Sunday, January 6, 2019

Visa & Mastercard Are censoring Conservatives. FIGHT BACK PEOPLE!

NOW THE LEFT IS USING


Financial Blacklisting to Censor Conservatives. Master Card, Visa and Discover and working behind the scenes to censor us by Financial Blacklisting.

Wake up PATRIOTS!!!

 

.. the "EVIL EMPIRE WITHIN AMERICA" have used Hollywood to Blacklist Conservative Ideas.. they use the Print Media, and Social media and The News Media to Censor us! They use the schools and Universities to to Indoctrinate the Next Generation....Now its the next layer back. Financial Networks. Don't ya'll get it? We are losing the battle because we refuse to engage!

TIME TO FIGHT BACK ON THE STREETS!

It is the most totalitarian form of blacklisting: not just to be prevented from speaking on a university campus, or to be kicked off social media, but to be shut out of the entire financial system. That is the terrifying new threat to freedom that western societies must now contend with.

 YET WE DO NOTHING SUBSTANTIVE THAN TO WHINE OR POST STUFF LIKE THIS. ITS TIME FOR MORE AGGRESSIVE MAIN STREET TACTICS!

Financial blacklisting doesn’t just rob you of a chance to spread your message: it robs you of your ability to do business, your livelihood, your very means of functioning in a capitalist society. Thanks to the encroachment of progressive ideology into the financial industry — including major credit card companies like Visa, Discover, and Mastercard — it has now become a reality.

Left Leaning financial platforms — like Visa and MasterCard —work with Socialist Entities to  deny service to customers for political reasons.

Yes... Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), bluntly warned that banks and credit card companies had become “de facto internet censors.” That even liberal groups had raised the alarm signaled the seriousness of the problem.

Since then, financial blacklisting has only gotten worse. In August, Mastercard and Discover deplatformed conservative and Islam critic Robert Spencer. In the same month, Visa and Mastercard ceased service to David Horowitz. While credit card processing service to Horowitz was eventually restored, Spencer remains financially blacklisted.
Crowdfunding platforms like Patreon, which allow online content creators to collect donations from their supporters, are frequently cast as the primary villains in financial blacklisting. 

Patreon’s recent ban of YouTuber Carl Benjamin, better known by his moniker Sargon of Akkad, triggered a crisis for the platform. Both donors and creators — including prominent atheist Sam Harris — quit the platform in protest, while Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin pledged to create an alternative platform that is pro-free speech.
But Patreon and other crowdfunding platforms are not the real villains. They are dependent on the whims of the credit card companies, something that was already apparent in August when Mastercard forced them to withdraw service from Robert Spencer. We now know that the credit card companies were also a factor in Patreon’s decision to boot Benjamin.

YouTuber and Patreon creator Matt Christiansen recently released a transcript of his conversation with Jacqueline Hart of Patreon about Benjamin’s ban. Hart frankly admits that the sensibilities of credit card companies play a key role in Patreon’s decisions.
Here’s an excerpt of that transcript (emphasis ours):

JACQUELINE: The problem is is Patreon takes payments.  And while we are obviously supportive of the first amendment, there are other things that we have to consider. Our mission is to fund the creative class. In order to accomplish that mission we have to build a community of creators that are comfortable sharing a platform, and if we allow certain types of speech that some people would call free speech, then only creators that use Patreon that don’t mind their branding associated with that kind of speech would be those who use Patreon and we fail at our mission.  But secondly as a membership platform, payment processing is one of the core value propositions that we have. Payment processing depends on our ability to use the global payment network, and they have rules for what they will process.
MATT:  Are you telling me that this was Patreon’s decision then, or someone pressured you into this?
JACQUELINE:  No – this was entirely Patreon’s decision.  
MATT:  Well then I don’t understand passing the buck off to somebody else.  
JACQUELINE:  No, I’m not passing the buck off.  The thing is we have guidelines, but I’m trying to explain, #1 it is our mission to fund the creative class and obviously some people may not want to be associated.  
MATT:  Well if it’s your mission, then payment processors are irrelevant.  It’s your mission. That’s what you’re pursuing.
JACQUELINE:  We’re not visa and mastercard ourselves – we can’t just make the rules.  That’s what I’m saying – there is an extra layer there.
This “extra layer” places platforms like Patreon in an impossible position: abandon free speech or lose your ability to process payments. That’s also why so many free-speech alternatives to Patreon have failed: FreeStartr, Hatreon, MakerSupport, and SubscribeStar all tried to offer a more open platform, and were promptly dumped by the credit card companies. All are unable to do business.
This exposes the emptiness of establishment conservative arguments about the free market. Those who oppose Silicon Valley censorship aren’t allowed to just build their own alternative platforms. They must build their own global payment processing infrastructure to have any hope of restoring free speech online.
That, or they must find a way to stop Visa, Mastercard and Discover from taking advice from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Color of Change. The former was allegedly responsible for the blacklisting of Robert Spencer, while the latter claims to have removed 158 funding sources from “white supremacist sites” — although as the group won’t list what those sites are, we don’t know if they really are “white supremacist.” The far left typically includes regular Trump supporters under the label.
Another thing the credit card companies will have to avoid — listening to the New York Times, which is currently pressuring them to blacklist gun purchasers.
The only other option is to find an alternative to Visa, MasterCard, and Discover that is indifferent about American social justice politics. There’s only one card which has a similar level of global coverage — China’s UnionPay. It remains to be seen if a company at the whim of Chinese Communists is better than Visa, Discover, and Mastercard — all of which currently appear to be at the whim of American communists.

ITS TIME TO FIGHT BACK AGAINST THE VILLAINS BEHIND THE VEIL..
Conservatives have long been the target of shadowbans, biased algorithms, and account bans on social media. Not content with silencing their voices online, the left now wants to stop the right from using the web to fundraise. Thanks to the increasing willingness of online fundraising platforms and payment processors to ban clients for political reasons, they are getting their way.
One of the most popular fundraising platforms is Patreon, a site that allows users to collect monthly recurring donations from their supporters. With the decline of ad revenue on platforms like YouTube, Patreon has emerged as an important and effective tool for online content creators to earn a living. In some cases, it can take little more than a hundred fans contributing set amounts per month for a creator to support themselves full-time.
In theory, this creates an environment similar to that of talk radio in the 1980s: a decentralized ecosystem where new creators can quickly establish an independent support base, without relying on gatekeepers in the establishment media. With only their fans to answer to, as opposed to controversy-shy advertisers, it should be the perfect formula for free expression.
There’s just one problem — Patreon itself. Like the rest of Silicon Valley, Patreon has decided it wants to be more than just a neutral platform, and now routinely cuts off income from content creators for political reasons. Chief among them is “hate speech”, which Patreon says it does not tolerate on its platform. It has used “hate speech” as a justification to ban a number of figures on the far-right, including white nationalist Jason Kessler. But although the alt-right is shunned by most, including Breitbart News, the idea that politics should dictate whether someone is allowed to access financial services is even more controversial.
As is often the case, banning extremists was the start of a slippery slope. Patreon’s purge quickly escalated beyond the alt-right to target independent conservative journalists. The latest example is YouTuber and author Brittany Pettibone, who was banned from the platform last month. Patreon cited her support for the European identitarian organization Generation Identity, a group Patreon claims is a “violent organization.” (The organization explicitly disavows political violence.)
Patreon also banned the independent journalist Lauren Southern in 2017 over her work exposing globalist NGOs assisting the illegal trafficking of persons into Europe via the Mediterranean. Patreon said her work could “cause loss of life” by stopping the work of NGO “rescue vessels” — but migrant deaths in the Mediterranean actually fell by 40 percent as attempted crossings declined in the wake of her reporting. Also, if interfering with the illegal activities of NGO vessels in the Mediterranean is unacceptable to Patreon, they should make it clear that the governments of Italy and Malta, which now bar NGO ships from their shores, aren’t welcome on the platform either.
Double Standards
In the bans documented above, Patreon used tenuous, insufficiently supported accusations of “violence” to suspend services to right-wingers. But with the exception of one token ban against It’s Going Down, a far-left site that encourages and celebrates political violence, the platform does not appear to apply its rules to the left with the same level of strictness.



British left-winger Mike Stuchbery currently collects donations from Patreon. Yet he has repeatedly encouraged and supported violence on his Twitter account, most recently defending an incident in which a teenage Trump supporter was attacked and robbed in a Whataburger restaurant for wearing a MAGA hat. Although he later backtracked on those statements, Stuchbery has also said that Trump supporters are the modern-day equivalent of Nazi brownshirts and that Nazis should be punched.
Patreon insists that Generation Identity, which publicly disavows violence, is violent, and went so far as to ban Brittanny Pettibone simply for expressing support for the group. But Stuchbery, who uses Twitter to openly defend violence, is allowed to continue using Patreon.
It’s not hard to find more examples like Stuchbery. Heidi Culliman is a far-left author who has over 200 supporters on Patreon. She has also called her member of congress a Nazi, has called the President and the current U.S. administration Nazis, and, you guessed it, has called for punching Nazis. When people say the President is a Nazi, and that Nazis should be punched, that isn’t just a problem for Patreon — it’s a problem for the Secret Service.
Maybe Stuchbery, Culliman, and other violence-supporters who collect Patreon donations might clarify that they only want actual white supremacists like Richard Spencer to be punched, and not the President (they haven’t yet, by the way). But you don’t get a pass to punch someone like Spencer just because they’re morally wrong. Punching actual white supremacists, unless they punch you first, is still unprovoked violence, and advocating for it is still against the law, as well as Patreon’s policies (if they were enforced consistently.)

Patreon’s bias can also be seen in its approach to Antifa, a far-left organization that, much like Stuchbery and Culliman, supports the use of violence against people they determine to be “fascists.” As you might expect, those are frequently just ordinary Trump supporters and conservatives. Antifa’s rampages at pro-Trump events, where random acts of violence are accompanied by widespread looting and damage to private property, have in the past caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. Last year, an Antifa member pled guilty to plotting an acid attack on Trump supporters during the Presidential inauguration.
The U.S. government isn’t keen on these self-appointed fascist-fighters, and has categorized Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Yet it’s a domestic terrorist organization that is still allowed on Patreon. A cursory search of Patreon reveals at least six [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] pages, some of them boasting dozens of regular contributors, which are affiliated with Antifa, express their support for Antifa, or display the movement’s symbol, the red-and-white anarcho-communist flag.
One of these pages, LibCom.org, defended violent attacks on German police with glass bottles and rocks during the 2017 G20 protests in Hamburg as “large-scale resistance” and “basic self-defense” via a blog named “Victory of the People.” True to the Antifa designation as domestic terrorists, LibCom also published a story celebrating the sabotage of U.S. army materials. Patreon, which takes a cut from the site’s donations, is directly profiting from this material.
Patreon is also directly profiting from the following image, which Antifa California is distributing through the platform as a reward to supporters:

(archive link)
The image of a bike lock is a reference to Eric Clanton, the left-wing professor and Antifa member accused of assaulting a Trump supporter with a bike lock in April 2017. Clanton was arrested on assault charges, and faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted.
Patreon, in other words, allows Antifa to glorify a real act of violence for which someone was arrested and charge. Meanwhile, Lauren Southern was banned because of a tenuous and ultimately debunked theory that her actions might cause harm.
Patreon’s double standards go beyond its inability to clamp down on left-wing support for violence. In February, Patreon banned the account of Jeremy Hambly, a critic of the incursion of progressivism into the community associated with the popular card game Magic the Gathering (yes, the culture wars now extend to card games — read more about it here). Patreon said they banned Hambly for “doxing,” or the release of a person’s private information online, a charge Hambly denies.
Whether the charge is true or false — and the Southern incident suggests Patreon is disingenuous in its allegations of rule-breaking against the right — the Hambly ban again reveals Patreon’s inconsistency. The platform has for years refused to take action against Randi Harper, a serial bully who poses as an “anti-abuse” activist, but who herself has a long, well-documented track record of abusing others. This extends to doxing, which Harper has unapologetically used as an intimidation tactic. She once revealed the CEO of a debt collection agency’s home phone number, and threatened to release those of his family if the debt collectors did not stop trying to contact her (doing their job, in other words.) Despite this well-publicized behavior, Patreon has taken no action against Harper to this day.
Competitors? 
Patreon isn’t the only way to raise money on the web. There are other fundraising platforms, including Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and GoFundMe, which allow users to raise money for their projects. GoFundMe, in particular, has emerged as a popular method for activists, who use it to raise money for causes and campaigns.
But if you’re looking for a neutral platform that doesn’t come with the risk of a politically-motivated ban, these services are no better than Patreon. All have publicly committed to interfering in their users’ activities if they offend the company’s progressive values.
Earlier this year, Kickstarter banned the project of a Swedish academic who was raising funds for a book examining the statistical correlation between immigration and rape in Sweden. The academic, Ann Heberlein, said she started the project because the Swedish government no longer keeps adequate records of the ethnic and cultural backgrounds of offenders in the country.
IndieGoGo, another crowdfunding site, explicitly bans any campaign that “promotes hate” or “promotes hate symbols and/or hate terms on their website, as defined by the Anti-defamation league.” (The Anti-defamation league, which has previously blamed Trump supporters for rising anti-semitism, includes the internet meme Pepe the Frog on their list of “hate symbols.”) IndieGoGo also has a blanket ban on crowdfunding for “weapons, ammunition, and related accessories.”
GoFundMe also takes sides politically. It deleted the fundraising campaign of a Christian-owned bakery from Oregon, which was at the time facing a $135,000 fine for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. GoFundMe has also deleted conservative Jamie Glazov’s fundraiser for an anti-Sharia law tour, a campaign to expose Hillary Clinton’s anti-Israel sentiments during the 2016 election, and a fundraiser by an organizer of the “Draw Muhammed” contest which aimed to cover security costs for his family.
PayPal and Stripe: Impassible Gatekeepers
It’s not difficult to build a website. If all existing online fundraising services have been co-opted by censor-happy progressives, why not build competing services that don’t ban users for political reasons? When you don’t like what’s on offer, build your own. That’s the free-market conservative argument.
But it’s not as simple as that.
In order to build a fundraising platform, you need a payments processor. And the market for payments processors is dominated by just two companies: PayPal and Stripe. And they’re just as intolerant as the fundraising platforms.
When Lauren Southern was banned from Patreon, she did what free-market conservatives recommended, and set up her own fundraising platform, powered by Stripe. Then, directly after Southern hit the headlines again over her lifetime ban from the U.K. for distributing leaflets satirizing Islam, Stripe abruptly withdrew their service.
Stripe informed Southern that she was banned for violating their rules on “Prohibited Businesses and Activities”, although they did not highlight precisely how she violated it. The list includes a prohibition on activity that “encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence toward any group based on race, religion, disability, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, or any other immutable characteristic.”
Stripe has also withdrawn services from FreeStartr, an alternative to Patreon and GoFundMe set up by free speech maximalist Chuck Johnson. Johnson says the platform has also been banned by PayPal. Already notorious for freezing WikiLeaks’ account in 2011, PayPal also withdrew services from nationalist YouTuber Faith Goldy earlier this week.
Because of the lack of a payment processor, all of FreeStartr’s funds are now at risk, including a legal defense fund for jailed British Islam critic Tommy Robinson, a support fund for South African farmers at risk of racial violence, and income streams for various mainstream conservatives like organizer Ali Alexander and YouTuber Ashton Whitty.
Johnson says Stripe accused him of “obfuscating funds”, although the company did not respond to a request to comment asking them to elaborate on the allegation.
Johnson also says Stripe changed their story. He says he was initially contacted by senior Stripe employee Edwin Wee, a former Democrat operative who previously worked for Joe Sestak and Mike Bloomberg, who informed him that the presence of a legal defense fund for white supremacist Richard Spencer meant that Stripe could no longer do business with him. Because of one objectionable fund, the entire platform had to go.
“Everyone will think like, ‘oh it’s Richard Spencer, he can go f*** himself’ — but they shut down my entire business over his account,” said Johnson, who claims his goal is to build an open, neutral platform, and not to personally endorse the people who use it.
“My position on this is simple, it’s the same position the ACLU had in Skokie.” said Johnson in comments to Breitbart News. “Everyone has certain rights… If they need a legal defense, and people donate to it, and all the money’s legal, then I don’t see an issue with it. People have a right to donate to controversial causes.”

MakerSupport, another alternative to Patreon that promised to allow creators to raise funds regardless of their political affiliations, has effectively been destroyed after Stripe withdrew service from the platform. MakerSupport revealed their difficulties with Stripe back in April, before going silent. People who donated to creators through the site were left wondering where their money had gone.
That’s the brutal reality of payment processor censorship. Once a service like Stripe decides to withdraw support for a platform, thousands of dollars — peoples’ donations, income streams, and livelihoods — can be left in limbo.
Can a conservative competitor to Stripe or PayPal be created? Almost certainly not. The regulatory hurdles of setting up a payments processor, the difficulty of forging relationships with major banks, and the complexity of the technology and scarcity of talented programmers with experience in the field mean the operating and start-up costs are high. A payments processor targeted at the niche market of former Patreon users who have since been banned from the platform will not turn a profit. Anyone willing to set one up would have to be willing to burn a lot of money. Much like competing with Google or Apple, it’s easier said than done.
Moreover, a PayPal or Stripe competitor would still be dependent on business relationships with banks and credit card providers, none of which have any incentive to be first amendment friendly. MasterCard proved that back in 2011 when they joined a financial services boycott against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In order to fully guarantee a politically neutral service, you would need more than your own version of PayPal: you’d need your own bank and your own credit card business.
The existing banks can’t be relied on, that’s for sure — even mainstream conservative causes are too controversial for them these days. Citi, the fourth-largest bank in America, announced in March that it would withdraw its services from weapons and ammunition stores that refuse to accept a range of progressive gun control demands, none of which are mandated by U.S. law. These included prohibitions on the sale of bump stocks and “high-capacity magazines.” A week later, an investing group claiming to represent over $600 billion in assets urged its members to cut ties with the NRA.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was recently refused service at a restaurant because of her position in the Trump administration. Now imagine being refused a bank account because you won’t comply with progressives’ gun control demands.
But it’s not just conservatives who are concerned by the power of payment processors and financial institutions to shut down political expression. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a liberal organization known for promoting left-wing causes like the Obama administration’s “net neutrality” regulations, has expressed grave misgivings at the decision of financial institutions to withdraw services for political reasons.
In detailed comments provided to Breitbart News (read them in full here), the liberal group said payment processors like PayPal have become “de facto internet censors.”
“EFF is deeply concerned that payment processors are making choices about which websites can and can’t accept payments or process donations,” an EFF spokeswoman told Breitbart News. “This can have a huge impact  on what types of speech are allowed to flourish online.”
An Existential Threat 
In online fundraising as in social media, the internet provides a tremendous advantage to those who know how to use it. When allowed, conservatives and critics of progressivism have used these platforms to great effect. The dissident Canadian academic Jordan Peterson is supported by over 9,500 small donors on Patreon. Memories Pizza, the Indiana-based pizza parlor forced to close its doors after it was publicly attacked by the establishment media for refusing to cater gay weddings, was able to reopen after its supporters raised over $800,000 via GoFundMe.
As the left prepares for the 2018 midterms and the 2020 general election, they want to ensure that only they have access to that tremendous power. And with PayPal and Stripe withdrawing support from politically neutral fundraising platforms, they are well on their way to achieving that aim. Like the social media purges, this represents an existential threat to the conservative and pro-Trump movement.
Here is an expose about Mastercard!

Known as “Interbank” and “Master Charge” from its 1966 founding through 1979, Mastercard Incorporated is a multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Purchase, New York. It was created by an alliance of several California banks to compete against the Bank of America’s BankAmericard, which later became the Visa credit card issued by Visa Inc.  Mastercard’s principal business activity …
Known as “Interbank” and “Master Charge” from its 1966 founding through 1979, Mastercard Incorporated is a multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Purchase, New York. It was created by an alliance of several California banks to compete against the Bank of America’s BankAmericard, which later became the Visa credit card issued by Visa Inc.  Mastercard’s principal business activity is to process the credit- and debit-card payments of purchasers across the globe.
Mastercard’s leadership team includes a number of individuals who feel a deep affinity for Democratic and leftist causes, coupled with a low regard for conservatism. The company’s President and Chief Executive Officer since 2010 has been Ajay Banga, who previously served as the CEO of Citigroup Asia Pacific and is a longtime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Banga gave $22,300 to the Democratic National Committee in 2016. He also has donated money to the political campaigns of such Democrat luminaries as Charles Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Hillary Clinton.
Banga’s ties to the Clintons are particularly noteworthy. In 2006, for instance, he pledged to give $5.5 million to the Clinton Global Initiative, the signature program of the Clinton Foundation. Ten years later, at a “Women in the World” Summit in New York City, Banga voiced support for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid. “You need women who lead countries,” he said. “I hope we have one soon. You can see where I’m going.”
Banga also has cultivated significant ties to former President Barack Obama, who in 2015 appointed him to serve on the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations. The following year, Obama named Banga to the Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.
In April 2018, Michael Froman, who previously had held several executive positions at Citigroup and had served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, joined Mastercard as its Vice Chairman and President of Strategic Growth. Since 2001, he has made large political donations to high-profile Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Al Gore, John Kerry, Charles Schumer, and Barack Obama.
From 1993-95, Froman served in the Bill Clinton Administration as Director of International Economic Affairs for both the National Economic Council and the National Security Council. And from 1997-99, he was Chief of Staff in the Clinton Treasury Department.
Froman also has a close relationship with Barack Obama. The pair first met in the 1980s, when they both attended Harvard Law School and worked together on the Harvard Law Review. When Obama later decided to run for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Froman, according to Politico, “rallied immediately to the cause, advising and supporting the candidate as he was elected to represent the state of Illinois.” Two years after that, Froman served as an Advisory Board member for the Obama-Biden presidential transition team. From 2009-13, he was Assistant to the President in charge of international economic affairs. And from 2013-17, he held the title of U.S. Trade Representative, serving as Obama’s chief adviser and negotiator on international trade and investment issues.
Another major figure at Mastercard is Seth Eisen, who has been an executive with the company since 2010 – and its Senior Vice President of External Communications since 2016. In the aftermath of the August 2017 “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, where a contingent of white nationalists clashed violently with Marxist-anarchists affiliated with Antifa, Eisen wrote that: (a) “we’ve been made aware of websites accepting our [Mastercard] products that could be considered as ‘hate groups’,” and (b) “we’re working with our acquirers to shut down the use of our cards on sites that make specific threats or incite violence.”
A year later, in August 2018, Mastercard announced that it had decided to stop processing all donations to the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC), a conservative think tank whose mission is “to defend free societies which are under attack from enemies within and without” — most notably, enemies aiming to advance the agendas of the radical left and Islamic jihad. Mastercard took this action largely in response to pressure from the Southern Poverty Law Center and Color Of Change, both of which had recently designated DHFC as an organization that promoted “hate.” Thanks, in part, to numerous conservative organizations and media outlets that publicly condemned Mastercard’s action, the credit card company restored DHFC’s fundraising privileges within a few days.
Yet another key leader at Mastercard is board member Craig Calhoun, currently a Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University, and formerly the director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. He contributed to the 2013 book, Does Capitalism Have a Future? Therein, he wrote that capitalist development is commonly associated with ecological crisis, and that capitalist economies will have to transform dramatically if they are to have any chance of surviving.

Informational curated from www.Breitbart.com and www.Discoverthenetworks.com
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