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.