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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   22623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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Otherwise it does feel like complete control of social media plus financing plumbing had been accomplished.

Remember that about half of the Patrick McKenzie article is about an attempt by the SPLC and allies to debank conservatives which failed. See for example this post where he points out that you can tell that there have not been large-scale debankings for conservative political speech because rich Republicans still pay for their lunches in DC using Chase Sapphire Preferred.

There were three sets of contacts between the SPLC and the banks discussed in the article:

  1. Maintenance of a blacklist of extremist nonprofits that various donation platforms used to deny service. McKenzie points out that this blacklist was not widely used to deny basic banking services, because the culture that it is banking does not (and to a first approximation never did) outsource its conscience to the SPLC in the same way that the culture that is nonprofit fundraising did (and probably still does). In so far as the article contains criticism of how SPLC maintained the list, it is that it was underinclusive of extremist organisations that the SPLC found sympathetic (like left-coded terrorist orgs), not that it was overinclusive of mainstream right-wing voices.
  2. Fraudulently opening bank accounts in the names of straw orgs in order to pay off the informants used to maintain (1)
  3. Mostly after the foundation of Change the Terms in 2018, an explicit pressure campaign to kick specific MAGA voices (including the Trump campaign) off the internet, including pressure to debank them. This wasn't done using an electronic blacklist, it involved a series of FTF meetings between activists and bank employees. What was said at those meetings was a combination of "if you don't do what we say, you are a bad person and should feel bad, in particular because you personally will have contributed to black people being murdered by extremists" and "if you don't do what we say, we will call you racist on the internet".

McKenzie is carefully vague about the extent to which (3) succeeded - even more so re. banks than re. big social media platforms. But if there had been widespread debankings after January 6th in response to SPLC pressure, or even with no need for SPLC pressure in the climate that existed in early January 2021, he could have said so. What he says is that there were widespread social media bans, and that some bank accounts that were set up specifically to fundraise for the insurrectionists were closed. If you compare what he says about the post-Jan 6th environment in the US to what he says about the debankings in response to the Canadian trucker convoy, the logical reading is that McKenzie does not think there was a Canada-style debanking of conservatives after Jan 6th, but is not willing to explicitly claim it didn't happen because of the difficulty in verifying a negative.

I'm not going to claim that this was a storm in a teacup. Some bad things happened, and some similar bad things did not happened. Everything in the latest SPLC expose is consistent with the picture in McKenzie's first debanking post, which is that "Americans were denied access to core banking services based on right-wing political speech" is one of the things that didn't.

The world where a coalition of anti-freeze peach leftists controlled bank compliance departments in the way they controlled Silicon Valley Trust & Safety departments looks very different to the one we lived in.

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