, & corrupt election officials” involved in what Trump, who claims the 2020 presidential contest was stolen, considers unscrupulous election-related behaviour. They “will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our country.”

Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, wants to ban pornography, though it generally enjoys constitutional protection. Vance’s instincts extend to political opponents. In 2021, Vance asked interviewer Tucker Carlson, “why don’t we seize the assets of the Ford Foundation” and other non-profits that pursue left-wing policies on hot-button issues. The veep nominee also wants to “seize the administrative state for our purposes,” replace existing bureaucrats with “our people” and defy the courts if they object.

Florida’s Republican Governor and recent presidential contender, Ron DeSantis, and his party’s lawmakers pushed the Stop WOKE Act to ban controversial racial training adopted by private companies. It was blocked on First Amendment grounds.

If you seek evidence that candidates for public office and political partisans disdain restraints on power when that power is in their hands, and want to punish opponents, there’s plenty of evidence on both sides of the aisle. This would come as no surprise to the founders. During debates over adopting the constitution, James Madison wrote about the balance necessary in designing a government. “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

Madison feared letting majorities run roughshod. “In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign, as in a state of nature where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger,” he warned.

The imperfect result was a constitution that limited government with checks and balances, and a Bill of Rights that forbade officials from interfering with many freedoms. The intent was to let people do and say a good many things that officials don’t like but are powerless to prevent or punish. It goes without saying that the U.S. government is now much larger than intended, and exercises far more authority than was contemplated by the founders. But that’s still not enough for some critics.

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Writing last month in The New Yorker, Louis Menand noted a new crop of scholars who are dissatisfied with the constitution. In their ranks is Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California–Berkeley, who hopes to strip anti-majoritarian elements from the system. Others want to completely scrap the document and start over with something that would deliver their preferred results.

But these scholars are playing catch-up with a political class intent on simply ignoring First Amendment protections for speech and constitutional restraints on their power. Ironically, efforts to abuse the power of office to hurt opponents is precisely what the founders intended to prevent with the constitution.

That authoritarian politicians justify their actions as responses to opponents who they allege are the real danger to the republic is also no surprise. Those who think coercive government is a solution to problems will inevitably try to apply it to opponents they see as problems.

The American Constitution was intended to thwart the kind of people who now make up pretty much the entire political class. We’ll see if it’s up to the challenge.

National Post