Imagine Laura was a candidate for a major political party and had 150 million impressions a month on her twitter account. What happens if her bank and then Twitter delete her accounts. They give no real reason. She’s stranded, and spends a month writing letters and making phone calls, and setting up alternatives. After a month, the bank gives her a cheque for her savings. She got her money, but she lost a month.
Imagine accidents like these happen a lot more often to people on one side of politics — people who want to break the Tech Giants up?
h/t David E
How corporations can delete your existence, by Gavin Haynes.
Let’s call her Laura. In September, Laura was out in Leeds City Centre, buying some bits, when her card was declined. Funny, she thought. She definitely wasn’t in the red. But these things happen, so she left the shop, tinting crimson, and dashed towards the nearest cashpoint.
But her card wouldn’t work at the cashpoint either. She tried another one. With the same result.
Laura opened the banking app on her phone. It said only ‘error’, then automatically closed.
She finally abandoned her shopping and went into the nearest branch of Santander. There, the counter assistant seemed just as mystified. After about an hour of waiting, though, Laura was called through into the manager’s office.
“I’m going to read a statement out for you,” the manager said. “But I’m not going to be able to answer any of your questions after that.”
He read out: “We have locked your bank account. We can’t give you any more information. We might be in touch in future with more information. But we don’t know when that might be.”
Could she have her money? No.
But how was she supposed to get home? After all, she lived eight miles outside of Leeds, and now she had no bus fare. Apparently, this was not the bank’s business.
Sadly, that story is true. It happened, and is increasingly happening to people who annoy the elites.
Laura Loomer, Republican candidate
‘Laura’ could be any of us. But she is also Laura Towler, one of the founders of Patriotic Alternative. Towler is a sort of next-gen BNP type, a net-savvy white identitarian who campaigns against mass-migration, and occasionally winks to her Telegram followers about ‘you know who’ (they know alright: The Jews). It would seem that Towler had been expelled from Santander for her views. But in line with the bank’s conditions, this has not been made clear.
By a strange coincidence, in the same month, the same thing happened to Mark Collett, her Patriotic Alternative co-founder. Only, Collett doesn’t bank with Santander — he is with HSBC. Somehow, the same thing also happened, in different countries, to Europe’s leading young white identitarians: Brittany Pettibone and Martin Sellner.
Coincidence abounds in the modern world. Last year, on the other side of the Atlantic, various alt-ish-Right figures who banked with JP Morgan Chase woke up on the same morning to find that they no longer banked with JP Morgan Chase. They included the chair of the Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio, former InfoWars staffer Joe Biggs, Project Veritas associate Laura Loomer, and Martina Markota, a Trump-supporting performance artist.
The Tech giants have a conflict of interest with democracy:
When Laura won preselection for the Republicans she applied to get reinstated on Twitter like “every candidate” running for office:
No dice. She can’t get on Big Social, the broadcast networks are ignoring her, and her opponent, Lois Frankel, won’t even say her name, let alone debate her.
Should she win — still a long shot — Loomer has sworn to spend her time on Capitol Hill breaking up the tech giants’ monopoly. So couldn’t it be said that they’re acting to titrate their own legislative environment?
Rod Dreher says “pay attention”
We had all better pay attention to this. If you think that the banks and other gatekeepers of the financial system are going to stop with far-right political extremists, you are deluded. ..
Having a bank account is required to participate in the economy in more than a primitive way. To deny someone that is to exile them from modern life. Moreover, the more our economies move to the cashless model, the more difficult it will be for those without a bank account (and a debit card that goes with it) to participate at all in the economy.
If lawmakers don’t use the power of the state to keep access to the economy open to individuals that the ruling class finds deplorable, then we should understand that we are well on our way to allowing Woke Capitalism to create an American social credit system.
Some will call her a fringe nutter (or some other variation). But underlying that is someone making excuses to forgive predatory unfair behavior, or someone trying to find a reason this couldn’t happen to themselves.