Today’s liberal authoritarian thought police are weaponizing the financial industry.
By Donald Jeffries
In September 2018, PayPal summarily cancelled the account of alternative media figure Alex Jones. The abrupt move had followed several other high-profile cancellations by the online financial giant over the course of that year. Now, however, PayPal’s actions appear to be the opening salvo in weaponizing the financial industry against conservatives as conventional banks are moving to follow suit.
Earlier this month, Chase, one of the giants of the banking world, informed Martina Markota of right-wing alternative news site Rebel Media that it was terminating service for her business. No explanation was provided.
Former Infowars reporter Joe Biggs recently revealed that Chase had closed his account, too, although they later reinstated it after a storm of criticism on social media.
Earlier in February, Chase shut down services for the online store run by Enrique Tarrio, a black conservative of Cuban heritage, who heads the Proud Boys organization. A short time later, Chase notified Tarrio that his personal account was being closed as well. Tarrio has faced the full brunt of “liberal” censorship, having been banned from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and PayPal, among other lesser-known social media outlets.
In August 2018, both Mastercard and Discover blacklisted right-wing critic of Islam Robert Spencer, while Mastercard and Visa cut off service to high-profile conservative David Horowitz.
Popular online funding platform Patreon created a firestorm of criticism late last year, when it eliminated services to left-of-center Carl Benjamin, more commonly known as Sargon of Akkad.
Plenty of well-known figures such as far-left podcaster Sam Harris, libertarian talk-show host Dave Rubin, and psychologist Jordan Peterson quit Patreon in protest.
All these companies have been under intense pressure from the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center and Color of Change to cease doing business with open supporters of Donald Trump. Color of Change, in fact, proudly boasts of having removed some 158 funding sources from so-called “white supremacist sites.”
The left-leaning Electronic Frontier Foundation was one of the few honest liberal voices to express alarm about this overt suppression, warning that banks and other payment processors were becoming “de facto Internet censors.” Laughably, Chase Bank told Breitbart News that it would “never close an account for political reasons.”
On top of YouTube’s new crusade to deny the public the opportunity to view “conspiracy videos,” Project Veritas recently published damning disclosures from a former Facebook insider. Courageous Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe relies heavily on such insiders, and has noted, “Our future depends on those who are willing to give up everything for what they believe.”
The anonymous insider was fired from Facebook in 2018 and subsequently joined Project Veritas. In an exclusive interview, the insider told Project Veritas, “I saw things that were going on that I personally found to be troubling.” The insider claimed that Facebook instituted a routine suppression of conservative pages, which was done under the code name “Action Deboost Live Distribution.”
The insider, identified only as a female, went on to say, “I would see [this term] appear on several different conservative pages. I first noticed it with an account that I can’t remember, but I remember once I started looking at it, I also saw it on [conservative activist] Mike Cernovich’s page, saw it on [conservative comedian] Steven Crowder’s page, as well as the [news website] Daily Caller’s page.”
Crowder’s page had been shut down previously in 2016, in a dispute that was eventually settled out of court. Crowder’s attorney Bill Richmond told Project Veritas, “Louder With Crowder is investigating the allegations of concealed stream throttling by Facebook. The accusations are deeply troubling given the previously settled dispute with Facebook uncovered by Gizmodo.com, which found the show was targeted by Facebook workers with secret audience restrictions on political grounds alongside other prominent conservative voices.”
Cernovich commented, “Facebook, or an individual at Facebook, has the unilateral power to create false allegations against someone he or she doesn’t like.”
The danger in this “deboost” algorithm is that it doesn’t send the user any warning or notification.
The insider stated that she’d never noticed the tag on any left-wing pages of controversial figures like former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Most shockingly, Project Veritas learned that the deboost tag was tied to an artificial intelligence system designed to block suicide and self-harm posts.
Other Facebook documents revealed a campaign to “control trolling,” whose primary author, Seiji Yamamoto, is an advocate of addressing “the perimeter of hate speech.” The insider noted that this referred to “things that aren’t actually hate speech but that might offend somebody—anything that is perceived as hateful but no court would define it as hate speech.”
Yamamoto also wrote about “destructive behaviors . . . red-pilling normies to convert them to their worldview.” There were disturbing references to “bad content” and a proposed “Troll Twilight Zone.” Also mentioned were limiting the bandwidth and causing technical glitches to “troll accounts,” which would be triggered “leading up to important elections.”
Red pilling refers to the process of an individual going from a liberal (blue) to a conservative (red) as they access new information that shatters their liberal assumptions.
The insider had been fired by Facebook just after Project Veritas released undercover video of Twitter employees discussing “shadow banning” and other abuses of privacy.
All this ideologically driven censorship should outrage the civil libertarians that remain in this country.
Donald Jeffries is a highly respected author and researcher whose work on the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations and other high crimes of the Deep State has been read by millions of people across the world. Jeffries is also the author of two books currently being sold by AFP Book Store.
