CHAT 1008 COMMENTS
People arrive at JPMorgan Chase headquarters in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
It’s hard to imagine how conservatives could be even more complacent than they actually are about what’s being done to this country.
The schools our children are taught in are almost universally run by liberals who hate everything we stand for, but we don’t demand that our representatives pull funding from state schools that behave that way.
Hollywood has become vocally, over-the-top hostile to Christians and conservatives, but we go see the movies anyway.
We still buy the papers and watch the cable news shows of networks that talk about us like we’re Nazis because we don’t agree with their liberal worldview.
More recently, increasingly monopolistic social media companies that have an inordinate amount of control over who gets heard and who doesn’t have started actively targeting conservatives and we just shrug or spout platitudes.
“If you don’t like the way they do it, take on those monopolies with hundreds of millions of users and billions in cash by building your own company.”
So, what happens when banks and credit card companies target people for their political views? Do we need to build our own banks, too?
Activist Laura Loomer, who has already been banned by PayPal, claims she had her account suspended by Chase Bank.
Enrique Tarrio, the black leader of the Proud Boys, a group that has laughably been branded a white supremacist organization by liberals, was also suspended by Chase. So was Martina Markota. And Joe Biggs, who made enough of a stink that Chase reluctantly gave him his account back.
Banking is one of the most heavily regulated industries in America for a good reason – and it’s not just because the bankers can steal your money. The idea that citizens could be cut off from using a bank because of their political views is extremely dangerous. Imagine going to your bank and being told to produce your voter registration before you’re allowed to open an account or get a credit card. If Chase is allowed to do this, we are taking a step into that world. A world where your political views could keep you from being able to get credit or run a business. Certainly, there are an awful lot of liberals who would love to see us enter a world like that. In fact, there was a column in the New York Times last year calling for weaponizing the financial industry in exactly this way to shut down the gun industry as part of an effort to deny Americans their Second Amendment rights.
Republicans in the Senate should demand that Chase executives come before them and answer some hard questions about targeting customers for their political views. Maybe we need to rewrite banking regulations to make sure this kind of discrimination can’t occur. I tell you what’s not a “maybe”: Republicans in Congress should at least let banks know that they are paying attention to this issue and that there could be rather severe consequences for Chase or, alternately, for the whole industry if this practice spreads.
You may have heard someone say, “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” I would add to that “capitalism is not a suicide pact.” Breaking up monopolies is a conservative idea with a long track record. Protecting middle-class citizens from the abuses of corporations that are targeting them unfairly is not something conservatives have historically shied away from doing when it was needed.
If conservatives are too complacent and lazy to address the challenges of the 21stcentury, maybe they should step aside for the socialists. They’re not complacent. They don’t sit around saying, “Gee, our people are being mistreated, but it would take work to do something about it and we might offend some powerful business owner if we fight back, so I guess we should let them trample us into the dust.” Conservatives with power need to stop mumbling platitudes about the free market and capitalism while their supporters are being stomped into the ground. They need to defend the real human beings, warts and all, who make it possible for conservatism to exist.