The Federal Government Colluded with Big Banks to Censor Americans: ADF

Recently our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom discussed how official documents indicate the federal government colluded with big banks and other financial institutions to censor Americans.

Congressional investigations show that after the events of January 6, 2021, the U.S. Treasury Department gave banks and other financial institutions guiding “typologies” — patterns that could be used to identify suspicious people or activities — including search terms and patterns like “TRUMP” and “MAGA.”

The government also encouraged financial institutions to comb through transactions for terms like, “Bass Pro Shops,” “Cabela’s,” and “Dick’s Sporting Goods” when looking for “Homegrown Violent Extremism.”

In a recent video interview about this issue, ADF’s Senior Counsel and Senior Vice President of Corporate Engagement, Jeremy Tedesco, said,

You’re buying guns, you’re shopping at Bass Pro Shops, you’re buying religious texts, you’re giving to religious nonprofits. Under the Biden Administration, you could become [labelled] a domestic violence extremist.

Family Council has written repeatedly about how financial institutions may censor conservative Americans. In 2021 our credit card processor that helped handle our donations terminated our account after designating Family Council as “high risk.”

At 10:29 AM on Wednesday, July 7, 2021, our office received a terse email from our credit card processor — a company owned by JPMorgan Chase — saying, “Unfortunately, we can no longer support your business. We wish you all the luck in the future, and hope that you find a processor that better fits your payment processing needs.”

Within sixty seconds, our account was terminated and and Family Council could no longer accept donations online. All we can do is speculate that our conservative principles and our public policy work might have had something to do with the decision to close our account.

Unfortunately, other organizations have had similar experiences as well. In fact, corporate shareholders, state attorneys general, congressmen, and news outlets all have expressed concerns over conservatives being wrongly labeled as “high risk” or “hate groups” and subsequently debanked.

JPMorgan Chase recently took steps to prevent religiously-motivated debanking. That’s good, but our state and federal government need to make sure this sort of thing never happens to anyone again. After all, banks that are too big to fail are too big to discriminate.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.