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This is not a Quality Contribution.
This is a Quality Contribution. You really ought to just read the whole thing and maybe not even bother reading my comment.
Patrick McKenzie, if you don't know, knows a lot about financial infrastructure and its interaction with tech, regulatory, and human systems. He routinely shares his knowledge in mostly accessible form online. He is also one of the few authors where I would be shocked if I learned that he used LLMs in his written work. When I read him, he often plays incredibly subtly, almost understating his point, often making me have to think again to see if think he's making the implication I think he might be making. His writing is quite unique in my mind. The linked post is his sizable contribution to the conversation about the SLPC indictment.
When the indictment came out, I didn't really say much. I didn't have a lot of specific expertise on the legal case. I was generally suspicious of how one could draw proper lines around the idea of 'donor fraud', where non-profits are defrauding donors who usually give money to non-profits without any strings attached.1 I upvoted @Rov_Scam's comment to that effect. I don't want to denigrate it; I think it was a great comment, fully deserving of a Quality Contribution in its own right. However, I now (only with the benefit of hindsight of McKenzie's post) think it may have taken a bit too much of a gloss over the bank fraud charge.
McKenzie is very serious about the bank fraud charge. He appears to have lived and breathed a world where bank fraud charges are routinely brought and routinely won by the government. He recounts how incredibly easy it seems to be for the government to routinely win on these cases. I don't know that I have a good summary of this; again, you kind of should just read it. He seems to think that basically any lie to a bank will do (a single piece of paper or a single word, he says), and he goes on at length about the extensive record-keeping done by banks and how these systems allow both internal-to-banks investigators and external regulators to easily find the documents or communications to make such charges a done deal. He gives a plethora of examples of actual people going to prison for these exact charges to make his case.
He then turns to what may be more important for the broader Culture War. Sure, lots of conservatives are vaguely annoyed with the SPLC, but even if they get brought up on charges, how much does that really change in the world? He lays out the technical means by which banks evaluate their customers and their transactions. Some of this might be known to people who were already steeped in this portion of the Culture War, but I hadn't really realized until he laid it all out. Sure, I knew of stuff like OFAC, where the Treasury will give a list of foreigners/entities that US banks are prohibited from dealing with, and sure, they pay close attention to that list and scrutinize their customers/transactions accordingly. But they also use all sorts of other 'data products' to screen out potentially 'problematic' customers/transactions. One of the most widely used was developed by the SPLC, which if you're one of those conservatives who were vaguely annoyed by the SPLC but didn't know this already, get ready for your blood to boil.
Admittedly, as he points out, much of this was actually public information. I just never had it laid out in one place, in a way that really made it sink in what was going on.
Not just banks, but all kind of other tech/finance companies, including regular companies who have employer matching contributions to non-profits, use lists like those generated by SPLC, to filter who they transact with. They want to tell regulators that they take steps not to transact with The Bad People, and how else can they feasibly do that other than to just use the SPLC list? In one of those 'public, but I didn't really know about it/internalize it' moments, he talks about how Amazon used the SPLC list, and how Jeff Bezos talked about it in public Congressional testimony:
[Me here: returning to it after a minute]
[Me here: returning to it after another minute]
What's next is what may be the biggest impact of the SPLC indictment. Not some guys from some non-profit, no matter how influential, going to prison. Instead:
That is, he thinks that all those companies, those banks, finance companies, internet companies, employers matching contributions to non-profits, etc. will probably have to stop letting the SPLC tell them who The Bad Guys are that they shan't transact with.
His post goes on.
He describes an alliance of non-profits, organized by SPLC, that he describes as having engaged in an extremely lengthy campaign to pressure companies. He describes the mechanics of how their pressure campaign worked, how they burrowed themselves into the policies and workings of many companies. Again, I find it hard to summarize, and you should read, but his persistent theme is to imply that these folks were claiming to be non-partisan in this non-profit work, but building an extensive case that they were clearly targeting partisan targets, and their entire operation dried up after their partisan targets seemed to be no longer a target.
In his typical understated fashion, right near the end, he tells a parable, presumably for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. My interpretation of his parable is that non-profit law requires folks to actually be non-partisan. Of course, non-profit law is not McKenzie's specialty, so others closer to that world will have to chime in. But it seems to me that he's clearly indicating that he thinks it's plausible, perhaps likely, and if The Powers That Be haven't thought of it yet they probably should, for the gov't to continue going after various folks who were involved in this.
1 - For, uh, reasons, I am aware that people can and do attach strings to donations plenty of times. Moreover, I'm aware that from the non-profit's perspective, this can be quite annoying unless they've already chosen to build boxes for those particular strings (e.g., "We have a 'X Fund', and donations marked as going to the X Fund will be used in the X Fund"). In fact, my sense is that plenty of non-profits will simply refuse donations that try to attach additional strings that they don't already have boxes for.
Ok, but what’s to stop thé SPLC from handing it’s list off to some other foundation?
Nothing, obviously. Blue Tribe takes a week to hit consensus on who "owns" the list, and Bob's your uncle. Not to mention that anyone who claims that the SPLC itself will in fact be got here is out over their skis. Obviously, they have broken the law and so they should be prosecuted and convicted. But that's not actually how things work, is it? Procedural outcomes are not deterministic, but rather are manipulated.
A more relevant question is whether the political system he describes is one we should be upholding and maintaining. To a first approximation, it seems to me that everything works this way, and the novel development is that things are happening fast enough that the nature of the system is weakly perceptible. Obviously, the SPLC and every other organization that cooperated with them in their regulatory push should be nuked to ash. Equally obviously, that almost certainly isn't going to happen, and if it did it would not solve the actual problem, which is that Blues fundamentally do not believe that rules constrain their desires or behavior, and do not recognize a need to share society or its mechanisms with those who disagree with them. It's neutral vs conservative all the way down.
Okay, but power is observably the only law, and anyone who doesn't recognize it at this point is either a fool or a liar. Many people observably are above the rules, and exist in this pleasant state for long periods of time. We do have kings in this country, have and very likely will. Now what?
I don’t think anyone else can run this playbook again. It worked because most firms were looking to play ball so they would only need to get a few renegade scalps. Without everyone else playing ball then there are too many renegades to target at one time.
And you think the whole dirty alliance is going to fold up because one of their tentacles got stung? There are thousands of groups doing exactly what the SPLC is doing in every western country. The SPLC is just one of the more egregious examples, but that hole has already been filled and Amazon/FBI/All FDIC banks are now taking their orders from a different communist NGO funded by capitalist robber barons. We should be finding out which one and what it's called in a few decades, and it will be thrown to the wolves someday, maybe even before we die of old age.
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That they had the guts to use the name "Center Investigative Agency" for one of their alleged shell cracks me up.
I wonder if that's deliberate for the purposes of paying people to rat - confusing/frightening them into thinking it's a legitimate government op.
Never mind that I'm pretty sure internal is supposed to be FBI's territory, but I doubt any of the people they were going after were the sort to be familiar with three-letter-agency jurisdictional conflicts.
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One of the major issues for aware independents/neutrals is that while Blues are doing this while they are in power, can Reds offer any evidence that they wouldn't do the same? The Reds clearly had the power in the 1980s and used it to do pretty much the same thing the Blues are doing now. They used the federal government to write laws to ban behaviors that they felt were morally incorrect, to punish organizations in the outgroup. Is there any evidence that the Red tribe has learn the bitter lesson? Or once they dismantle the Blue-tribe institutions with the help from independents, will they immediately turn on those allies for being sinners and go back to instituting their own class of authoritarian ideals, now with an extra helping of zero-sum power politics?
What did the Reds do in the 1980’s? Is this the war on drugs or banning some swearing? I guess we had LATAM commie death squads but that seemed like both sides were down.
Moral Majority. I'd go so far as to say a lot of the anti-conservative/anti-religious reaction today by the progressives is due to generational trauma inflicted by overzealous authoritarianism by the moral majority. Notice how most of it is not economic leftism but cultural leftism, the moral majority was authoritarian cultural rightism.
The moral majority also made a lot of people from Boomers to Millennials, incapable of even conceiving of the left as authoritarian. Gen Z having never experienced it seems a lot more comfortable pushing back against woke excess.
I wonder if its incapability or if has just created such a psychological scar that they perpetually view themselves as the underdog. A lot of ink has been spilled on the weird prog belief, that even as they control much of the establishment, they still genuinely see themselves as the underdog fighting the system. Part of that is undoubtedly the revolutionary marxism, but I wonder how much of it is scarring from the moral majority?
Yeah I predict Gen Z having experienced a decade+ of Leftwing Authoritarianism will swing rightward in the cultural direction while also being leftwing/populist in the economic direction as a direct consequence of their upbringing.
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I guess I agree with the policies they want. But do you actually think they are the same as what we saw 2014-2024? Sure they did politics. And I could see how someone would find them annoying. But SPLC would basically ban you from the internet, maybe take away your job. Annoying family value rallies just doesn’t seem like the same thing.
I mean the internet didn't exist in the 70s and 80s. Considering the Moral Majority engaged in cancel culture at a similar levels as the Woke/SJW, I imagine, if it did exist the Moral Majority would have wasted no time in cancelling you on the internet. The Moral Majority did try to take away your job...
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The Right passed actual laws in the 70s and 80s that banned gay people from teaching in public schools, or even someone advocating gay rights in public outside of school contexts. And there were the FCC crackdowns on indecent content, e.g. Howard Stern, the Helms Amendment.
There was also quite the panic around video games, movies, music, and board games, though that was admittedly bipartisan. I remember one teacher I had freaking out because I was reading one of those choose your own adventure books, which she associated with Dungeons and Dragons for some reason.
Did you ever feel like your fellow Americans hated you? Maybe I’m being histrionic but I guess 2016-2024 I just need knew fellow Americans were capable of doing things they did to me then. Like evil. The America I grew up with was united. Muslims hit us and we would all go kill them together. But 2016-2024 we were enemies with each other. It’s like losing my innocent. A civil war I never saw coming. And it honestly feels like we almost lost and America was over.
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Obviously, which is why the most liberal times in American history come when either Blue is busy destroying Red institutions, or vice versa (or there's an economic boom which distracts everyone; you can't deploy cancel culture lists when people [and in particular cities] are so desperate for workers it doesn't matter at all what their political persuasion is).
Once one side starts consolidating things get bad, which is why 2014-2024 in particular were especially fucked.
This is why independents are the way they are: it's more about Noticing when one side is starting to accumulate enough power to pull this off, and [trying their best] to deal with them. And whether that best is good enough or not generally depends more on economic factors than anything else.
I think this is an interesting thought. Like a trace that economic need/prosperity requires cooperation among a larger subsection of the populace, but once a threshold is achieved, the luxury beliefs of intra-tribal warfare resurges until at which point all the economic surplus is consumed starting the cycle over again.
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Of course we would, there's no constituency for classical liberalism. But ask yourself- do you prefer school prayer, or school secret gender transitions?
I view them as equal levels of bullshit. The fact that you think one is worse than the other is the point. You think the Red's way is the lesser of two evils.
You don't think one is worse than the other?
I understand you aren't a big fan of prayer in public schools, and probably not Christianity more generally. But if one is an atheist, then following along politely with the Our Father once per day is not a big ask, not in the way that 'the school can arbitrarily change my child's gender' is.
The difference is that underage gender transition will only affect a vanishingly small proportion of the underage population, while school prayer affects everyone. There's a difference between being pissed of about what other people's kids do and what your own kids are forced to do.
Ah, but [my kids] are forced to affirm a lie (as in, that a man magically becomes a woman because he donned fake breasts and cut his penis off), in exactly the same way, and for the same reasons, as it is for State religions. The school will punish them for
blasphemymisgendering if they do not.Naturally, for those who believe in that, especially for those who draw a salary from that belief, it's just Common Decency.
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At the risk of channeling WhiningCoil, that implies that the progressive version stops at other people's kids. Even ignoring for now the difficult question of how consenting a 13-year-old getting browbeaten by the educational system gets, there's no shortage of directly compelled pro-transgender speech that the state has been quite happy to mandate in schools, and an even broader set that the schools 'don't mandate' they just punish anyone that doesn't go with.
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Much of the worry about the school gender crap is precisely worry about what your own kids are being groomed to do.
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To be clear you are clearly biasing the framing towards your viewpoint.
To me you asked me:
Or
Yes a polite Sig Heil is not a big ask.
Have you tried not oppressively forcing your child to adhere to evil capitalist notions that people are not all inherently created equally?
Your conception of the prayer vs gender pronouns is hysterically biased. It's never just a polite "oh father" just like its never just a polite "please use they/them". Give an inch and everyone takes a mile.
In practice we kinda do know what religion in schools looks like(and it’s not the handmaid’s tale)Christian schools are a dime a dozen.
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Everyone would eventually do this given the ability. It’s in the nature of humans to form hierarchy and enforce their ideas of morality on society. It’s been that way for most of human history. I don’t think we’re that different.
Which is why we must never rest on our laurels and assume that liberalism has decisively won. We must always be on the lookout for those who seek to turn this world into a penitentiary and themselves into warders. We must maintain CONSTANT VIGILANCE!!!
Damn why does this sound so much like revolutionary Marxism... Yes! Comrade the subversive illiberals must be rooted out before they poison the discourse! Vigilance must be maintainted!
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Sure, but is not history evidence that WEIRD Anglo's enforced a classical liberalism morality that strongly emphasized a "fuck you stop bothering me" morality. Seems to me that it won so hard that people are like fish: they aren't even aware they have it until its gone. People are slowly waking up to that fact, and currently are re-inventing all the sectarian conflicts that lead to that morality even emerging.
Maybe people should stop being barely evolved apes and actually just grow up.
I mean other than trying to conquer the entire planet, sure. It’s kinda strange that Anglos invented the idea of conquest for liberal democracy.
I think giving Anglo's the credit/blame for inventing the idea of conquest to be a bit nonsensical. And I'd say classical liberalism and democracy are two separate things. I'd go further and argue that democracy actually exacerbates that weakness/failure of classical liberalism. The crowd is always dumb, and there is nothing dumb people like more than dopamine triggering behaviors. The failure of democracy is that it provides a means to allow such easy thrills to be indulged, provided by the state. And what thrill is more primal, more intrinsic to human nature, and more destructive to communities than intra-tribal warfare.
Universal Suffrage has pretty much fucked us.
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As moderate evidence, the fact that the Reds tolerated this behavior from people who were often open insurrectionists acting in accord with a hostile foreign power. Just saying, we live in a world where a third of academics refuse to tolerate the hiring of colleagues they consider to be right-wing, no matter how qualified. If Reds were willing to act the same, Bill Ayers would still be rotting in a prison instead of teaching Education at Columbia and communist sympathies would be as much of a hiring black mark as Nazi sympathies.
See I am increasingly cynical that this is not a Red vs Blue split but an Elites vs Proles split. While a case could be made on the sanctity of freedom of speech, to me this looks like the Red Elites not punishing the Blue Elites so that they won't be punished in return. The common man still gets fucked by the laws. The common gay/lesbian was still barred from marriage, Abortion was still banned, Porn is still trying to be banned, DnD was still shunned as devil worship. The rich/elites didn't have to worry about any of these "laws" because they were rich/elite. Evidence of them being exempt is about as convincing as rich blues being exempt from DEI and woke-shit.
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