PayPal and America's Pending Social Credit System
Plus talking census chicanery with Monica Crowley
PayPal and America's Pending Social Credit System
Do Americans wish to live in a world where dissenters from prevailing elite orthodoxy face discrimination in every public domain?
The recent fracas over PayPal's user policy raises the specter of such a dystopia: a de-banked future—driven by de facto social credit scoring—that is quickly becoming our present.
I unpack this story—including the fact that PayPal already has speech-chilling policies that could trigger the same outrageous penalties contemplated under its since-nixed “misinformation” provision—in a new piece at Newsweek, writing in part:
PayPal's pulled policy matters because it portends the weaponization of Woke Capital—like Big Tech—against Wrongthinkers. That weaponization targets both the mind and material. Given PayPal's past practices, and notable instances of alleged debanking or at minimum troubling signs of ideological targeting by financial institutions, the future of a social credit system with American characteristics may well already be here.
We should expect a growing push among financial services companies to police Wrongthink, and threaten those who engage in it.
The idea that dissenters could "build their own bank" might hold today. But we should also expect that a rush for the exits from incumbent firms towards new ones would be met with a series of regulatory roadblocks aimed at making it near-impossible to create a parallel financial ecosystem.
After all, the state deems dissenters deplorable dangers too.
If we assume that dissent on virtually every major issue is ultimately going to be cast by those in government, Woke Capital, Big Tech, and beyond as fake, or even hateful and violent, then the assumption has to be that every institution may well impose a standard like the one PayPal laid out, and seek to kill competition with the full force of the state.
This viewpoint discrimination poses a clear and present danger to the American system.
Read the whole thing here.
U.S. Census Chicanery on “The Monica Crowley Podcast”
I was pleased to join my friend Monica Crowley on her eponymous podcast starting at ~26:23 to discuss Democrat efforts to control the U.S. Census, the substantial, republic-distorting errors made during the 2020 decennial effort, and the implications regarding the nature of our administrative state and the challenges it poses.